Reading between the Lines of the Censorship of "Between the Lines"

Curmie isn’t sure whether the classic rock lyrics du jour should come from Stevie Nicks or Whitesnake, but it’s clear that the situation is hauntingly familiar and yes, here I go again.

The topic is yet another idiot public school administrator shutting down a high school theatre production because he appears to have neither the brains nor the spine of the average earthworm.  This one involves the suppression of the musical Between the Lines at Mississinewa High School in Gas City, Indiana, a fortnight before the scheduled opening.

Curmie got his first teaching gig at a small church-related college in the Bible Belt.  His predecessor had been fired (or pressured to resign) in part, at least, for staging a play that someone considered objectionable.  Curmie is reliably informed that the people presumed to have been so horribly offended by the show enjoyed it immensely while actually in the theatre, then put on their public faces and were utterly horrified that actresses were briefly seen in undergarments.  Censors are often hypocrites.

All of Curmie’s choices for productions at that school were reviewed by a committee prior to contracting for production rights.  Those meetings were brief, and Curmie got the distinct impression that they were intended to protect him rather than to limit him: a couple of tenured faculty signed off on Curmie’s choices (they always approved whatever Curmie proposed), and they appeared ready to take the heat should anything arise.  (It’s also true that Curmie’s predecessor allegedly did some things that might have legitimately merited dismissal, and this kerfuffle may have been a way for the college to save face.)

Why mention this here?  Because, if you’re even tempted to censor theatre productions, establishing such a committee or some other form of review before a season is finalized was what should have happened at Mississinewa High, and what Superintendent Jeremy Fewell has proclaimed will happen in the future.  (Insert reference to shutting barn doors here.)  Curmie has made this point repeatedly in the past: no high school theatre teacher is authorized to spend the hundreds or (more likely) thousands of dollars to pay for royalties and script rentals for a musical.  Those checks are authorized by an administrator—a principal or superintendent.  One might reasonably suggest that competent people would know what they’re buying.  These folks, Fewell and Principal Rachel Roesch, don’t pass that test, and those who suffer for their sloth are the high school students involved in the production.  Nothing to see here; move along.

The foregoing, of course, is based on the presumption that there is something in the script, even as bowdlerized, that merits censorship.  This is, of course, a risky proposition at best.  The point here is that even if there was something problematic about the script, the time to make that point is before you’ve spent thousands of dollars on scripts, royalties, costumes, sets, publicity, etc. (it’s possible the leasing agency might refund the royalties, but not the script and score rentals), and before staff and students have spent thousands of person-hours in rehearsals and the tech shops.  If you’re going to be a censorial asshat, at least be timely about it.

Curmie doesn’t know the show, so it’s possible that Fewell might have had a point had he raised concerns months ago.  Curmie doubts it, but it’s possible.  Still, what seems to be emerging in commentary from the students’ parents is that references to sexuality and alcohol use are being used as cover for the real problem: one of the characters is (GASP!) non-binary.  Curmie can’t improve on the commentary of Jodi Picoult, who wrote the book on which the musical is based:

Received this devastating news yesterday while I was literally in the West End at the premiere of another musical I wrote - The Book Thief - which is all about censorship and fascism.  The irony was not lost on me. This Indiana school already was granted permission through licensing to make changes to the script, but a single parent still complained about the existence of a non-binary character (whose gender orientation is not even explicitly mentioned) and the superintendent cancelled the show after kids had put in hundreds of hours of rehearsals. Censorship in America has spilled from books into theater. When one person decides for others what is appropriate, we have lost freedom of expression. Worst - this show is NOT explicit. It’s been performed by hundreds of school groups. The message it offers: Live the story you want if it’s not the story you’re in. Perhaps this objecting parent can explain to me what, exactly, is so wrong about that?

One trusts that Ms. Picoult is not really waiting for an answer to that question, as the parent in question will almost assuredly remain cravenly anonymous.  That’s how the system works, after all.  One loud-mouthed parent (or in some cases not even a parent) and a spineless administrator is all it takes.  Curmie has written about this phenomenon several times.  Here’s most of one paragraph from one of those instances. 

As a class, these people [school administrators] are far more fond of rules than of thinking, and their one unifying characteristic is risk aversion on steroids: a single dissenting voice (from anyone other than a student or teacher, of course) sends them scurrying for cover like cockroaches when the lights come on. They’re also, of course, the very people who at least de facto approved that show when scripts and royalties were ordered, and in many cases insisted on being consulted on the choice of show… then, they are shocked!, to an extent that hitherto only Claude Rains in “Casablanca” had ever been shocked, that a character is wearing a short skirt or drinking a fake martini or says he has two dads.  

...or doesn’t conform to someone’s idea of what gender identity ought to look like.  It’s fine to have Nazis in The Sound of Music or gang members in West Side Story.  It’s even acceptable to have an actress play the title role in Peter Pan or for Luther Billis to cross-dress in South Pacific.  That’s because there’s no attempt to suggest that what is being presented on stage is in any way reflective of reality: Peter is a magical character; Billis isn’t trying to convince anyone he’s really female.  But suggest that a young character, especially (OMG!) one who is treated sympathetically, might be… you know… <whispers> non-binary, and the pearls will never have been clutched quite so hard.

Adults who object to a particular play have an easy recourse: not buying a ticket.  Parents can pull their own children from the show.  It’s not fair to the kids, who have put in dozens if not hundreds of hours of work, but parents are entitled to act like parents.  They can even try to convince their friends not to attend.  Preventing other people from seeing the show, or other kids from participating in it, is a different matter, and the problems had damned well better be objectively egregious.  Curmie’s betting that isn’t the case here.

