Adams State's Big Read Project celebrates free speech (08-20-07)
August 20, 2007
Opinion by Dr. David Svaldi, president of Adams State College
Adams State College has been selected to participate in the National Endowment for the Arts' "The Big Read Program." Through the leadership of Dr. John Taylor and Dr. Carol Guerrero-Murphy, ASC will receive grant funds to promote the reading of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 throughout our community. While the activities are designed to encourage reading, critical thinking, and artistic expression for all age groups, the drama in both Bradbury's story and the play based upon his book flows from "firemen" who burn banned books. Book speech is "free," unless it involves books judged to be so subversive that the public must be protected from their ideas.
Regrettably, book banning and book burning are as American as apple pie. Books from James Joyce's Ulysses to Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughter House Five to various Harry Potter novels (!) have been thrown into the fire. Too often, valuing free speech means protecting our own ideas while attempting to suppress ideas which make us uncomfortable, threaten our children and/r national security etc., etc. A few years ago, the ASC Theatre Department produced the award-winning play, "The Vagina Monologues." As college Provost at that time, I received numerous phone calls and complaints protesting the production. None of the callers I spoke with had ever seen the play, but they seemed to know that it was something dangerous and probably subversive. One individual asked if we just couldn't call the play something else. It was with satisfaction that I witnessed a contribution to our local battered women's shelter from proceeds raised by the production of the play.
A college has a special role to promote and protect the free exchange of ideas. Adams State graduates are going to live in a world that is increasingly more complicated, diverse, and compressed., with more communication media than ever imagined by my parents. Today's global society is also increasingly more divided. Our graduates must solve or live with all the problems we are leaving them: global warming, a growing deficit, worldwide conflict and terrorism. They need to read about and understand and discuss as many different points of view, ideas, theories, and faiths as possible. The surest way for us to fail them is to start precluding some books, ideas, theories, or research.
While some believe that the Soviet Union fell because the US outspent them in an arms race, I believe the Soviet empire crumbled a little bit each time a certain idea, theory, or discovery was deemed inconsistent with Soviet doctrine and, thus, not for discussion. As Aristotle observed, the true mark of an educated person is an ability to entertain an idea without necessarily accepting it. An ASC graduate does not have to abandon their beliefs. But they do need to understand as much of the reality of the world they will live in as is possible. The Big Read project will teach all of us that no book ought to be burned, and that the truth will survive the test of debate-as famed British debater Charles James Fox declared, "The truth will out."