How 3 Colleges Are Hoping to Head Off the Specter of Costume Controversy

With Halloween around the corner, some colleges are trying to educate students on what makes a costume insensitive.

Cultural appropriation is controversial — and colleges that confront the subject often land in hot water with free-speech activists. When that happens, the administrators tend to insist they’re only nudging students in the right direction, not dictating their behavior. But those who see Halloween costumes as all in good fun bristle at such suggestions.

Susan Scafidi is the founder of the Fashion Law Institute at Fordham University and the author of a book on cultural appropriation. In an academic sense, she says, cultural appropriation is a neutral term. Misappropriation is what upsets people.

“You can have cultural misappropriation, which is problematic or harmful, and you can have cultural borrowings that give us Tex-Mex cuisine and California rolls,” Ms. Scafidi said.

But rather than being a free pass, she said, Halloween is a time ripe for harmful misappropriation. “Because we are associating the costumes we wear with ghosts and ghouls and also with humor and parody, we might want to think twice before we turn someone’s culture into a costume,” she said.

The Chronicle spoke to officials at three colleges that are incorporating education about cultural appropriation into their messaging before Halloween:

University of Denver

The University of Denver tried to have a conversation about cultural appropriation last Halloween, but in Carrie Ponikvar’s words, “it did not go so well.”

The university was inspired by a popular Ohio University poster campaign designed to educate students on the harmful effects of culturally appropriative Halloween costumes, said Ms. Ponikvar, director of residential education at Denver.

In the original 2011 campaign from Ohio, somber-faced students hold pictures of someone in a costume parodying their culture — a geisha with her face painted white, a student wearing an American Indian war bonnet and clutching a red Solo cup, a man dressed in a Middle Eastern thobe strapped with fake explosives.

“This is not who I am,” the posters read, “and this is not okay.”

When the Denver versions rolled out in time for Halloween last year, administrators weren’t prepared for the backlash. Critics took to the anonymous social-media site Yik Yak to disparage the campaign and the students in the posters with derogatory language.

The web page the university set up for the campaign says the college received “helpful feedback” from student leaders, specifically, that students felt the campaign focused primarily on telling students what not to do versus educating them.

“DU’s an interesting campus population,” Ms. Ponikvar said. “We’re a predominantly white institution.” She said the criticism might simply have come from a handful of students who reject the notion of cultural appropriation.

In any case, this year Denver administrators are better prepared. The university’s housing and residential education web page says that with this year’s relaunch of the “We’re a Culture, Not a Costume” campaign come “important changes.”

There’s education for staff and student leaders, for one, on how to open a dialogue about cultural appropriation — which will help them educate students about why the practice can be harmful. The program will also be expanded beyond residential education into a universitywide effort. There will be a carnival where students can ask questions, engage in conversations on the subject, and even make a Halloween mask if they decide they want a new one.

Ohio University

Halloween is a big deal in Athens, Ohio.

The city’s annual block party dates to 1974, when some Ohio University students let their celebration spill into the street and ended up blocking traffic for several hours. Now the party draws thousands of revelers each Halloween. In the years leading up to 2011, members of an Ohio University group called Students Teaching About Racism and Society, or Stars, began noticing something: A lot of the costumes played on racist stereotypes.

The group wanted to find a way to react to that, Mailé Nguyen, the current president of Stars, said. “Like our posters say, ‘You wear the costume for one night, but we wear the stigma for life,’” Nguyen said. “The people who the costumes are aimed at have to live with those stereotypes and negative stigma surrounding them always.”

The “We’re a Culture, Not a Costume” campaign was born. The posters and slogans have changed over the years, all different iterations of the same theme. In one version, a person in an offensive costume — blackface and an Afro wig and clutching a microphone, or a large sombrero and a poncho and holding maracas — stands in the center, surrounded by the disapproving gaze of four students whose culture is being mocked. The tagline reads, “When this is how the world sees you, it’s just not funny.”

The poster campaign began five years ago and took off the next year, Nguyen said. Now Nguyen gets calls and emails from colleges all over the country asking for permission to use them in their own cultural-appropriation education.

Stars also gets a lot of hate mail from people accusing the group of being overly sensitive, but Ohio University students have generally been open to listening, if not completely accepting, Nguyen said. “They’re not like: ‘Yes, I totally understand. I’ll never wear these costumes again,’” Nguyen said. Instead, the reaction is “more like: ‘Wait a minute, why are these costumes offensive? I don’t really understand.’ And then we answer questions and have these discussions with them.”

University of Florida

The University of Florida was only trying to encourage students to be responsible when it ended up courting controversy, said Jen Day Shaw, associate vice president and dean of students.

“The message to students really is: Think about your choices. You get to choose whatever you want to choose. You’re an adult,” Ms. Day Shaw said. “But think about your choices before you go out there in public and present yourself in a certain way.”

The university sent out a newsletter this month advising students to carefully consider their Halloween costume choice. Certain costumes perpetuate racist stereotypes, and a misstep can reverberate on social media for a long time, the newsletter cautioned. It ended by reminding students how to report bias incidents and that the university has a counselor available by phone 24 hours a day.

Several conservative outlets and news sites pointed to the newsletter as political correctness run amok. Ms. Day Shaw was taken aback by the criticism, she said, since an identical message had been sent the year before without incident.

The university sent the message earlier this year than last for one reason, Ms. Day Shaw said: reports of creepy clowns. After female students reported seeing one lurking near sorority row and male students were spotted wandering around the area with baseball bats in search of the clown, the university wanted to make sure no one got hurt while trying to play a prank.

Ms. Day Shaw concedes that not specifically mentioning clowns in the newsletter was an oversight, but administrators were simply trying to encourage students to think about their actions, she says. And while they’ve received a slew of criticism from people unrelated to the university, no students and fewer than five alumni have complained.

“The alumni were concerned that we were being oversensitive to our students’ needs,” Ms. Day Shaw said. “And my counter to that is, Yes, we are very, very sensitive to our students’ needs.”