Censorship always has the exact opposite effect from the one intended. We learned that back in the USSR but in the US the message is taking longer to land.
As I reported earlier, our Chancellor forced the student newspaper to remove the last sentence of an article that said “Fuck the Chancellor.” A week has passed, and the censored article has become part of the school’s mythos. It now firmly entered the institutional conscience. People discuss it loudly and happily in the hallways. Even those who never read the student paper before are now passing around screenshots from the original, uncensored version. Jokes and memes abound.
The Chancellor is young and inexperienced and doesn’t know that the only way to preserve respect is by being magnanimous, leaning into the joke, showing no touchiness, and projecting strength and confidence.
I once walked on a group of students who were parodying my teaching mannerisms in an exaggerated manner. It was spot on and hilarious. Also, very uncomfortable because I wasn’t aware I had been doing any of it. Students looked scared but I leaned into the fun and for the next few days exaggerated the mannerisms they had parodied, eliciting excited peals of laughter. The fashionable thing to do would have been to interpret the students’ mockery as a sign that they despise me because I’m a woman and an immigrant. I could have turned this situation into a banner of victimhood and waved it in people’s faces for years. Instead, I joined in on the joke and students loved it. It became easier to teach because I reestablished myself as a figure of authority that cannot be reached by student pranks.
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