Tag: Bans
-
NCAA bans ex-Temple basketball player for betting on own games (CBS Philadelphia)
Higher Education Inquirer : NCAA bans ex-Temple basketball player for betting on own games (CBS Philadelphia)
-
UI Bans Considering Race, Sex in Hiring, Tenure, Student Aid
A UIC official said the system made the decision after “considering the increased risk to our faculty and to the University that these criteria present in the current climate.”
Just_Super/iStock/Getty Images Plus
The University of Illinois system is telling its institutions they can’t consider race, color, national origin or sex in hiring, tenure, promotion and student financial aid decisions—a move that’s drawn opposition from a faculty union at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Aaron Krall, president of UIC United Faculty, an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers and the American Association of University Professors, said the UI system circumvented shared governance.
“This was a directive that came down and surprised everyone,” Krall said.
The system implemented a policy saying it and its universities don’t consider race or the other factors in determining eligibility for need- or merit-based financial aid. In a statement, the system further said it “issued guidance to its universities to ensure that hiring, promotion, and tenure processes follow the same standards.”
The statement said, “There may be some variation in how and when changes are fully operationalized” across its three universities: UIC, Springfield and Urbana-Champaign. The system didn’t provide Inside Higher Ed an interview Tuesday about why it’s making this change now.
Krall shared communications that he said UIC officials sent out last week. One, from Chancellor Marie Lynn Miranda and others, suggested the student aid change would apply to “donor-funded, college-determined and institutionally funded scholarships” and said “UIC will replace its Affirmative Action Plan with a Nondiscrimination and Merit-Based Hiring Plan.”
In another message Krall provided, a UIC official wrote that “faculty may no longer submit a Statement on Efforts to Promote Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the dossier, nor may faculty members be evaluated on norms related to” DEI. The official wrote that the system “made this decision after carefully considering the increased risk to our faculty and to the University that these criteria present in the current climate.”
Krall said. “The most shocking thing to me, really, is they want to change the policy and make it retroactive—so we have [affected] faculty members going up for promotion right now who have already submitted their promotion materials.” He said the union has demanded the right to bargain over these changes.
-
Cellphone bans can help kids learn — but Black students are suspended more as schools make the shift
Thirty states now limit or ban cellphone use in classrooms, and teachers are noticing children paying attention to their lessons again. But it’s not clear whether this policy — unpopular with students and a headache for teachers to enforce — makes an academic difference.
If student achievement goes up after a cellphone ban, it’s tough to know if the ban was the reason. Some other change in math or reading instruction might have caused the improvement. Or maybe the state assessment became easier to pass. Imagine if politicians required all students to wear striped shirts and test scores rose. Few would really think that stripes made kids smarter.
Two researchers from the University of Rochester and RAND, a nonprofit research organization, figured out a clever way to tackle this question by taking advantage of cellphone activity data in one large school district in Florida, which in 2023 became the first state to institute school cellphone restrictions. The researchers compared schools that had high cellphone activity before the ban with those that had low cellphone usage to see if the ban made a bigger difference for schools that had high usage.
Indeed, it did.
Related: Our free weekly newsletter alerts you to what research says about schools and classrooms.
Student test scores rose a bit more in high cellphone usage schools two years after the ban compared with schools that had lower cellphone usage to start. Students were also attending school more regularly.
The policy also came with a troubling side effect. The cellphone bans led to a significant increase in student suspensions in the first year, especially among Black students. But disciplinary actions declined during the second year.
“Cellphone bans are not a silver bullet,” said David Figlio, an economist at the University of Rochester and one of the study’s co-authors. “But they seem to be helping kids. They’re attending school more, and they’re performing a bit better on tests.”
Figlio said he was “worried” about the short-term 16 percent increase in suspensions for Black students. What’s unclear from this data analysis is whether Black students were more likely to violate the new cellphone rules, or whether teachers were more likely to single out Black students for punishment. It’s also unclear from these administrative behavior records if students were first given warnings or lighter punishments before they were suspended.
