The April Fools’ Day edition of Carnegie Mellon University’s student newspaper, The Tartan, was rubbish. It is clear who the April fools are. A cartoonist’s racial slur and a “joke” about running down blacks on the street stunned the campus. Protests, apologies, presidential condemnation, fired cartoonist, two editors’ resignations, an investigation. Discipline, up to expulsion? The entire publication, however, was prurient. Think ethnic and gender insult. Think below the waist and punctured nipples. Now you have it. CMU President Jared Cohon, a professed exponent of diversity in ethnicity, opinion and scholarship, hardly had this kind of miscellany in mind. He has to be asking — as an educator — if or where he went wrong. He shouldn’t blame himself — these are college students, after all, some of the stupidest people on Earth. Excess is hardly unknown on college campuses, nor are raunchy April Fools’ Day student newspapers. But Mr. Cohon has work to do. He should certainly know this by now. The CMU community is ripe, we think, for a good talking-to, Dutch-uncle style. Are we calling for political correctness• Not even close. But Cohon can raise a mighty thunder, and a therapeutic tough love. Race-baiting isn’t funny when you’re on the receiving end, and it’s a visible compound of self-hate and irrational fear when you’re dishing it out.

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