When Your University Censors a Conference on Censorship

Sometimes the absurdity of modern American life is almost too much. I’m a censorship nerd. Quite literally not a day goes by where I don’t think about the topic. I’ve spent months of cumulative time in archives collecting documents on the history of the practice. I’ve snuck away from my partner during vacations to steal some time in local archives. I write about it. Hell, this entire blog is dedicated to the topic of censorship in whatever vein of it I’m currently obsessed with. So I was excited when my university decided to dedicate its 27th Annual Unity Conference to the issue of censorship. I happily volunteered to serve in two roles where I would share my expertise. Then irony struck. Or maybe it was just the inevitable outcome of the continued destruction of higher education. You see, administrators decided that no one could present information at this conference that suggested that censorship was the result of one side or the other or that partisan strategy is important to censorship. I, a political scientist, was told not to talk about politics. Or, I guess, I could talk about politics so long as I pretended that both sides were equally involved in censorship (or censorship just emerged from the ether). In other words I was ordered to lie to my colleagues, students, and the general public. Luckily I could easily refuse to do this by simply backing out of the conference, even though this meant that the information presented would be poorer. But what do I do when this movement inevitably comes for the content of my courses, such as my censorship class I discuss weekly on this blog?

Here is the administrative email. And here is my open letter sent to administration.

Update 10/2/25: The organizers of the Unity Conference made the decision yesterday morning to cancel the event in full. This was the only reasonable response to the demand that speakers be censored.