Okay, this happened.
As you probably know if you know me well enough to find yourself here, I spent 5 years at Michigan State University while I completed my PhD. I can say from my time there that it’s a pretty standard midwest college campus, with some diversity issues and perhaps slightly more oblivious upper administrators than most. It’s no hotbed of hate, though. It’s what you’d expect.
This ban is kind of silly. I mean sure, I get it. I wouldn’t want people to write racist or homophobic or sexist or even size-ist things on my door. But I also understand how ink, keys, tape, paper, post-it notes and paint work. This move might stop the laziest of hateful people, but anyone who wants to send a message of hate can just write on the door or stick up a note. I mean that’s how people harassed the othered students at Indiana University when I was there. And at Miami, where I work now, they put up poorly designed mass-printed fliers in bathrooms. People who are hateful are going to hate. Removing one of their means of doing so might help, but it’s also going to hinder those who might have wanted the whiteboard to do something of merit.
TL:DR to this point: nice job, MSU. *eyeroll* You’ve become the slacktivists of whiteboards on doors.
But then I spied with my little eye this article with quotes from FOX News’ own turd with a bowtie Tucker Carlson. Carlson, for my liberal friends who avoid FOX like the plague it is to rational thought is someone you might remember from the star making moment where Jon Stewart visited CNN’s Crossfire. The deer in headlights with the bowtie in that scenario is Tucker. He’s actually not dumb, and he’s usually not a super-moron. But he and I rarely agree. But given how Glenn Beck has surged back from insanity to become a voice for reason, I was willing to give Tucker a chance. And the first quote in this article had me thinking “is the world so crazy that I’m on Carlson’s side?”
he said: “Why not ban pens, keyboards, and other instruments of divergent opinions and just kind of suppress speech, and everyone will be happy?”
I’m not sure I would classify a whiteboard on a dorm room door as an “instrument of divergent opinions” but otherwise I was with him. Why ban a method of writing messages when you cannot stop people from using something else to write in the exact same space? That’s futility, like trying to stop a bee from buzzing.
But good old Tucker wouldn’t let me down. He’d go on to express his fear that we’re squelching people’s freedom of speech (not where I’d go with it, because, again, you can just write on a door in a dorm with a Sharpie. Those things work on wood!). Then there was this nugget:
“Maybe we live in such an Orwellian world that the only outlet is on a whiteboard.”
Because of course. Animal Farm was an allegory on how we use our dorm doors. 1984 was a warning about the quick-erase culture. Clearly the people coming for our guns and trying to let weirdos in our bathrooms have found the perfect place to install their agenda– silencing you at the dorm door, the last bastion of freedom. Without those whiteboards first and second year students will be powerless to leave the message their upper-class off-campus and Greek house friends can. They’ll be silenced forever by the machine.
If you’re worried about the most powerful outlet for free speech, though, the President has made it clear he thinks it’s Twitter, Tucker. He’s telling us 140 characters at at time about his own lack of character(s).
And if you’re afraid I can’t tell you how I feel because you don’t have a whiteboard, don’t worry. I carry a Sharpie in my shoulder bag, and I’ll doodle all over your fucking door. I don’t even care if I ruin the wood. Because freedom!