Columbia College proudly stood its ground last spring when the Secret Service came to investigate a campus art exhibit that included an image of George Bush with a gun to his head. “We’re an art school,” media relations director Micki Leventhal told the Sun-Times. “We support freedom of speech, freedom of artistic expression and academic freedom.” Nonetheless, when a cartoon version of the college president, Warrick Carter, started popping up on posters in Columbia buildings in October the school responded with Watergate-style tactics.
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Wacky Warrick hosts an array of images, messages, and memorabilia depicting the Kewpie-Carter–everything from an audio clip of his giggle to T-shirts embellished with his face. There’s also a link to a MySpace account created for the fictional president. In November the site posted a three-minute animated video–a loose homage to Citizen Kane in which Carter professes his affection for tuition dollars, dithers over whether to send an e-mail account of his financial history to nearly everyone on the school’s staff and faculty (something he actually did by accident early in his tenure), and dons a robe to take an interviewer from the student paper on a tour of his mansion. The cartoon manse is complete with ballroom and elevator–just like Columbia’s actual $3.7 million presidential home. A tuxedoed servant spits in the eye of the interviewer so he won’t have to blink, and a mouse-eared dartboard hung in Carter’s bedroom is a reminder of something revealed in his errant real-life e-mail–that he was laid off from his previous job at Disney.
Phillips says he was called to the office of Columbia’s human resources director, Patricia Olalde, on December 19 and shown a printout of his MySpace blog. He says he was asked if he used school equipment to create and run Wacky Warrick and that he said no. Two days later he was brought in again and asked if he’d learned anything that might help the investigation; again he said no. Then on December 22, just before the school shut down for the holiday break, he was summoned to Olalde’s office and told that investigators had found evidence that he’d worked on the site while on the job. “They said they’d found a poster and some other small files from the Web site on my computer and were forced to terminate me,” he says. “I was so stunned it wasn’t until I’d walked away that I thought to myself, ‘I don’t have a computer at the lab.’ All but the director’s computer are used by whoever comes in–administrators, teaching assistants, students. They had fired me for something that could have been downloaded by anyone.” Olalde did not return calls for this story.
