Seeing Red Over Off-Color Parody

The spoof issue of UC Davis’ student newspaper, an annual mix of mischief and journalism, has sparked a brouhaha that could lead to an overhaul of the paper’s operations.

Responding to complaints about sexual and racial references in the year-end parody section, the student-dominated Campus Media Board agreed Tuesday to consider firing the newspaper’s new editor in chief.

The editor, Fitz Vo, assumed leadership of the California Aggie on June 1.

The section that triggered the uproar, a six-page insert titled the “The Ivory Basement,” appeared June 7, the last day of regular classes. One of the most controversial items was an image of a phallic symbol that was digitally superimposed in the middle of a photo of children playing on the campus’ two “egghead” sculptures.

Another photo showed a white student holding a knife while eyeing an African American student who was the student government president last year.

Alice Hannam, a UC Davis staffer who is head of the media board, called the section “mean-spirited, incredibly juvenile and, in a couple instances, ugly.”

Vo, a 20-year-old majoring in communications and math, acknowledged that he is guilty of lapses in judgment. The Vietnamese American junior, who listed himself in the spoof issue as “editor in chink,” said the issue was “not indicative of what I intend to do in my tenure at the Aggie.”

He urged the board to let him stay on in the job and consider such measures as hiring a faculty advisor to work with the newspaper. Vo said he is open to suggestions, and that he doesn’t want “to jeopardize the Aggie’s journalistic integrity.”

Many of the students and others complaining about the spoof issue say that it’s too late to save the Aggie’s integrity. Mary Vasquez, a UC Davis student who is a frequent critic of the student newspaper and who was a target of a sexually explicit insult, urged the media board to take action against the paper.

Vasquez, the appointed head of UC Davis’ ethnic and cultural affairs commission and a member of its Student Senate, said the edition “was racist, sexist, homophobic and vulgar. They wrote a hit piece ... and they shouldn’t get away with it.”

She asked the board to discipline any students involved in publication of the item that named her, to require the Aggie to apologize in its first summer and first fall editions, and to send its staffers to mandatory diversity and sexual harassment sessions.

This isn’t the first outcry over the parody edition at the UC Davis newspaper. In the late 1990s, a cartoon depicted an explosion at the campus’ Hart Hall, a building housing ethnic studies departments.

University officials responded by, among other things, establishing a new newspaper policy on handling sensitive issues and launching a journalism writing course.

It also made the parody issue, a campus tradition for at least 20 years, the responsibility of the incoming editor in chief instead of the outgoing, and possibly graduating, editor in chief.

Even though the 1st Amendment protects parody on and off campus, several observers said that spoof editions aren’t as widespread as they were in their heyday of the 1960s and 1970s.

College news media advisors say the fear of lawsuits may be one of the reasons.

“We would say, ‘Don’t do spoofs. It’s kind of like walking into quicksand,’ ” said Ronald Spielberger, executive director of College Media Advisors, a national group of campus officials who oversee student news media.

Students, he said, may not recognize when they cross the line between poking fun and libel.

Vo said he is smarting from the reaction to his experience at UC Davis. “I love the Aggie a lot, and I hope it shows next year,” he said. “This is a downer of a way to start.”