The data suggest that students adjusted to the new rules. A year later, student suspensions, including those of Black students, fell back to what they had been before the cellphone ban.
“What we observe is a rocky start,” Figlio added. “There was a lot of discipline.”
The study, “The Impact of Cellphone Bans in Schools on Student Outcomes: Evidence from Florida,” is a draft working paper and has not been peer-reviewed. It was slated to be circulated by the National Bureau of Economic Research on Oct. 20 and the authors shared a draft with me in advance. Figlio and his co-author Umut Özek at RAND believe it is the first study to show a causal connection between cellphone bans and learning rather than just a correlation.
The academic gains from the cellphone ban were small, less than a percentile point, on average. That’s the equivalent of moving from the 50th percentile on math and reading tests (in the middle) to the 51st percentile (still close to the middle), and this small gain did not emerge until the second year for most students. The academic benefits were strongest for middle schoolers, white students, Hispanic students and male students. The academic gains for Black students and female students were not statistically significant.
Related: Suspended for…what?
I was surprised to learn that there is data on student cellphone use in school. The authors of this study used information from Advan Research Corp., which collects and analyzes data from mobile phones around the world for business purposes, such as figuring out how many people visit a particular retail store. The researchers were able to obtain this data for schools in one Florida school district and estimate how many students were on their cellphones before and after the ban went into effect between the hours of 9 a.m. and 1 p.m.
The data showed that more than 60 percent of middle schoolers, on average, were on their phones at least once during the school day before the 2023 ban in this particular Florida district, which was not named but described as one of the 10 largest districts in the country. (Five of the nation’s 10 largest school districts are in Florida.) After the ban, that fell in half to 30 percent of middle schoolers in the first year and down to 25 percent in the second year.
Elementary school students were less likely to be on cellphones to start with and their in-school usage fell from about 25 percent of students before the ban to 15 percent after the ban. More than 45 percent of high schoolers were on their phones before the ban and that fell to about 10 percent afterwards.
Average daily smartphone visits in schools, by year and grade level
Average daily smartphone visits during regular school days (relative to teacher workdays without students) between 9am and 1pm (per 100 enrolled students) in the two months before and then after the 2023 ban took effect in one large urban Florida school district. Source: Figlio and Özek, October 2025 draft paper, figure 2C, p. 23. Florida did not enact a complete cellphone ban in 2023, but imposed severe restrictions. Those restrictions were tightened in 2025 and that additional tightening was not studied in this paper.
Anti-cellphone policies have become increasingly popular since the pandemic, largely based on our collective adult gut hunches that kids are not learning well when they are consumed by TikTok and SnapChat.
This is perhaps a rare case in public policy, Figlio said, where the “data back up the hunches.”
Contact staff writer Jill Barshay at 212-678-3595, jillbarshay.35 on Signal, or [email protected].
This story about cellphone bans was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.
-
Book bans becoming the new norm for districts, report says
Dive Brief:
- In the fourth school year since book bans proliferated on local school board levels, districts are now also facing federal and state pressures to ban books, according to a report released Oct. 1 by PEN America, a nonprofit that advocates for free speech.
- The organization noted that federal efforts to influence education issues are repeating state and local book banning rhetoric, which it calls a “a new vector of book banning pressure.” For example, the parental rights movement behind book banning is being repeated at the federal level in executive orders leading to the reversal of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and LGBTQ+ inclusion.
- The escalating book censorship campaigns usurp educators’ time that would otherwise be used for instruction, can subject them to harassment, and also leads to them spending long hours cataloging books and dedicating more administrative time to comply with bans, the report said. Districts are also incurring “significant” legal costs navigating lawsuits.
Dive Insight:
There were 6,870 instances of book bans across 23 states and 87 public school districts in the 2024-25 school year, according to PEN America. That totals 22,810 cases of book bans across 45 states and 451 public school districts since the organization began tracking the issue in July 2021.
PEN America’s definition of “bans” includes books that have been taken off the shelf pending investigation, and any other steps taken against books as a result of parent, community or government pushback leading to limited student access.
