The twenty-second Munk Debate pits acclaimed journalist, professor, and ordained minister Michael Eric Dyson and New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg against renowned actor and writer Stephen Fry and University of Toronto professor and author Jordan Peterson to debate the implications of political correctness and freedom of speech. Is political correctness an enemy of free speech, open debate, and the free exchange of ideas? Or, by confronting head-on the dominant power relationships and social norms that exclude marginalized groups are we creating a more equitable and just society? For some the argument is clear. Political correctness is stifling the free and open debate that fuels our democracy. It is also needlessly dividing one group from another and promoting social conflict. Others insist that creating public spaces and norms that give voice to previously marginalized groups broadens the scope of free speech. The drive towards inclusion over exclusion is essential to creating healthy, diverse societies in an era of rapid social change.

Library staff and faculty defend intellectual freedom and describe standing against book challenges. Book bans and challenges frequently make the news, but when the reporting ends, how do we put them in context? The Fight against Book Bans captures the views of dozens of librarians and library science professors regarding the recent flood of book challenges across the United States, gathered in a comprehensive analysis of their impact and significance. It also serves as a guide to responding to challenges. Chapter authors provide first-hand accounts of facing book challenges and describe how they have prepared for challenges, overcome opposition to certain books, and shown the value of specific library materials. Library science faculty with a range of specialties provide relevant background information to bolster these on-the-ground views. Together, the chapters both articulate the importance of intellectual freedom and demonstrate how to convey that significance to others in the community with passion and wisdom. This volume provides a timely and thorough overview of the complex issues surrounding the ongoing spate of book challenges faced by public and school libraries. Reinforces the significance of intellectual freedom to public and school libraries Describes how different librarians have responded to challenges and explained the importance of intellectual freedom to their communities Acts as a step-by-step guide to responding to challenges

The Literary Agenda is a series of short polemical monographs about the importance of literature and of reading in the wider world and about the state of literary education inside schools and universities. The category of 'the literary' has always been contentious. What is clear, however, is how increasingly it is dismissed or is unrecognised as a way of thinking or an arena for thought. It is sceptically challenged from within, for example, by the sometimes rival claims of cultural history, contextualized explanation, or media studies. It is shaken from without by even greater pressures: by economic exigency and the severe social attitudes that can follow from it; by technological change that may leave the traditional forms of serious human communication looking merely antiquated. For just these reasons this is the right time for renewal, to start reinvigorated work into the meaning and value of literary reading. For the Internet and digitial generation, the most basic human right is the freedom to read. The Web has indeed brought about a rapid and far-reaching revolution in reading, making a limitless global pool of literature and information available to anyone with a computer. At the same time, however, the threats of censorship, surveillance, and mass manipulation through the media have grown apace. Some of the most important political battles of the twenty-first century have been fought-and will be fought-over the right to read. Will it be adequately protected by constitutional guarantees and freedom of information laws? Or will it be restricted by very wealthy individuals and very powerful institutions? And given increasingly sophisticated methods of publicity and propaganda, how much of what we read can we believe? This book surveys the history of independent sceptical reading, from antiquity to the present. It tells the stories of heroic efforts at self-education by disadvantaged people in all parts of the world. It analyzes successful reading promotion campaigns throughout history (concluding with Oprah Winfrey) and explains why they succeeded. It also explores some disturbing current trends, such as the reported decay of attentive reading, the disappearance of investigative journalism, 'fake news', the growth of censorship, and the pervasive influence of advertisers and publicists on the media-even on scientific publishing. For anyone who uses libraries and Internet to find out what the hell is going on, this book is a guide, an inspiration, and a warning.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1969.

How civil liberties triumphed over national insecurity Between the two major red scares of the twentieth century, a police raid on a Communist Party bookstore in Oklahoma City marked an important lesson in the history of American freedom. In a raid on the Progressive Bookstore in 1940, local officials seized thousands of books and pamphlets and arrested twenty customers and proprietors. All were detained incommunicado and many were held for months on unreasonably high bail. Four were tried for violating Oklahoma's "criminal syndicalism" law, and their convictions and ten-year sentences caused a nationwide furor. After protests from labor unions, churches, publishers, academics, librarians, the American Civil Liberties Union, members of the literary world, and prominent individuals ranging from Woody Guthrie to Eleanor Roosevelt, the convictions were overturned on appeal. Shirley A. Wiegand and Wayne A. Wiegand share the compelling story of this important case for the first time. They reveal how state power-with support from local media and businesses-was used to trample individuals' civil rights during an era in which citizens were gripped by fear of foreign subversion. Richly detailed and colorfully told, Books on Trial is a sobering story of innocent people swept up in the hysteria of their times. It marks a fascinating and unnerving chapter in the history of Oklahoma and of the First Amendment. In today's climate of shadowy foreign threats-also full of unease about the way government curtails freedom in the name of protecting its citizens-the past speaks to the present.

How did writers convey ideas under the politically repressive conditions of state socialism? Did the perennial strategies to outwit the censors foster creativity or did unintentional self-censorship lead to the detriment of thought? Drawing on oral history and primary source material from the Editorial Board of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences and state science policy documents, Libora Oates-Indruchova explores to what extent scholarly publishing in state-socialist Czechoslovakia and Hungary was affected by censorship and how writers responded to intellectual un-freedom. Divided into four main parts looking at the institutional context of censorship, the full trajectory of a manuscript from idea to publication, the author and their relationship to the text and language, this book provides a fascinating insight into the ambivalent beneficial and detrimental effects of censorship on scholarly work from the Prague Spring of 1968 to the Velvet Revolution of 1989. Censorship in Czech and Hungarian Academic Publishing, 1969-89 also brings the historical censorship of state-socialism into the present, reflecting on the cultural significance of scholarly publishing in the light of current debates on the neoliberal academia and the future of the humanities.