Vandals evidently opposed to radical Conservative Ann Coulter have left their mark on the UNM campus.
On the doors of Popejoy Hall, posters for her planned appearance tonight have the words "You too can join the master race" and "You too can think like a war criminal" scribbled across them. Coulter's photo on the fliers also had the words "reactionary loser" and "enemy of the arts" written across it sometime after UNM's College Republicans put them up around campus Sunday.
Scott Darnell, president of the College Republicans, said the group decided not to put up the posters to promote the conservative speaker until days before the event because he didn't expect them to stay up.
On Monday morning, Darnell said he started to hear reports the posters had been taken down or vandalized.
"Certainly half of them are defaced or gone," he said.
Paul Suozzi, manager of the 21st Century Speaker Series, which books speakers at Popejoy, said he saw the posters Sunday, and they all looked fine.
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"I came in this morning (Monday) at 10 a.m. and most of the posters had graffiti," he said.
Suozzi said by Tuesday while he removed what was left of the posters, a dialogue began to appear on them, including phrases like "Forgive them. They know not what they do."
Any person violating the rules of posting at UNM, including the removal of posters, may be subject to discipline under the University's Student Code of Conduct.
"I don't think any individual is in power to clean up a board unless they are in jurisdiction for that board," said Randy Boeglin, dean of students. "If it was a group-type thing, there would be a sanction if it was established they were responsible for that type of activity."
After a walk around campus Monday, Ryan Brightbill, a UNM junior, said he went looking for the Coulter fliers he had helped put up Sunday. He said when he saw the table for UNM's College Democrats at the Duck Pond, he stopped to talk about Coulter.
"I acted like a Democrat and said it was great that someone was writing on the fliers," he said. "A girl at the duck pond said, 'We had been taking them down and wrote some dirty comments on them as well.'"
Brightbill said as he left he thanked the group and said he was a College Republican.
Coulter's planned appearance tonight has been postponed until late April because she has acute laryngitis, Suozzi said.
"We want everyone to hear this lady speak," said College Democrat co-president Ambrosia Ortiz. "I want to hear her spit out crazy lies for two and a half hours."
She said the group understands buying tickets for the show will benefit Popejoy, not Coulter.
She said as far as she knows, nobody from her group touched the posters.
"If anybody did, we apologize and will definitely send an e-mail out telling everyone that's not OK," Ortiz said.
Both Darnell and Ortiz said they tell their members that it is not acceptable to touch fliers put up by any other student group regardless of whether they conflict in ideology, but it still happens.
"It is childish, and basically, it is a right that was taken away from the College Republicans," Brightbill said.
