Lessons in Censorship: How School and Courts Subvert Students’ First Amendment Rights

Lessons in Censorship: How School and Courts Subvert Students’ First Amendment Rights Catherine J. Ross. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 2015. 356pp. $39.95"Censorship," like "prohibition," is a word that takes on whole new meanings simply by being upper-cased. Deliberately denying access to information has a long, long history, extending back to at least the fifteenth-century BCE, when Hatshepsut's successors unsuccessfully tried to excise all evidence of her reign. And today, more than ever, we need not look very far to encounter multifarious efforts to debar access to ideas or information. Television blackouts of sports events that do not sell out, extortionate admission prices to such events, as well as to theatrical and musical performances, and the prohibitive costs of post-secondary education come readily to mind. Although not quite as overt as the classical examples of censorship, these practices are no less effective.No surprise, "religious" organizations have invariably been in the vanguard of censorship. Every religion has its priesthood, through which information is filtered to the lesser classes. The Israelites had a temple in which to stow information, which was accessible only to a chosen few. In their turn, Christians produced their scriptures only in Latin and Greek until the fifteenth century, if not into the twenty-first. To keep communicants on the straight and narrow, the Roman Catholic church published twenty editions of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum between 1559 and 1966 and established the National Legion of Decency in 1933 to assist in helping its membership know which movies to abjure. Now extinct, the two enterprises stand as precursors of today's movements detailed in this work.Catherine Ross is a law professor at George Washington University and in Lessons in Censorship she offers a tour d'horizon of the relevant landscape over the past forty years or so. In her coverage, approach, and expression she is unapologetically legalistic. Her focus is unwaveringly on the American experience and largely as it relates to high schools and universities. After a few pages dedicated to the first half of the twentieth century, Censorship plunges into the hectic 1960s, with only glancing references to earlier events later on.Ross's principal argument is that today's schools and legislative systems- including the judiciary-constantly defy the Constitution by limiting students' right to free speech. She addresses numerous examples of this, many approaching the absurd, with which readers will be familiar through the generally negative press coverage they attract. Perhaps one reason to celebrate free speech while at the same time palling it, would be for teachers to insist that students exhibiting words or actions for or against points of view be expected to develop an argument supporting their case within a short period of time and submit it to classmates and others, thereby engendering debate and enhancing accountability.Censorship is more challenging than it really needs to be. For example, readers are assumed or expected to be aware of the historical background of the issues raised. …