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In other words, Brandeis itself recognized Weller as a respectable artist with a gift for stirring up thought and debate; he was not some right-wing hack parachuting in to stir up trouble.

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In fact, Weller did exactly what Brandeis announced he would do when it bestowed the award on him last year: write a play “about the student protest culture on college campuses – and specifically Brandeis.” To do this, Weller made good use of his time in residence, delving into the school’s Lenny Bruce archives and talking to Brandeis students to get a feel for their habits and mores.

The only problem is that Weller took Brandeis’s measure a little too well. A draft of the script, according to campus newspaper The Brandeis Hoot, has the main character, Ron, trying to perform an obscene Bruce-like comedy act, complete with racial slurs repeated in an effort to render them meaningless. This doesn’t go well for Ron, who is met with protests by students associated with the Black Lives Matter movement and administrative threats of academic probation.

Brandeis itself recognized Weller as a respectable artist with a gift for stirring up thought

The character wonders,“If Lenny Bruce came to life right now, for one day, and he was booked for a gig on campus, how would the administration react?”

We certainly have our answer now, if there was ever any doubt.

One of the details of the real-life protest is so absurd that Weller would have been accused of exaggeration if he’d included it in the play. An outraged Brandeis grad took to Facebook to declare “Buyer Beware” “an overtly racist play [that] will be harmful to the student population if staged.” The alum wrote this post without having read a word of the script, and was seemingly not embarrassed by her actions. (“I don’t need to read the actual language to know what it’s about,” she told the Hoot.)