At New Jersey’s Bergen Community College, art and animation professor Francis Schmidt was summoned for a meeting with the human resources department, and the school’s security staff. He was questioned about his threat to shoot up the school, suspended without pay, and told he would not be reinstated until he had been cleared by a psychiatric evaluation.
This meeting was in response to what the school staff found to have been a threatening e-mail: the auto-notification that Google sends when a Google+ contact posts a new picture. Bergen had posted a picture of his elementary-school-aged daughter wearing an oversize T-shirt with the phrase, “I will take what is mine with fire and blood,” along with a symbol that is used by the HBO show “Game of Thrones.” The words were a quote from the fictional Daenrys Stormborn, the fictional Mother of Dragons, and refer to her desire and willingness to use her fictional dragons’ fictional abilities to incinerate enemies to assist her in taking the fictional Iron Throne and ruling the fictional kingdoms of Westeros.
The school staff, however, reportedly viewed this e-mail as threatening because, according to the security official, “The word ‘fire’ could be a proxy for AK-47s.”
The story, as well as the purportedly threatening photograph, can be found here.
He claims the reaction was a pretext based on an earlier dispute concerning his sabbatical. The school denies it, but bizarrely even now does not admit that their approach was unwise. After all, as school president Kaye Walter explained, there were three school shootings across the country in January prior to the T-shirt post, so they can hardly be said to have made any kind of an error.
Because the linked article is a UK paper, I was hoping for a second that this was in Europe and not the US. That way we wouldn’t have so much of a monopoly on ridiculous zero tolerance policies and sniveling weanie school administrators who wet themselves at the drop of a hat.
No such luck. It’s in a NJ college.
This one certainly hits all the right buttons. Irrational fear of firearms? Check. Freaking out over the message on a t shirt? Check. Complete overreaction on the part of the school? Check.
Gross, now there’s daily fail all over my monitor.
If anything, I’m most shocked that not only was he posting to G+, there were people following. But, yes, the story as presented casts the school administration in an ineffectual and out-of-touch light. I mean, if you really think someone is a credible threat to shoot up your school, would you really want to antagonize them by suspending them without pay?
Not to blame the victim, but it rarely seems like a great idea to give business contacts access to one’s personal profile. FB and G+ should probably have a warning to that effect.
[ X ] I understand that by default, all contacts— including my boss, co-workers, vindictive ex-wife and deeply religious grandparents—will be able to see every photo I post, including those where I’m stuffed in a Speedo or wearing blackface or doing tequila body shots off a waitress’s belly in Cancun.
I’ve gotten flack in the past for wearing stuff the mundanes don’t grok…but holy smokes, it’s Game of Thrones. Even the most mundane of mundanes know about this by now.
New shirt ideas guaranteed to get you fired and/or arrested (each with the GoT logo prominent, natch) :
“My Son Visited the Sept of Baelor and All I Got Was This Lousy Hatefuck From My Sister”
“Old Enough To Bleed, Old Enough to Breed a New Targaryen Line”
“I Gotcher Needle Riiiight Here, Motherfucker”
“Mess With My Khaleesi And I’ll Cut Myself and Then Shit On Your Corpse”
“You Can’t Fire Me, Slaves Have To Rise Up and Murder You in the Name of the Stormborn”
“King’s Landing: Come For the Rape and Brutal Murder of Women and Children, Stay For the Regicide!”
.
I fail to see how posting a picture of someone’s kid wearing a shirt with a moderately violent quote from a MASSIVELY POPULAR TV SHOW is tantamount to threatening anything, and anyone with half a brain should have just Googled the quote and realized that it’s a commercially made shirt referencing a quote from a popular character.
Instead, they went full retard (to use another moderately offensive movie quote), and did this.
Every so often, I read a perfect one-liner like this, and I am immediately filled with envy, hatred, and greed: envy that I didn’t think of it first, hatred of you that you DID think of it first, and greed that motivates my plan to steal it, file off the serial numbers, and use it myself.
According to the article, they asked him to prove his claim that this was a popular show (or possibly to prove that the phrase originated from a show).
As though the T-shirt wasn’t some sort of clue in that regard.
Well, in their defense, the advent of the internet means you can order a t-shirt with just about anything you want on it. As opposed to the old days, when you had to drive to the mall and get one with crappy iron-on lettering.