There is a special kind of narcissism that accompanies these censorial outbursts.  Curmie has mentioned several times that sometimes he just isn’t the target audience: not for Dog Sees God, not for Taylor Swift, for example.  And you know what?  That’s just fine.  Not a lot of people are big fans of Václav Havel or Warren Zevon, but Curmie is.  You do you, Gentle Reader, and let me do me.  Different strokes for different folks, and all that.  But to the censorial mindset, one’s personal tastes, interests, and value systems ought to be imposed on everyone, and those who disagree are attempting to infect America’s youth with their poisonous ideologies.  Curmie calls bullshit on that, and suspects that you wouldn’t be here, Gentle Reader, if you didn’t agree with him.

The censorship here isn’t about protecting kids from growing up too fast.  Curmie isn’t telling you anything you don’t already know in suggesting that high schoolers have already been exposed to sex and alcohol and both the allures and the dangers of both.  Curmie knew some non-binary schoolmates when he was in high school fifty-something years ago, but he didn’t “knowingly know” them; that is, today’s kids can be more open about their identities now.  Curmie thinks that’s a good thing.  What he knows (as opposed to merely thinks) is that non-binary people exist.  Denying that basic fact is not merely bigoted; it is an attack on reality itself.

We can hope that the students involved in the production of Between the Lines will be able to mount their show independently of the school, as those kids at Santa Rosa High did with Dog Sees God.  But sometimes those arrangements can’t be made, and Curmie isn’t blaming the students or their directors a bit if the show just doesn’t happen now.  Idiots like Jeremy Fewell have a lot to answer for, either way.

Three Stories from the OnStageBlog, Part 1: High School

The recent writer’s block and attendant dearth of posts is when Curmie turns to familiar topics… like theatre, for example.  There will be, I hope, a more complex piece forthcoming, triggered by a thought-provoking editorial a while back by Joel Grey in the New York Times.  For right now, though, it’s three stories from this fall that appeared on the OnStageBlog site.  Curmie is going to take two posts to cover the three stories—two here, one to come—lest the posts get too long even by Curmie’s standards.

A scene from the Dog Sees God dress rehearsal

The first two, from the world of high school theatre, are, as Stevie Nicks might have said, hauntingly familiar.  We start with Santa Rosa High School in California, where school officials shut down a production of Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead after opening night, capitulating to complaints that play is “obscene” and “offensive.”  The complainants were, of course, unidentified.  They always are.

Curmie read Bert V. Royal’s dark comedy, which imagines the Peanuts kids as dysfunctional teenagers, not long after its first production in 2004, and saw a production of it a couple of years ago.  He admits that he found it more vulgar than iconoclastic, more pretentious than profound, and frankly rather boring.  But it got great reviews from a lot of New York publications.  More importantly, small-town sexagenarian curmudgeons aren’t exactly the play’s target audience.  You know who it resonates with?  Adolescents and post-adolescents.  Go figure.

So… is Dog Sees God “obscene” or “offensive”?  Maybe.  After all, one of those reviews calls it “raunchy,” and the Dramatists Play Service blurb (linked above) suggests that “Drug use, suicide, eating disorders, teen violence, rebellion and sexual identity collide and careen…”  All that stuff does in fact appear on stage, but Curmie doesn’t remember ever finding anything offensive, per se.  Of course, he’s not easily offended, and he’s not the parent of a teenager, so he may be missing something. 

It’s also worth mentioning that the parents of all the students involved in the production had been informed of the play’s content and had given their consent for their children to participate.  Ah, but you see, the school hadn’t warned the parents of other kids.  Oh, bloody hell.  And of course, the decision to shut the play down had been “not made out of censorship but out of caution and concern.”  Translation, if you’re not familiar with educational bureaucracy-speak, Gentle Reader: “we absolutely censored the play because we’re afraid of idiots who are unwilling to stand for their beliefs openly.”

The point here is that some caution might be appropriate, but the time to impose any restrictions is much earlier than opening night: before spending hundreds if not thousands of dollars on scripts, royalties, sets, costumes, advertising, and all the other expenses involved in producing a play, and before the thousands of person-hours spent by faculty and students in rehearsal and in technical support.  It’s also worth noting, as Chris Peterson does in the article linked above, that another school in the same district did the play two years ago, placing second in a high school theatre festival. 

Given the fact that the cancelation was apparently ordered by district officials rather than by, say the school’s principal, that’s a rather significant indictment of the decision-makers.  If the previous production was “obscene,” then this one should not have been allowed to proceed (note: the theatre teacher didn’t write a personal check for the royalties).  If the earlier show was deemed acceptable, then the board is clearly signaling that they will be swayed by a heckler’s veto.  Not a good look.

Theatre people being a somewhat canny lot not given to submitting to authoritarian stupidity, the company proceeded to find another venue, the privately owned Mercury Theater in nearby Petaluma, whose owners volunteered their space after hearing of the cancellation.  (Hats off to them!)  They did two shows there, at least one of which was sold out to the point of turning people away.

The good news, such as it is, is that the board backed down, at least somewhat, following community uproar and nationwide humiliation upon reconsideration.  Their compromise solution, that the play could continue but only to audiences over 16, would have made sense as an initial decision, provided, of course, that those under 16 could see the show with parental approval (or perhaps if accompanied by a parent).  It’s unclear whether Santa Rosa High includes 9th graders or not.  If it does, then there’s a reasonable chance that 15-year-old freshmen could work the show but wouldn’t be allowed to buy a ticket. 

This, alas, wouldn’t surprise Curmie.  School boards do all too often represent the perfect storm at the nexus of authoritarian impulses and intellectual cowardice.  Quoting Paul McCartney this time: “La la how the life goes on.”

Curmie was tempted to cite yet another popular song from decades ago to introduce the second OnStage article in question.  But with all due respect to Herman’s Hermits, “Second verse, same as the first” isn’t quite accurate, although it’s pretty close.  There are indeed similarities between the Santa Rosa situation and one at Cesar Chavez High School in Phoenix.  

