Quotes bumpersticker my office door as if it were a Volkswagen Beetle headed toward an outdoor Tracy Chapman concert: “You can make your mouth say anything.”  “Excuses are the tools of the incompetent.” “Great minds have always been met with violent opposition from mediocre minds.”  Although John Lennon’s “Niggers are the women of the world” is also plastered on my office door, an Instagram quote I most recently taped to my door has upset my department chair who insisted–not directly to me, but to the University’s General Counsel–that I remove it from public view because the “inappropriate” quote challenges “scholarly discretion, and good citizenship” and it (or I) fails to exercise “appropriate restraint and good judgment.” Additionally, it (or I) is a marked departure from “responsible professional behavior”–all of which are outlined in the Board of Trustees Regulation. The “inappropriate” quote reads:

Say how you feel. Leave the job you hate. Find your passion. Love with every ounce of your bones. Stand up for the things that matter. Don’t settle. Don’t apologize for who you are.

Be fucking brave.

I kept my sign up. For weeks. Mainly because I am an American citizen who’s protected by the First Amendment but also because I am a university professor–more specifically, a rhetoric & composition scholar in the Department of English & Modern Languages–where my academic freedom (particularly my freedom to explore language) is just as secure in that space as it is within the United States Constitution. Alas, I am wrong. Well, theoretically, I am not wrong. However, after being labeled “insubordinate” in front of the University General Counsel, I needed to “right” this absurd accusation. I’m on a tenure track line, so apparently I have very few rights to language, to composition, to rhetoric, and to non-traditional pedagogical practices. (Oh the irony in spending five years and over $130,000 on a Ph.D. in Rhetoric & Composition just to enter a publicly funded institution of higher learning that forbids me to publicly post the word “fucking” as an adjective that inspires.

According to New York City’s former mayor, Michael Bloomberg, in his 2014 speech, “On the Repression of Free Expression (from the Commencement Speech at Harvard University),” “Repressing free expression is a natural human weakness.” He claims, “Intolerance of ideas–whether liberal or conservative–is antithetical to individual rights and free societies, and it is no less antithetical to great universities and first-rate scholarship.” My fresh(wo)man composition students are currently assigned to read this essay as part of our discussion on free speech. After discussing the unit before, “Language: Do Words Matter?” and introducing them to the Last Poets’s poem, “Niggers Are Scared of Revolution,” a few students shared their reservations at hearing the word “niggers” exclaimed 94 times, along with the word “fucki/ng,” which was repeated 33 times. “The poem felt violent,” said one of my students. “Hearing the n-word and f-word in the classroom felt weird,” said another.

Of course, I felt it both violent and weird that my first year university students, who are more exposed to the profane via social media, reality TV, and public radio than any other generation before them, seemingly have not been engaged in academic spaces where they actually explore the profanity and vulgarity that surround them–that many of them embrace. And as I write this, I am thinking, and why would they have been?

Books like Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Walker’s The Color Purple, both of which explore language, sex/rape, and race, are on the Top 100 Banned Books List, along with Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, which mentions the n-word 219 times. Additionally, K-12 schools block most online social media sites, which prohibit teachers from integrating those communication technologies into their classroom discussions, and test taking drills re: state assessments curtail classroom opportunities to interrogate culturally relevant television like Aaron McGruder’s The Boondocks or Christopher Lloyd’s The Modern Family and Kenya Barris’s black-ish. Couple all of that with the steady omission of liberal arts subjects in public high schools across the nation, and wa-la! The University, whose obligation, says Bloomberg, “is not to teach students what to think but to teach students how to think,” is faced with students who have not been provided the space to think about themselves in relationship to the world around them. And now that these un-knowing students are in the University, mine happen to be attending one that silences its writing teachers (and have yet to implement courses grounded in subjects like queer theory, but I digress).

Now, by no means do I believe academic spaces should transform themselves into immorally explicit forums. However, to censor profane language from public academic spaces not only infringes upon a scholar’s right to free speech and academic practice, but it deters students’ opportunities to interrogate people’s rights to and use of language. Additionally, censoring curse words from public schools resists the separation of church and state, for “profanity,” from the Latin “profanus,” means “before the temple.” Etymologically speaking, “profanity represented secular indifference to religion or religious figures” (openbible.info). And so I wonder: Does my chair believe herself to be a religious figure I’ve verbally offended? Perhaps as a junior faculty member, I am merely a follower pursuing tenure status. (So I better shut the fuck up, huh?)

Shoulder shrug.

Bloomberg says, “Requiring scholars . . . to conform to certain political standards undermines the whole purpose of a university.” Others say “pick your battles” and “respect your elders”–which is ageist, by the way, when they are my colleagues. And so, while I did not remove my “inappropriate” quote, I did replace the word “fucking” with “freaking,” since the adjective “fucking” is obviously offensive–seemingly more offensive than “freaking.” As a result of my revision (read: conformity), I feel silenced and oppressed. They are feelings of injustice I don’t ever want to infringe upon my free thinking students.

My students will not be undermined. Neither will their work nor their classroom discussions be suppressed. I aim to remind my students of their humanity, to reintroduce themselves to themSelves, to allow them to free their minds so that they may live purposely and purposefully in a creative freedom that nourishes their spirit. I dare them to be fucking brave.