Expand your mind: Socratic dialogue Dec. 11 to consider book bans in America

PEN America, an organization that since 1922 has defended free expression around the globe, says books are under attack.

The organization reports that in 2023-24 alone, there were more than 10,000 book bans in public schools, with many of the banned books penned by authors of color, women, and members of the LGBTQ+ community. Topics deemed unreadable have explored themes of racism, sexuality, gender and history.

On Dec. 11, students in Professor Suzanne FitzGerald’s undergraduate Public Relations Case Studies class will host a Socratic dialogue to consider censorship in the form of book bans. The program, which will be less a debate than an informed discussion seeking to reach a consensus, will empanel a group of students, faculty and guests representing different viewpoints on the issue.

“States all over America are banning books,” said Mackenzie Criss, a senior Public Relations & Advertising major who’s helping promote the event.

Erin Campbell, a senior Public Relations major who’s also on the event’s publicity team, said the notion of book bans is foreign to Americans like herself who grew up without them. She believes the rise in school board and local government officials challenging what students may or may not read is jarring and dangerous.

School districts in a variety of states, including Louisiana, Arizona, Virginia, California and Minnesota have blocked or removed from shelves copies of some books.

Among banned or challenged books is Harper Lee's “To Kill A Mockingbird,” which won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was made into an Academy Award-winning film. The story explores themes of racial injustice, gender roles, loss of innocence and sexual violence. In 2007, President George W. Bush awarded Lee the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

“There is so much information in the books being banned,” Campbell said. “We grew up in a time when they weren’t.”

Mairead Markel, another senior Public Relations major on the publicity team, noted that Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” is among the most frequently banned books in America. That book, which in 2017 was made into a popular Hulu series, has been banned for a variety of reasons, including sexual themes, profanity, violence and political messaging.

Atwood wrote about the ongoing challenge to reading materials in a 2023 piece in The Atlantic, “Go Ahead and Ban My Book.”

“I read The Handmaid’s Tale in high school,” Markel said. “In my school library we had a whole section of books that were banned (in other states).”

This year’s Socratic dialogue, a hallmark of the case studies class since the 1970s, starts at 5:30 p.m. Dec. 11 in the Rowan University Welcome Center, 131 Rowan Blvd. Refreshments will be served.