CMU paper's April 1 cartoon has no one laughing

Students at Carnegie Mellon University will be protesting -- not laughing -- today at an April Fools' Day prank they consider racially offensive.

A rally -- at 10 a.m. at an Oakland campus landmark called "the fence" -- will protest an April Fools' Day cartoon in The Tartan, the student newspaper. A character in the cartoon talks about running over blacks and uses a racial epithet.

"I just feel it's a disgrace -- especially in this Easter season, this Lent season -- to put out things of this sort," said Ronald White, 22, a black student from Baltimore.

"As a Christian," he said, "my first responsibility is not to get angry but to educate those who are naive to racial matters."

Another black student, Tommy Taylor, 21, of Washington, D.C., said he was stunned by the cartoon.

"I'm a pretty comical guy, but I didn't really find any humor out of it," said the senior. "It seems pretty blatantly racially motivated."

Kevin Manley, 19, a black student from Monroeville, said he wonders how this could happen at Carnegie Mellon.

"I was blown away," the sophomore said. "I didn't think we were still at a point where this stuff would be published in a newspaper."

Editor-in-chief Alex Meseguer, a junior from Wayne, N.J., agreed that the strip is offensive. He said The Tartan will apologize for the cartoon and remove all the issues from the racks on campus.

Meseguer said he's trying to determine why he didn't see this cartoon before the paper was published. He could not say which of the paper's cartoonists produced the work.

"It was late night before it was published," he said. "We were up until the wee hours producing it."

Meseguer said he will attend today's rally to address students' concerns.

"I really felt I let the campus community down," he said. "I've never dealt with anything like this before."

Michael Murphy, dean of student affairs, said the cartoon is "deplorable, hurtful and offensive." He said a dozen students, faculty and staff members have talked to him about it.

"People felt it was offensive and entirely inconsistent with the values of this community," he said.

Murphy said he is reviewing the incident to determine whether he should take action.

"There is the issue of rights in terms of speech," he said, "but there's the issue of responsibilities that go along with that free speech."

Aysegul Askan, 25, a doctoral student from Ankara, Turkey, argued that the newspaper's apology does not absolve The Tartan from responsibility.

"It doesn't help. It doesn't change anything," she said. "This campus is proud of being culturally diverse and respectful of everybody's right. But this totally violates its mission."