Related Issue
April–May 2025
Politics & Law
Don’t Read This
How Brown professors and alums are fighting a wave of book bans.
By Will Bunch '81 / April–May 2025
April 10th, 2025
Book banning isn’t new in the U.S.—for instance, Judy Blume was widely banned in the 1970s—but there’s been a recent spike. In reaction to 2020’s mass marches for social justice, “anti-woke” activists led some 10,000 book bans over a two-year period from mid-2021 to mid-2023, according to the literary advocacy group PEN America. Last year, they say, public-school book bans increased by 200 percent. Professors, alumni, and others from Brown—celebrated for its Open Curriculum, encouraging wide-open discourse—are on the front lines of both raising awareness about book banning and fighting back.
In the classroom
Professor Esther Whitfield specializes in modern Cuban literature with a focus on the role of censorship. That’s how she came to teach a Brown course titled, simply: Banned Books. She started teaching it in 2022—the year fights over books about race, LGBTQ+ issues, and other topics really exploded—and she has seen student interest in the subject rise steadily since.
The class covers the history of free speech, both in the United States and abroad, outlining the various rationales—once protecting the virtue of women, today more often the innocence of children—used to justify censorship. She assigns students to argue both against and in favor of restrictions.
A class that begins with the warnings of George Orwell about a dystopian 1984 now leads up to a final session about the real-life book-ban battles raging today, including a visit from librarians in nearby Westerly, R.I., to talk about the pressures they face. “I’m trying to bring in a local face of what happens, and how different parts of the United States experience book banning,” Whitfield says.
On the front line
David Levithan ’94 published Boy Meets Boy, a young-adult novel about two gay teens that turned the rom-com formula on its head, in 2003. He vividly remembers the libraries that wouldn’t stock it, and even a protest at one of his events.
Still, Levithan—an editor at Scholastic who writes frequently for young adults about gay male themes—says objections used to be more personal and sincere. “lt was having a conversation with a parent who genuinely believed that their child would go to hell if they read my book,” he recalls.
Since 2022, however, Levithan has seen opposition not only grow in intensity but feel a lot more organized and political, led by conservative groups like Moms for Liberty. Levithan says these activists often haven’t read the books they are trying to ban.
ILLUSTRATION: Mar Hernández
In helping to organize the group Authors Against Book Bans, Levithan pondered the geographical reach of Moms for Liberty and created a similar structure of local chapters, with some presence in all 50 states.
Levithan sees the fight as a reaffirmation of the values he nourished as an undergraduate at Brown, that “we fight for these books because we’re fighting for the larger point of intellectual freedom.”
Behind the desk
After a high-profile career running an imprint for Scholastic, Arthur Levine ’84 left in 2019 to found Levine Querido, a children’s book publisher that focuses on authors from marginalized groups. He understood that the mission would be challenging, but even a veteran like Levine could not have anticipated the book-banning buzzsaw unleashed in the 2020s.
Levine says the typical consumer doesn’t see the insidious ways that a censorious climate affects what gets published or widely circulated, as publishers kill controversial book ideas before they ever get printed, or as librarians decline to stock new titles that might get them in trouble. “The way this impacts readers is that they are not getting certain books,” Levine explains. He and his firm are doing what they can to fight book bans, including by working with the Independent Book Publishers Association on a program called We Are Stronger Than Censorship, which buys and distributes extra copies of books that have been banned.
Levine credits Brown professors like Elizabeth Weed, a cofounder of the Pembroke Center for Research and Teaching on Women, with showing a kid from a predominantly Jewish neighborhood in Queens how to appreciate the power of voices and experiences other than his own. “I have this idea,” he says, “that beauty and truth come from all different places.”
IN THE CONSTITUTION
For Corey Brettschneider, a leading U.S. constitutional scholar, coming to teach on College Hill meant following in the footsteps of a man he considers a beacon: 20th-
century free-speech pioneer Alexander Meiklejohn, class of 1893 and namesake of the Meiklejohn peer advising program.
Brettschneider, author of books such as the recent The Presidents and the People, which traces threats to constitutional rights from the nation’s leaders going back to the era of John Adams, says that the push by modern conservatives to yank books from library shelves proves Meiklejohn’s central thesis that free speech is essential to a functioning democracy.
Assaults on reading, or public debate, are ultimately “a shutdown of democratic governance by the force of regulation,” Brettschneider says. “When the government starts to criminalize speech, it’s an attempt to shut down dissent.”
Yet Brettschneider notes his research shows that every wave of government repression has been pushed back and mostly undone by opposition, often from grassroots movements, like those fighting right-wing school boards today.
AT middle school
For Meg Wolitzer ’81, the ability to write with empathy about people with different life experiences resulted in acclaimed novels such as The Wife. Her success didn’t prepare her for the reaction to her 2019 young adult novel, To Night Owl from Dogfish. The story, coauthored with Holly Goldberg Sloan, is told through letters between two 12-year-old girls whose gay dads are dating each other.
The novel got excellent reviews and positive recommendations from officials in a half-dozen states from Georgia to Washington. So, it was something of a shock when four years later, she learned that it was getting pulled off school library shelves in Iowa, after the enactment of a state law that banned books dealing with sexual orientation from K-12 schools. The negative listing of To Night Owl from Dogfish spread like a virus to other states.
It didn’t matter, as Wolitzer noted, that there’s no depiction of homosexual acts in the book. It was a first for Wolitzer in more than 40 years as a novelist, and an assault on those core values she learned at Brown. “If you’re denying kids access to finding out about other people’s lives and their families, it’s a great, great shame and a tragedy,” Wolitzer says.
