Shakespeare once argued that “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Apparently, some college crybullies have forgotten Romeo and Juliet, since they’ve managed to force their school to kill the nickname for their school’s athletic center.
No, you really can’t make this crap up:
Students at the Colorado School of Mines — a public university in Golden, Colorado, focused to engineering and applied science — voted overwhelmingly last year to nickname their athletic arena “the Mine Shaft.”
But in an email sent last August, a student (whose name was redacted) describes being “shocked and disgusted” at the nickname choice for the university’s Lockridge Arena.
“The idea behind the name, at least from the students perspective, was that the students could tell the opposing team they had been ‘shafted,’” the student wrote. In making her complaint, the student used another racially loaded term (and some misspellings) in an email to administrators: “The most common definition of the word means to get jipped out of a deal, which doesn’t make since [sic] for us to be telling another team. But the other and most disturbing definition is to be raped. Bottom line, I think the name supports rape culture. If Mines is truly trying to diversify the campus maybe they should not have the student section have such aphalic [sic] name.”
Administrators sprung into action after receiving the student’s complaint.
Katie Schmalzel, assistant director of housing operations, took the complaint so seriously that she forwarded it to the university’s Title IX coordinator. “I agree with [pronoun redacted] about the name being inappropriate, and goes against everything our work stands for,” she wrote.
This may well be one of the most ridiculous crybully complaints ever — and in this era of crybullies running rampant over colleges, that’s saying something.
First, let’s look at the argument: getting “shafted” means rape?
Even the complainant agrees that the prevalent definition is to get screwed in a deal. When the heck has it been used to describe rape? The Free Dictionary has no such definition. Neither does the Online Slang Dictionary. The Urban Dictionary comes close to using that definition, but says nothing about nonconsensual sex — instead, it ascribes the use of the term to the gay community and simply describes the act as “humiliating.”
If the definition of getting “shafted” being rape exists anywhere, the crybully did some serious investigating to find it. More likely, this definition only exists in his or her addled mind — but administrators, cowed into taking such things seriously, caved.
Now, a case could be made that the term “shaft” could be phallic … if the school wasn’t the freaking Colorado School of Mines, for crying out loud.
And Social Justice Warriors don’t understand why so few of us outside of the college setting take them seriously.
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