I am sorry and sad to say, but this play was also shown at Xavier University a year or two ago, here in Cincinnati. I was rather disgusted. Here is the article:
**Play rallies campus on academic freedom ****
**By Shelly Whitehead
Post staff reporter
Even the participants in Friday’s rally at Xavier University seemed a little shocked by the scene.
There, in the center of the Catholic university’s campus, surrounded by dorm exteriors emblazoned with letters spelling out “V-A-G-I-N-A” and “P-E-N-I-S,” were 200 students and faculty loudly proclaiming their rights to see works like “The Vagina Monologues.”
It was just five days after the school’s executive committee banned the performance, only to capitulate two days later and permit its staging when a professor offered to present it as part of a class on discrimination and power. The power students and faculty felt after their victory was evident at Friday’s rally.
But there also was a strong sense of resolve to do more expressed across T-shirts scrawled with anti-censorship messages, posters chastising school administrators for their actions, and over loud speakers blaring vows of teachers and students to keep the pressure on for more academic freedom at Xavier.
“Be careful what you ask for because you just might get it,” said Economics and Human Relations Professor Dr. Nancy Bertaux, who is presenting the play as part of her class.
“Father Graham asked for engagement on issues of – social justice and he got it.”
The crowd’s roaring reception for Bertaux’s remark came just as students learned of an emergency meeting two hours earlier of the Xavier faculty senate. Faculty members “overwhelmingly” voted in favor of petitioning the school’s president, vice president and academic chairs to extend academic freedoms beyond the walls of the classroom, a measure that might have prevented the move to ban the play, not initially part of course work.
But Xavier’s administrative leaders did not appear at Friday’s gathering. Xavier University External Relations Director Kelly Leon said that University President Father Michael Graham was at a funeral in Florida.
A statement he issued Friday night in response to the rally said, "I commend (students) for coming together – to passionately express their opinions and concerns. – I am fully supportive of the principles of academic freedom.
“The points students and faculty have raised – will continue – to be embraced and discussed by the entire campus community.”
The play at the center of the storm continued as scheduled Friday night at the Gallagher Student Center without incident. Two more performances of Eve Ensler’s work, based on interviews with more than 200 women about their vaginas, are set for this evening.
The production is part of a student-led project at Xavier designed to raise awareness about violence against women and money for the Women’s Crisis Center.
By Friday, however, the so-called “V-Day” project also had clearly become about censorship and student freedoms.“What started as my idea to bring ‘The Vagina Monologues’ to campus has ended up being something that has united students and faculty alike,” said the play’s director, a Xavier junior, Chris Sims.
