Michigan State to ban whiteboards on dormitory doors to prevent anonymous offensive language: Report

Residence halls at one prominent public Midwestern school will soon be a safe space from … dry-erase tablets?

Officials at Michigan State University are banning the hanging of whiteboards on dorm-room doors starting in the fall semester, the Lansing State Journal  reported Monday. The reason: to prevent offensive language, particularly slurs of a racial, ethnic or sexual nature from being written on the erasable tablets.

“The functionality of whiteboards used to outweigh the downsides,” said Kat Cooper, spokeswoman for MSU’s Residential and Hospitality Services, the Journal reported. “That’s not happening anymore.”

“In any given month, there are several incidents like this. There was no one incident that was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” Ms. Cooper told the Detroit News. “Sometimes these things are racial, sometimes they’re sexual in nature. There are all sorts of things that happen.”

The spokeswoman said the move is not retroactive because the policy was not part of the existing on-campus housing contracts signed by student residents.

“We are not removing the ones that are already up,” Ms. Cooper said, the Detroit News reported. “They are personal, private property of students living in the rooms.”

Whiteboards will still be permitted so long as they are kept in a student’s room, the Journal reported, while the Detroit News said MSU officials had yet to firm up how exactly they will enforce the new whiteboard policy.

Libertarian academic watchdog the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) rates Michigan State a “yellow light” school when it comes to free speech issues. 

“Yellow light colleges and universities are those institutions with at least one ambiguous policy that too easily encourages administrative abuse and arbitrary application,” FIRE explains on its website.