Is it just me or do people (university and high school administrators) take Halloween costumes way too seriously? In my kids' school (and this is a private school for heaven's sake) my kids were sent a memo that "a costume is not a culture". Translated: Don't wear anything from any culture, even if you aren't mocking anybody. So dressing up as a geisha girl is now considered insensitive (funny because when my wife was an exchange student in Japan her host family dressed her this way her first week there to teach her the culture).

I don't mind a little guidance. For example, another guideline my kids received in this memo was to not dress in any way where the word "slut" would be used to describe the costume: so, no "slutty nurse", "slutty librarian", etc. I can live with that because girls shouldn't be dressing immodestly at a school party anyway. But what really got me was the instruction to not dress in any costume that exploits the exploited. So no "homeless" costumes for example. I'm waiting for the animal rights folks to declare that the kids can't depict themselves as any kind of animal...after all who asked the animal?

At the University of Virginia my daughter has been notified to be careful and thoughtful as well about any costume choice. College kids apparently can't be trusted to come up with their own ideas. I noticed in today's WSJ a piece from a freshman at the University of Michigan. She points out that the liberal sensitivity police (my words) who are enforcing these new costume rules are the ones who are stereotyping minorities by protecting them from all the apparent insults that most of us never intended anyway. She says "by circulating accusatory posters and rebuking students before they even get a chance to pull on their hula skirts, student diversity groups are in effect perpetuating the very clichés about the minorities that the groups claim to care about". Good job PC America.