really, what's happening on college campuses is quite amazing. the editor of the dickinsonian here on my campus opposes parody t-shirts. the problem is that there is a rumor that someone sometime may have worn a shirt that said 'make dickinson great again.' she describes 'make dickinsion great again' as hate speech and says it violates college policies.
However, adapting his most popular slogan for the ostensible purpose of fraternity recruitment makes light of a candidate who has called Mexican immigrants “rapists,” threatened to ban Muslims from entering the country and made misogynist remarks about journalists and political opponents.
so let's start here: any student who actually wanted to wear a trump 'make america great' hat around campus should surely be more than welcome to do so. if i feel like wearing a trump button to class, i will. but now, even if i would be endangering your space by saying 'make america great,' who in the world could i be imperiling by parodying or revamping that slogan? anyway, the editorial really seems to entail that anyone's actually advocating trump's candidacy on campus would be an act of violence and harassment or something. in other words, i disagree with you, so i'ma gonna ban you. now perhaps we think of our mission as including things like airing political ideas. definitely, as long as the ideas we bat around go from bernie on the left to hillary on the right; i guess that's 'political science'. we're going to take a mainstream politician who just won the new hampshire primary and shame people mercilessly even for making fun of him or whatever. we're going to go for 'he-who-must-not-be-named.'
i think what kills me most about it is that the obvious objections or the nature of education etc do not register at all. people are working themselves up into a tizzy of censorious self-righteousness about less than nothing. i can only imagine how people like that might respond to this blog. but if you want my t-shirt, you're going to have to scrape it from my cold dead torso. it's really going to be fun trying to get through the trump administration on campus; we'll have to assign a censor to each tv monitor in every room, prohibit the internet, and perhaps lapse into a safe yet utter silence.
what kills me second most is that the person saying this is the editor of the school newspaper. back when i was editing school newspapers or serving as the faculty advisor for one, we were ready to go to war for free speech, and we did several times. our job as we understood it was to create a free space for the widest possible exchange of opinions and information. and i come from a long line of newspaperpeople; they all thought about it like that, and they thought that free expression and a free press was central to even the possibility of democracy. that was their job. that was what made what they did a contribution to their city or country. that's what america had that fascist italy or communist russia didn't have. that's what we were fighting wars for, etc; because americans would never accept totalitarianism. now we are producing totalitarian personalities like an assembly line. it actually does make me a little nauseous.
overall, i blame the pointedly authoritarian mood of american k-12 education. it's a humanitarian crisis. but case by case i blame each person who makes an argument like this no matter what the history of their institutionalization.
if all my students thought this way - and more and more of them do all the time - it would not only be impossible for me to teach, i would no longer want to teach, or even be able understand what it would mean to teach.
