THE NATIONAL COALITION AGAINST CENSORSHIP NEWSLETTER SPRING 2013 NUMBER 118 NCAC BOARD Jon Anderson Michael Bamberger Joan Bertin Judy Blume Susan Clare Chris Csikszentmihalyi Eric M. Freedman Robie Harris Phil Harvey Michael Jacobs Chris Peterson Larry Siems Emily Whitfield
COUNCIL OF ADVISORS Amy Adler Helene Atwan Julian Bond Rev. John Harris Burt James Cromwell Norman Dorsen Gail Edwin Chris Finan Frances FitzGerald Rev. Carl E. Flemister Danny Goldberg Victor Gotbaum Franklyn S. Haiman Marjorie Heins David Henry Hwang George Kannar Rhoda H. Karpatkin Tony Kushner Sylvia A. Law Pamela A. Mann Gail Markels Jay Mazur Joyce D. Miller Victor Navasky Aryeh Neier Robert M. O’Neil Pat Scales Stanley K. Sheinbaum Nadine Strossen Cleo Wilson Susan N. Wilson
The Harlem Shakedown Did 30 students at a suburban Detroit high school deserve suspensions for joining the latest viral dance craze? Not according to a recent poll. Most people thought it was harmless fun. Unfortunately, many school officials don’t agree. More Unfortunately, than 100 teens from Florida to Minnesota have been suspended from school and extracurricular activities for creating or participating in their own videos and posting them online. (See NCAC’s statement in response at ncac.org/harlemshakedown.) Thousands have taken part in what has become a global phenomenon, dancing to the song “Harlem Shake” by DJ Baauer Baauer.. Thanks to the craze, the song topped the No. 1 spot on the Billboard Hot Hot 100 chart for weeks.
criticism of teachers and administrators or rumors and mean-spirited comments about classmates. What’s a school administrator to do? What they do best: teach. When schools suspend kids, they not only risk infringing on their free speech rights but also lose the opportunity to teach them responsible online behavior. Some schools are already taking the lead. At Connecticut’s New Canaan Canaan High School, social media is an integral part of the instructional program. Teachers and students use Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Google Apps to teach lessons, collaborate, and do homework. Michelle Luhtala, who chairs the school’s library department, says these are the tools students “need to become 21st Century learners.” Her point is well-taken. Some 93 percent of young people between the ages of 12 to 29 go online, according to a recent study by the Pew Internet Project. The solution, Luhtala says, is to embrace social media, educate kids on how to use it well, and show them how to become good digital citizens.
Why would school administrators come down so hard on students for this high-spirited and nondisruptive expressive behavior? Suspensions are usually reserved for egregious infractions, like violent behavior, cheating, or damaging From “Jailhouse Rock” to “Harlem school property. Even the parents Shake,” dance trends still panic adults. of some suspended students When our legitimate concerns expressed confusion and consternation, saying officials about teen online activities escalate into exaggerated had overreacted. fears about new technology (David Finkelhor, director of the University of New Hampshire’s Crimes Against The Harlem Shakedown is part of a larger debate Children Research Center, Center, calls it “juvenoia”), children’s over the authority of school officials to regulate online education can end up severely compromised. Young student speech—whether it occurs on campus or people grow and thrive when they can explore issues off. Teens have been disciplined for emailing, texting, of interest, learn on their own terms, ask questions, tweeting, and posting on Facebook and YouTube. and express themselves. It’s far more dangerous to The Internet doesn’t stop at the school door—online stifle their ability to take advantage of opportunities for activity done at home ends up on students’ phones online communication and expression—and to learn and school computers, and the messages may very to do so safely and responsibly—than to just let them well relate to what’s going on in school—whether it’s boogie to “Harlem Shake.” N C A C
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In The Courts
NCAC PARTICIPA PARTICIPATING TING ORGANIZA ORGANIZATIONS TIONS Actors’ Equity Association American Association of School Administrators American Association of University Professors American Association of University Women American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression American Civil Liberties Union American Ethical Union American Federation of Teacher Teacherss American Federation of Television & Radio Artists American Jewish Committee American Library Association
Gene Patents A gene patent case now in the Supreme Court is attracting a lot of attention, not only because of its importance to scientific research and health care but also because of its potential free speech implications.
vacated on the ground that the Regents had acted in a “quasi-judicial” capacity and thus enjoyed the same kind of immunity that protects judges from liability to dissatisfied parties in cases they decide. Churchill is now asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn this decision.
Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics challenges the validity of patents held by Myriad on the BRCA1 and BRCA2 gene, which, in mutated form, are associated with an increased risk of breast and ovarian cancer. cancer. According to the brief of scientists, doctors, and patients who brought the case, the patent gives Myriad “control over a body of knowledge and over pure information,” which “is impermissible” under the First Amendment because it denies individuals access to information about their own genetic characteristics and inhibits scientific research.
Arizona: State of Confusion The saga over the fate of Arizona’s MexicanAmerican Studies Program (MAS) just got more confusing (see CN CN116). 116). In Acosta In Acosta v. v. Huppenthal, a Huppenthal, a federal district court upheld most of a state law banning the teaching of ethnic studies.
American Literary Translators Association American Orthopsychiatric Association American Society of Journalists & Authors Americans United for Separation of Church & State Association of American Publishers Authors Guild Catholics for Choice Children’s Literature Association College Art Association Comic Book Legal Defense Fund The Creative Coalition Directors Guild of America The Dramatists Guild of America Educational Book & Media Association First Amendment Lawyers Association International Reading Association Lambda Legal Modern Language Association National Center for Science Education National Communication Association National Council for the Social Studies National Council of the Churches National Council of Jewish Women National Council of Teachers of English National Education Association National Youth Rights Association The Newspaper Guild/CWA PEN American Center People For the American Way Planned Parenthood Federation of America Screen Actors Guild Sexuality Information & Education Council of the U.S. Society of Children’s Book Writers & Illustrators Speech Communication Association Student Press Law Center Union for Reform Judaism Union of Democratic Intellectuals
The Court may not reach the First Amendment issue if it decides that genes, which are “a product of nature,” can’t be patented. Regardless, it’s unlikely that the case will fully resolve all the issues related to gene patents, which pose the same kind of tension with the First Amendment that’s familiar in copyright disputes, regarding the ability to use, share, or build on pre-existing creations and discoveries.
Unitarian Universalist Association United Church of Christ, Office of Communication United Methodist Church, United Methodist Communications Women’s American ORT Woodhull Sexual Freedom Alliance Writers Guild of America, East Writers Guild of America, West
NATIONAL COALITION AGAINST CENSORSHIP Joan E. Bertin, Executive Director Dalton Burns, Administrative Assistant Debra Lau Whelan, Development Director Svetlana Mintcheva, Director of Programs Acacia O'Connor, Kids' Right To Read Project Coordinator Michael O'Neil, Communications Director Barbara Pyles, Business Manager Mary Reinke, Accounting Cynthia Villani, Librarian Censorship News Founding Editor: Roz Udow (1926-2006) Design: Jeanne Jeanne Criscola/Criscola Design
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Ward Churchill: In the News—and the Courts—Again After Ward Churchill, a tenured professor at the University of Colorado Colorado,, wrote a controversial article about the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Colorado officials demanded that he be fired. University administrators acknowledged that Churchill couldn’t be fired for f or expressing unpopular views but launched an investigation seeking academic grounds for his dismissal. Churchill was eventually terminated for “academic misconduct.” He countered with a lawsuit alleging that he’d been terminated “in retaliation for his politically controversial but constitutionally protected speech.” In a case that raises troubling questions about academic freedom, the jury agreed with Churchill, but the judgment was
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However, in a separate decision in a However, long-running school desegregation case, a different federal judge issued an order that, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, requires Tucson schools to adopt “culturally responsive curricula to engage and increase the academic achievement of African-American and Latino students [and] programs to support [their] academic success and engagement.” In fact, MAS was originally developed in response to an earlier ruling in this case. How these apparently conflicting decisions will actually be reconciled remains to be seen. In an interesting twist, on March 20 John Pedicone, the superintendent of the Tucson Unified School District, announced his resignation, effective June 30, a year before his contract ends. Pedicone said disagreements over the way the district handled MAS “pushed other educational efforts off course.” Harmful to Minors: Butt v. State of Utah NCAC routinely encounters censorship to protect minors from allegedly “harmful” material. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court recently declined to hear the case Butt v. Utah,, which might have provided muchUtah needed guidance about the permissible scope of state “harmful to minors” laws by clarifying that representations of nudity don’t lose First Amendment protection just because minors might be exposed to them. We’re grateful to Jenner & Block, whose pro bono assistance allowed NCAC to make these arguments to the Court in an amicus an amicus curiae brief. curiae brief.
