There is currently some controversy here at BU involving an art exhibit being shown in the University Art Museum (see Page 1). The exhibit is a collection of photographs depicting African women taken in the 1940s and 1950s.

You can check out the details in the article, but the gist of the story is that some faculty and students feel that the exhibit represents Africans in an outdated, negative light, and should therefore be immediately closed. Whether you agree or disagree with the content of the exhibit is completely up to you … we won’t ram our judgement down your throats.

But we do feel it is your right to make the decision for yourself — and to make that decision, the exhibit must be open for you to go and view it.

The exhibit currently being shown at the University Art Museum is about discourse, not hate. Its aim is to encourage discussion and thought, not violence or prejudice. Whether you happen to approve of the exhibit or not, you have the right to form your own opinion. And the curators of the Museum and the exhibit have a right to show it. We all have a right to see it if we choose.

Those who feel that the exhibit is offensive are certainly within their rights to do so; but they’re far overstepping their boundaries in trying to censor someone else’s right to show the exhibit, and everyone’s right to see it for themselves.

Here in America, we have what we at Pipe Dream like to refer to as “freedoms.” You know, there are a whole bunch of them promised to us in that Constitution-thingy — like freedom of speech, freedom of expression and (our personal favorite) freedom of the press.

A large part of enjoying the freedom to make your point of view and opinions heard is the responsibility to respect the right of others to also express themselves.

Let’s take another example of a potentially explosive exhibit. Let’s pretend the University was bringing to campus an exhibit that depicts Nazi propaganda for the express purpose of initiating dialogue about it in its historical context — which is what the current African exhibit says it’s doing. Though such an exhibit would undoubtedly be found distasteful, if not downright offensive, by the majority of this campus (we’d hope by the entirety of the campus, but blanket statements like that are usually a no-no), we’d still stand behind the right of the exhibit to be shown. After all, if you don’t agree, you don’t have to view the exhibit, and you’d have every right to criticize it.

But the odiousness of calling for the exhibition’s closing goes beyond the Constitutional protections it violates: it stifles the exchange of ideas that’s supposed to be an integral part of the college experience. After all, this is a college campus, an environment designed specifically for academic discourse and the uninhibited spreading — and challenging — of ideas. Limiting students’ exposure to certain ideas, just because some may not agree with them, is not really the best way to encourage intelligent discourse.

And it’s doubly hypocritical that professors, the people who are supposed to be helping students grow as people and thinkers, are the ones leading the charge to censor the exhibit. In fact, you could even call it betrayal.