In the latter case, officials from the Phoenix Union High School District delayed the opening of the school’s production of The Laramie Project only hours before the scheduled opening, citing “the need for additional time to better prepare our audience and the public for the seriousness of the play’s content. So there’s something akin to censorship by a school board who should have done their jobs earlier in the process.  A little communication between the theatre director and district officials would have gone a long way.

Here’s where Curmie’s profession may get in the way a little: no one in my line of work doesn’t know that The Laramie Project is about the torture and murder of Matthew Shepherd in Laramie in 1998 (well, Curmie had to look up the date, but you get the idea, Gentle Reader).  The play, constructed by Moisés Kaufman and the Tectonic Theater Project, consists of statements by Laramie residents, company members’ journal entries, and news reports, all transcribed verbatim and presented by a small group of actors, each of whom play several roles. 

But, as Curmie is reminded every time he and Beloved Spouse watch the Macy’s or Rose Parades, not everyone is expected to know everything: “Who the hell is that country singer who’s apparently so popular?”  So it’s not exactly dereliction of duty for school officials not to recognize the title of the play.  True, given the fact that reading as much as a one-sentence description of The Laramie Project would tell administrators pretty much all they’d need to know, that level of supervision doesn’t seem overburdening.  And if students’ claim that the board had initially signed off on the project is accurate (as opposed to the board not explicitly forbidding the show), then there’s a real problem.

Still, the theatre faculty certainly should have known that the material might require a warning to prospective audience members; that they didn’t initially provide one or (apparently) consult with the board doesn’t show them in the best of light.

Students, of course, started throwing around words like “censorship.”  But the board’s actual press release doesn’t seem outrageous.  Here’s part of that statement:

The themes and language in the play need additional acknowledgments and disclaimers for families and students in attendance. Many of our students have younger siblings, and we must properly inform families about the content they are going to see so they can make informed decisions about whether younger family members attend. In addition, we want to ensure proper mental health support is in place for those in the audience who may have strong feelings about the play’s contents.

That’s fine if they meant it, and if they were really talking about a delay rather than a cancellation… and it turns out they were.  The play went on a week after the scheduled opening.  According to one report, it was unaltered, although the director had apparently agreed to excise “bad language”  (over the strenuous, and absolutely legitimate objections of many of the students involved: “If you change all the language that was said, is it really even a hate crime anymore? You're censoring it. These real things were said about this person that died because of a hate crime.”)  It is unclear (to Curmie, at least) whether the bowdlerization ultimately occurred, or, if so, if it was approved by the rights-holders.

It seems that the production was originally scheduled for only a single performance.  That seems odd, but plausible.  If that’s the case, then the single show a week after schedule with appropriate content warnings almost, almost, solves the problem.  The good news, of course, is that there aren’t a lot of high school productions that get nationwide publicity.  We take our triumphs where they come.

Roald Dahl Can't Catch a Break

Roald Dahl (1916-90)
Suddenly controversial to left and right alike

When last we left Roald Dahl, he was being censored for such crimes against humanity as using “female” as a noun, referencing only male Oompa Loompas, and failing to mention that there are multiple good reasons to wear a wig. These objections, of course, came mostly if not exclusively from the Loony Left. Now the Ridiculous Right wants equal time. 

A couple of hours south of Curmie is Houston’s Main Street Theater, part of whose mission is to create “memorable theatrical experiences for audiences of all ages.” That means, among other things, a three-show season in their Theater for Youth series, which has been active for over four decades. One of this year’s offerings—the one currently playing—is a stage adaptation of James and the Giant Peach, probably Dahl’s best-known book. 

As might be expected, a lot of local schools bring their students to the theatre, and the company provides all manner of services: group rates, study guides in both English and Spanish, etc. Students in Spring Branch, about three hours to the west, were to have attended a recent performance. But you’ve already sussed where this story is going, haven’t you, Gentle Reader? 

Yes, the trip was cancelled, not because that’s a long time to expect little kids to sit in a bus, but because the show was alleged to be age-inappropriate. You see, the 19 roles in the play are performed by only seven actors, and sometimes that means that a male actor plays a female… insect. And that’s drag, and to allow kids to see that, to borrow a line from late, great George Carlin, will curve their spines, grow hair on their hands, and keep our side from winning the war. 

The situation is exacerbated by the fact that one of the actors is also, completely independently, a drag performer. Sigh. 

Anyway, someone under the soubriquet @htxkidsfirst posted this kind of drivel online, and the school district promptly capitulated to yet another bullshit heckler’s veto from the right. Curmie can’t find who actually made the decision—the superintendent? the school board? a collection of principals?—but if he’d done something this spectacularly stupid, he’d want to duck responsibility, too. 

Initially, of course, parents weren’t even told why the cancellation was going to happen. We can only guess that district officials feared the collapse of the telephone system under the weight of dozens of simultaneous phone calls all clustered around expressions like “It’s James and the Giant Peach. Are you fucking insane, or what?”. 

OK, there are two responses to this nonsense. The first, obviously, is that there is no legitimate complaint. As Main Street’s marketing director, Shannon Emerick, points out, this isn’t drag: “Drag is a different art form. There is a whole art form that is drag.” And here is where Curmie goes all professorial (forgive me). There is a difference between “drag” and “in drag.” The former is indeed a very specific performance style. Curmie, like many Spring Branch parents, apparently, would see no harm in having drag seen by little kids, but at least recognizes a weak but extant rationale for the objections. But that’s not what this is. 

The latter term, “in drag,” means simply the portrayal of a character by a performer of the opposite sex. This would include the original performances of literally every Greek tragedy, every play by Shakespeare (a show like As You Like it, in which a male actor played a female character who plays a male character who plays a female character is especially fun in this regard), and almost every Nō or Kabuki play. The list goes on, but you get the point, Gentle Reader. 

