Censored 2014

by Mickey Huff

  One challenge for anyone who faces ostracism for displaying civil courage is that newly earned and demonstrated respect may come from groups that the individual has long been taught to despise and disregard. You lose (perhaps all) your old friends, but you do gain new ones, whose values you discover correspond to those that came to separate you from your former relationships. For example, Sibel Edmonds found that Federal Bureau of Investigation whistleblowers (including, initially, herself) were extremely uneasy at being applauded by, or even associated with, members of the American Civil Liberties Union. General Lee Butler, who denounced the nuclear weapons that he had previously been in charge of, found that he couldn’t lunch any more with other generals, but was acclaimed by antiwar and an-tinuclear crowds, whom he had previously found, at best, simplistic, wrongheaded, or unpatriotic. (He backed away from his public stand, though he didn’t repudiate it.)

  Still, the Ridenhour Prizes for journalistic courage and whistleblowing (presented by the Fertel Foundation and the Nation Institute) and Yoko Ono’s recent Courage Award to Julian Assange, are steps in the direction of honoring civil courage. They make potential whistleblowers or other insider dissenters aware, at least, that while they lose membership and respect from groups they have long belonged to and valued (and this sense of loss, including the loss of multiple personal friendships, may be long felt and never fully compensated for), they will not be outcasts from the larger society, and will even earn extreme respect from groups they themselves come to respect and value. In addition to high-profile awards, organizations like Edmonds’s National Security Whistleblowers Coalition and Ray McGov-ern’s Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity provide valuable reassurance of this.

  Observers have noted that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have provided us with virtually no nationally known heroes for battlefield courage, though a number have earned high decorations. But Bradley Manning is a war hero from those conflicts whose name will ring for a long time—even, and perhaps especially, if he spends his life in prison.

  DANIEL ELLSBERG, the former American military analyst who in 1971 released the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret study of government decision-making during the Vietnam War, to the New York Times and other newspapers, is the author of three books: Papers on the War (1971), Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (2002), and Risk, Ambiguity and Decision (2001). Since the end of the Vietnam War, he has been a lecturer, writer, and activist on the dangers of the nuclear era, wrongful US interventions, and the urgent need for patriotic whistleblowing. In 2006, the Right Livelihood Award Foundation awarded Ellsberg its prize, known as the “Alternative Nobel,” for “putting peace and truth first, at considerable personal risk, and dedicating his life to inspiring others to follow his example.”

  WHAT’S POSSIBLE? JOURNALISM THAT MATTERS

  Josh Wolf

  For two short days in Denver this past spring, I momentarily forgot that the news business is barreling down a collision course with democracy.

  At a journalism conference, ironically titled “Journalism Is Dead, Long Live Journalism,” about one hundred journalists huddled together in small groups to explore what journalism might look like over the next century. Although everyone in attendance was well aware of the industry’s uncertain prognosis, no one dwelled on what isn’t working. Instead, every participant at the conference was focused on what’s possible and on how to turn possibilities into reality.

  Since 2001, the nonprofit organization Journalism that Matters (JTM) has been bringing together journalism professionals, student journalists, and anyone else invested in the future of news to both ask and answer the questions that are central to practicing journalism in the twenty-first century.

  One month after 9/11, JTM convened its first gathering within the Associated Press Managing Editor’s board conference to discuss “Journalism that Matters in a World Gone Mad.” The reaction among participants was powerful; more than one said they got more ideas out of the experience than out of the rest of the conference.

  While most conferences set clear agendas and designate certain people as panelists, moderators, and attendees, JTM instead uses “Open-Space Technology,” an approach for hosting conferences and other types of meetings that was “discovered” in the mid-1980s by Harrison

  Owen, after he grew tired of planning and preparing for his annual organizational management conference and had an epiphany at the bar:

  The following year, he sent out a simple, one-paragraph invitation, and more than 100 people showed up to discuss Organization Transformation. In his main meeting room he set the chairs in one large circle and proceeded to explain that what participants could see in the room was the extent of his organizing work. If they had an issue or opportunity that they felt passionate about and wanted to discuss with other participants, they should come to the center of the circle, get a marker and paper, write their issue and their name, read that out, and post it on the wall. It took about 90 minutes for the 100+ people to organize a 3-day agenda of conference sessions, each one titled, hosted, and scheduled by somebody in the group.3

  Over the past twelve years, JTM has hosted more than fifteen gatherings with well over 1,000 journalists participating in the process of crafting the agenda and igniting the future for news. In 2008, I attended my first JTM conference at the Yahoo! campus in Sunnyvale, California.

  The topic for this gathering was NewsTools, and one of the tools that came out of the conference was Spot.Us, an online crowdfunding platform developed a year before Kickstarter was launched. David Cohn, the founder of the innovative nonprofit, described it as Kiva for journalism, in reference to the Kiva microfinance lending website. Cohn went on to receive a $340,000 grant from the Knight Foundation, and in 2011 his organization was acquired by American Public Media after successfully financing hundreds of stories.

