LITTWIN: Well, this is one way to pack a college classroom

By Mike Littwin, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published September 27, 2007 at midnight

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FORT COLLINS - It was a four-letter word that got David McSwane in deep, uh, doo-doo. It wasn't, though, as you may have heard, the F-word.

It was the B-word.

We wouldn't be talking about this at all without the B-word. Put the F-word in front of some other name - as my colleague Jim Spencer pointed out, you can pick just about any other name - and see if we'd be having this conversation today.

If you don't recognize McSwane's name - and he hopes you don't - he is the student editor who penned the infamous four-word editorial in The Rocky Mountain Collegian last Friday with the four-letter words.

It read simply, "Taser This . . . F--- Bush."

Except without the hyphens.

The editorial was, I think we can all agree, brief. It was also confusing, sophomoric, obscure and, well, vulgar. It was supposed to be about the Tasering of a University of Florida student during a John Kerry speech - and it was supposed to, well, shock what McSwane has called an apathetic Colorado State University campus.

It shocked, all right. It dismayed. It also caused a storm of indignation - not all of it righteous, however. Supposedly shocked advertisers started pulling out of the paper, to the tune of about $50,000. Campus Republicans circulated petitions to have McSwane fired. The talk shows lit up. It was sort of like Ward Churchill - if Ward Churchill light.

At minimum, the apathy problem was resolved.

Which is why I was here Wednesday night for a hearing of the CSU Board of Student Communications, which will decide McSwane's fate today.

I talked to him before the hearing, and the kid - he's 20 - looked like he wanted to be somewhere else, anywhere else. He explained the editorial, saying, "We decided we wanted to make a statement about freedom of speech by exercising it, not just talking about it." But he said if he'd known what would come of it, he'd have figured another way to do it.

If you expected a cocky activist - he is the kid who went underground as a high school student to see how far military recruiters would go to recruit him and made it into a national story - who loves the cameras, you're looking at the wrong student editor.

"I don't even look good on TV," he said. "I've got this scar on my face."

He wasn't smiling.

"The last couple of days have been hell for all of us," he said of himself and the other student editors.

McSwane could be fired. He could be censured. Or, given that this is a university, the adults on campus could make sure a college newspaper works the way it's supposed to work - as a learning experience, as a place for growth, as a place for 20-year-olds to figure out how to be a grown-up, if not necessarily mature, journalist.

Someday, he can learn there are many ways to be provocative without using the F-word, although it may not land him a gig on HBO. And, of course, I can read comments much uglier written to me on my blog at the Rocky.

I mean, are we really shocked? It's obvious that McSwane, uh, messed up, but it's just as obvious that this became an issue because it's the liberal media on liberal college campuses using a four-letter word much too liberally.

I know I've already learned something. For example, if you want to fill a college classroom, all you have to do is drop a well-placed F-bomb or two.

In the 300-seat Classroom C-101 in the Plant Science Building on the Colorado State University campus, the F-bombs were flying - as one astute student put it - like confetti on New Year's Eve. In fact, for what may be the first time, cops had to actually turn students away from a classroom. Their parents must be proud.

You knew it was a college debate because, at one point, a student described the First Amendment as "awesome." Another debater was wearing a "F--- Bush" T-shirt. And yet another was holding a sign reading: "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad F?"

It sounded like a good time, especially for a Wednesday night. It was raucous, but everyone got to talk, and nobody was shouted down, not even the guy who compared the F-word to the N-word, except he didn't use "N."

Some worried that the CSU diploma had been devalued by one headline. Others said it wasn't about the First Amendment.

But, of course, it is about the First Amendment and freedom of the press and freedom to say stupid things in the process. As one student pointed out, the problem can't be the F-word, not if it's OK for Dick Cheney to use it on the Senate floor or for George W. Bush to use it in a 1999 Talk magazine interview with Tucker Carlson.

To the biggest applause of the night, the student said that "the editor of a college newspaper should be held to the same standards as the president of the United States."

To which he might have added: Taser that.

littwinm@RockyMountainNews.com

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