I had a bad experience with a group of Japanese tourists on campus this week. I wanted to discuss it in this space, but a friend cautioned me that the subject might be too “racially charged.” I’m not sure if he was serious or not, but in saying so, he summed up an important part of the culture here.

Take note, newbies. As you will learn if you read this page often enough, political correctness is coin of the realm at Stanford. Even those who openly chafe against the practice, like the diligent staff of the Stanford Review (title of one recent article: “Exactly How Latino is ‘Latino?’”), are usually, in the end, only feeding the beast. For that matter, the use of the phrase “political correctness” in this column feels too correct. I prefer the grandfather-friendly phrase “pussy-footing around.” As in, there’s a lot of pussy-footing around on this campus.

(For anyone who doesn’t know what the phrase means, I would recommend reading “Poem” by William Carlos Williams. The poem is about a cat, a flower pot and a jamcloset.)

John Hennessy likes to pussy-foot around. We may have the most politick University President in all of higher education. In one statement from last year he responded to the flap created by Harvard President Lawrence Summers about women in the sciences. The title, “Vantage Point: Look to future of women in science and engineering,” reads like something translated from Chinese into English by Google.

In the statement, Hennessy seems to want to criticize Summers for speculating about “innate differences” between men and women. But we’ll never know, because he buries the criticism underneath a few statistics and a pile of words like “enterprise,” “pipeline,” and “untoward.” His pleasant, insubstantial tone flutters on the page like a seagull riding the updraft.

But the statement was actually a team effort, much like the St. James Bible, except to different effect. He wrote it with two other University presidents, which is like going out on a limb after first stacking mattresses underneath. After reading it, I went and listened to my pirated copy of Slim Thug’s “Like a Boss.”

Why pick on President Hennessy several months after the fact? Because it’s a trickle-down effect.

Recently, as part of a vague, ongoing series of columns described only as being “on men and women,” Andrea Runyan wrote in The Daily that, “ ... as politically incorrect as it is to say so, male and female minds are fundamentally different.” Right as I read that, I heard the slight crinkle of little pussy-feet padding across my paper.

Perhaps Hennessy, Runyan and I can sit down over a saucer of milk sometime and talk about why it might be politically incorrect to say that male and female minds are different. But seeing as I’m leaving for Oxford in a week, I’ll be untoward and put the enterprise somewhere down the pipeline.

But about the Japanese tourists. My Sophomore College class of 14 students and two professors was sitting around one of the half-moon conference tables in a room in the History Building, discussing the plays we had just seen at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

So I’m sitting there, trying not to bite my fingernails, when a group of Japanese tourists passes beneath our open window, talking with abandon. I hear the outside door open, and a moment later the tour guide leads a group of 10 or 12 (I’m certain it was an even number) people through the hallway by our room. The tour guide shushes his group loudly when he sees our class through the open door.

The tourists slow as they pass in order to catch a glimpse of our class, which I admit looked like something out of the University brochure. They walk and talk softly, sometimes pointing into our room, until the last of them is out of sight. I resume biting my fingernails. A moment later, I look to see a hand creeping around the doorframe, holding a small digital camera. A head emerges behind the hand, followed by a body.

The beholder, a middle-aged Japanese man, does not say hello, nor does he ever break eye contact with the small, silent, bloodless image on his viewfinder screen.

He moves slowly into the door frame with the careless confidence of a turn-of-the-century Safari hunter. His concern is not that we might take umbrage at his shooting us, but rather that any sudden motion on his part could send our group leaping like gazelles out the window.

One of our professors, seated with her back to the camera, notices the faces of a few students have turned towards the door. She turns to see what they are looking at just as the camera’s flash goes off. She blinks to erase the spots from her vision before turning back to the discussion.

The first photographer disappears, but another soon takes his place. And another. Most of us are too stunned to think to close the door until they have gone.

Brendan Selby is not a regular columnist, and he is fleeing the country a few days after this is printed. He is under no obligation to answer your e-mails to bselb@stanford.edu, and he obviously doesn’t represent the views of The Daily.