At the CSA meeting on Monday, a new draft of the Carleton poster and chalk policy was presented. This draft, should it be implemented, limits the autonomy of students and faculty alike to contribute their ideas via this historically significant form of creative expression on college campuses through a series of restrictions on content, anonymity and placement of posters and chalk throughout campus. Ranging from bizarre restrictions on the use of copyrighted material to the implementation of a registration system for posters that requires them to be identifiable down to the individual, this policy, as written, is an affront to student activism, intellect and any serious commitment to the ideals of a liberal arts education. The  Carleton administration’s response to national crackdowns on protest and expression is not to encourage dialogue and student voices but to clamp down further when students try to speak out. This is a policy that was unasked for and conciliatory to the worst tendencies in American politics, aimed at quashing dissent and expression.

The current policy all but eliminates anonymous writing by requiring each poster to include the name of a sponsoring organization or individual. In the face of an authoritarian federal government, anonymity is one of the most powerful tools for expression. I can only write these words because they are not tied to my name because of  the repercussions that could occur should the wrong people find this article. Who loses out when this anonymity is taken away? It’s vulnerable students who otherwise would face severe punishment for speaking their minds. It’s DACA students, undocumented students, international students and students from other marginalized groups who benefit from being able to dissociate their identifiable information from their stated views. Students who want to speak out about injustice or even their own experiences in poster or chalk form must now either have their speech erased or risk putting themselves in incredible danger. Is that the kind of DEI that Carleton stands for, where marginalized students are nice photo opportunities for admissions, but their speech is made to be as difficult as possible to express?

This is also an issue of political cause. There are no legal consequences for right-wing speech. Support for genocide, mass deportations and the killings of political opponents is a regular part of political discourse on the right. It is leftist speech and protest that is under nationwide restriction, when protestors and bystanders alike are beaten and killed for speaking against ICE occupation, for opposing the Palestinian genocide and for opposing the destruction of the American experiment. The consequences to right-wing speech on campus at maximum is social ostracization, while the consequences to left-wing speech are potentially being kidnapped by government forces, as in the case of Rumeysa Ozturk. This imbalance can be overcome in some capacity through the veil of anonymity, protecting students and their speech, but this anonymity is unacceptable to Carleton for reasons I can only guess at. The only students who can now speak out are students who are not worried about consequences, the already-privileged, or students who are willing  to put everything on the line and risk their status in the country. That is not a choice students should have to make, yet this policy forces them to.

There is a wider philosophical point here about the purpose of public spaces and postering/chalking in general. The administration notes that we should ‘be mindful that the Carleton campus is accessible to the public and postings will be seen by a broad array of internal and external community members, including children’. Yes, of course, the primary function of the space is information and is predominantly used as an advertising vector. But the history of dissent on college campuses shows that these very sites of public view are powerful tools in building solidarity, community and resistance in the face of overwhelming repression. Bringing issues to people’s attention that aren’t well-discussed, like the famine in Sudan or putting up posters that oppose the systemic violence we see on a daily basis, now helps us feel sane and connected in a media landscape dedicated to the hypernormalization of the insane. Chalking sidewalks to publicly oppose Carleton’s complicity in its investments, whether you agree with those investments or not, is a legitimate form of speech and the college giving itself the power to remove these at its discretion should absolutely be evaluated by the potential for this policy to enable an abuse of this power. Some posters may be divisive or not representative of the average student, but God forbid we see something that challenges us at an institution of higher education. Bending the knee to the idea of ‘comfort’ should beg the question: whose comfort? Marginalized students are unsafe even leaving campus now, so whose feelings are we really protecting by preventing the use of public space to express our discontent with present circumstances? Trust me, it’s not theirs.

This arbitrary taking down of posters is codified in the policy’s sixth point, which explicitly states that ‘postings will be removed periodically at the discretion of the college’. It prefaces this with an explanation of the conservation of space, but this feels secondary to the administration’s power to remove any posters they want without recourse. There are no qualifications aside from event posters being prioritized for non-removal, and there are no clauses that prevent the administration from removing any posters critical of them. What’s to stop them from removing the Title IX discussion posters that are critical of them, for example? Why should the college, incentivized to play it safe and tamp down on radical positions held by students due to their donors and pressure from the federal government, be the one at discretion to decide what goes too far and what students can or can not say?

The policy prohibiting copyrighted material in poster use is simply unenforceable and absurd. Posters made for Carleton events are for educational purposes, are usually transformative (think of the SUMO posters that use stills from movies or the official posters for their term posters) and are decidedly non-commercial and fall under fair use laws, and so the restriction and prohibition of copyrighted or trademarked work makes absolutely no sense. A simple change indicating that posters should adhere to copyright and fair use would be sufficient, but yet again, the administration overreaches in its restrictions. Additionally, unless security is going to be trained to spot copyright infringement, I really don’t see how this policy would be enforceable at all, and I see it being used to take down posters mistakenly or arbitrarily.

We don’t need a poster or chalk policy, not one like this anyway. Why should the public face of Carleton be snipped and curated by the administration and not the students or the departments themselves, as it had been before? This policy restricts when it should liberate, silences when it should allow us to speak and disappoints when it should bring us a better learning and campus environment. The Carleton response is a capitulation to the censorship worming its way through the US, an admission of defeat and an abandoning of student speech for the sake of convenience and perceived safety through silence. Being silent, being non-expressive, and standing still does not make us safer. It would be nice to have an administration that backed up its commitment to us with a policy befitting the intellectual and experiential diversity they claim to love within the student body. It would be nice to have a policy that does not insult us in its restriction, but let’s see if that is what we get.