Author: Kevin Abrams
As a staunch enemy of moral censorship and any legal regulations carried with it, I simply cannot see any real, practical value to such a practice. I can understand the initial desire for some degree of censorship but in practical terms I find it totally useless. It is for this reason that, upon discovering Occidental’s policies regarding music censorship at its school dances, I was pleasantly surprised.
Some students may have been puzzled at last week’s Halloween dance, which involved a sort of ‘selective censorship,’ editing out certain ‘dirty words’ from the songs played, while leaving others in. The whole process seemed quite arbitrary. However, after e-mailing Sonia Castaneda, the Residence Halls Association Programming Director, I was delighted to hear that the school has never been involved in the business of censorship, at least as far as school dances are concerned. “Never has an administrator notified me that the music needs to be censored or that certain songs can’t be played,” Castaneda said. “Music is censored at the DJ’s discretion.” That being said, it would seem that the ‘selective censorship’ at last week’s dance was little more than a fluke, a one-time thing rather than a result of any policy held here at the school.
To put it simply, college students aren’t going to learn any new words from songs they’ve already heard, and some would argue that bleeping out certain words just gives them that much more power when they are inevitably used. I myself would like to give mad props to Oxy for staying out of the censorship business. In a society where people can be fined for saying certain words on television, on the airwaves or even in public, it’s nice to go to a school somewhat more tolerant for the profane. Not every college student can say that.
Kevin Abrams is a sophomore DWA major. He can be reached at kabrams@oxy.edu.
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