Oversized inflatable beach balls get bounced out on college campuses by student organizations that invite everyone to write on the “speech ball.” Students scrawl political slogans, insults, and provocative symbols. On some campuses, it might be a speech wall or a boulder. In all these cases, the idea, we’re told, is to exercise free expression. But what actually happens is a spectacle of empty rhetoric, where showboating and shock masquerade as meaningful discourse and campuses become stages for provocative performances rather than spaces for genuine intellectual exchange.

Students sometimes scribble penises and swastikas, or write “Women shouldn’t have the right to vote” on these speech props. Rather than reading such messages as expressions of genuine belief, I see them as deliberately exaggerated gestures meant to provoke reaction and generate spectacle. In this way, participants turn a profound civic and intellectual freedom based on the hard-fought guarantees in the First Amendment into a moment of rebellious posturing. The more obnoxious the gesture, the quicker the audience reaction, and the more visible the performance. Such public provocation is hardly Socratic inquiry; it is agitprop wearing a civil-discourse costume.

But the campus provocateurs are only part of the cast. The audience of the outraged and offended also is an active participant in this performance, shaping meaning through their indignant responses. This audience, including the students, social media followers, alumni, advocacy organizations, and the press, magnifies the spectacle. After the provocateurs scrawl the predictable images and words on the speech ball, multiple people will take to social media—amplifying, denouncing, and circulating the offending expression as proof of their enemies’ depravity—and demand that the university punish the students responsible.

Both the slur scribbled on a plastic ball and the social media rant that follows are pieces of political theater. Each is the intellectual equivalent of cotton candy: brightly colored, briefly exciting, and nutritionally void. Both the offensive statements on a speech ball and the demands to punish them are dripping with the same rage-baiting syrup. Both sides substitute audience engagement for healthy intellectual exchange. And when outrage becomes a substitute for sound argument and reasoning, censorship is always the next step.

Both sides, knowingly or not, play roles in a predictable script: One side gets to showcase its opponents as histrionic and censorious, while the other side gets to point to the provocateurs as hateful, bigoted bullies. What we get is not intellectual debate but campy political theater in which extremism is stylized in a spectacle rather than articulated as argument. Like camp, the actors rely on hyperbolic symbolism, turning themselves into caricatures rather than participants in serious inquiry and debate.

Would that the spectacle of moral signaling stopped with the student scribblers and their outraged audience. But on many campuses, especially those that have not embraced institutional neutrality, another set of actors enters the scene: the risk-conscious university administrators. Pressured by moral warriors to “do something” about the provocateurs, and aware of a wider public watching the culture war unfold, these administrators must consider reputational concerns, political scrutiny, harassment claims, and the potential impact on student recruitment before taking any action. 

Ever watchful for these risks, administrators might issue a statement on expressive freedom that sounds principled but that is laced with escape clauses and vague commitments. Like the speech balls and the reactions to them, such pronouncements are performative: a kind of governance theater that projects virtue while preserving institutional flexibility in hopes of shielding their university from socio-political risk. 

At the university, we don’t exclude ideas because they cause moral or emotional distress. While we must take unprotected behavior seriously—harassment, true threats, defacing property, and conduct that undermines safety—ideas themselves should remain open to debate. But debate requires something more demanding than a marker and a camera phone. It requires slow, good-faith, reasoned exchange structured by shared standards of evidence, accountability, and intellectual humility.

We cannot stop our students from bringing society’s toxic polarization to campus—indeed, doing so would only get us accused of quashing free expression, or being “woke” or “fascist” (depending on whom you ask). But we can try to find ways to better provide students with a compelling opportunity to think deeply, engage seriously, and speak thoughtfully. 

Universities need not be theaters for rehearsing the culture war. As Michael Rohd, a leader in the field of civic practice theater, demonstrates, theater can be designed as a venue for fostering structured, participatory dialogue. In this light, perhaps we should set up a giant speech umbrella with a big blanket beneath it, where students can sit and actually discuss something. Unlike the staged spectacles of campy performance, this space would reward thoughtfulness over grandstanding, slow reasoning over instant reaction, and curiosity over posturing. 

Likewise, university administrators could move from managing expression as reputational risk to cultivating it as an intellectual good that helps foster the university’s knowledge-seeking mission. And we could all remember the distinct reason universities embrace free expression and civil discourse: not to rehearse democracy on a campus stage, but to create the conditions under which ideas can be examined, evidence weighed, and knowledge advanced.