Garry Trudeau has criticized many people and institutions in the 40 years since he first started drawing Doonesbury, the Pulitzer-Prize winning comic strip. But his latest cause is a personal one: he has come to the defense of two of his more colorful characters who’ve been banished from a Connecticut college campus.
Since Tuesday, Doonesbury has focused on a 2008 decision by Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., to force students to rename two campus festivals that had been named for the characters Zonker Harris and Uncle Duke. The festivals — one in the fall and one in the spring — were held every year for more than 30 years.
It seems that Wesleyan decided that Uncle Duke and Zonker Harris, well known to Doonesbury fans as heavy drug users, were not the sort of characters the school wanted to be associated with, especially during a spring festival that tends to coincide with campus visits by prospective students and their parents.
So the festivals were renamed. Uncle Duke Day is now the 8th Day of the Week, as in the Beatles song. Zonker Harris has taken on a Harry Potter reference; his day is now known as Ze Who Must Not Be Named.
Student festival organizers are not happy. They wrote to Mr. Trudeau appealing for help convincing the university administration to change its policy.
Mr. Trudeau, a graduate of Yale (30 minutes down the highway from Wesleyan), wrote in an e-mail Thursday that he decided to take up the cause because he did not like the way the director of Wesleyan’s Office of Residential Life has recently characterized Duke and Zonker.
“The director of Res-Life called Zonker a ‘hippie-druggie,’ which, of course, he is, but what student holiday is named after a model citizen?” Mr. Trudeau wrote.
Mr. Trudeau also isn’t crazy about the new names, describing the replacement for Duke Day as “awful.” He wrote that Ze Who Must Not Be Named is not so bad, but added, “it doesn’t support my brand as directly as I’d like.”
A statement by the university said it was “flattered to be satirized” in Doonesbury.
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