Friday, February 17, 2006

Morality of books in higher education today

Think the debates over "racy French novels" and the like of 1876 are over? Think again. From the online academic news site Inside Higher Ed comes an article on a bill under consideration by the Arizona legislature which would chill academic speech in public universities in that state:

When faculty leaders talk about the various versions of the Academic Bill of Rights circulating among state legislators, many single out a bill in Arizona as the worst of all.

The legislation there would require public colleges to provide students with “alternative coursework” if a student finds the assigned material “personally offensive,” which is defined as something that “conflicts with the student’s beliefs or practices in sex, morality or religion.” On Wednesday, the bill starting moving, with the Senate Committee on Higher Education approving the measure — much to the dismay of professors in the state.

The Arizona bill goes beyond the measures that have been pushed in other states — in fact it goes so far that David Horowitz, the ’60s radical turned conservative activist who has pushed the Academic Bill of Rights, opposes the measure. “It doesn’t respect the authority of the professor in the classroom,” he said. “This authority does not include the right to indoctrinate students or deny them access to texts with points of view that differ from the professor’s. But it does include the right to assign texts that make students feel uncomfortable.”

Horowitz’s opposition to the bill is of little comfort to professors in Arizona. Although the legislation has a long way to go before it could become law, the idea that the Senate committee charged with overseeing colleges would approve the measure is upsetting to academics. They are also angry because the evidence cited by lawmakers to support the bill appears to be based on a misreading of an acclaimed novel.

The sponsors of the bill did not respond to messages seeking comment. But local news coverage of the session at which the bill won committee approval quoted Sen. Thayer Verschoor as citing complaints he had received about The Ice Storm, a novel by Rick Moody that was turned into a film directed by Ang Lee. “There’s no defense of this book. I can’t believe that anyone would come up here and try to defend that kind of material,” Verschoor said at the hearing, according to The Arizona Star. Other senators spoke at the hearing, the newspaper reported, against colleges teaching “pornography and smut.”

Actually, there are plenty who would defend teaching The Ice Storm, including the professor whose course appears to have set off Verschoor. The course — at Chandler-Gilbert Community College — was “Currents of American Life,” a team-taught course in the history and literature of the modern United States. The literature that students read is selected to reflect broad themes of different eras, according to Bill Mullaney, a literature professor. For example, students read John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.

The Ice Storm was a logical choice for teaching about the 1970s, Mullaney said, because the novel looks at suburban life at a crucial point in that decade: the collapse of the Nixon administration. While two families’ lives are dissected, Watergate is always in the background and the relationship between private morality and public scandal is an important theme.

Adultery is central to the novel and one of its most famous scenes involves a “key party,” in which couples throw their car keys in bowl, and then pull out keys to decide which wife will sleep with which husband (not her own) after the party. From comments at the Senate markup of the bill, it seems clear that lawmakers had heard about the wife swapping, but Mullaney and others doubt that they actually read the book. If they had, they might have realized that Moody’s portrayal of ’70s culture is far from admiring.

The question for the class is: Should library and information professionals react to such efforts? If so, how? (How have they historically?)

4 comments:

Deborah said...

The ALA Code of Ethics states, "In a political system grounded in an informed citizenry, we are members of a profession explicitly committed to intellectual freedom and the freedom of access to information. We have a special obligation to ensure the free flow of information and ideas to present and future generations."

So the ALA and its librarian members would definitely side with the academics in Arizona, rather than the legislature. But the Code of Ethics is fairly specific to libraries. Isn't the Arizona bill outside the scope of the ALA? Of course, individual librarians and info professionals can protest such legislation and if they are, in fact, committed to the free flow of information and ideas, it would be in their best interests to oppose legislation like the Academic Bill of Rights.

Kelly said...

Are there any books that don't "conflicts with the...beliefs or practices in sex, morality or religion" of SOMEBODY? Wouldn't almost any book fall into this category?

Lia said...

People of like minds band together. The ALA abhors censorship of any kind and should thus side with Arizona's academia. Libraries often support the college classes, both campus and non-campus (such as the public, since many students, esp. undergrads, use what they know, which many times is the public library). The ALA's Academic Freedom page includes the Academic Bill of Rights and other literature written by the American Association of University Professors, which shows ALA's obvious support. Issues of intellectual freedom overlap everywhere in our culture and an entity that values intellectual freedom should defend it in the academic setting.
I echo Kelly's comment. Whenever I hear about cases of censorship, I shake my head and wonder when the hell people will learn that everything has some element that will offend or disturb and no one will be "safe"? What is a college career that doesn't make the student think or make him/her face uncomfortable truths? But then I have to remind myself that censorship is about control, about maintaining the status quo and it will always exist. That's why organizations like ALA and AAUP and others have to band together and fight our first amendment rights.

Kelly said...

I'd have some sympathy for high school kids who were assigned to read something that really upset them, but at the college level students have the freedom to choose their own classes and drop the ones they don't like. If the reading list bothers them, well, no one's forcing them to take the class. I've known people to drop classes because the reading looked too difficult, so why not drop a class if the reading looks too "immoral"?