“From a birds’ eye view, school districts today are surrounded by multiple and persistent local, state, and now federal pressures to ban books, with diminishing reasons not to,” the report said.
At the federal level, the Trump administration’s U.S. Department of Education in January rescinded Biden-era guidance. That guidance had warned school districts that they could violate civil rights law by implementing book bans, and it said that removing “age-inappropriate” books from schools is a parent and community decision that the federal government “has no role in.”
At the same time, the department dismissed 11 civil rights complaints related to book bans.
It also eliminated the position of a book ban coordinator, created by the Biden administration in 2023 to develop training for schools on navigating book bans.
Four years after the initial wave of book bans swept localities, communities and educators “have been conditioned to expect book challenges and bans as part of the U.S. education system,” PEN America said in a statement.
“A disturbing ‘everyday banning’ and normalization of censorship has worsened and spread over the last four years,” said Kasey Meehan, director of PEN America’s Freedom to Read program, in an Oct. 1 statement. “The result is unprecedented.”
Districts are responding by removing books to comply out of fear of losing funding, staff being fired or harassed, and sometimes having police involvement, the organization said.
In an August 2024 report, the Knight Foundation found in a survey of over 4,500 adults that two-thirds of Americans oppose book restrictions in schools and even more are confident in public schools’ book selection. More Americans said in that survey that it was more concerning to restrict students’ access to books with educational value than it was to provide them with access to books that have inappropriate content.
However, a majority (6 in 10) also said that age appropriateness — as opposed to parents’ political views, religious beliefs or moral values — was a legitimate reason to restrict students’ book access. The survey included responses from over 1,100 pre-K-12 parents.
-
LAWSUIT: Texas bans the First Amendment at public universities after dark
AUSTIN, Texas, Sept. 3, 2025 — The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression filed a lawsuit today to stop enforcement of a new, unconstitutional law that turns every public university in Texas into a speech-free zone starting at 10 p.m. every day. FIRE is suing the University of Texas System on behalf of student musicians, journalists, political organizers, and religious students who span the ideological spectrum, all of whom the new Texas law threatens to silence.
“The First Amendment doesn’t set when the sun goes down,” said FIRE senior supervising attorney JT Morris. “University students have expressive freedom whether it’s midnight or midday, and Texas can’t just legislate those constitutional protections out of existence.”
In 2019, Texas was a national leader in protecting student speech, passing a robust law enshrining free speech on public university campuses. But after a series of high-profile protests over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in 2024, the Texas legislature reversed course and passed Senate Bill 2972, transforming the speech-protective 2019 law into one mandating that the state’s public universities and colleges impose a host of sweeping censorship measures.
FIRE’s lawsuit is challenging two major provisions of the law, which went into effect on Sept. 1. The first requires public universities in Texas to ban all “expressive activities” on campus between the hours of 10 p.m. and 8 a.m., which the law defines as “any speech or expressive conduct protected by the First Amendment.”
That is a shocking prohibition of protected speech at public universities. Under the new law, universities now have the power to discipline students at nighttime for wearing a hat with a political message, playing music, writing an op-ed, attending candlelight vigils — even just chatting with friends.
“This law gives campus administrators a blank check to punish speech, and that authority will inevitably be used to target unpopular speech,” said FIRE attorney Adam Steinbaugh. “Administrators have plenty of ways to prevent disruptive conduct that do not involve such a broad censorship mandate.”
FIRE is also challenging the law’s mandate that universities ban student groups from a host of protected expression during the last two weeks of any semester or term, including inviting guest speakers, using amplified sound, or playing a drum. The Fellowship of Christian University Students at UT-Dallas, for example, would be unable to invite an off-campus minister to lead a prayer during finals.
“Our organization gives students on campus a place to worship with one another and hear from Christian leaders,” said FOCUS committee chair Juke Matthews. “For many of them, this is their church away from home. This law would yank away part of their support system right at the most stressful time of the term.”
