Reed College Student Claims Ban on Bathroom Graffiti is Capitalist ‘Suppression’
“The demand to cease making our own modifications to the built environment of Reed is deeper than a suppression of our self-expression”
Reed College is in Oregon and is a hotbed of radical leftism, so this isn’t surprising.
The College Fix reports:
Reed College ban on bathroom graffiti is capitalist ‘suppression,’ student says
A recent decision by Reed College in Oregon to ban graffiti in its bathrooms has drawn criticism from students, with one likening the move to capitalist “suppression.”
The college’s Presidential Council on Campus Climate announced the decision in October after “a series of recent incidents in which hateful and harmful language was found written in restroom spaces.”
In a letter published at the Reed College Quest, the council acknowledged that Reed allowed the bathroom graffiti for many years – a part of campus culture that provided space for students to express themselves.
However, recent and on-going problems with “hate speech and derogatory language that undermine our values and create a climate of fear and exclusion” prompted the change, the council stated.
After considering and rejecting the idea of security cameras for privacy reasons, the council decided instead to ban the graffiti altogether.
“While the affected groups have varied, the impact has been consistent: these messages cause harm, silence voices, and erode trust across our campus,” it wrote.
Student Louis Chase said the council’s decision has “rightfully” received widespread “condemnation” on campus. Chase wrote about it in a Quest op-ed over the weekend.
Describing the decision as “a blatant abuse of power,” Chase said the bathroom graffiti is a long-standing tradition at Reed.
Quoting Marxist arguments, Chase wrote that “the act of making graffiti transforms us as subjects by developing our capacity to make space significant.
“The graffiti artist encounters the GCC basement bathroom as a taciturn consumer but slips in with a Sharpie and leaves with the knowledge that they can reconfigure urban space to suit their desires regardless of whether admin authorizes doing so. When they have that knowledge, the whole urban world opens up,” the student wrote.
Chase continued: “Under capitalism, the city is a highly striated space dominated by market forces, which legitimize their own uses and abuses of urban space and delegitimize any attempt by the people who actually live and work here to make the city their own.”
Ultimately, the council’s decision is a form of capitalist oppression, Chase wrote.
“The demand to cease making our own modifications to the built environment of Reed is deeper than a suppression of our self-expression; it is a suppression of our self-production which claims further power for admin,” the student wrote.
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Comments
how else is lefty going to get dates??
Stop sh*ing on the walls. Where were you brought up — in a collective farm structure?
Lol, the ban was because of “conservative speech.” You must be so confused about where you stand on this non-issue.
this is an attitude of a child who never had to clean up his own messes, never had household chores or yard work as a kid. I am very insistent that any group I am in with children need to be involved in cleanup after the event. That teaches them respect for their surroundings and the work it takes to make a place welcoming for all.
after thought…. fine – allow the graffiti. And then make sure there are a lot of conservative ideals on the stall walls…. see how quickly he takes offense to people surrounding him with ideas he does not like.
You see this attitude all the time in restaurant and merchant reviews on Yelp. “All the right-wing / Trump / firearms decorations in the establishment made me feel unwelcome / unsafe.” I’ve never read a Yelp review that complained that someplace was oversubscribed by fluorescent-haired transsexuals, or had too many Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger records in their jukebox. Conservatives would rather be private Coolidges than public Karens.
These useless little twits don’t seem to understand that, while they have every right in the world to express themselves, they don’t have a right to deface someone else’s property. Defacing, damaging or destroying someone else’s property is not protected speech, it’s vandalism.
You’re doing it wrong.
It’s “repression.” As in “Help, help! I’m being repressed!”
There’s another way to approach this. Mount a pad of D-size paper on the stall walls and let the infantile vandals write to their heart’s content. Every week or so, tear off the top sheet and take it to the campus newspaper. You’ll know if it works when you see little ditties like “Don’t throw tooth picks into the toilet. Crabs know how to pole vault.” show up as column fillers.
It worked at Mountain Home AFB in the 70s. How do I know? Well, let’s just say that one of the commenters here submitted a suggestion on a Form 1000. It seemed every week an innocent little saying showed up in the base newspaper.
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