NC college administrators play king and censor a play | Opinion
A few hours before opening night on April 16, students at Cape Fear Community College were told that their set for the production of an ancient Greek tragedy had a major problem.
The play was The Bacchae by Euripides, about an arrogant king who refuses to acknowledge Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, madness, and theater. To avenge the king’s irreverence, Dionysus drives the women of the city mad and they tear the king apart. Students decorated the floor of the stage with protest slogans. One read, “Say Her Name.” Another, “We The People.” There was also “No Justice No Peace,” “Liberty for All,” and “Silence = Violence.” Administrators had reportedly objected to all such slogans, but after pushback from students and staff, most were allowed to remain. One phrase, however, was the exception: “No Kings.” It still had to go. So the students replaced it with a new slogan, “We Need Your Courage,” spelling out some of the letters in red: “Our rage.”
They had a reason to be enraged. The college’s decision was an example of heavy-handed art censorship that betrayed the very culture of expression that a campus and a theater exist to cultivate.
The college’s vice president cited “political neutrality,” but neutrality doesn’t include scrubbing student art of any messages that might make administrators squirm. Properly understood, institutional neutrality means that the college does not take official positions on the political questions of the day. What it does not mean is that every student production, classroom discussion, theater set, or club event must be flattened into unoffending blandness.
A college does not endorse every idea expressed at an event simply because it hosts the event. If that were the rule, public colleges would have to police every student newspaper column, every guest lecture, every debate, every play, and every art exhibit for perceived political implications. Besides, obliquely commenting on contemporary issues of the day is a time-honored tradition in the arts. Euripides himself used ancient myth to comment on the decline of contemporary Athens, just as Shakespeare used Macbeth to indirectly comment on the reign of King James I. So while a “No Kings” slogan on the set for a Greek tragedy may seem like a left-field intrusion to some, it’s actually carrying forward a venerable practice among the masters of the stage.
The college’s administrators said the “No Kings” slogan risked narrowing the audience’s interpretive space. But they narrowed it themselves by deciding, hours before curtain, which interpretation was too risky to allow. The students’ set invited audiences to ask questions: Who is the king? Pentheus? Dionysus? The state? The self? The impulse to control? The school answered with a command: paint it over.
A healthy campus culture does not teach self-censorship. It teaches students to question, argue, interpret, dissent, offend, reconsider, and respond. It trusts audiences to think for themselves. It understands that the answer to provocative student expression is more discussion, not last-minute censorship.
The irony is almost too perfect. In a play about the devastation that follows when those in power try and fail to control forces they do not fully understand, Cape Fear chose the pyrrhic command of the censor — not realizing that attempting to silence others often hands them a megaphone. In a production about the danger of rulers who cannot recognize their own limits, administrators acted as though their discomfort with a slogan was enough to tread over students’ free expression. In a drama haunted by the question of what happens when power denies what it cannot tame, the college ordered students to cover the words “No Kings.”
Similarly, after nearly launching an investigation over a student comedy sketch, UNC Chapel Hill recently showed that administrators can still do the right thing after an initial misstep. The university quickly changed course and reaffirmed its commitment to free speech. Cape Fear Community College ought to do the same — and restore the principle that student art belongs to students, not to administrators playing king.
William Harris is the strategic campaigns specialist at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).