Every English pantomime, many of which feature not only a male actor as the “Dame,” but an attractive young woman as a boy—a character like Jack of beanstalk fame, for example—would also be on the list. And bringing the kids to the local panto is very much a Christmas-season tradition for thousands upon thousands of English families. Curmie has a friend and former student who is one of the best-known Dames in England; he is adamant that what he does is not drag. And he’s right.  (Of course.)

Virtually all performances of Peter Pan are also “in drag” shows: the most famous portrayals of the title character include Nina Boucicault, Maude Adams (not to be confused with two-time “Bond girl” Maud Adams), Mary Martin, and former gymnast Cathy Rigby. 

Plus, of course, dozens of films—the best known of which would have to be “Some Like It Hot,” “Mrs. Doubtfire,” and “Tootsie,” but there are many more—would also be on the list. Jack Benny, Jackie Gleason, Milton Berle, Benny Hill, Johnny Depp, Tom Hanks, John Travolta, and a host of others that Curmie can’t remember off the top of his head at the moment, all appeared “in drag.” The earliest performance by Laurence Olivier that Curmie knows about was when Lord Olivier was a teenager at school… and in drag. 

In the other direction, there’s Glenn Close, Barbra Streisand, Julie Andrews, Gwyneth Paltrow, Dame Judith Anderson, Fiona Shaw, Sarah Bernhardt, and, again, many more. 

The allegations of “grooming,” of course, are too inane to even bother to refute. If you want to complain about grooming of kids by men in floor-length gowns, come back when you’ve cleaned up the Catholic Church. 

So the objection is completely unfounded. But, just as Curmie suggested recently that Tommy Tuberville isn’t the problem, neither are the constipated parents who apparently are more interested in promoting a particularly noxious brand of puritanism than in allowing their kids to have a fun day at the theatre. No, responsibility for this foolishness falls squarely on the shoulders of the school administrators for whom stupidity and cowardice are in a death struggle to be their defining characteristic. 

If school officials want to let parents keep their own children from seeing James and the Giant Peach, Curmie is still going to think a little less of them, but it is at least a passable response. But that isn’t what happened here. Curmie refuses to believe that anything approaching a majority, or even a significant minority, of Spring Branch parents are insular, ignorant, and repressive enough to keep their sons and daughters from seeing the play. 

But what’s happening here is that everyone’s kids are prevented from doing so. Curmie considers it bad parenting to unilaterally and arbitrarily decide that one’s own progeny ought to be prevented from reading this book, watching that movie, or attending that play. But it’s understandable, and parents have a legal and indeed ethical right to do so, even if Curmie would do something different. 

Demanding that someone else’s kids be thus restricted, however, is arrogant, narcissistic, and unethical. (Curmie notes an exception for legal authorities.) That’s the point school officials who aren’t auditioning to be the Scarecrow or the Cowardly Lion in the community theatre production of The Wizard of Oz (which would also, no doubt, be boycotted by the yokels) ought to be making: keep your kids home if you want, but we’re going, and we’re going to have a great time. 

But that would require a modicum of common sense or courage, and those attributes are in increasingly short supply among today’s educational administrators. We have ample evidence that the next attack from the pathological do-gooders may come from the left or the right. We can be sure of two things, however: the perpetrators will have no doubts about the righteousness of their actions, and the rest of us must stand ready to defend free expression, access to works of art, and intellectual curiosity. 

Oh… One more thing. We can but hope that in whatever afterlife he inhabits, Roald Dahl is laughing at the idiots on both fringes.

It's Déjà Vu All Over Again. Again.

Strains of Pete Seeger’s song “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” waft through Curmie’s consciousness. Well, not the whole song, but the key line of the chorus: “When will they ever learn?” 

You will perhaps recall, Gentle Reader, the brouhaha at Hamline University a few months ago, when adjunct professor Erika López Prater was de facto fired for showing two images of the prophet Muhammad in her art history class, despite the fact that she had warned students both in the course syllabus and on the day of the class in question, giving them the option to opt out of that viewing. 

A few weeks later, Macalester College faced a similar challenge when an art exhibition by Iranian-American artist Taravat Talepasand was deemed offensive by a Muslim student. Macalester handled the situation a lot better than Hamline did, but they did take some pretty extreme short-term censorial actions. Curmie wrote about this story, too, under the headline “It’s Déjà Vu All Over Again.” 

Professor Behmooz

And now… another one, necessitating the title you see above. Like the proverbial bad penny, these incidents keep re-appearing. There are, to be sure, a few notable differences between what’s currently happening at San Francisco State University and what happened at Hamline. 

Dr. Maziar Behrooz teaches history (as opposed to art history). He’s an associate professor (presumably tenured), not an adjunct. He is Iranian-born, so his knowledge of Islamic culture is that of long-term direct contact. He did not provide an opt-out for students who objected to seeing the image. At present, there’s only an investigation as opposed to dismissal or any other sanctions. 

But the basic story is (cue Stevie Nicks: it’s a songfest today!) hauntingly familiar. Behrooz has been teaching the course in the history of the Islamic world from 500-1700, and using an image of Muhammad as part of that course, for years. That means that scores, probably hundreds, of students have taken the class without incident. Indeed, if there were so much as a complaint on an anonymous course evaluation form, it’s the responsibility of the department chair and/or dean to find out what happened and to pursue the matter with Professor Behrooz if that seemed appropriate. 

No such action appears to have ever been taken, but a complaint from a single (currently anonymous) student has led to an investigation by the university’s Office of Equity Programs & Compliance: definition by example of the heckler’s veto… not to mention that the investigation started in March, long after the alleged infraction in the fall semester. 

