At Montclair State, you can call someone racist, but you can’t call someone fat
By Art Gallagher
Last September Steve Lonegan addressed a group at Montclair State University. During his presentation, a fat guy asked Lonegan about his famous 2006 billboard controversy. In case you forgot, Lonegan gained widespread press coverage in 06 for asking McDonalds to remove a billboard written in Spanish from a Bogota roadside. Lonegan was mayor of Bogota at the time.
The fat Montclair State student proceeded to heckle Lonegan, calling him a racist and a shameful American fascist. Fatboy was escorted from the meeting after he refused to shut up. The incident was captured on video and posted to youtube where as of this writing it has only 510 views. (UPDATE: The fatboy youtube has been set to private)
Evidently fatboy has a fat girl friend. It’s not clear from the video who the girlfriend is, but Joseph Aziz, a graduate student at Montclair got himself into hot water for posting a comment on Youtube that the woman’s legs look like “a pair of bleached hams.” Someone complained to the university administration, according to a surviving reporter at the Star Ledger, They forbade Aziz from having any contact with the fatgirl or from posting her name anywhere on the Internet. MoreMonmouthMusings was going to ask Lonegan if the girl was really fat, but we figured he wouldn’t know.
Aziz later joked about the incident and the fat girl in a facebook group. He said he thought the facebook group was private. Someone sent Aziz’s comments to the Montclair University Internet Police and Aziz was suspended from the university for a year. Karen Pennington, Montclair’s vice president of student development, campus life and manners, cited New Jersery’s Anti-Bullying Law as justification for Aziz’s suspension and for denying his appeal of the suspension. Aziz says the suspension puts his future career as a microbiologists at risk.
MMM has been told that the fatboy who called Lonegan a racist and a shameful American facist while disrupting the event received no disciplinary consequences from the Montclair State administration.
Neither fatboy nor Aziz should have been disciplined by the University. Their friends and families should tell them they were being assholes. The only fascists in this sordid story are the administrators at Montclair who are abusing their power to forward a polictical agenda.
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Although I Agree that the suspensions is pretty ridiculous. He was not being reprimanded for his comments(well he was but it was dropped apparently). He did not follow some sort of conduct code . In MSU’s defense, they told him flat out not to contact or mention whats her face. He blatantly disregarded this warning and got caught. If he wanted to fight and counter with the first amendment argument that is something else. But as far as I know he didn’t. Also In regards to his future career. He is 25 and throughout the year he tried to do 33 credits and only ended up completing ten.(just a side note since he was the one who brought it up) Yeah it sucks that he is suspended, but every students signs a binding contract to abide by the code of conduct. He broke his contract and now he has to deal with it.
http://thefire.org/article/15325.html
[…] YouTube video of the fat heckler was set to private within an hour of MMM asking the University for the identity of the heckler and if the heckler had also been […]