Why The ******* Censorship?

Seriously.

This isn't the first time any of us have seen censorship, and it definitely isn't the first time its happened at Houghton but it seems to be happening more and more often now. Take last semester's 'SPOT' event, for example. SPOT is, essentially, a glorified variety show run by the student body for the student body- bot not last semester. No, last semester SPOT was run almost entirely by the college administration, bringing in the hosts of last years event as well as several acts deemed "classic" by the administration. Granted, it was the college's 125th anniversary- it's understandable that the administration would want this years SPOT to be perfect. If I were a 125 year old manager of La Scala, I wouldn't want to see a second-rate performance of Wagner's Parsifal. However, even if I were a 1250 year old manager of La Scala, I wouldn't dream of walking into another person's opera house and start telling them which acts to perform and which singers to hire. Yet essentially, this is what Houghton has done. Acting under the belief that somehow their 125th anniversary justified their actions, the administration commandeered (for lack of a better word) SPOT. Sure that semester's SPOT was decent, but so what? I personally don't care if that semester's SPOT was the greatest show since the creation of the Belagio's water fountains- the administration had no right to do what it did.

So what? There was another, student-run SPOT this year. We won't have to worry about the administration unfairly stepping in for another quarter-century. Surely they're done for now...

Not quite.

Administrative censorship reared its ugly head again this semester at the 'Houghton's Got Talent' event, in which certain acts were forbidden due to their content. In the Houghton Star, for example, a student stated that he had withdrawn his act because he had been forbidden from performing the song "Kiss" by Prince (in either its original or edited form) due to some "implied sexual language". After looking up the lyrics, I would agree that there are some implications in that song, however, (1) the same could be said for nearly every song written in the past decade and (2) I'm confident that the students of Houghton are capable of handling a handful of vague references.
Again at the 'Purple & Gold Dance-a-thon', the song (and arguable, the very anthem of the 70s) "That's the Way I Like It" was deemed "inappropriate" (again, if you've got a dirty enough mind you might be able to squeeze some kind of implication out of it, but if you're seriously that deranged, you'd probably see explicit references in the instructions for a pack of ramen noodles.)

So what's the message being sent here? Does the administration seriously consider us incapable of dealing with a few potentially salacious songs or acts? Is it that we're not trusted enough to make our own judgments? How far can/will the administration go to "protect" the student body from what it deems offensive. What's the criteria for something being offensive anyways?

Seriously, we can get married, get jobs, be conscripted in a draft and sent off to die- surely we can be allowed to decide for ourselves what is inappropriate and what isn't. After all, we singed a community covenant- a covenant is based on mutual trust, rather than a agreement which makes up for the lack of trust between two parties. We've signed on to obey and respect the community covenant- the administration needs to respect that covenant too, **** it.