Steve Thomas: Emily Knox, welcome to Circulating Ideas.
Emily Knox: Hello, thank you for having me.
Steve Thomas: So you’re now an associate professor at Urbana Champaign, but how did you get interested in the library field in the first place?
Emily Knox: So my mom was a high school librarian for 32 years, and I often worked with her in the summers doing inventory and checking in magazines, so she always encouraged me to go to library school. She said, it’s a very flexible degree that can go with you, and after doing some other things, I eventually decided to get my MSLIS, which I actually did at the University of Illinois. And then I was a reference librarian at a seminary in New York for five years before going to get my PhD.
Steve Thomas: And have you been at Illinois for your entire teaching career?
Emily Knox: Since 2012, I’m still at the School of Information Sciences.
Steve Thomas: Is there anything in particular that brought you to intellectual freedom and censorship as one of your big research interests?
Emily Knox: Yeah. So my mom always brought home banned books week information. So that was one of the things we would do every year. My favorite author, Judy Blume was always on those lists. Eventually I studied sociology of religion in undergrad and my first time in grad school, and I was really interested in evangelicalism and fundamentalism in America.
But I always really was interested in banned books and thinking about books, reading, the book as an object, and when I finally went back and got my PhD, I knew I wanted to study why do people ban books? I just really wanted to think through the theory and how to think about it more conceptually.
Steve Thomas: And I do want to talk given our current climate, a lot about the Book Banning in 21st Century America book, but in the Intellectual Freedom book, what was your approach to intellectual freedom in that book?
Emily Knox: So that book is based on my class which usually is an eight-week class but actually this semester, I’m teaching it as a 16-week class because of all the challenges. The way I think about intellectual freedom is as a human right, and also as being necessary for social justice. So that is the overall framework of the book.
I go through several different topics such as access, privacy, my favorite topic is actually copyright. We don’t think about copyright enough as actually the water that we all swim in when it comes to access and intellectual freedom. And then I talk about the history of information professions and intellectual freedom, and then I give very short overviews of upcoming challenges when it comes to intellectual freedom in the last chapter, which is basically how I teach the class.
I really get my students to try to understand that this is a professional principle that we support. This is part of our code of ethics. You may or may not agree with some of the things that come up personally when it comes to intellectual freedom, but it is important for the dignity, autonomy, and flourishing as human beings and something that we all have a right to. It is encoded in the UN declaration on human rights. I try to get my students to think outside of the United States, right? Like, it’s not the First Amendment that gives us the right to intellectual freedom. It is being a human being that gives you the right to intellectual freedom.
Steve Thomas: Exactly. Yeah. And then that also comes into copyright because obviously copyright is different in every country. What do you see as the biggest challenges around copyright law? A little thing was going around online recently of like how that little Sticker we put on all of all like photocopiers and stuff is not really enough.
Emily Knox: It is necessary but not sufficient. So you should have the little sticker. I actually wrote a book on interlibrary loan many years ago, that was my first book, and I talked about that sticker. You still need to have it. What’s coming up right now is we’ll have to see when happens when Mickey Mouse moves into the public domain. I don’t know how much Disney is going to fight that. As many of you know, there was already a fight to move the copyright office out of the Library of Congress. We’ll see what happens.
I really encourage librarians, along with all the book challenges, to keep abreast of what’s going on with copyright law, because it is going to be a fight, and I’m worried that will take place a little sub rosa because other things are going on. It doesn’t matter if the books are challenged, if we’re not able to expand the public domain and copyright law and think about, what are the obligations to the creator, which is, of course, also part of our code of ethics, if the law is too narrow.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, and it’s hard now because we’re in this uncharted territory because like corporate ownership of things that wasn’t really part of the founding fathers thinking of copyright law, so now, Disney as a corporation exists, like Walt Disney, the person can have a copyright or something, but how do you… yeah, that’s hard. And I agree, Mickey Mouse is going to probably be the flashpoint, because Disney is going to throw all their lawyers at that.
Emily Knox: Right, and they’ve made Mickey Mouse a trademark, but I still think that they’re in the strike with the creators, with the performers and writers, but I’m sure they have lawyers tackling this right now.
Steve Thomas: Yes, I think they can afford all the lawyers.
As you mentioned before, and we’ve talked about your other book, the Book Banning has been here as a fight for a long time but it’s really escalated in the last, what, year or two, I guess? Your book was 2015, but it’s just as relevant today as it was when you wrote it. What were you thinking about when you wrote the book?
Emily Knox: So I’m always interested in what I call the discourse of censorship, which is the arguments that people give for removing a book because it’s anti freedom, anti-rights, right? It has this very paternalistic air to it. It has an outside sense of like, “my values over your values.” So I’m not as interested in the books, although I love reading the books, I’m much more interested in how are people making these arguments, and so in my dissertation, and in this book that came out of my dissertation, I look at these arguments and I try to say, you know, what do they have in common? And even today, the same arguments are used. Yeah. I’m now at the point where when I hear someone arguing against a book, I can pretty much just code it in my head. I don’t even really need to think through it very hard because there are only so many arguments you can use.