Behrooz says that he “was not prepared for somebody to be offended, in a secular university, talking about history rather than religion.” Perhaps he should have been, but remember that the incident at Hamline hadn’t yet made headlines. He also speaks from first-hand experience that the type of drawing he shows in class can be bought at markets in Tehran (where he grew up!) near holy shrines, and that many Shiite Muslims have such drawings in their homes. Clearly, the prohibition against images of the prophet are not universal in the Islamic world. Curmie thinks we can pretty much take it for granted that if it’s permissible in Tehran, it’s probably okay for a lot of Muslims. 

Predictably, FIRE (the Federation for Individual Rights and Expression) has gotten into the act, noting that “SFSU administrators haven’t learned anything from Hamline’s mistakes.” Well, duh.  Hit it, Pete: “when will they ever learn”? 

Side note: SFSU earned the dubious distinction of drawing the Ire of FIRE (great band name, yes?) twice in a single day. The other case was the shouting down of former NCAA swimmer Riley Gaines, who was invited to campus by the local chapter of Turning Point USA to speak about gender and sports, presumably concentrating on the Gaines’s opposition to allowing trans women to compete in women’s competitions. 

This is part of a particularly disturbing trend on university campuses, which ought to be a haven for the interplay of opposing ideas, but have often lapsed into sites for ideological shouting matches which actively suppress free expression. To be blunt: Curmie doesn’t give a rat’s ass if you’re “offended” by the ideas of someone whose views you find abhorrent, and he’s pretty damned certain that you weren’t “harmed.” (News flash: they’re not real thrilled with your positions, either.) No one is forcing you to agree. You’re even welcome to protest, provided you don’t disrupt the event per se. That’s not really a very difficult concept to understand. But the heckler’s veto, even if invoked by the majority in a room, has no place in a democratic society. 

Anyway, revenons à nos moutons. In a lengthy letter to SFSU President Lynn Mahoney, Sabrina Conza of FIRE writes that:

As a public institution bound by the First Amendment, SFSU’s actions and decisions—including the pursuit of disciplinary sanctions—must not violate faculty expressive freedoms, including academic freedom to determine whether and how to introduce or approach material that may be challenging, upsetting, or even deeply offensive to some students. As such, SFSU cannot take adverse action against faculty, including initiating an investigation, with the implication of potential punishment, for exercising the pedagogical autonomy to display instructionally relevant material in the classroom, regardless of whether that material offends any students.

Clearly, the 1st amendment/academic freedom argument is paramount here, but it’s important to note something else, too: that the mere fact of launching an investigation is itself a punishment. Professor Behrooz, like Dr. López Prater before him, faces unwarranted scrutiny by the academic community. Damage to his reputation has already been done. 

FIRE, by the way, received an almost immediate response from Robert King, the Director of Communications in the SFSU President’s office. First off, a Director of Communications who, in a business email, addresses a correspondent he presumably doesn’t know by her first name? Not cool, dude. 

But the claim that “once an investigation is initiated, the University has limited ability to dismiss it” is a particularly laughable exercise in circular reasoning. They shouldn’t have opened the investigation to begin with, of course—the case against Professor Bermooz is a nothingburger if ever there was one—but you can’t claim to be incapable of fixing a problem of your own creation because you yourselves created a stupid policy (note: not a law or anything like that, a university policy) that forbids you from dismissing a case that obviously has no merit. 

Perhaps, as King hints in his letter, the university is actually trying to amend their policy to prioritize the 1st amendment and academic freedom. Three responses:

1). Curmie will believe it when he sees it, and it’s already too little, too late.

2). Where the hell is the university counsel? It’s understandable, albeit problematic, that the president might not know that what she’s doing (or at least condoning) is a violation not merely of academic freedom, but of constitutional rights. But Curmie is willing to bet that the head legal beagle at SFSU is pulling down a salary several times what Curmie ever made as a professor; it’s not exactly unreasonable to expect this person to do their damned job and keep the university from making all the wrong kind of headlines.

3). It’s not like the Hamline case failed to get any traction in the national media, especially in places like the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Education, which every college administrator in the country ought to be reading assiduously. Hamline didn’t come out unscathed; San Francisco State won’t, either.

OK, one note of advice for Professor Behmooz: Don’t just “consider” the “compromise” of telling students you’re going to show an image that may offend a small handful of them; do it. This, of course, should have been the beginning and the end of the investigation: “hey, Professor, none of us wants to go through this again, so just give a little warning next time… if you do, we’ll absolutely have your back.” 

That said, however, the university looks a lot worse in this than the professor does. When will they ever learn?

Florida Out-Floridas Florida: On the Imminent Demise of Education in the Sunshine State

Four somewhat related stories appeared over the last few days. Curmie has already written about one of them, the saga of a marble statue’s dangly bits causing a Florida principal to be fired. Two other incidents—we’ll get to them in a moment—also in Florida (go figure), of capitulation to heckler vetoes further indicate that legislation like the “Parental Bill of Rights,” which passed the US House a few days ago, is aptly named. 

That’s the good news and the bad news. Curmie is going to assume that the good part is self-evident: that in general terms parents ought to be more aware than they have been of late about school curricula, safety concerns, etc. There are deeply problematic parts, too, of course. Demanding that teachers tell parents if students use different pronouns than they were born with, for example, is creepy at best. 

If those kids can’t be their true selves as they perceive themselves to be at home, then demanding that school officials nark them out has a legitimate chance of placing them in danger. The current law even in Florida (!) allows a school to withhold information if there is a legitimate fear for a child’s safety; the proposed national legislation does not. Having more of a 1950s mindset than Florida is not a good look. 

Curmie stipulates that the urge to use different pronouns than biology would dictate might be a “phase.” So be it; let it play out. But a truly loving home would never demand that children deny their nature. (The trans and gender fluid people Curmie knows have been, by and large, supported by their families, albeit sometimes after a period of confusion and dismay; that doesn’t mean that all such folks are.) 

