Free speech on campus increasingly resembles the Great Pumpkin — a mythical being that never arrives, not even in the most sincere pumpkin patch. And this Halloween, the monsters that lurk in the dark are safe spaces, free-speech zones, and ample student support for policing what costumes people are allowed to wear.
A new survey from the polling service College Pulse reveals that 51% of college students think other students who wear “highly offensive Halloween costumes (such as blackface)” should face punishment for their decision, whereas only 49% think “they are a protected form of free speech.”
Students were split along partisan lines: 76% of those who strongly identified with the Democratic Party were in favor of costume censorship, with 64% of those weakly affiliated with the Democrats agreeing. Meanwhile, 9 out of 10 students who strongly identified as Republicans oppose this censorious stance, with 70% of weakly-identified Republicans sharing their opposition.
College Pulse conducted this survey through their usual methodology, which involves student-provided online responses in exchange for incentives, such as gift cards. They have a two-step verification process to ensure respondents are registered students, and they match their samples to national data sets to ensure their results can be as nationally representative as possible. For this particular survey, the sample size was 1,501 students.
To be clear, no student should wear a truly offensive costume. Blackface, for example, has a clearly racist history and certainly by now (if not long ago) there’s no use for it that doesn’t involve evoking that on purpose. But there’s a big difference between encouraging students to be respectful of others in their costume choice and punishing people for wearing the wrong costume. One is reasonable, and the other is not.
It’s also a bit ironic to suggest an immature student deserves official punishment for dressing up in blackface, but liberal sweetheart and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, or Democratic Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, should get a pass for their decades-old affinity for racist costumes.
And beyond the easy examples such as blackface, who gets to decide what constitutes “offensive?” It’s an incredibly subjective and inherently political characterization. You’d have to imagine that in the scenario of higher education, either university administrators or some sort of student panel would get to make this judgment call. Either way, you’re talking about decision-makers who in most cases, will lean far to the Left.
In their estimation, is dressing up as President Trump “highly offensive?” What about dressing up as President Ronald Reagan? Or a police officer?
It’s unfortunately quite easy to imagine such innocuous forms of political speech facing cries of “racism” or “endangering” minorities on modern college campuses, as left-wing as they have become. If students give would-be censors an inch, they’ll almost certainly take a mile. And that’s something even liberal students shouldn’t support.
