In 2007, a group of students at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln fought to establish the first satirical newspaper on the campus. Eight years and nearly 70 issues later, the paper still hits the newsstand every other week. Recently, however, a committee charged with allocating student fees proposed defunding it — saving students a mere 15 cents annually — for the one reason that scares and baffles me the most. “While it does create a number of opportunities for students,” the committee wrote, it does not serve to “enrich, enliven and humanize” the campus community.
I disagree. At the risk of sounding like a bad comic, I think they’re missing the point.
Let me start from the beginning.
I’d loved The Onion since I was 16. I loved it so much I started a version of my own in central Nebraska, thinking myself especially clever for mocking pick-up trucks and communities smaller than my own (pop. 3,500). The high-school principal banned the second issue, thereby necessitating a third, fourth, and fifth.
But when I got to college, I felt a void. The Onion didn’t distribute in Lincoln, and the only publication on campus, The Daily Nebraskan, appeared to specialize in histories of the bell tower and student-government play-by-play.
I spent the summer after my freshman year converting my plans for a satirical newspaper into the stuffy jargon the university required. I recruited my roommates as founding members, drafted articles of incorporation and codes of conduct. We called it The DailyER Nebraskan and promised to buy papers online behave as an “equal-opportunity offender.” We pictured it rolled up in our peers’ back pockets, hidden in our TA’s gradebook, displayed on the racks next to our teetotal counterpart.
We submitted the documents. We waited. The trees changed color. The days grew shorter, the skirts longer. We daydreamed about the paper’s impact in a deeply conservative state, about spotlighting the absurdities of student government and college athletics. And finally, just before holiday break, the Publications Board delivered its verdict: No.
An ancient document ordained that all university publications must strive to achieve fairness and objectivity. I pictured some hooded administrator deep in the catacombs, whispering Latin and blowing dust from a leatherbound book. The DailyER couldn’t meet those standards, at least not superficially, and thus the board voted 4 to 3 to deny our request for affiliation.
That should have been it. But we were young and stupid, and we’d started to believe in all those things we’d said about the higher powers of satire, how it could scratch at truths journalism never could, how the Fourth Estate needed a Fifth. How crucially this university needed a radical student voice, a gong to shake the campus awake. We needed a cause célèbre, and The DailyER Nebraskan seemed as good as any. So we petitioned, and within a few short weeks gathered more than a thousand signatures, more than voted in that year’s student-government elections. By February, The DailyER had been granted full university affiliation and a $2,000 loan.
The rest, as they say, is history — if history were written in phallic jokes and typos. We put together the first issue in a musty fraternity basement, filling holes in the layout by writing stories on the spot: “Local student masturbates after roommate falls asleep,” and “City campus construction workers: ‘We don’t know what the f*** we’re building either.’” We hit a wall. Then we hit it again. Then we devoted an entire page to “Interesting Sports News” and left it blank. By 4:00 a.m. everything said aloud seemed funny enough to print and not funny at all.
In the weeks that followed, we fielded phone calls from the Muslim Student Association, livid over our front-page headline, “Prophets Jesus, Mohammed face off in holy scriptures sales competition,” a riff on Kanye West’s challenge to 50 Cent. We lost our faculty adviser, scared off by the content. We achieved our dream of becoming a liability. We purchased liability insurance. And later still, that inaugural staff moved on, became copy writers and doctors (Dan became a dentist!), journalists and computer programmers, radio DJs. One of them became a Republican.
I moved to Wilmington, N.C., where I spent three years studying and teaching creative writing at the University of North Carolina. I noticed something funny: The sign-toting evangelist in the university’s public uk essays plaza attracted more undergraduates on a Monday morning than most professors could on Thursday afternoon. Better yet, the students were engaged. To watch this preacher condemn everything from the hint of cleavage to the LGBTQ community, and to watch the students throw it back, was to watch both the educational and democratic processes at work. I often saw my own students gathered around him, learning in a way they never could in my classroom.
It came as something of a shock, then, when many of my peers in the creative-writing program voiced their disapproval. They called the preacher’s rants hate speech, said they were both personally offended and that their students were, too. Meetings were held with the administration to discuss the “problem,” to strategize how one might ban the preacher from campus. Surrounded as I was by liberals in a writing program, it took me a few minutes to comprehend the sincerity of their beliefs. Their position seemed hypocritical and misguided, and more important, it seemed to belittle (albeit unintentionally) the intelligence of their students.
In a strange way, I’ve come to believe that the satirical newspaper and the fire-and-brimstone preacher serve a similar function — and a vital one — within the incubator that is the American public university: to catalyze the exchange of ideas. To agree or disagree with either is to ignore the larger significance of both. The greater threat to the public university is not a good old-fashioned masturbation joke or the lampooning of Jesus Christ. It’s inertia. It’s complacency. And both the preacher and the satirical newspaper — wearing starched collars and waggish headlines — work tirelessly to stoke the fire. From controversy a dialogue is born, a dialogue that compels the student to articulate his or her beliefs not in a mid-term essay but among his or her peers.
Anyway, all of that came later.
In that old basement in Lincoln, we were just greasy college kids strung out on coffee and bad jokes, sure of nothing except the idea that our campus could use a few good laughs. When we finished, we spilled out of that fraternity like patients escaped from the psych ward. The sun had already risen. A raven cawed, and it was beautiful. The next day, we started over. We kept starting over, for eight years. I hope they start over again.
Carson Vaughan is a freelance journalist in Lincoln, Neb.