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Video Games Back in the Crosshairs Journalist and scholar H.L. Mencken famously said, “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” The simple—and wrong—response to mass violence, regularly offered up by pundits and talking heads, is to blame it on representations of violence in the media, especially video games. The reaction to the December 2012 nightmarish n ightmarish shootings in Newtown, CT, is no different. Scapegoating video games does nothing to prevent the next tragedy,, but it does serve an impressive array of interested tragedy parties, including fans of guns, critics of contemporary culture, and child-protection advocates like Common Sense Media. These groups coalesce around the idea that the problem will go away if we “protect” young people from the corrupting influence of games, a position that invites politicians to “do something” about games and forget about everything else. This is an invitation that appears too good to refuse. At the state and federal level, proposals have proliferated since December December.. They include schemes to restrict sales, to set up study commissions (mostly designed not to investigate the causes of violence but to prove that games are at least partly responsible), and to tax certain kinds of games, or their creators. What is completely lost in all the finger-pointing is the fact that games—like literature and art—comprise a variety of subjects and perspectives, can be used for education, entertainment and
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NCAC recently launched the first-ever “Museum Best Practices for Managing at the College Arts Controversy” at Controversy” Association Conference in New York City. The document is designed for museums and other cultural institutions concerned about accusations of inappropriate or offensive content, and offers guidelines on how to deal with potential controversies. You can find the guidelines—a joint project with other national arts organizatio organizations—at ns—at http:// tinyurl.com/bcoxasz. Eden Taylor Taylor Ames of Illinois won the grand prize in NCAC’s 2012 Youth Free Expression Project film Project film contest, followed by Naomi Clements of Utah, and Alexis Opper of Colorado. Daniel Pritchard of Shirley, NY, won the contest’s first People’s Choice Award. All winners gathered in New York City on March 30 to attend a special screening of their works and to receive their prizes. Stay tuned: the contest theme for 2013 is “Video Games in the Crosshairs!”
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catharsis, and attract a large and diverse audience. Like books and art, some games—but by no means all—depict violence; as with art and literature, the depictions of violence differ widely and mean different things to different viewers. This more complete and accurate understanding of games and gamers is supported by researchers like James Paul Gee, a professor of literacy studies at Arizona State University and author of What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. Literacy. The work of Gee and other researchers demonstrates the social, educational and neurological value of games, many of which are complex, difficult, and—yes—fun. Video games are no longer a marginal cultural phenomenon, but something that appeals to millions around the world. According to the Entertainment Software Association, gamers include Americans of all ages and backgrounds. Of these 68% are adults, and 47% are women. Contrary to popular myths, gaming is not an isolated activity: most gamers play with others, either virtually or in person. It’s past time to check the knee-jerk reaction to point the finger at video games, which the Supreme Court has held enjoy the same First Amendment protection as books and art, whenever something bad happens. Censoring video games is no more likely to stop real-world violence than censoring the Qur’an is likely to prevent jihadist attacks. Our zeal to do something in response to tragedy isn’t a license to do just anything. — Joan Bertin
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Photographer Sally Mann, Mann, along with critics, scholars, and 10 artists featured in a recent exhibition at Wisconsin’s joined John Michael Kohler Arts Center joined NCAC in protesting the removal of Betsy Schneider’s work Schneider’s work from the show. Museum officials claimed that nude photos of the artist’s growing baby daughter in the “Kids Are All Right” exhibit polarized the community.
Congressman Jerrold Nadler , Councilman Brad Lander La nder,, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and Quinn and other city, state, and federal New York officials recently tried to stifle dialogue on the Israel/Palestine conflict by pressuring Brooklyn College to cancel or alter a planned discussion about the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign. Brooklyn College President Karen Gould and CUNY Chancellor Matthew Goldstein stood behind the principle of academic freedom—and the panel discussion eventually went on as planned.
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Whyy ‘P Wh ‘Pers ersepo epolis lis’’ Belo Belongs ngs in Publ ublic ic Sch School oolss by Noah Berlatsky
graders exposed to narratives about suicide, torture, God, or sex, and don’t want them to read the word “fuck.” There are probably parents who would be horrified to learn that my third-grader is reading Louise Erdrich’s The Birchbark House at House at his school—a book in which virtually everyone dies in a hideous smallpox epidemic.
