Poem: Friend With Benefits

This was submitted to The Subversive Human's April 2011 contest, and is in the sijo form (or as best as I can approximate it):

Simple touches, aches, caresses, as we go to our bed

To tantalize, arouse, ensnare, or just to please the mind

I remember still, that night we shared - away from prying eyes

Response to Threats To Freedom: Campus Censorship

I never did like writing introduction posts, so instead, I'll just get to the point. The following is a little something I'm doing for a scholarship contest, in reaction to the embedded video, as well as a convenient way for me to go behind my alma mater's back and utterly chew them out for various inappropriate behaviors and policies, as well as failures to do right by their students which they either denied, covered up, or "strongly advised" me to remain uninvolved with. Though I do not have documentation anymore (for some of it, I had documentation, while the rest was derived from convincing people to tell me what they knew), they are all true to the best of my knowledge.

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As Lukianoff said, campus censorship, while utterly and totally inappropriate, is also pretty much business as usual at colleges in the US. It was no different at Dowling College from 2006 to 2010, and if anything, has gotten worse since I graduated. Free speech there, although not formally regulated, is highly dependent on one's social standing, which I learned immediately in my first semester of freshman year. My roommates were given carte blanche to insult, mock, and even physically harass me to an extent, including discriminating against me for being GLBT, as well as for being autistic. Attempts to appeal to RAs and residence life staff got me nowhere, with the director of residence life directly advising me that I should have never been open about who or what I am. After such a response, I didn't dare pursue the matter further or report any additional incidents, even when physically threatened and nearly raped one night when they were drunk and tripping on acid, and transferred to another dorm shortly thereafter. My freedom to speak and communicate was infringed upon heavily, because when I spoke up, I was blamed for my mistreatment. Beyond that, however, are the more traditional ways in which Dowling puts a kaibosh on students and their ability to freely communicate.

As an example of these draconian restrictions, all usage of the Dowling College name must be approved by their Public Relations department. This can even affect a student club's ability to endorse outside projects that they want to promote, such as when their Gay-Straight Alliance wanted to promote a project for Long Island GLBT poetry, but opted out of endorsing it because they were afraid it would meet censure from the administration. Similarly, the administration often imposes draconian amounts of red tape on anyone wishing to film anything on campus. When Perspectives: Poetry Concerning Autism and Other Disabilities started its book tour, Dowling was the first place we had an event, and we wanted to film the whole thing for public access and Youtube. Somehow, the administration found out, and told us that we were prohibited from broadcasting anything from that event on television, ever, with the implied threat of lawsuits if we or anyone else failed to comply for any reason. We were not even allowed to be interviewed on campus for said public access show, and it took over six months to schedule an off-campus interview due to their outright refusal to support the arts, even given the non-controversial content of our poetry. Security was also supposedly told to check for professional-grade recording equipment, which had been specifically banned from the event at the last minute. How can we speak freely if we're not allowed to communicate freely, and how can a college's administration justify tying the hands of people who aren't even their students anymore? It's bad enough that they refuse to support the actions of their students which have had a significant positive impact on the outside world, but to directly obstruct them from doing even more good through their campus is an obscenity. Dowling College, while perhaps not in the "Top 12 Worst Colleges in America" for free speech, certainly makes the case for why campus censorship is a threat to freedom.