Censorship Class: Final Thoughts
As I wrote four months ago, I’ve been playing around with censorship class ideas since I started this research seven years ago. Some of this I did in small ways, such as expanding the obscenity/scandalous material section of my free speech course. I also usually do a day on the suppression of gay materials in my queer history and politics classes. But that only scratched the itch a little. I kept encountering so many fun stories in my work, and about a widening array of media types, that I thought more and more about what would end up being the censorship course. Having now taught it fully, time to reflect on the experience. Luckily, the experience was great.
I was most nervous about the assessment strategy I went with. For non-academics this means the assignments. We are always told that it is good to have low level weekly assignments to keep everyone honest. But I decided not to do that. Partly this was in the design because this was a course split between honors students and political science students who were using the course for their senior thesis. As such, I went with an assessment based primarily on a 20+ page research paper into some censorship “thing.” As this didn’t necessarily tie directly into any of the readings specifically, the wisdom is that small extra assignments are necessary to keep them reading and engaged. I rolled the dice that a combination of honors and political science students at least moderately interested in the topic wouldn’t need this. So instead I went with a hefty chunk for participation and then everything else was steps to the final paper. I have to say this worked far better than any past attempt at something similar. The students were overwhelmingly prepared and thoughtful and the final papers I received were almost all excellent. What I particularly enjoyed were non-political science students who used the research paper to explore something perhaps a bit outside the box of what I think of as censorship research but related to their broader interests. The assignment structure worked great and even the breaks that I built in for them to work seemed to have the intended effect of getting them researching and writing earlier than the last few weeks.
The content I decided to cover worked well. There were some weeks where I tried to do too much and a few that I may have planned too little, but this rarely affected the substance of the class as we just worked the material in discussion until we finished. And my favorite thing happened more than once: students made connections between weeks that took us in totally unexpected directions. In terms of content, nothing I covered felt at all like a failure (and let me tell you, you know when something planned just flops for everyone). But I do want to think about expansions. I wouldn’t mind trying to work in a third film week but I’m not sure I have the content. I’m playing around with the idea of the Hayes Code as I had it before, then the obscene 1960s where we could take a much deeper dive into film around sexploitation, other exploitation genres, violence and then a new week where we look at the 1980s and ‘90s controversies say on Natural Born Killers or The Last Temptation of Christ and the culture war attacks on supposedly liberal Hollywood. I can’t decide if this is necessary or that I’ve just been thinking about modern film more heavily. I also don’t spend time on what we might think of as art controversies, say the NEA funding battles of the 1990s or the Mapplethorpe trial in Cincinnati in 1990. Again I’ve been thinking a lot about 1990s culture wars … maybe I just need a week on that.
The biggest subject I knowingly skipped was the modern Trump era censorship. Basically summed up by bans on diversity, equity, and inclusion, science, humanities, and arts funding bans, and the generally idiocy of the Trump administration anytime something they perceive as “woke” occurs - up to and including the font that press releases are typed in. I had planned to end the semester with this but ran out of weeks. I still like the idea of working it in because it is a massive censorship regime that not only affects things it directly targets, such as schools, but also indirectly as media companies ratchet down on their “diverse” programming that was all the rage a few years ago but now risks retaliation from an unhinged president. While I liked the idea of including it, a lot of weeks we got there anyway with students themselves noting the similarity of some subject of discussion to modern censorship demands. So I’m on the fence on whether it truly needs a separate week or not.
All in all, the class was a fun one to teach and, if my students can be believed, pretty fun to take. I’m trying to work out a couple of potential plans for offering it regularly, say every two years. Partly this is wrapped up in idiotic state education politics that hates everything that isn’t about “job training” and, thus, we don’t even know if our honors program will exist in two years. Regardless, the goal is to work out some interdisciplinary space where I can reach from a few different programs where students are interested in analyzing censorship conflicts.
For ease of access, here are all the posts on the censorship class:
