37TH ANNUAL SILHA LECTURE ADDRESSES BOOK BANS, CENSORSHIP

BY CLAIRE COLBY

ON OCT. 25, 2022, ROBERT CORN-REVERE, a First Amendment expert and partner at Davis Wright Tremaine LLP in Washington, D.C., discussed book bans during the 37th Annual Silha Lecture. The United States has long faced controversies over banning books, he said. “The names change over time, but the issues continue to recur,” he said. “There’s always going to be some moral panic or another and it’s going to affect certain titles at a given time. And then years later, people are wondering what all the fuss was about. But then a whole new set of outrages come up and people fight each other over those.”

Approximately 120 individuals attended Corn-Revere’s lecture titled “Inherit the What? Banning Books in 2022,” in Cowles Auditorium on the West Bank of the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities campus. The lecture was the first to be held in person since 2019, and an additional 60 people attended the lecture live, utilizing the online option offered due to continuing COVID-19 concerns. Corn-Revere was the first-ever repeat Silha lecturer. His 2007 lecture, titled “The Kids Are All Right: Violent Media, Free Expression, and the Drive to Regulate,” addressed the regulation of violent video games.

The 2022 lecture’s title was derived from that of the 1955 play (and subsequent 1960 film) “Inherit the Wind” about the 1925 Scopes “monkey trial.” The case involved Tennessee’s ban on teaching the theory of evolution in public schools and centered around a biology textbook that treated evolution as established fact.

Corn-Revere drew connections to the current political and cultural climate. “We live in a time of great technological and social change,” he said. “We are still recovering from the global pandemic.” Our country has experienced “significant political polarization,” and public education has again become a focal point of cultural debates.

Freedom of speech laws need to be “supported by a culture of expression,” Corn-Revere argued. At the time of the Scopes trial, there “really was no developed First Amendment jurisprudence in the United States” and “book banning was essentially the norm.” controversial subjects.” Some bills, like the Florida Parental Rights in Education Act, colloquially known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, received great national attention. The Texas “Partisanship Out of Civics Act” requires teaching “widely debated and currently controversial issues” without giving deference to any one perspective. Corn-Revere said that following the passage of the Texas law, a school administrator told teachers that if they had books in their classroom about the Holocaust, they must also offer a book with “other perspectives.” Corn-Revere noted that this trend is accelerating: 137 bills with “educational gag orders” have been introduced in 2022.

Between July 1, 2021 and March 31, 2022, 86 school districts in 26 states enacted book bans affecting 1,145 titles by 874 authors.

Corn-Revere said at that time the country “still had work to do on developing a culture of free expression.” He displayed contrasting images of Hitler Youth members burning books in Nazi Germany with images of students in a Catholic school in New York burning comic books at the “height of a national panic over whether comic books caused juvenile delinquency.”

These issues “continue to pop up from time to time,” Corn-Revere said. In 2005, a federal court in Pennsylvania held that a law allowing teaching intelligent design instead of evolution was “not science.” He predicted that cases like this will continue “as long as there are politicians.”

Several social factors are responsible for the problems currently facing schools, Corn-Revere said. First, the New York Times Magazine published “The 1619 Project” in 2019, which suggested that preserving slavery was a primary motive for the American Revolution. It won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. The Times selected the Pulitzer Center to produce a companion curriculum based on “The 1619 Project,” and 17 states sought to expand the teaching of “anti-racist” history. At the same time, 36 states made efforts to restrict that type of curriculum.

According to PEN America, an organization that supports writers and free expression, between January and September 2021, 24 state legislatures introduced 54 bills to restrict teaching in the K-12 schools and some of these bills extended to state agencies and universities. Eleven of these bills passed by late 2021: 42 of the bills prohibited discussion of “divisive concepts,” with eleven bills prohibiting using materials from “The 1619 Project” specifically, and nine bills targeting critical race theory. Eight bills would mandate “balanced teaching of

These are “complicated issues” with “strong opposing views” and Corn-Revere clarified that he was not arguing that there was a “clear right side or wrong side” to “the policy issues facing schools.” The problem is not that people have diverging views, but rather “that these issues have been politicized in a winner-takes-all culture clash.” Banning books and school curriculum issues are closely linked, he said.

He said that between July 1, 2021 and March 31, 2022, 86 school districts in 26 states enacted book bans affecting 1,145 titles by 874 authors. Forty-one percent of bans resulted from directives from state officials or lawmakers, and 96 percent did not follow best practices established by the American Library Association, such as requiring a formal written challenge and review by a committee. Though there has been an “undoubted” and “well-organized” increase in book banning activities, Corn-Revere said that these bans still only affect a small proportion of school districts.

Corn-Revere thinks the law of free expression remains solid, but worries about the future. He is “not as alarmed” as he could be because “censorship is a losing proposition.” Censorship tends to make things popular. “The lesson should be that these efforts to ban books are futile,” he said. The problem comes from “institutionalizing the culture war” via politics, adding that we need to “find ways to turn down the heat” on this situation. It’s a “mistake for state legislatures to micromanage curriculum” or single out specific works for exclusion.

“I’m not here to give you a solution but I will say that we do need to find a way to minimize the polarization that surrounds education,” Corn-Revere said. “This winner-takes-all culture war approach is unsustainable, unwinnable, and will serve no one. We need to focus more on the things that bring us together.”

A video of the lecture is available online at silha.umn.edu. Silha Center activities, including the annual Silha Lecture, are made possible by a generous endowment from the late Otto and Helen Silha.