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 saysA 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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