COURTESY PHOTOS OF STUDENT CLIENTS FOR MEDIA USE
If state officials and campus administrators want to regulate disruptive speech, the First Amendment demands that they narrowly tailor any such regulation. But Texas’ blanket ban makes no distinctions about the noise level or location of the expression. The Texas law would permit a tuba concert during finals weeks, but not one with drums. And the law exempts “commercial speech” from its sweeping bans on speech. So Texas students are free to advertise t-shirts featuring the First Amendment after hours… but could face discipline for wearing them.
FIRE is suing on behalf of a diverse group of students and student organizations whose speech the new Texas law will harm. Along with the UT-Dallas chapter of FOCUS, other plaintiffs include:
- Young Americans for Liberty is an Austin-based national grassroots organization for students who want to advance the cause of liberty. Many of their student members at Texas universities engage in protests, petitions, and “Free Speech Balls” that traditionally take place during evening hours. FIRE is also representing an individual YAL member who attends UT-Austin and would personally face punishment for inviting YAL speakers in the final weeks of term or for sharing his political opinions at the wrong hour.
- The Society of Unconventional Drummers is a registered student organization at UT-Austin that puts on performances throughout the term, including at the end of each semester. Texas’s arbitrary rule banning percussion the last two weeks of any semester would force the students to cancel one of their most popular shows.
- Strings Attached is a student music group that holds public performances on UT-Dallas’s campus, including in the final two weeks of term. Some of their concerts take place after hours or during the day with sound amplification, both of which could fall afoul of the Texas law’s sweeping bans.
- The Retrograde is a new, independent student newspaper that serves the UT-Dallas community. Whether it’s writing a story, emailing sources, editing a column, much of its staff’s newsgathering and reporting necessarily happens after Texas’ 10 p.m. free speech cutoff.
“Under these new rules, we’re at risk of being shut down simply for posting breaking news as it happens,” said Retrograde Editor-in-Chief Gregorio Olivares. “With that threat hanging over our heads, many student journalists across the UT system face the impossible decision between self-censorship and running a story that criticizes the powers on campus.”
FIRE’s clients will ask the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas to issue a preliminary injunction to prevent UT’s new speech bans from taking effect. The defendants in the lawsuit include the members of the UT System Board of Regents, UT System Chancellor John M. Zerwas, UT-Austin President Jim Davis, and UT-Dallas President Prabhas V. Moghe.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to defending and sustaining the individual rights of all Americans to free speech and free thought—the most essential qualities of liberty. FIRE recognizes that colleges and universities play a vital role in preserving free thought within a free society. To this end, we place a special emphasis on defending the individual rights of students and faculty members on our nation’s campuses, including freedom of speech, freedom of association, due process, legal equality, religious liberty, and sanctity of conscience.
CONTACT:
Alex Griswold, Communications Campaign Manager, FIRE: 215-717-3473; [email protected]
-
Phone bans proliferate as digital media’s harm to students grows clearer
This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback.Even as school cellphone bans proliferate, a growing body of evidence suggests digital media — and cellphone use specifically — is harming child and teen development.
A meta-analysis of 117 studies published in June found that the relationship between screen time and socioemotional well-being is somewhat of a Catch-22: Increased screen time can lead to emotional and behavioral problems, and children with those problems rely on screens to cope with them.
Another study of 4,285 U.S. teens published last week found nearly a third showed increasing addictive behaviors related to social media and almost a quarter for cellphones. These addictive behaviors — rather than screen time alone — were linked to increased risks of suicidal behaviors or thoughts.
School phone bans have gained traction across political divides nationwide in recent years, with educators and lawmakers citing both student mental health and academic performance as reasons to restrict cellphones during the school day.
As of May, 21 states ranging from California to Utah had instituted a ban or limit on cellphones in the classroom, according to Ballotpedia.
Most recently, Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo signed a law requiring school districts to adopt policies regulating cellphone use during the school day and limiting classroom cellphone use in most cases.
A separate study released in March — this time examining about 1,500 11- to 13-year-olds in Florida, where cellphones have been banned during class time since 2023 — suggested that restricting cell phones would boost grades and mental health for children who use screens more heavily.
