Political campaigning should take place off campus. Colleges should be institutions where higher learning takes place. A political campaign that helps a university profit from it’s ideas should never be allowed. Students should be allowed to make decisions on their own, through discourse with other students, and their families when it comes to their political affiliations. University campuses should not be forums where time, space, and message is bought and sold by the highest bidder. How would a university even ensure fairness?
One idea I have would be to allow every political party a certain allotment of time, where all parties, for the same price, gets to spend time reaching out to students. This would have to take place in between an election cycle to ensure no particular candidate were being promoted. Parties would be able to expose those who are interested, to their parties’ ideology, and their history.
I don’t think politics should be treated like a popularity contest. Whether a student is left, right, or center; a university has a responsibility to promote fairness of all ideas. Sadly, this is not the case today. Too may college campuses are hotbeds of one political side or the other. There is rarely a day where