HIGH SCHOOL DRAMA STIRS UP A VIRGINIA COUNTY

A one-act play about a high shool student who decides he is gay is kicking up a fuss in Loudoun County, Virginia, with the student author complaining of "intolerance" from adults while a state legislator is accusing the schools of "promoting homsexuality."

Presented as part of a drama festival at Stone Bridge High School, the 20-minute play features a popular football player whose friends turn against him when he comes out.

The author, Audrey Jess, said she wrote the play in an effort to expose intolerance among students.

It includes a scene in which two boys appear to be about to kiss when the lights go down, and a concluding speech by the hero in which he asks the audience, "See me as a person, inside. Do you see one just like you? Is that the problem? A little of me hiding in you? Is that the problem?"

The answer, quite generally is "hell, no," but the question is a popular one among gay activists.

The legislator, Republican Delegate Richard Black, denounced the play in an email to his constituents and urged them to complain to the school board. He said the play includes "a scene where two male students kiss and then tell the audience that, 'You can't tell me that there isn't a little bit of me in every one of you'."

That seems to be a fair enough summary, although the local newspaper insisted that the kiss was "in the imagination of the audience" and the school system's PR man described Black's version as an "urban legend."

The school's principal requested some changes in the script but allowed the play to be staged.

Some fifty high-school students showed up to support the author at a school board meeting, raising a question of just how much intolerance there actually is at Stone Bridge High School.

Homosexuality is hardly an unknown subject to high school students, even in Loudoun County, which is partly a fast-growing suburb of Washington and partly a rural community. Delegate Black is way too late to protect his young constituents from hearing about homosexuality.

Still, the play sounds labored, more of an exercise in leftist political correctness than drama. The young author would do well to study "The Crucible," Arthur Miller's drama on the Salem witch trials, which he wrote to shed light on the anti-communist hysteria launched by the House Un-American Activities Committee in the early 1950's. (Senator Joe McCarthy came along a little later.) Miller wrote a great play to make a political point, but didn't shove his point into the audience's face; he let them figure it out for themselves. Compelling drama can be written about the agony of coming out. Taunting the audience is not compelling.

Still, let the show go on. The reaction to it is more educational than the play could ever hope to be.

FIORINA'S DEPARTURE: POWER OF THE PRESS?

Carly Fiorina was deposed as CEO of Hewlett-Packard today, and one can only wonder how much of a factor it was that FORTUNE magazine skewered, disemboweled, and virtually beheaded her in a recent issue.

The FORTUNE article was unmerciful in its analysis of Fiorina's tenure at H-P, especially in her leadership of the company's merger with Compaq Computer. The merger has failed to produce the profitable high-tech conglomerate predicted by Fiorina.

The magazine noted, among other things, that H-P stockholders went from owning 100 percent of a profitable business in printers to owning about 63 percent of it as a result of paying for Compaq with H-P shares, and that H-P's pre-merger projections have totally failed to play out. Profits from the printer business, in which H-P is the leading brand, are used to support the struggling computer and consulting businesses, in which H-P is an also-ran. The article accused her of having no strategic vision that actually makes any sense in real world.

All of these facts and observations have been out there for many months, and one can only wonder why the board waited until now to take action. Perhaps the board was as heavily invested in the pointless merger with Compaq as Fiorina herself. But perhaps the board members hadn't quite put it all together until FORTUNE did it for them.

And perhaps the board members couldn't figure out how to respond to FORTUNE's criticisms by making any move short of dropping Fiorina overboard. Life at the top is dangerous, especially when the press takes a hard look at one's failures.

WARD CHURCHILL AND THE VALUE OF FREE SPEECH

The entertaining farce over the 9/11 "analysis" published by Ward Churchill, a professor of Indian studies at the University of Colorado, illustrates nicely the value of free speech.

Churchill's convoluted reasoning, in which he argues that the U.S. basically had it coming when Al Qaida murdered 3,000 innocent people, clearly relies more on anti-American bias rather than on any type of rational analysis such as might be expected of a college professor. (Mr. Churchill, by the way, does not hold a Ph.D. in any field and is thus less educated than most members of the professoriat.)

In other words, his argument is the product of garden-variety left-wing nut job, various permutations of which description are well known to infest the academic world. So why the big fuss?

It's the syndrome of the crazy aunt in the attic. Everyone knows she is there, but no one listens to her ravings or thinks they have any connection to reality. As long as CU, or any other university, has people like that on the faculty, it can pretend to be achieving "diversity" goals without going to the trouble of actually advancing human knowledge by one whit.

An Indian activist gets a job, students have some easy "A" courses in which they do not have to think, the university has a few Native Americans on the payroll, and everyone is happy.

Until someone actually reads what the man is saying, and all hell breaks loose.

Mr. Churchill has been induced to resign his position as department chairman, which he was going to leave in June anyway, and the university can hope that the controversy will blow over.

But the whole world now knows what a waste of time and money is represented by Ward Churchill, and can only wonder how many more publicly funded college professors are preaching hate instead of thinking, researching, and teaching.