We should all learn to take a (bad) joke. The sense of humor failed the other day at one of Pittsburgh's greatest institutions, Carnegie Mellon University, and who knows what economic repercussions may result• Parents might decide not to pay the school's enormous tuition. Why should we send our kids, they might ask, to a place that inflates a scrap of trivia out of all proportion• It shows a lack of balance. This could be worrisome in a faculty that teaches engineering and architecture. What rocked the foundations of the university was an April Fool's joke, of which a percent fall flat in the first place, but they don't ruin the day of any sensible person. Not only was it a bad joke but a bad joke in a cartoon in a student newspaper, which ought to be a clue that it was at least trying to be funny. The artist gave offense with racial vulgarisms that he must have thought would surely be taken as a joke by anybody with an ounce of humor, but he was wrong. Many people lack that ounce. This is especially in an era when political correctness leaches it out of the brain. The jokester obviously made a mistake. Unhappily, mistakes in print circulate. Not just a few noses were wrinkled by it. The mistake deserved and received an apology, even though nobody was hurt by it so much as the kid who did it. He will be kicking himself a long time over this. Still, he didn't spray graffiti on anybody's locker. He broke no windows. Ironically, if he had cartooned Attorney General John Ashcroft, perhaps dressed in drag, calling out the troops against abortion, gay marriage or Arab women in burkas, it might have spread chortles. Those who would find that a bad joke would throw up their hands, saying: "Ah well, students -- what can you expect?" But the joke this time was very no-no. It was outrageous. There can be nothing worse. Abortion and treason pale beside it. It shaded the skin of the cartooned figure. It used the "n" word! The president of the university's breakfast was ruined. He cited an "unconscionable act that has created harm to all of our campus." He issued a public letter. This "horrible" cartoon "must not be tolerated. I condemn the author ... and the editors." And so, to end on a happy note, the cartoonist got fired, two other editors resigned, and the paper's regular editions reportedly are suspended for the rest of the semester. The only loose end is that maybe all this lightning and thunder over a bad joke does not augur well for "keeping young people in Pittsburgh," an important economic consideration here. Students' futures ought not to be blighted for doing something merely stupid. Students do that. People older than students do it. Chairmen of the board and presidents do it. Can the punishment be so severe in this marketplace• An eminent institution of higher learning might try to give the community a better example of how to take a (bad) joke.

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