Censorship Sensors: The AAUP, the ALA, and Other Guardians of Inquiry

Dan Steward, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The contemporary moment is one of heightened concern about censorship, whether in the form of book bannings, assaults on academic freedom, or other threats to free expression and inquiry. Various individuals and organizations stand out over the years as particularly active censorship-sensors in civil society. This paper focuses on the established practices of two such social actors, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the American Library Association (ALA). Samples of alleged censorship practices can be drawn from the public-facing work of these organizations, and especially from the lists of banned books (maintained by the ALA) and censured administrations (maintained by the AAUP). Generating such samples (from 1990 to present) to serve as points of departure, this paper maps the key social actors (i.e., universities, authors, faculty), artifacts (i.e., books), and claims (i.e., that an artifact or actor constitutes a problem) that are represented in contemporary censorship discourse. Such maps are then used to explore the extent to which the AAUP, the ALA, and similar censorship-sensors (e.g., the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation) are addressing common censorship campaigns or relatively autonomous censorship threats in distinctive social realms. Special attention is given to the themes of the 2024 Annual Meeting, and the extent to which apparent censorship efforts include claims regarding the truth or provenance of problematic artifacts and actors, and whether anti-censorship efforts include similar claims about the censorship actors and artifacts.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 115. Scholarly Orthopraxy/Orthodoxy: Re/Constructing Norms and Canons