It began at Emory University, but has quickly spread across the country like a calcium carbonate plague. #TheChalkening has now terrorized college students from the University of Michigan to Arizona State, with temporary, hand-scrawled messages of support for Donald Trump on public sidewalks and stairways.
While various campuses have dealt with the scourge in different ways—some creating safe spaces for the triggered teens, some encouraging the free exercise of ideas in temporary outdoor media—one school, DePaul University in Chicago, is turning to extreme measures.
They’re banning chalk. Or, at least, they’re banning the use of chalk. Whether the campus intends on performing door-to-door dorm searches for paraphernalia remains to be seen.
According to school officials at DePaul, students and faculty found the chalked messages, which included support for Donald Trump and exhortations to “Make DePaul great again” in obvious reference to the candidate’s slogan, “offensive, hurtful and divisive.” They were only temporarily affected, though, as campus grounds crew had cleaned up the chalk messages by the next morning.
Still, DePaul is taking no chances that an “inflammatory” political message may remain scrawled on the ground for more than a few hours. In an email, sent to students and faculty, DePaul’s administration claimed that the chalk messages could, to an outside observer, seem reflective of the university’s views and opinions in violation of DePaul’s 501(c)(3) tax-exempt, non-profit status. Since it’s possible people could think DePaul had actively endorsed Donald Trump, however unlikely, all chalk messages are now banned.
This means that chalk now ranks among the truly dangerous items of our time, joining the word “crazy,” clapping, red pencils, and burritos on the list of things that make current college students squirm. After all, who knows what terrible fate might befall a young, impressionable mind who happens to glance at a sidewalk and see a poorly scrawled Donald Trump 2016 slogan beneath their Toms slip-ons?
This is, of course, ridiculous. College campuses are supposed to be bastions of free speech—academic speech—and the intellectual exchange of ideas. Hopefully the trend reverses before campus conservatives and Trump supporters are introduced to even scarier forms of temporary messaging, like soap and silly string.