Ultimately, though, however qualitatively damaging such incidents are, they’re likely to be rare. So it’s really the “parents’ rights” part that has the greatest chance to cause quantitative problems. As Curmie wrote a few days ago, “’Parental rights trump everything else’ is not merely problematic, but chilling. No, they don’t, or at least they damned well shouldn’t. Education is not, cannot be, about serving up whatever pabulum the most insular and doctrinaire parents want. It’s about students, and what is best for them must be the primary objective.” 

If we look at these bills in purely political terms, devoid of ethical or philosophical elements, the situation becomes clearer. Schoolchildren don’t vote and they don’t make campaign contributions. Parents do. And True Believers of every description are going to be more forthcoming with those political contributions than the average citizen will be. Thus, the wackadoodle base has outsized influence. 

The seemingly innocuous provisions of the Parental Bill of Rights actually provide a de facto open invitation for every homophobe, Christian nationalist, racist, or garden variety anti-intellectual within hailing distance to remove any topics of discussion, course materials, library books, or whatever else that might disrupt their myopic and theocratic view of the world. What purports to be an exercise in ideological balance and freedom of expression, therefore, is precisely the opposite. 

To be fair, this isn’t intrinsic to the bill, although we might reasonably suspect that some of its sponsors and supporters were aware of the dark ironies at play. Much of the blame can be placed squarely at the door of local school officials—boards of education, superintendents, principals—who tend to be (how to say this?) invertebratedly inclined. It’s easier to go along with utterly stupid interventions from even the most irresponsible sources than to say “no, this book stays, not only in the library, but in the curriculum.” Standing up to bullies can get you in trouble in places where being the loudest is all that matters. 

One of the cardinal principles of American government has always been, or at least was until recently, the twin concepts of majority rule and respect for the minority. The latter was often more aspirational than reality-based, but at least the concept was out there. But if you happen to be in a disenfranchised minority (if you’re gay or Muslim or—heaven forfend!—trans, for example), that respect is not always perceivable in certain communities even in tiny manifestations. 

Of course, BIPOC people are often at the center of these contretemps. Curmie isn’t going to deny that in some instances the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction (DEI regulations are often contrary to at least two of their three initials, for example), but the two specific cases Curmie mentioned in his introductory paragraph certainly do little to suggest that racism isn’t a major force in the “parental rights” movement. 

The first story is sort of a two-parter. The exact details are a little unclear, in part because there’s contradictory evidence, in part because not all journalists write well. We know, sort of, that some 73 books were returned to the distributor by the Duval County, Florida, school district in December. 

Quoting the online version of Jacksonville Today: “Among the rejected titles are a book about Martin Luther King Jr. intended for fourth graders; a biography of Rosa Parks for second grade classrooms; a first grade Berenstain Bears book about God; and multiple titles including LGBTQ+ characters and families.” Gee, I wonder what the agenda of those censors was. 

Homophobia and variations on the theme are still considered acceptable in some places, but rejecting books about perhaps the two most famous figures in the Civil Rights movement suggests a racial animus that ought to infuriate even the most conservative members of the citizenry. (Curmie grants that they could just be terribly written books, but if that’s your argument, you damned well better make it, and provide some evidence for the allegation.) 

Duval officials claim they didn’t really reject the Rosa Parks book because, you see, they never actually bought it to begin with. It was apparently shipped as a substitution for some other book in the order; anyone who placed an online order for grocery pickup during the pandemic understands this phenomenon. 

What appears pretty clear is that Duval did reject the book after it was delivered (intentionally purchased or not), and Curmie is tempted to wonder how it looks better for Duval that they’re now claiming they had the opportunity to order the book but declined, sight unseen. 

Books about black baseball players Hank Aaron and Roberto Clemente, the two greatest rightfielders of Curmie’s youth, were finally approved, but only after a long delay and a national outcry. Nope. Nothing to see here. Keep the line moving. Move along. 

But let’s return to Rosa Parks for a moment. The Grio reports that the publisher Studies Weekly actually tried pandering to Florida’s absurd governmental interference by producing multiple versions of their Rosa Parks story. One version omits race altogether, saying only that “She was told to move to a different seat.” Apparently this was too much even for Florida, but the mere fact that the publisher thought it was worth a try tells us more than a little. 

Let’s face it, Gentle Reader, we all know about Rosa Parks not because she was somehow accidentally in the wrong seat, but because people of her race weren’t allowed to sit where she was sitting. The publisher bears a good share of the blame here, but their cowardice wouldn’t have been necessary, even to them, if the state weren’t run by people whose paranoia is exceeded only by their authoritarianism. Hell, Curmie would settle for grown-ups. 

The last (please, let it be the last!) story in our trio looks a whole lot like the second, except in happened in a different city and about a different medium. This one comes, again, as the result of a single complaint, from a parent in St. Petersburg about the 1998 Disney film (well, technically an episode of “The Wonderful World of Disney”) ”Ruby Bridges,” which had been a staple in Pinellas County classrooms for years. 

Young Ruby, you may recall, Gentle Reader, was the 6-year-old girl who had the grim but significant responsibility of being the black child who integrated New Orleans schools in 1960 (six years after Brown v. Topeka, in other words). The film presents an accurate portrayal of historical events, centering, of course, on the steadfast courage Bridges showed, even as a child, in the face of racial slurs and threats of violence directed against her. 

Ah, but you see, an accurate depiction of those events might lead to the impression that white people hate black people. Or that’s the argument of a paranoid and/or racist idiot named Emily Conklin, who wouldn’t allow her child to watch the film and subsequently lodged a formal complaint. Needless to say, rather than telling Conklin to shut up and sit down, school officials capitulated, at least to the point of banning a program that was shown on network television over 20 years ago from all classrooms at North Shore Elementary until a committee can decide what to do about the situation. 

