School officials nix ‘Monologues’

The course of a production of "The Vagina Monologues" was reversed Tuesday as the administration decided that the 2002 campus ban by the Board of Trustees and former president Fr. Robert Spitzer, S.J., stands as a precedent.

This semester, the administration was working with a group of student leaders through an approval process that students participants believed would lead to official acceptance to hold the performance on campus.  According to the Monologue Web site, the Monologues, written by playwright Eve Ensler, are meant to give meaning to varied women's sexual experiences. In 2002, a group of students held a performance of the Monologues off-campus after an administrative ban. 

Tuesday, Interim Academic Vice President Earl Martin gave student leaders and faculty a letter from Interim President Thayne McCulloh outlining the reason for the official decision.
"As one who has worked closely with the Trustees for a period of time, and now serves as a member ex officio, I am confident that many of the Trustees who were involved in the decision in 2002 see their earlier vote as having affirmed the president's decision in relation to this specific production," Dr. McCulloh wrote.

McCulloh did make it clear that he is willing to meet with the students who have organized the tryouts and rehearsals to date, including seniors Libby Villa, Maura Pisciotta, and Ian Sullivan. He also made it clear that the group is welcome to hold the production off-campus to bring awareness to sexual violence against men and women, student leaders said.

"We're a humanistic, Jesuit university whose goal is to educate mind, body, and spirit, and it's disheartening to hear that the University is choosing to exclude a performance that raises awareness about the disenfranchised mind, body, and spirit," Villa said.

The leaders and performers still met on Tuesday night for rehearsal.  They plan to hold the performance, now scheduled for Wednesday, although the location and time is to be announced. The students are attempting to find a location near campus so that as many students as possible can attend.

"The ban eliminates discourse," Pisciotta said.

"There was going to be an organized discussion following the performance."
McCulloh cited two criteria as a basis for the decision.

"I have spent a good deal of time in the past several weeks considering carefully two primary issues: (1) the context the history establishes regarding consideration of the current proposal, and (2) contemporary issues which also require consideration (for example, relationships with current constituencies, both internal and external, as well as the Events Policy and its review process)," McCulloh wrote.

The letter's reference to the Events Policy is vague at best, Villa and Pisciotta said.   
Womens and Gender Studies Chair Patsy Fowler said, "The grand irony of the University's stance against ‘The Vagina Monologues' is that it comes just as the theater department's production of ‘Lysistrata' is opening on campus. Apparently, the Board of Trustees  is quite comfortable with blatant sex jokes and erect phalluses being presented live on stage for comedic effect, but it deems inappropriate a celebration of women's empowerment  as part of a campaign to raise awareness and money to end violence against women," Fowler wrote in an e-mail. "Let me be clear, I support and applaud the production of ‘Lysistrata;' it is an important piece of classical drama that I often teach.  But to censor ‘The Vagina Monologues' because of inappropriate content is nothing less than absurd."

"We as students find it difficult that the Board of Trustees set the policy but are disengaged from our campus," Villa said. "To be denied the venue to speak about women's issues in a phallocentric university is disrespectful, it's discrimination."

McCulloh did not rule out the future of the performance on campus.

"I am confident that the Trustees would be willing, at my request, to review the current proposal and advise me in light of that review…the Chair and I both feel, however, that such deliberation could properly occur only within the context of a full Board discussion," McCulloh wrote.

The group will notify the student body of the location, time, and date of the performance as soon as details have been decided.  A Facebook group entitled The Vagina Monologues: Banned at Gonzaga University has more information.