The 22% of Florida students surveyed who reported using their favorite app for six or more hours per day were also three times more likely to report getting mostly D’s and F’s than their peers.
Those students were also 6 times more likely than less-frequent users to report severe depression symptoms — even when ruling out factors like age, household income, gender, parent education, race and ethnicity.
Students who always had their cellphone push notifications turned on, which made up about 20% of the sample, were also more likely to report worse grades and to experience anxiety.
“Banning students’ access to phones at school means these kids would not receive notifications for at least that seven-hour period and have fewer hours in the day to use apps,” the study’s authors wrote in an overview of the study published by The Conversation, a nonprofit publication written by academic experts.
However, that same study found 17% of Florida students who attend schools that ban or confiscate phones report severe depressive symptoms, quadruple the 4% who attended schools that allowed limited phone use and reported those symptoms.
Correlation in this case did not necessarily mean causation, however. “We are not suggesting that our survey shows phone bans cause mental health problems,” the authors wrote. “It is possible, for instance, that the schools where kids already were struggling with their mental health simply happened to be the ones that have banned phones. ”
-
Survey of 1500 Kids Suggests School Phone Bans Have Important but Limited Effects – The 74
Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter
In Florida, a bill that bans cellphone use in elementary and middle schools, from bell to bell, recently sailed through the state Legislature.
Gov. Ron DeSantis signed it into law on May 30, 2025. The same bill calls for high schools in six Florida districts to adopt the ban during the upcoming school year and produce a report on its effectiveness by Dec. 1, 2026.
But in the debate over whether phones should be banned in K-12 schools – and if so, how – students themselves are rarely given a voice.
We are experts in media use and public health who surveyed 1,510 kids ages 11 to 13 in Florida in November and December 2024 to learn how they’re using digital media and the role tech plays in their lives at home and at school. Their responses were insightful – and occasionally surprising.
Adults generally cite four reasons to ban phone use during school: to improve kids’ mental health, to strengthen academic outcomes, to reduce cyberbullying and to help limit kids’ overall screen time.
But as our survey shows, it may be a bit much to expect a cellphone ban to accomplish all of that.
What do kids want?
Some of the questions in our survey shine light on kids’ feelings toward banning cellphones – even though we didn’t ask that question directly.
We asked them if they feel relief when they’re in a situation where they can’t use their smartphone, and 31% said yes.
Additionally, 34% of kids agreed with the statement that social media causes more harm than good.
And kids were 1.5 to 2 times more likely to agree with those statements if they attended schools where phones are banned or confiscated for most of the school day, with use only permitted at certain times. That group covered 70% of the students we surveyed because many individual schools or school districts in Florida have already limited students’ cellphone use.
How students use cellphones matters
Some “power users” of cellphone apps could likely use a break from them.
Twenty percent of children we surveyed said push notifications on their phones — that is, notifications from apps that pop up on the phone’s screen — are never turned off. These notifications are likely coming from the most popular apps kids reported using, like YouTube, TikTok and Instagram.
This 20% of children was roughly three times more likely to report experiencing anxiety than kids who rarely or never have their notifications on.
They were also nearly five times more likely to report earning mostly D’s and F’s in school than kids whose notifications are always or sometimes off.
Our survey results also suggest phone bans would likely have positive effects on grades and mental health among some of the heaviest screen users. For example, 22% of kids reported using their favorite app for six or more hours per day. These students were three times more likely to report earning mostly D’s and F’s in school than kids who spend an hour or less on their favorite app each day.
They also were six times more likely than hour-or-less users to report severe depression symptoms. These insights remained even after ruling out numerous other possible explanations for the difference — like age, household income, gender, parent’s education, race and ethnicity.
Banning students’ access to phones at school means these kids would not receive notifications for at least that seven-hour period and have fewer hours in the day to use apps.
Phones and mental health
However, other data we collected suggests that bans aren’t a universal benefit for all children.
Seventeen percent of kids who attend schools that ban or confiscate phones report severe depression symptoms, compared with just 4% among kids who keep their phones with them during the school day.
