The Education of an Anti-Censor
by Nicholas Karolides
University of Wisconsin-River Falls

When I first met censorship, I was a teacher of seventh-grade English and Social Studies in a so-called core curriculum in New York State. I was an innocent, so innocent that I did not recognize what I was being introduced to. The first example was a parent who objected to a comment that I had made in class that was perceived as being critical of one of the presidents of the United States, and identified by her as being inappropriately un-American for seventh graders. The second, a couple of years later, involved FBI agents contacting the school’s principal about letters sent to the Soviet Union Embassy by several of my students, seeking information for a Social Studies report. (In coordinating the two subject areas, I had taught the structure and content of the formal letter and required one to the embassy of the country being researched.) I discovered that this community had a significant number of known Communists among its residents. Although initially “amused” at the improbability of any supposed security threat, I realized how closely the government monitored some citizens’ behaviors. My innocence, however, was at least modestly eroded.

The next stage of my professional experiences was broadly enlightening about censorship and its effects. My attendance at NCTE Annual Conventions had always included censorship-discussion sectionals. Additionally, as a member of the Executive Committee of the Wisconsin Council of Teachers of English, censorship issues and resolutions were often discussed. These discussions were frequently instigated by Lee Burress, also a member of its Executive Committee. (He served as chair of NCTE’s Censorship Committee.) He was a fervent advocate of freedom of expression and freedom to read: his passion was persuasive, igniting my intellectual and social consciousness. As editor of the Wisconsin English Journal, I published one of his censorship surveys of Wisconsin public schools in 1963 and in 1980 devoted an issue to “Censorship Issues and Responses.”
 
Two gratuitous events illuminated my understanding of the censor. The first was a presentation I gave to librarians of two counties about adolescent literature. At the luncheon that followed, the group with which I was sitting discussed censorship challenges that they were experiencing. One of the librarians accounted for the lack of challenges at her library’s collection: her tactic was not to order books that were censored elsewhere, thus a closet censor herself. The second was while I was working with a group of English teachers from a local school district to assist them in building a defense for Catcher in the Rye. It was being challenged as a required reading in the eleventh grade curriculum. Subsequently, I received an inquiry from a citizen of the same community, indeed from, as I later surmised, the challenger.

I am also very interested in your professional opinion of the Catcher in the Rye. It does contain a great deal of profanity and derogatory statements toward women, and smoking seems to be glamorized. Would you still consider it to be in the Top 10, or could it also be outdated? Would you please give me your opinion on whether you think this book is appropriate to be taught to all high school students? Would it be more appropriate if limited to a class particularly for the college-bound student? What is your opinion on having students read the book out loud during class?

Having not succeeded in her eleventh grade challenge, she seemed to be attempting a more seductive approach. Her use of the word  “outdated,” implied that, beyond simply seeking fresh titles, aging texts do not merit recommendation, age somehow causing their expression of the human experience, their revelation of character and social issues to be necessarily faded.
 
My specific involvement with censorship publications resulted from Lee Burress’s invitation to co-edit a collection defending the 30 most frequently censored books (such defenses came to be known as “rationales”); this list had emerged from the several national and regional surveys of teachers, librarians, and administrators he had conducted. (They are detailed in Burress’s The Battle of the Books: Literary Censorship in Public Schools, 1950-1985.) This collection, Celebrating Censored Books, was published by the Wisconsin Council of Teachers of English in 1985. It was succeeded by an extended collection, Censored Books: Critical Viewpoints -- 63 defenses of 59 literary works -- published in 1993. Lee and I contacted over 100 authors and academics for submissions; among those of the former group who agreed were Rudolfo Anaya, Norma Fox Mazer, James Michener, Arthur Miller, Zibby Oneal, and Katherine Paterson. Because of my editorial experience, I chiefly did the editing of manuscripts.
 
Other publications followed: a successor collection of rationales of challenged books, Censored Books II: Critical Viewpoints, 1985-2000 -- 64 defenses of 62 literary works. Two defenses were written by authors of their own books: Christopher Collier of My Brother Sam Is Dead and Zilpha Keatley Snyder of The Headless Cupid. I authored Banned Books: Literature Suppressed on Political Grounds (1998); 100 Banned Books (1999), co-authored with Margaret Bald and Dawn Sova (a revised edition -- 120 Banned Books -- will be published in 2005), and Encyclopedia of Censorship, originally authored by Jonathon Green, which I revised and updated. It also will be published in 2005.

These activities led to three intellectual freedom awards:

• 1998 Wisconsin/SIRS Intellectual Freedom Award (Wisconsin Reading Association)
• 2002 Lee A. Burress Intellectual Freedom Award from the Wisconsin Council of Teachers of English and Language Arts
• 2002 NCTE Intellectual Freedom Award

I am indeed honored to have received these awards. Equally significant, too, is the pleasure and knowledge gained from working with the manuscripts of all the authors and my own research.