The dorm room window is one of the limited spaces students have on campus to freely express themselves to the rest of the world. That is why so many students hang their state or country’s flag in the window or place their sorority’s letters there.
Window displays allow to students to express their identities and be proud of who they are. Before last week, the university seemed to be fine with these displays. Now, Wake Forest is policing student’s free expression.
The issue began when students living in Magnolia Hall decided to place a Black Lives Matter sign in their window at the beginning of the semester. The suite below them placed a Trump flag in their window, causing students from the suite above to respond.
They added to their display by placing signs in their window saying “F*** Trump” and “Trump=Bigotry,” as well as an LGBT pride flag. A student submitted a photo to Residence Life and Housing, causing them to enforce their window display policy.
The window display policy in the Guide to Community Living states that “students may not post items in and/or on exterior windows of rooms and/or common spaces.” The policy was enacted in the early 1990s to remove alcohol signs and profanity from exterior windows. Since then, the policy was amended to allow students to display political signs that endorse a candidate up to 10 days before an election. In the past 3 years, the policy has only been enforced 3 times, on a case to case basis: twice to remove a Confederate battle flag, and once to remove Greek letters.
If Wake Forest wants to accept everyone on campus, they must allow everyone to express themselves freely. Period.
On Monday, administrators hosted a forum to hear from students about their concerns with this policy. Some of the conversation in the meeting focused on the merits of the window-display rule, but most of it was about the implementation of the policy.
They didn’t seem to care about Greek letters or national flags. Based on this incident, however, it seems that Wake Forest is deciding that expressing yourself, whether it is through a Make America Great Again flag, LGBT pride flag, or Black Lives Matter sign, is wrong if it is “controversial.”
If these expressions are not allowed, that makes students feel like they aren’t allowed to be who they are and display it for the campus to see. They feel like their identities are not allowed at Wake Forest. While this feeling hurts those with identities of choice, like Greek affiliation or political affiliation, it is incredibly damaging to those with identities that they cannot choose, like race or sexual orientation.
Everyone on this campus should be able to be freely express their identity any way they see fit. I applaud students who protested on Tuesday by freely expressing their identity via clothing and flags. These expressions shouldn’t be seen as controversial, especially when they are strongly linked student’s identities. If Wake Forest wants to accept everyone on campus, they must allow everyone to express themselves freely. Period.
