Response to sculpture was harsh

To the editor:

I just don't get it. I understand why some members of the University of Iowa community were repulsed by Serhat Tanyolacar's Kluxer effigy, even though I dispute the contention that Tanyolacar's sculpture is 'racist” and consider demands that he be fired or not allowed to teach disproportionate and unjust.

I don't get how the UI administration, in the person of President Sally Mason, could get its response so wrong. Tanyolacar is a faculty member, an artist; his work, whether he had permission or not to display it on the Pentacrest, did exactly what he intended, provoke response from the university audience. Tanyolacar learned a valuable lesson about what happens when you release your art into the wild, but he did nothing that requires an apology.

As the public face of a leading research university, Mason pandered. The UI owes no one an apology for Tanyolacar's sculpture: as an artist, he presented us with a vision which may be disturbing, but which is also grounded in our past, and obviously still affects our present. As evidenced by the outcry over the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner (and thousands more, unnamed), this country refuses still to reconcile itself with the truth of its racism.

Tanyolacar did nothing to harm us. He made many of us uncomfortable, even angry, but forced us to articulate that discomfort and anger. Tanyolacar simply did what any university faculty should do: get us to question, think, then speak.

Jeff Klinzman

Coralville