Ward Churchill’s firing upheld. NCAC Executive Director on Churchill and protecting controversial speech

A court Tuesday upheld the University of Colorado’s firing of professor Ward Churchill after controversy arose from his essay which referred to victims of the 9/11 attacks as “little Eichmanns.” Judge Larry Naves ruled that Churchill would neither get his job back nor receive financial compensation. According to the LA Times, in ruling, the Judge stated “I am bound by the jury’s implicit finding that Professor Churchill has suffered no actual damages as a result of the constitutional violation.”

Churchill is vowing to appeal. The University of Colorado is going to bill Churchill over $10,000 for lawsuit costs.

In a June piece, “Ward Churchill Redux” National Coalition Against Censorship’s Executive Director Joan Bertin argues that academic institutions must be vigilant in protecting the free, political speech of it’s faculty. Bertin writes:

It is virtually inevitable that holders of unconventional or controversial views will be attacked on professional grounds. The consequent chilling effect on professors’ freedom to express political views is likewise predictable.  To prevent this damaging sequence of events, universities and scholars should always defend colleagues’ right to hold and express controversial views as a matter of principle, regardless of whether they agree with them or respect their scholarship. …

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In this issue of Censorship News, we look at Toni Morrison, her experiences with book censorship, and the ongoing challenges to books in classrooms and libraries. You can download a pdf of the newsletter here.

Here’s an excerpt from “Reflections on Book Censorship, circa 2009“:

Photo: Toni Morrison and Fran Lebowitz at the launch of NCAC's Free Speech Leadership Council

It all started with Adam and Eve tasting the fruit of the tree of knowledge, says Toni Morrison. For this sin, they were cast out of Eden. The message was: “Knowledge is bad, it is sinful, it will corrupt you.” At the same time, she observed, knowledge is “the route out of any oppression, any limitation.” Slaves once risked their lives to learn to read. “You have to read, you have to know, you have to have access to knowledge.”

In The First Amendment in the Courts we review the Federal Communications Commission’s ongoing battle with fleeting expletives; whether depictions of “animal cruelty” should be considered protected expression; and current gene patent ownership and how they limit scientific research and access to information.

Joan Bertin, Executive Director of NCAC, looks at academic freedom for controversial professors, focusing on Ward Churchill. She underlines how “the right to speak, write, and think independently is at the core of higher education.” Read her piece here.

Our roundup of some of the top censorship stories in The Long and the Short of It.

We have an excerpt from JoAnn Wypijewski’s piece “Through a Lens Starkly” which lays out the uncomfortable system of the monitoring, investigation, and punishment of teens who take nude photos of themselves.

Want More? Browse the Censorship News archives.

Kids’ Right to Read Opposes Censorship of “Love/Gender/Family” Literature in Litchfield, New Hampshire

The Kids’ Right To Read Project sent a letter today to the Chair of the Litchfield District’s School Board opposing the removal of several titles from Campbell High School’s upper-class elective “Love/Gender/Family” unit.

KRRP also interviewed Andy Towne, a member of the Class of 2007 at Campbell High School after he authored an op-ed for The Nashua Telegraph about the School Board’s decision in Litchfield.

Revisiting Shelby Knox’s Fight Against Abstinence-only Education – A Review and an Update

The Education of Shelby Knox. Click to watch the trailer.

I recently had the chance to watch The Education of Shelby Knox, a documentary chronicling a high school student’s campaign to bring alternatives to abstinence-only education to her school in Lubbock, Texas.  A lot happens in eight years. Shelby has since graduated from both high school and college; she is now 23 years old and living in New York City. With Obama in office, abstinence-only education has all been but written out of the proposed budget for next year.

Kids’ Right to Read urges Leesburg library to uphold decision

The Kids’ Right To Read Project sent a letter today to the Leesburg Public Library Advisory Board applauding their decision to keep two challenged books on the shelves in the Young Adult section without labeling or restricting them in any way.  We also urged the Board to uphold its decision during an appeals process.  Libraries serve every member of the community, and the First Amendment aims to protect individuals’ expression from the “tyranny of the majority.”  Parents have the right to restrict any books from their own children, but the books should continue to be available to every community member who wants to read them.

