Anti-vegetarianism at Vanderbilt?

From the Nashville Scene:

You couldn’t blame Ari Dubin for overlooking the roasted pig’s head. It was impaled on a piece of wood and propped, rather discreetly, in a corner on the front patio of Vanderbilt’s Schulman Center for Jewish Life. When he showed up for work last Monday morning—smack in the middle of the Jewish High Holy Days that begin with Rosh Hashanah and end with Yom Kippur—Dubin simply didn’t notice the porcine porch decoration.

A staff member called it to his attention. “Someone said, ‘Hey, did you see that?’ ” Dubin, the executive director of Vanderbilt Hillel, a Jewish campus organization, recalls coolly. “I said, ‘No—did you call the police yet?’ So we did.” That’s because a pig’s head on the doorstep of a Jewish life center or synagogue serves as a universally recognized symbol of anti-Semitism. Due to a scriptural prohibition, orthodox Jews don’t eat pork; bigots tend to mine that cultural distinction for harassment and hate crime fodder.

Someone was sending Vanderbilt’s Jewish community a chilling message during the holiest days of the year. But who would do such a thing?

No one, according to Dubin and university officials; it was all just a very unfortunate—and offensive—misunderstanding. Here’s what happened: on Saturday, Oct. 8, Vandy’s Sigma Chi fraternity chapter, which is housed across the street from the Schulman Center, hosted their annual football game-day party, at which they roasted a whole pig. After the game, one Sigma Chi brother—acting alone, says the fraternity—thought it would be funny to put the pig’s head outside of Grins (pronounced “greens”), the vegetarian café across the street.

The joke, you see, was that vegetarians would be upset to find meat on their front porch. (Good one, brah.) Unfortunately for this pig-headed student—whose identity Vanderbilt has declined to release, citing federal student privacy laws—Grins is a kosher vegetarian café, and it’s located inside the campus Jewish life center.

Trying to intimidate Vandy's Jewish community would have been an egregious crime. But while using a pig-head-on-a-stick to poke on vegetarians is a far more mild gesture, I don't know that it can be passed off as an innocent prank. I'm a vegetarian and have often been amazed by how many people have taken issue with my culinary choices, especially since I have never advocated moral vegetarianism for all people. I don't feel threatened by the head of swine, but I don't find it terribly clever either.

"I will never eat meat, so that I may not cause on of them to fall" (1 Corinthians 8:13, taken entirely out of context).