The job of American schools, as enforced by the bureaucracy, isn’t really education. It’s censorship. A colleague of mine working on a world history course was told to omit the fact that gay people were targeted during the Holocaust. I was told that I could not, for sensitivity reasons, include a test passage about storms at sea. Ditto on passages about rats, alcohol, love, and death, as well as those that depicted, or even mentioned, slavery—and this was for an American history exam.
The truth is, outside of arithmetic, it’s hard to teach anything worth learning that someone someone won’t won’t find offensive or upsetting or frightening or off-putting. If it’s interesting, if it’s something people care about, then people are going to have opinions about it. That means somebody, somebody, somewhere, isn’t going to like it. The drive to keep our children perfectly safe from dangerous knowledge just ends up reducing their education to a bland, boring, irrelevant slog.
So I wasn’t surprised to learn that the Chicago Public Schools have recently restricted access to Marjane Satrapi’s graphic memoir memoir,, Persepolis,, which deals with her experiences growing up under the Persepolis fundamentalist regime in Iran. The exact reason for the ban is still somewhat unclear.
So do we want to micromanage our schools for ideological purity? Or do we want kids to learn something—even, sometimes, something with which we might disagree? If we want the first, we should keep the status quo. If we want the second, we need to stop worrying that teachers might teach the wrong thing so that we don’t let them teach anything at all.
School officials claim that they don’t actually object to the political content. Instead, they say, the book is still sanctioned for school libraries, but not lower grades because of “graphic language and images that are not appropriate for general use in the seventh grade curriculum.” High school teachers can still use the book, though only with special training.
Obviously, nobody wants first graders watching slasher films. But Obviously, Persepolis isn’t a slasher film. It’s aimed in part at kids. Satrapi shows herself, as a child and then as a young woman, dealing with violence, with sexuality—with moving away from her parents, and failing, and trying again. Hopefully, most of the students who read it won’t be faced with the level of trauma and danger that she faced—though some of them in Chicago may well . But even if their exact experiences don’t map onto hers, surely a lot of kids in middle school or high school will see themselves in the narrative here.
To be fair, Persepolis Persepolis does does include a certain amount of violence and (especially in its second volume) some sex. Satrapi talks about the torture of friends and relatives, both by the Shah and by the Revolutionary government. She also talks about the Iran-I raq war, war, and there are pictures of wounded soldiers. She describes her escape from Iran to Austria, and talks (without much detail, but still) about her sexual adventures as a young woman living on her own. She describes her suicide attempt. She uses the word “fuck.” She talks about her gay roommates. She shows herself as a young child having imagined conversations with God and as an adolescent smoking cigarettes and dealing pot. In my experience, any one of these infractions would be sufficient excuse to keep Persepolis out Persepolis out of students’ hands.
The worry, worry, then, seems to be not so much that the material will be too much for them (like horror films in first grade), but that students might feel like the story resonates with them. Perhaps they might even see, in the senseless, narrow-minded institutions of Iran, an analogy to narrow-minded institutions closer to home. This is a condensed version of an article that originally appeared on TheAtlantic.com
I’m sure there are some parents who don’t want their seventh
Jay’s interests went beyond his work as an economist. He was deeply interested in, and committed to, academic freedom and free expression. He became a staunch supporter of NCAC when he learned, in the early 1980s, about the organization’s work tracking and opposing book challenges around the country, and using these situations to build wider public appreciation for the value of intellectual freedom and First Amendment rights.
S Jay Levy, May 31, 1922-October 4, 2012 We were deeply saddened by the death of S Jay Levy, a longtime friend and benefactor. A noted economist, he was widely recognized for his economic forecasts. Indeed, one respected commentator observed that he “probably has the best record of any economist in the U.S.” According to Bloomberg News, in 2005 Jay predicted that “the deflating housing bubble” would precipitate a recession that would have a deep impact on the financial sector, which occurred in 2007-8. His knowledge of finance and insights into markets were sought by government officials, corporations, and the media.
Jay’s keen intellect and commitment to principle were not disguised by his warm and gracious manner. manner. Having a discussion with Jay was both a pleasure and a learning experience. He was a force for good in the world. He will be remembered fondly and greatly missed.
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