Now, of course, the school is saying they didn’t actually ban the film (despite considerable evidence that they did): it was a “miscommunication,” you see. If you take that excuse at face value, Gentle Reader, please accept my apologies, but you’re on the wrong page: this blog is for grown-ups. It’s far more likely that they got busted for being craven imbeciles, and now they’re backfilling as fast as they can. 

It’s worth noting at this juncture that Curmie has more than a little sympathy for parents who don’t want their child exposed to truly controversial materials. Curmie wouldn’t put images of Michelangelo’s David, a book about Rosa Parks, or a film about Ruby Bridges on that list, but whatever… None of this, however, grants a lone parent the right to prevent other people’s kids from having access to those media. 

Considerable damage has already been done, of course: damage to the schools’ reputations, to the possibility that good sense might someday prevail in Florida, to the education system in Florida and beyond. That this morass should be the direct result of political initiatives of the GOP—you know, the unintrusive small government, reduced bureaucracy, individual freedoms folks—is darkly ironic but hardly surprising. Duh: they’re hypocrites. 

Curmie isn’t saying the Democrats aren’t, of course. In the words of the image currently used on the cover photo on the Curmudgeon Central Facebook page, “A plague o’ both your houses.” (Note: you’ll have to click on the image to see the quote; Curmie hopes many of you will recognize John McEnery as Mercutio in the Roman Polanski film version of Romeo and Juliet, so you’d know what Curmie was up to without the quote.) 

There are, of course, a few professions that gather as much commentary from people who don’t know what the hell they’re talking about as teaching does—professional athletics comes to mind, acting is up there—but there are literally none which allow a tiny minority of often stupid and almost always ignorant people to have such an outsized influence on the way a profession operates. The subtitle of a recent article in Salon may be a little harsh, but it’s not altogether inaccurate: “Republicans want the dumbest parent at the school to control the curriculum.” 

But no one in the New York Jets hierarchy, for example—not the coach, not the general manager, not the owner—gives a damn that Joe from Poughkeepsie (or Curmie from Texas) thinks that spending potloads of money and talent to get a 39-year-old prima donna as their quarterback is a bad idea. But virtually every board of education or principal will do backflips at the behest of some moron who thinks Michelangelo was a pornographer. 

Curmie has often argued that the only people who know (or care) less about education than boards of trustees and boards of education are state legislators. It appears that US congresscritters felt overlooked in this analysis and wanted to assert their claim. But (with the exception noted above, which is inexcusable), at least some of them might have thought they were doing the right thing instead of paying obeisance to the prescribed talking points. Doubtful, but possible. 

But there’s a reason that all three of the incidents Curmie mentions here are from the same state. Ron DeSantis has been masterful at maintaining plausible deniability (Curmie has a half-written piece about this phenomenon that he may someday finish), but if he’s going to run for President using his intrusions into a space where he doesn’t belong, he needs to be held accountable. Indeed, he’s the scarier of the two front-runners for the GOP nomination. Donald Trump is just as wrong on the issues, just as authoritarian, and even more narcissistic, but at least he’s stupid.

Academic Freedom and Reasonable Doubt: The Johnny Eric Williams Case

Professor Johnny Eric Williams

This started out as a comment to a post by Curmie’s netpal Jack Marshall over at Ethics Alarms, entitled “Sought: An Ethical Reason Why This Professor Should Not Be Fired Immediately, And Never Hired For A Teaching Position Again, Anywhere.” Soon, however, my reply took on a life of its own, extending well past the length of a mere comment on someone else’s post, sort of demanding multiple links, and, well, putting my lengthy commentary on current events in higher education on someone else’s blog instead of my own.

The background is this: on the evening of Sunday, June 18, Trinity College (CT) associate professor of sociology Johnny Eric Williams took to social media to re-post an article from Medium by “Son of Baldwin” with the shall we say provocative title of “Let Them Fucking Die.” There’s a preface there now: “NOTE: This essay is in the context of bigotry and is speaking about bigots. If you aren’t a bigot, then it doesn’t apply to you. But, if you happen to feel hit, then holler, dog.” One suspects that was a later add-on, but in the absence of a screenshot of the post as it first appeared (maybe there’s one out there?), Curmie can’t say for sure.

What is clear is that Son of Baldwin is less than pleased with the state of race relations in the country right now. His prose is more fiery than most, but ultimately he presents a rather familiar argument:

In a battle between the moral and the immoral, the immoral will always win because they have no qualms about not abiding by the rules. Whereas those of us who imagine ourselves as moral gladly die at the immorals’ hands because we think better glories await us in some other, unseen realm. We, the moral, are terrible at memory. We never remember who created these rules and for what purpose. The immoral created morality so that we would accept their abuse and never even dream of retaliation. Like any drug white/cisgender/heterosexual people have ever given us, we get high on this notion that forgiving them after they slaughter our grandparents in churches, obliterate our siblings in the streets, and mangle our children in playgrounds makes us better people than they.

His screed concludes:

Saving the life of those that would kill you is the opposite of virtuous.

Let. Them. Fucking. Die.

And smile a bit when you do.

For you have done the universe a great service.

Ashes to ashes.

Dust to bigots. [emphasis in original]

Williams was subsequently to claim that his re-posting of Son of Baldwin’s piece was a response to the police shooting of Charleena Lyles in Seattle on Sunday morning. That would make sense in terms of timing, but given the fact that the article on Medium opens with a photo of recent shooting victim Rep. Steve Scalise and an accusation of racism and homophobia against him, commentators who argue that Williams seems to be endorsing Son of Baldwin’s implicit claim that Rep. Scalise somehow deserved to die can be forgiven their misinterpretation… if indeed it is such.

Screen capture of the posts that led to the controversy.

