What you don’t know can hurt you. Upper administrators, including Renee Romano, Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs, and Richard Herman, former Chancellor here at UIUC did their best to block the registered student organization Students for Chief Illiniwek (SFCI) from sponsoring a “Next Dance” event featuring the former UIUC mascot. I know that the Chief has been a divisive issue on campus, but for a minute, think about the generalities of this case, and not its specifics.
While projecting the image of an “inclusive” campus, administrators clearly showed that they do not value freedom of speech when they disagree with the message. And that, my friends, is a sad state of affairs. You may or may not care beans about the mascot issue. But let me ask you this: have you seen the banners proclaiming “Student Affairs is Everywhere You Are?” If that’s true, and you have a message or event that student affairs doesn’t particularly want broadcasted, you may face the type of censorship that was narrowly avoided in this case. Kudos to those who filed a freedom-of-information act in the Chief case to see exactly what was going on behind the scenes.