All of this blog’s coverage of the challenges to The Bermudez Triangle and Only in Your Dreams: A Gossip Girl Novel in the Leesburg Public Library may be found here.

Interview with Maureen Johnson, YA author of The Bermudez Triangle

Kids’ Right to Read Project Director Jamie Chosak interviewed author Maureen Johnson about her experiences with censorship, including the recent challenge against her book, The Bermudez Triangle, in Leesburg, Florida.  Here’s an excerpt:

The Kids’ Right to Read Project: Challenges against The Bermudez Triangle have focused on ‘homosexual themes.’ Some commentators have identified this as an increasing trend. Would you like to comment on this?

Maureen Johnson: This “we aren’t banners, we just think those are adult themes and therefore the books must be labeled/moved to the adult section/require permission to take out” nonsense . . . why, exactly? What is particularly adult about being gay? There are gay kids, gay teens. They have to go on awkward first dates, like all the wrong people, obsess over their crushes, have their hearts broken, fall in love with friends, get permission from their parents to go out, try to borrow the car . . . There are loads of YA books about those things featuring heterosexual characters, and no one bats an eye. Why is it so adult if gay kids are doing it?

It’s not. It’s the same thing. Gay kids need to see their lives reflected in stories. And straight kids want to read these stories as well! Gay characters can’t be relegated to some dark corner of the shelf that you need a map to find and an ID to check out. To do so is basically saying to the gay kids, “There’s something dirty about you.” Anyone who would say that is the true filthmonger. Period.

• Read the rest of the interview here.
• Read more about the Leesburg book challenges here.
• Visit Maureen Johnson’s website.

A brief history of music censorship

To view the full image, click the image above.

The Case of the Dangerous Font

Two weeks ago in a round-up of tales of student press censorship around the nation, we mentioned the case of PULP magazine, a publication produced by a journalism class at Orange High School.  Just a recap of the highly sensitive items that raised red flags for the school’s, principal, SK Johnson:  a Top Ten list that playfully advocates skinny-dipping and cutting school (the magazine is willing to concede this piece), but more so, the cover of the magazine which corresponds to a feature on tattoos and uses what the principal considers to be a “gang-looking” font.  The dangerous font is the historical Old English typeface that is also often affiliated with Goth culture and newspaper mastheads.  The latest is that all 300 copies of the magazine are still sitting in Johnson’s office.  On Monday, Johnson told the local newspaper, the OC Register, that he has not decided what to do with the magazines (”I haven’t given it too much thought.”)

Skirting responsibility: Google CEO Eric Schmidt on internet censorship

On Monday, The Telegraph reported on Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s talk at the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival. In it, he chastised censorious governments, saying completely effective internet censorship was unattainable and governments trying to do so were doomed to fail.

Schmidt’s comments neatly skirt Google’s complicity with governments’ censorship by claiming that they warn governments that internet censorship can fail, and says that “if [the governments] don’t listen to us it is at their peril.” As we’ve seen in Iran, government clamp-downs on internet communications can fail insofar as they don’t manage to completely suppress all voices. But it is a weak argument that in such attempts at censorship, the companies providing technological systems (that fail to completely censor voices) hold no responsibility.

Litchfield teacher resigns amid short story controversy

On June 18, the School Board of Campbell High School in Litchfield, New Hampshire decided to remove four short stories from the “Love/Gender/Family” unit of an English class.  Early last week, Kathleen Reilly resigned from her position as English department head, citing a desire to teach elementary school in a different district.

Reilly, who had taught at the high school since it opened in 2000, did not teach the junior/senior “Short Stories” class herself, but did choose its curriculum.  She did not explicitly state that the controversy forced her to resign.  However, the principal’s suggestion that she had made a “mistake in judgment” when choosing the stories, coupled with the School Board’s decision to impose more oversight on curriculum development in the future, likely influenced Reilly’s decision to leave.