The other thing I’m really interested in is “the book”, like as I mentioned, the codex as a piece of technology and its outsized importance in our world and especially in the global West. So it’s no mistake that people are targeting books, even though they’re all sorts of other materials around, but the transmission over space and time that the book allows is just kind of magical if you think about it. And people think about books in ways that you know, this goes to my religious studies that are almost sacred, right? Like books should be true and truth should be in books. And I talk about how this is something that came to us through the Reformation, the understanding of the book, of course people are talking about the Bible, but actually this goes to your mass market paperback as well.
Steve Thomas: You made a good point in the book that people don’t think about a lot is that all sides of the issue here all agree that books are powerful. That’s the point of both sides.
Emily Knox: Yes, and I try to show arguments from both the right and the left, because I’m trying to show that it’s actually what is contained in the books and how we think about the practice of reading that matters. People say that reading this book will cause harm. Right. And it doesn’t matter. You know, you can agree with them or not, but this idea that texts cause harm is one that we have very much internalized and believe to be true. So I try to look at like, well, if that’s the argument that people are making, what are the different ways that they go about making this argument?
Steve Thomas: Yeah, no, and I think that’s a good approach to it and makes your book different from other ones, like a lot of other ones are talking about it from purely kind of an intellectual freedom point of view and pushing it from that way, but you were really trying to understand the other side, and I think you have to understand the other side of people who want to ban books to understand how to respond to them, because if you’re just going to yell that they’re Nazis at them, then they’re obviously going to shut down and not respond to you. So you have to kind of understand where they’re coming from, from their mindset.
Emily Knox: Yeah, and actually try to get people to understand that we all engage in censorship practices, right? This is what I call it in my newer book. I call this the four R’s: redaction, restriction, relocation and removal. There are things I will not read because I don’t want to expose myself to them. Now, that’s not the same thing as something else that someone else might not read. But if you think of it that way, it’s a little bit easier to understand where people might be coming with them. It’s not that I necessarily agree with them.
I also strongly accept that books can be harmful, right? It can be difficult to read about certain topics. We shouldn’t be saying that no, this won’t do anything because that’s not true either. What librarians accept is that we don’t know what a particular text will do to any particular person, right? That is not something that we should be engaged in. We say we make information accessible. If you’re a minor, you should talk to your parents about it, but for the general public, we make this information accessible and different people may interact with it in different ways.
Steve Thomas: Right, and there’s arguments there, too, especially with school librarians of kids’ rights and stuff like that, but that’s always hard because there are laws that, even if we think that kids should have just as much intellectual freedom as other people, there are laws that say that’s not true. There are some places that you have to get parental permission to do X, Y, Z. So you have to work within the legal system as well.
Emily Knox: Yeah, when I’m talking to a lot of journalists, I try to really emphasize that each of these cases is actually different. Asking for a school to remove something from the curriculum is not the same thing as asking them to remove it from a school library or a classroom library or the public school collection. They have different nuances and valences that the term “book banning” does not really communicate to people.
I do have an article on the coercive nature of curriculum, which some people chafe at that term, but curriculum is coercive, right? You have to read it. And so what is happening is that people are saying, I disagree with this curriculum. I don’t think that this is necessary for being a citizen in our world. I don’t agree with how you’re talking about our history. And this is a fight that we have to fight, right? We have to say, well, we are telling the truth about our history and it’s important that kids know it. It will be difficult for some of them to find out that we are a settler colonial state that enslaved people. That’s difficult history. But by not stating that, we are not telling kids the truth, and that to me is worse than actually going through the emotions of thinking about the privileges that come out of that history that we have.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, a lot of times they’re targeting a single book, but it’s like your problem is with the curriculum. Your problem is that we’ve decided to teach it this way. It’s not that we’ve decided to use this specific book. As you said, people may not like the word coercive, but that’s the whole point of curriculum is to guide the thinking into the way that the curriculum says we teach this. I mean, preferably the truth is where you’re leading them to, but you’re coercing them into the truth, basically, that you’re telling them, whatever you’ve heard before, this is the truth, as your teachers, we are imparting some sort of truth to you.
Emily Knox: Yeah. And we have to be more comfortable with saying like, “And this will be hard!” It’s okay. Education is actually, I sometimes get in trouble with this, but it’s actually a form of violence. It’s a way of saying we are making you a different person than who you were before. It can be extremely difficult. We force kids to wrestle with new ideas all the time. That is part of becoming an educated person. It’s part of growing up. I don’t think that we should pretend like these aren’t difficult topics. Like, that is not what it means to tell the truth about history: this is easy and everything is all better right now. We should say, no, this is going to be difficult for kids to learn about, and it’s still important for them to know it.
