Memory is a slippery thing. On college campuses, left-wing protesters pull down memorial statues and right-wingers put up memorial shrines. Should a college allow conservative students to “remember” 9/11 the way they want to? Or do colleges have an obligation to a higher kind of memorial?

Here’s what we know: Ripon College in Wisconsin attracted a lot of negative attention from conservative commentators. The school’s administration was accused of banning its local chapter of Young Americans for Freedom from putting up memorial posters for 9/11. The school replied that it had not banned anything; in fact the school had celebrated earlier YAF 9/11 memorials.

In this case, the memorial at issue was not the standard display of 2,997 American flags to memorialize the people murdered on 9/11. Instead, YAF wanted to put up a graphic “Never Forget” poster. The school charged that the posters targeted Islam unfairly and would make Muslim students feel unwelcome and attacked.

Too much? Ripon thinks so…

The parent Young America’s Foundation complained that the posters “merely depict history.” The school’s attitude against the posters, YAF’s Spencer Brown wrote, clearly shows “anti-conservative bias” at the school.

One Ripon College professor objected that history is never merely depicted. As Professor Steven A. Miller put it,

Most campuses don’t hold special ceremonies for Pearl Harbor Day, Emmett Till’s lynching, the Oklahoma City bombing, or Benedict Arnold’s switching teams.

What do you think? Should a college ban violent posters as memorials? Or do students have every right to free speech as long as they are not making threats?

My heart’s with Prof. Miller. As he concludes,

When we say we want students to remember 9/11, or the Civil War, or any of the many other tragedies that dot American history, we must accept that worthwhile remembering takes work. Colleges are one place where that work takes place, in the form of historical research, critical writing, and, above all, teaching new generations to think carefully through history in its full context. Students engage with difficult questions that challenge conventional wisdom and undermine the kinds of easy answers that lead amateur critics of academia to tweet about rip-offs. It may sometimes be uncomfortable, but that’s a necessary element of confronting, considering, rethinking, and growing.

Every day in class, I see my students struggle with the past, with all its uncertainty and all its consequences. This does not happen only once a year, and it is not easy, but that’s what it means to never forget 9/11.