  The next month, JTM hosted another event in Minneapolis in conjunction with the National Conference for Media Reform (NCMR), a semiannual event organized by the group Free Press. While my entire experience in the Twin Cities that week was amazing, I found the traditional conference structure of the media reform conference jarring and alienating in comparison to the JTM unconference that had immediately preceded it.

  While the JTM gathering had been about discussing new solutions, my experience at the NCMR centered on listening to people talk about old problems. In fact, the only speech I can remember from the conference was an incendiary keynote delivered by Van Jones less than a year before he was appointed by President Barack Obama as Special Advisor for Green Jobs. Mysteriously, the complete version of Jones’s speech was taken down from the Free Press YouTube channel shortly after it was posted and is no longer available, though the rest of the keynotes appear to remain online.

  Just as Owen had discovered before creating Open-Space Technology, the best part of the NCMR were the coffee breaks, the sole opportunity to actually engage people in a dialogue. These coffee breaks quickly crept further and further into the lectures and I soon felt like a grad student cutting class.

  A few years later, when the NCMR hosted their 2013 conference in Denver, I had decided that I would participate in the JTM preconfer-ence and then avoid the lectures at the NCMR entirely.

  I don’t think I attended a single session of the conference, but the conversations I had just outside were more valuable than any lecture. I can only imagine the solutions we might find if the thousands of people at the conference simply stopped listening to what’s wrong with the media and started creating what’s possible.

  JOSH WOLF is a freelance journalist and documentary filmmaker who is best known for his fight for the reporter’s privilege that landed him in a federal prison for more than six months. A visionary writer and producer, he was recognized in 2006 as Journalist of the Year by the Northern California chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists “for upholding the principles of a free and independent press.” A 2011 graduate from the University of California–Berkeley Graduate Sc
hool of Journalism, Wolf has been a staff member, since 2013, at Journalism that Matters, a nonprofit that convenes diverse communities in conversations fostering collaboration, innovation, and action to develop thriving news and information ecologies.

  THE FIRE: ACADEMIC FREEDOM UNDER THREAT

  William Creely

  The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to defending core civil liberties at our nation’s colleges and universities—and since our founding in 1999, we have stayed very busy. FIRE’s work on behalf of student and faculty rights demonstrates, with depressing clarity, that academic freedom and freedom of expression remain under threat on far too many campuses nationwide.

  Two recent faculty cases provide ample demonstration of the continuing disregard for academic freedom and free speech.

  In March of 2012, North Carolina’s Appalachian State University placed tenured sociology professor Jammie Price on administrative leave following complaints from students in her “Introduction to Sociology” course. Professor Price’s offense? Offending students. According to the suspension letter Price received from Appalachian State’s vice provost, four of her students objected to her in-class criticism of the university administration for its response to student allegations of sexual assault and its treatment of student athletes. According to the letter, the students also complained about Price’s screening of a documentary that critically examined the adult film industry without “introduc[ing] the film or explaining] that the material may be objectionable or upsetting to students.”

  Shockingly, Price was investigated and found guilty of creating a “hostile environment,” despite the fact that the allegedly harassing behavior did not remotely approach the standard for hostile environment harassment in the educational context and should have been protected by any reasonable conception of academic freedom. The university’s disciplinary response included imposing a development plan that required “corrective actions,” such as specific requirements for how to teach “sensitive topics” and “controversial materials.” Both the Faculty Due Process Committee and the Faculty Grievance Committee issued reports objecting to Price’s punishment, and FIRE sent letters of protest to Appalachian State administrators. Nevertheless, the university chancellor and the board of trustees each rejected Price’s appeals. The lesson for Appalachian State faculty could not have been clearer: have the temerity to criticize the university or offend your students’ delicate sensibilities, and you will be subject to sanction, academic freedom be damned.

  Like Price, Professor Arthur Gilbert of the University of Denver was disciplined for the content of his classroom lectures in contravention of long-established understandings of academic freedom. Gilbert, a fifty-year teaching veteran, was teaching a spring 2011 graduate-level course titled “The Domestic and International Consequences of the Drug War.” Course texts for a portion of the syllabus concerning “Drugs and Sin in American Life: From Masturbation and Prostitution to Alcohol and Drugs” included readings concerning “purity crusades” and a screening of the film Requiem for a Dream, which includes graphic depictions of the consequences of heroin use. In April 2011, two graduate students submitted anonymous complaints concerning in-class comments from Gilbert about course materials regarding shifting societal attitudes about masturbation.

