Students for Censorship

I am a faithful reader of The Vantage, but recently I’ve been disturbed to read some troubling articles publish in these very pages. You probably know the ones I’m talking about; subversive, threatening, most likely communist sympathizing. If I’d known that my fellow students were going to be expressing such dangerous ideas in my beloved Vantage, I would have eye-muffed myself. Rightly, these articles have caused quite a firestorm of outrage and whatnot. But it got me thinking about who truly is responsible. Surely the administration deserves some blame for allowing these subversive opinions to be expressed in the first place? Aren’t they at least partially at fault for encouraging students to think of The Vantage as a forum in which they can express their opinions? That’s why my proposal to the administration is simple, time-tested, and true. In a word: Censorship. Go ahead, say it a few times, let it roll around in your mouth a little. Sure it tastes nasty at first, but trust me, you’ll get used to it. It isn’t half bad once you become accustomed to the taste of bile. Think of all the unfortunate misunderstandings and heartache we could avoid if we simply controlled the paper’s content from the start. Why allow students to entertain wacky ideas of trying to “start a dialogue” (shudder), when we know we’ll just have to punish them for speaking out in the end? Let’s cut out the middle man and just take away the forum, or to be more precise, redirect it for the much more appropriate purpose of exalting the glorious status quo. If students get any ideas about freedom of speech or the like, they can go write for the suitably titled Naked City, or as I like to call it: The Sodom and Gomorrah Gazette. It’s time students learned an important lesson that will serve them well once they go out into the “real” world. And that lesson is that the word “freedom” back in the Founders’ day meant something slightly different than it does now. Owing to semantic shift the word “freedom” used to mean “correct, suitable or appropriate”. So when the Founders talked about “Freedom of Speech”, they actually were referring to the “Correctness of Speech”. Most people don’t realize that. Where was I? Anyway, my point is: let’s save ourselves a lot of trouble in the future and start correcting the speech of these wayward students before their harmful words reach my fragile eyes.