This finding held even after we ruled out other potential explanations for what we were seeing, such as the type of school students attend and other demographic factors.
We are not suggesting that our survey shows phone bans cause mental health problems.
It is possible, for instance, that the schools where kids already were struggling with their mental health simply happened to be the ones that have banned phones. Also, our survey didn’t ask kids how long phones have been banned at their schools. If the bans just launched, there may be positive effects on mental health or grades yet to come.
In order to get a better sense of the bans’ effects on mental health, we would need to examine mental health indicators before and after phone bans.
To get a long-term view on this question, we are planning to do a nationwide survey of digital media use and mental health, starting with 11- to 13-year-olds and tracking them into adulthood.
Even with the limitations of our data from this survey, however, we can conclude that banning phones in schools is unlikely to be an immediate solution to mental health problems of kids ages 11-13.
Grades up, cyberbullying down
Students at schools where phones are barred or confiscated didn’t report earning higher grades than children at schools where kids keep their phones.
This finding held for students at both private and public schools, and even after ruling out other possible explanations like differences in gender and household income, since these factors are also known to affect grades.
There are limits to our findings here: Grades are not a perfect measure of learning, and they’re not standardized across schools. It’s possible that kids at phone-free schools are in fact learning more than those at schools where kids carry their phones around during school hours – even if they earn the same grades.
We asked kids how often in the past three months they’d experienced mistreatment online – like being called hurtful names or having lies or rumors spread about them. Kids at schools where phone use is limited during school hours actually reported enduring more cyberbullying than children at schools with less restrictive policies. This result persisted even after we considered smartphone ownership and numerous demographics as possible explanations.
We are not necessarily saying that cellphone bans cause an increase in cyberbullying. What could be at play here is that at schools where cyberbullying has been particularly bad, phones have been banned or are confiscated, and online bullying still occurs.
But based on our survey results, it does not appear that school phone bans prevent cyberbullying.
Overall, our findings suggest that banning phones in schools may not be an easy fix for students’ mental health problems, poor academic performance or cyberbullying.
That said, kids might benefit from phone-free schools in ways that we have not explored, like increased attention spans or reduced eyestrain.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Get stories like these delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter
-
USyd bans ‘lecture-bashing’ in wake of Israel-Gaza protests – Campus Review
Pro-Palestine campers at Sydney University. Picture: Thomas Lisson
University of Sydney (USyd) vice-chancellor Mark Scott on Monday wrote to students and staff to inform them that students will not be allowed to make non-course related announcements at the beginning of class.
Please login below to view content or subscribe now.
Membership Login
-
Book bans draw libraries into damaging culture wars that undermine their purpose
For the last four years, school and public libraries have been drawn into a culture war that seeks to censor, limit and discredit diverse perspectives.
Yet time and time again, as librarians have been encouraged or even directed to remove books that include LGBTQ+, Black, Latino and Indigenous characters or themes or history from their collections, they have said no.
When librarians said no, policy changes were submitted and laws were proposed — all in the name of controlling the library collection.
Some librarians lost their jobs. Some had their lives threatened. Legislators proposed bills that attempt to remove librarians’ legal protections, strive to prevent them from participating in their national professional associations, seek to limit some materials to “adults only” areas in public libraries and threaten the way library work has been done for decades.
Here’s why this is wrong. For generations, libraries have been hubs of information and expertise in their communities. Librarians and library workers aid in workforce development, support seniors, provide resources for veterans, aid literacy efforts, buttress homeschool families —among many other community-enriching services. Your public library, the library in your school and at your college, even those in hospitals and law firms, are centers of knowledge. Restrictions such as book bans impede their efforts to provide information.
Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter featuring the most important stories in education.
Professional librarians study the First Amendment and understand what it means to protect the right to read. We provide opportunities for feedback from our users so that they have a voice in decision-making. We follow a code of ethics and guidelines to make the best selections for our communities.
It is illegal for a library to purchase pornographic or obscene material; we follow the law established by the Supreme Court (Miller v. California, 1973). That decision has three prongs to determine if material meets the qualifications for obscenity. If the material meets all three, it is considered obscene and does not have First Amendment protection.