  Following an investigation, human resources administrators from the university’s Office of Diversity and Equal Opportunity concluded, that “absent an academic justification, you created a hostile sexual environment in your class. Whether this is justified by the academic integrity of your teaching of the subject matter is beyond the scope of this investigation and will be determined by the appropriate academic decision makers.” (Emphasis added.) But such a determination on the academic merit of Gilbert’s allegedly harassing speech was never solicited from faculty. Instead, the dean of the university’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies simply suspended Gilbert. The suspension prompted sharp protest from the university’s faculty review committee, which found the suspension of a veteran professor on the basis of two anonymous complaints about in-class speech to be “outrageous and in variance with time-honored tradition in academe.”

  Both FIRE and the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) agreed, writing letters of protest. Undeterred, the university provost upheld the suspension, signaling a chilling disregard for academic freedom. As the University of Denver’s AAUP chapter president told the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Given how Professor Gilbert was treated, I’m not inclined to teach my course on human-evolved psychology and sexuality—a course whose subject matter significantly overlaps with that taught by Gilbert and whose academic content inevitably creates student discomfort—until the institution establishes better policies respecting academic freedom and due process. The risk to professional career and reputation, in my opinion, is too great.”

  Unfortunately, these are just two of an untold number of examples of faculty silenced by misguided administrators seeking to protect students from encountering challenging or disagreeable ideas. There are many more: Professor James Miller of the University of Wisconsin–Stout, threatened with criminal charges for posting a quote from the popular science-fiction show Firefly outside of his office; Professor Hyung-il Jung of the University of Central Florida, suspended for asking his accounting class, “Am I on a killing spree or what?” after a series of particularly hard exam review questions; Professor Donald Hindley of Brandeis University, found guilty of racial harassment for explaining and criticizing the use of the slur “wetbacks” in his Latin American politics course.

  Of course, the censorship of students is equally widespread—and equally shameful. For a more complete picture of the problem on campus, I recommend visiting FIRE’s website, TheFIRE.org, and reading FIRE President Greg Lukianoff’s recent book, Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate.

  Instead of providing students and faculty with unfettered access to what Justice William Brennan once memorably deemed the “marketplace of ideas,” today’s colleges too often answer dissenting, provocative, challenging, or simply inconvenient student and faculty expression with censorship. By choosing to silence opposing viewpoints instead of responding with still more speech, administrators teach their students precisely the wrong lesson about life in our modern liberal democracy. Properly conceived, the American campus must be where no idea is beyond challenge, where truth wins out through reasoned debate, and where we explore in dialogue with one another the social, moral, legal, artistic, and political challenges of our time.

  WILLIAM CREELY is director of legal and public advocacy for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), and a 2006 graduate of New York University School of Law. Defending student and faculty rights for FIRE since 2006, William has spoken to students, faculty, attorneys, and administrators at events across the country and online, and has led FIRE’s continuing legal education programs in New York and Pennsylvania, and on LawLine.com. William has coauthored amicus curiae briefs submitted to a number of courts, including the Supreme Court of the United States and the United States Courts of Appeals for the Third, Ninth, and Eleventh Circuits. William has appeared on national cable television and radio to discuss student rights, and his writing has been published by the Chronicle of Higher Education, Jurist, Inside Higher Ed, the Huffington Post, Daily Journal, the Charleston Law Review, the Providence Journal, the Boston Phoenix, Free Inquiry, the Legal Satyricon, and others. William is a member of the New York State Bar and the First Amendment Lawyers Association.

  BOOKSELLERS AND THE FIGHT FOR FREE SPEECH

  Christopher M. Finan

  Last year comedian Joan Rivers handcuffed herself to a shopping cart at a Costco store in Burbank, California, and began shouting through a megaphone that she was the victim of censorship.

  She was unhappy that Costco had decided not to sell her new book, I Hate Everyone . . . Starting With Me. She charge
d that the book had been banned because of its racy content. “Costco should not be like Nazi Germany,” she said. “Next thing they’ll be burning the Bible.” As TV news crews watched, she was escorted from the store by security personnel and Burbank police.

  Costco is not a bookstore. But when booksellers heard about the Rivers’s protest, they shook their heads in weary recognition. Almost all of them have been criticized for “censoring” authors. Particularly during election years, they hear frequent complaints that they are not selling enough books by one side or the other.

  In the din of a bullhorn, it is easy to become confused about the meaning of “censorship.” Governments censor, applying the full force of the state to deprive citizens of ideas that their rulers consider dangerous. Booksellers select books that they think their customers will want to buy. If a customer can’t find a particular book, booksellers are almost always delighted to order it.

  Not only do booksellers not censor, they are deeply committed to defending the First Amendment rights of their customers. They have rejected efforts to force them to remove controversial works from their stores, lobbied against censorship legislation in Congress and the state legislatures, and become plaintiffs in lawsuits challenging laws that restrict free speech. They support free expression through groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and Media Coalition, and in 1990 they created their own organization, the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE), the bookseller’s voice in the fight against censorship.