Anyway, Williams re-posted Son of Baldwin’s essay with the comment, “It is past time for the racially oppressed to do what people who believe themselves to be ‘white’ will not do, put an end to the vectors of their destructive mythology of whiteness and their white supremacy system.” And he added the hashtag “#LetThemFuckingDie.” A few minutes later, he added, “I’m fed the fuck up with self-identified ‘white’s’ daily violence directed at immigrants, Muslim, and sexually and racially oppressed people. The time is now to confront these inhuman assholes and end this now.”

Needless to say, this set off a firestorm in right-wing echo chamber circles. Calls for Williams’s firing were immediate, and (of course) there were threats of violence against him and even his family—you know, the kind that mouthpieces of the right claim never happen to leftist firebrands. Let’s be clear: Prof. Williams, contrary to the assertion in an otherwise thoughtful editorial in the Hartford Courant, did not “[create] an unsafe atmosphere at the college.” Other people did. Just as Ann Coulter and Milo Yiannopoulos are not responsible (short of actual incitement) for the violence their mere presence on a college campus might engender, neither is Prof. Williams to blame for the fact that people who disagree with him threaten violence. It is important to note here that neither Williams nor indeed Son of Baldwin advocate violence. The latter’s advocacy for selective non-intervention and the former’s condoning of, if not actual support for, that position may be abhorrent and unethical (Curmie thinks so), but it falls far short of incitement.

Just yesterday, I wrote in a comment on another of Jack’s posts (one in which Curmie’s insistence that the higher education classroom is not, in fact, a site of leftist propaganda was honored as “Comment of the Day”) that the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education generally supports conservatives, but not because they’re conservatives. This statement is an ideal example of what I meant. Whereas as FIRE release concentrates more on the threats that Professor Williams has received (and that other faculty who have taken controversial positions in recent times have received), they do explicitly endorse a statement by the chair of the American Association of University Professors’ Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure:

There is only one option consistent with academic freedom. Professor Williams is entitled to his right to express his personal views on social media and the university has the right to differ with those views. But Trinity College must defend the professor’s right to express them without fear of retaliation by the institution. Trinity College should refuse to let the sort of threats and intimidation directed against Professor Williams and the entire campus achieve their insidious aims.

Despite literally dozens of false media reports to the contrary, Professor Williams did not write the screed that generated the current brouhaha. Nor did he explicitly endorse it, although his re-post of someone else's blog piece could be interpreted that way. What he said himself is angry and vulgar, but Curmie sees it as well within the realm of protected speech that ought not inspire more than a raised eyebrow from university officials... except, of course, for the hashtag, which on the one hand merely references the article’s title and on the other seems to approve of the content.

And that’s the key. Does Professor Williams’s post actually advocate what the right-wing media storm says it does? Or was it merely an example of a moment’s sloppiness, worthy of an apology and nothing more? Does Professor Williams conflate whiteness and bigotry, or did he merely re-post an article which appears to do so? Does it matter that Professor Williams was not acting as a representative of the university when he made the offending remarks? I know of a case in my own experience in which a common colloquial expression was interpreted literally and led to accusations of advocating violence. Is this a variation on that disturbing theme? 

The answer to all these questions, to me, is unclear, meaning that those of us who don’t know Prof. Williams, haven’t read his scholarly work (which presumably is of a standard that a respected institution like Trinity considers worthy of a senior faculty member), haven’t sat in on his classes, aren’t equipped to make such decisions.

The person who is in the best position to make those determinations is Trinity President Joanne Berger-Sweeney, who seems to be handling the situation with finesse: she shut down the campus for the safety of all and re-opened it when it appeared there was no imminent threat. She issued an official response which states that Son of Baldwin’s call for “indifference to the lives of bigots” is “abhorrent and wholly contrary to Trinity’s values.” She argues that the use of the offensive hashtag was “reprehensible and, at the very least, in poor judgment. No matter its intent, it goes against our fundamental values as an institution, and I believe its effect is to close minds rather than open them.” But she also insists that Trinity “[continues] to uphold our fundamental belief in academic freedom and support our community members’ constitutional right to free speech,” and deplored the threats to Professor Williams. She forwarded the case to the Dean of the Faculty, who will advise her on “whether college procedures or policies were broken.” This strikes Curmie as absolutely the right path to take. Let’s see what the actual facts are, if this case is an anomaly or fits a pattern, if Professor Williams can muster a more persuasive apology than simply arguing that he did not intend to incite violence (well, of course he didn’t, but that’s not the point).

There is also a petition of support for Professor Williams. Like many such documents, it started off locally (it opens “We the undersigned faculty at Trinity College”) but has expanded to include signatories from well outside the college. Importantly, it stands alongside the FIRE statement in affirming academic freedom and, specifically, the use of social media as subject to its protections. The drafters of the petition are correct that many of the attacks on Professor Williams are founded on distortion and misrepresentation. That doesn’t mean they all are, of course, but the use of intimidation and fear-mongering is an all-too-familiar tactic of what one of Curmie’s favorite professors used to call the “foam-flecked brigade” of any ideology. This time, it’s the easily-incited right. Next time, it will be the equally malleable left.

Like virtually everyone else who has opined on this matter, Curmie is ignorant of a lot of the details of the situation. What I do know is that revoking tenure without absolute certainty of the legitimacy of doing so is at least as great a threat to higher education as allowing a single renegade professor (assuming he even fits into that category) to remain employed would be. Tenure is not a guarantee of a job for life. It is, rather, a nominal assurance of academic freedom. In terms of a situation like this one, it merely shifts the standards for dismissing a professor from, loosely speaking, “preponderance of evidence” to “beyond reasonable doubt.” 

I have reasonable doubt. I'm not sure this qualifies as the ethical defense of not firing Prof. Williams Jack rhetorically seeks, but Curmie kind of thinks it does.