The buzz-killing master puppeteers behind political correctness are at it again in the Ivy League. But this time, bullshit has been decidedly called. Sparks are flying, and IvyGate is here to settle the Great Yale T-Shirt Saga once and for all. Investigation ho!

Turns out, the tale is as tangled as it is lame. In the days preceding the Harvard/Yale Game, Eli frosh cobbled together a mildly amusing anti-Cantab t-shirt, emblazoned with the seemingly innocuous quote

I think of all Harvard men as sissies.

- F. Scott Fitzgerald, Princeton-dropout and required 10th-grade reading.

The little Elis subsequently patted themselves on the back for their cutting wit, and happily prepared themselves for yet another gridiron drubbing at the hands of not-quite-as-athletically-feeble-but-still-very-much-so Harvard.

But not so fast witty frosh! Like the charge of the light brigade, the Yale LGBT Cooperative descended upon the baby politicos of the Freshman Class Council. Apparently, Yale—normally the most homophilic of the Ivies—had committed a major gay-bashing no-no. In the words of LGBT Coordinator Julio-Perez Torres (whose Facebook lists “Freedom Fighter” as his Political Views.) Irony forthcoming:

The term ‘sissies’ is considered offensive and demeaning, and a “thinly-veiled gay slur.”

The Co-op cried foul to Yale administrators, and the hypersensitive head honchos put their foot down. The folks at the Huffington Post and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education are also mad as hell, and not going to take it anymore. Read on after the jump.

The shirt in question—which had won over half of the freshman vote—was scuppered with explicit orders from everyone’s favorite unapproachable matriarch, Yale Dean Mary Miller:

What purports to be humor by targeting a group through slurs is not acceptable.

Boom goes the dynamite! F. Scott Fitzgerald: surprise homophobe! (despite his rumored illicit affair with Ernest Hemingway… not making this up). A schoolyard jibe: suddenly and ambiguously unacceptable! The “sissies” shirt was axed; the new anti-Harvard design, more boring than The Game itself, was a flop.

Check out the quote’s blasely inoffensive context, which, obviously, noone read, below:

“I want to go to Princeton… I don’t know why, but I think of all Harvard men as sissies, like I used to be, and all Yale men as wearing big blue sweaters and smoking pipes. Monsignor chuckled.” “I’m one, you know.” ”Oh, you’re different—I think of Princeton as being lazy and good-looking and aristocratic—you know, like a spring day. Harvard seems sort of indoors—-” ”And Yale is November, crisp and energetic,” finished Monsignor. (This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald)

Guffaw! *adjusts monocle* But don’t think you’re getting away with it that easy Yale muzzlers…  Enter the libertarians. A few days ago, the Huffington Post blog picked up the controversy in a scathing column, penned by Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (aptly acronymed: FIRE!). Lukianoff writes:

If even quotes from Fitzgerald which have to be misinterpreted to be offensive can be banned at Yale, I fear these administrators will fall down and die the first time they watch an episode of Family Guy or South Park.

Meanwhile, Lukianoff’s less-snappy but more-pretentious colleague, Adam Kissell, FIRE’d off a missive directly to Yale President Levin, Dean Miller, the Yale Daily News and the Freshman Class Council:

It is not a happy day when a Yale College dean with degrees from Yale and Princeton, an historian of art, declares that T-shirts quoting Fitzgerald are “not acceptable.”…In matters large and small, Yale has taken steps that erode the freedom it once championed, teaching its students that the authorities ultimately decide which expressions are acceptable or unacceptable. This seems the very opposite of a liberal education in a free society.

All lofty rhetoric aside, tip-toeing carefully around vaguely/possibly/maybe/partially rude words doesn’t exactly portend fun, ballsy collegiate football. (Just ask ever-cautious Yale coach Tom Williams). This all raises the question… “Freedom-Fighter” Julio and Dean Miller: who are the real sissies here?

But should we be surprised? Not really. Yale has a rightly-earned rep for bravely taking on free speech at every available opportunity. Its Press refused to print Kurt Westergaard’s controversial Muhammad cartoons in a scholarly tome wholly about them; its students then protested the amiable cartoonist’s campus visit.

Yale, remember your famous Woodward Report on free expression, which my tour guide so aggressively hawked not so many years ago? Why not give it another read. How about this part, written explicitly for the PC crowd?:

We have considered the opposing argument that behavior which violates social and ethical considerations should be made subject to formal sanctions, and the argument that such behavior entitles others to prevent speech they might regard as offensive. Our conviction that the central purpose of the university is to foster the free access of knowledge compels us to reject both of these arguments.

Political correctness be damned. In this case, the rights-groupies are right. The freshmen overwhelmingly clamored for the shirt; “sissies” hasn’t been an anti-gay slur since Reconstruction.

Censorship is the antithesis of fun, humor, college, victory, and football. Here at IvyGate, we laugh in its face (also in the face of authority, nasty reader comments, and death). Yale, maybe you could learn a thing or two. Make sure that our sassy little blog isn’t exercising your precious Woodward Report’s “right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable” better than you are.

Step up; speak up. And, at the very least, we hope you had a Happy Christmas Holiday.

The painfully boring censored T-Shirt, which hardly anyone bought:

Some amusing, un-PC comments on the Yale Daily News website:

(Special thanks to Norman Rockwell and James Madison)