But our procedures have been co-opted, abused and flagrantly ignored by a small and vocal minority attempting to control what type of information can be accessed by all citizens. Their argument, that books are not banned if they are available for purchase, is false.
When a book or resource is removed from a collection based on a discriminatory point of view, that is a book ban.
Librarians follow a careful process of criteria to ensure that our personal biases do not intervene in our professional work. Librarians have always been paying attention. In 1939, a group of visionary librarians crafted the Library Bill of Rights to counter “growing intolerance, suppression of free speech and censorship affecting the rights of minorities and individuals.” In 1953, librarians once again came together and created the Freedom to Read Statement, in response to McCarthyism.
You may see a similar censorship trend today — but with the advent of the internet and social media, the speed at which censorship is occurring is unparalleled.
Much of the battle has focused on fears that schoolchildren might discover books depicting families with two dads or two moms, or that high school level books are available at elementary schools. (Spoiler alert: they are not.)
Related: The magic pebble and a lazy bull: The book ban movement has a long timeline
The strategy of this censorship is similar in many localities: One person comes to the podium at a county or school board meeting and reads a passage out of context. The selection of the passage is deliberate — it is meant to sound salacious. Clips of this reading are then shared and re-shared, with comments that are meant to frighten people.
After misinformation has been unleashed, it’s a real challenge to control its spread. Is some subject matter that is taught in schools difficult? Yes, that is why it is taught as a whole, and not in passages out of context, because context is everything in education.
Librarians are trained professionals. Librarians have been entrusted with tax dollars and know how to be excellent stewards of them. They know what meets the criteria for obscenity and what doesn’t. They have a commitment to provide something for everyone in their collections. The old adage “a good library has something in it to offend everyone” is still true.
Thankfully, there are people across the country using their voices to fight back against censorship. The new documentary “Banned Together,” for example, shows the real-world impact of book banning and curriculum censorship in public schools. The film follows three students and their adult allies as they fight to reinstate 97 books pulled from school libraries.
Ultimately, an attempt to control information is an attempt to control people. It’s an attempt to control access, and for one group of people to pass a value judgment on others for simply living their lives.
Libraries focus on the free expression of ideas and access to those ideas. All the people in our communities have a right to read, to learn something new no matter what their age.
Lisa R. Varga is the associate executive director, public policy and advocacy, at the American Library Association.
Contact the opinion editor at [email protected].
This story about book bans was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.
-
UC System Freezes Hiring, Bans Diversity Statement Mandates
The University of California System’s president announced a systemwide hiring freeze and other “cost-saving measures, such as delaying maintenance and reducing business travel where possible.”
“Because every UC location is different, these plans will vary,” president Michael V. Drake said in a Wednesday letter to the campuses of one of the country’s largest higher education systems. He said “every action that impacts our University and our workforce will only be taken after serious and deliberative consideration.”
Drake pointed to a “substantial cut” to the system in the California state budget atop the Trump administration’s disruptive national reduction in support for postsecondary education. He said the administration’s executive orders and proposed policies “threaten funding for lifesaving research, patient care and education support.”
“The Chancellors and I are preparing for significant financial challenges ahead,” Drake wrote.
Whenever hiring does resume, UC universities and their components will no longer be able to require that applicants submit diversity statements. Janet Reilly, chair of the UC Board of Regents, said in a separate statement Wednesday that the board directed the system to eliminate such mandates.
“While the University has no systemwide policies requiring the submission of diversity statements as part of employment applications, some programs and departments have used this practice,” Reilly said.
Paulette Granberry Russell, president and chief executive officer of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education, told Inside Higher Ed that, “while I think diversity statements added value on the front end of a search,” it’s far more important to have a structured approach to faculty hiring. She said this approach should eliminate biases and consideration of “non–job-related criteria,” such as accents or lack of eye contact, from the process.
Diversity statements, she said, are “not the defining factor in whether or not somebody’s going to be successful” if they earn the position.