BOULDER, Colo.—A University of Colorado student has angered some people with a satirical online column saying Asian students “hate us all” and should be forced to play drinking games and endure other ordeals until they change.
The column, posted Monday on the Web site of the Campus Press student newspaper, triggered a flurry of mostly critical online responses.
The column was written by Max Karson, listed on the Web site as a staff editor. University spokesman Bronson Hilliard said “columnist” was a more accurate description.
Karson’s column cites tension between Asian and white students and says, “(Asian students) hate us all. And I say it’s time we started hating them back.”
It suggests Asian students be rounded up and subjected to drinking games and a dancing contest, forced to eat bad sushi and be shouted at until “the Asian spirit has been broken.”
Hilliard said the column was protected speech under the First Amendment, although “it’s not the sort of speech we encourage our students to engage in. … But it’s also not something we really seek to censor.”
He said the dean of the mass communication school, Paul Voakes, would meet with the newspaper’s editors and adviser to discuss whether the column should have been clearly labeled as satire.
Karson declined to comment, as did Campus Press Editor-in-Chief Cassie Hewlings and faculty adviser Amy Herdy.
Hewlings and Herdy posted messages on the Web site defending the paper from criticism by three former Campus Press editors over the piece.
Pasha Minallah, 27, a CU music major and member of the South Asian Student Association, said the column was outlandish even as a joke.
“I just can’t believe it,” Minallah said. “It’s stereotypes left and right. It’s hard to believe that people think this way.”
Karson was arrested last year for comments he made in a CU class after a gunman killed 32 students at Virginia Tech. Police said he alarmed other students by talking about how someone could be driven to kill because of injustices at universities. The district attorney declined to prosecute.
In September, the editor of the student newspaper at the state’s second-largest school, Colorado State University in Fort Collins, angered many people across the state with an editorial that read: “Taser this: (Expletive) Bush.” It was a response to the Tasering of a student at the University of Florida.
The editor, David McSwane, was admonished but not fired by the board that oversees the paper.
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Information from: Daily Camera,