Steve Thomas: And I think it’s important to try to have some empathy for people, because I think it is, not only for kids, it’s hard, I mean, it’s harder, I think, for adults to change. I mean, somebody in their 70s or 80s trying to adjust their thinking about gender identity, it’s completely outside of what they just think. So it’s not that they think it’s even bad. You can’t just say, Oh, this is what it is now, and then they just switch, and like, this is how we think about it now. It takes time to get into these things. And I feel like sometimes people just immediately brush people off who don’t understand, but not understanding is different than just like pure hatred, then, you know, we’re in a different category there, but a lot of it’s just confusion, I think, especially with older people on topics like that, where they just, all their life, it’s been male / female, that’s all it is and your completely different worldview you’re presenting to them.
Emily Knox: Yeah. I would also say, this is where I really rely on the work of Kerry H Robinson, who’s in Australia. She talks about difficult knowledge and in fact, these are things that are difficult for adults to talk about. So issues of gender is something that we perform, that is embedded in ourselves, it gets into all sorts of very intimate issues and they’re difficult to talk about. And so a lot of the books that we see that are challenged right now are what you could characterize under difficult knowledge. Now, what Kerry Robinson says is that it’s still necessary to not censor this information because you need to have the vocabulary to discuss it.
So yes, it is true that there are older people who maybe have difficult to talk about gender, but it’s also possible that in fact, one of those old people is trans themselves and did not have the vocabulary to describe their understanding of their world, and so really thinking about. You know, this is Rudine Sims Bishop talking about mirrors, windows, sliding glass doors. A lot of times people think these are only mirrors or only windows, but in fact, what it gives you is more ability to describe the world as a whole, and you may or may not agree with it, right? Like just presenting the information does not mean that you’ll be like, and this is how the world is. You may not feel that way. But that doesn’t mean that it should be taken away from you.
Steve Thomas: Right, it’s presenting the point of view out there, and as you said, there are things that you’re not going to read. There are things that I’m not going to read. I have kids. There are things that I won’t let them read, but I’m making a choice for them, and I think I’m fairly open, but you know, I’m not going to let them just watch beheading videos or something like that. Just go, well, it’s out there. So it’s true. So I’ll just let you watch it. You know, it’s right. You put your own filters up within your own family, but that it’s the restriction from allowing anybody to get this stuff that ends up being the problem. I mean, you set your own ethics, your own morals and things like that. So that’s fine, but you can’t restrict those on others.
Emily Knox: Yeah. And this is something I do talk about in the book, which is really this private act that moves into the public when you have censorship. It is a difficult thing to wrestle with because what you really realize that people are talking about is community, that they want their community to share their values. And this is true across all political spectra, right? It’s not just true of people who are conservatives. People want other people around them to share their values.
It’s not surprising that where this really comes to a head is in the public goods that are supported by taxpayers. This is where we really learn about who shares our values, who does not, what is your money going towards? Do you agree with it or not? What does it mean when the rest of the community does not serve your values? What does it mean when people who are perceived to have power, but in fact, we’re talking about very feminized professions and both of these institutions that are actually quite weak institutions, how do we come to an agreement on what it means to have community values? And that is always something that people wrestle with.
Steve Thomas: For one thing, if you’re a conservative Christian or I mean any major religions, there is a holy book. There’s a book that has basically telling you the moral framework for how you should live your life. So I can see why they get that from there.
Emily Knox: Yeah, so this is actually where I trace some of the received ideas that we have gotten from the Reformation. It’s actually very specific. It is less true of the other religions of the book. As opposed to a very particular type of really American conservative, evangelical, and fundamentalist Christianity that has taken these ideas from the Reformation and put it on all sorts of books. But what the Reformers talked about was the doctrine of solo scriptura, that you could attain salvation through reading the Bible. And also that there is the priesthood of all believers, which is that there’s no one between you and interpretation. Now they actually had problems with that later. They worried that people were not interpreting the Bible correctly, however they interpret that as being…
Steve Thomas: And then the Catholic Church was like, “See, we told you!” [laughs]
Emily Knox: Yes. And then they wrote commentaries on the Bible. This is still quite important in conservative Christian cultures. The idea that, and I talk a little bit about how this came through to us through Scottish common sense philosophy, which is very influential in our founding fathers, the idea that we hold these truths to be self-evident. This is a very familiar tenant of Scottish common sense philosophy.
So what people say and the way it shows up is like, well, see this, if I read this out to you, how can you interpret it any other way? That’s what the words say. The words say what they mean and me what they say. What people start doing to me is reading out passages from All Boys Aren’t Blue and they’re like, how else can you interpret this? And you’re like, well, you’re actually reading a passage where George was assaulted. You’re talking about a horrible thing that happened to another person, and they are telling their truth. So I am actually interpreting this much differently than you are. I try to trace that over time.
My favorite one actually, I’ll just say, is that we started reading silently in the medieval ages and a lot of arguments that people use are, well, you can’t read this aloud in a classroom because you would be charged with child endangerment or something. And so the reading aloud argument comes up all the time. It’s just one of my favorite things to see because it’s actually something that we always used to read aloud. Reading aloud is important because people know what you’re reading, they know where you are in the text, they can interrupt you and tell you what the correct interpretation of it is.
This is really where I’m trying to understand what it means to read, like how do we understand this really powerful practice that we engage in, and how do we describe it, because it’s actually difficult to talk about what it means to read, so I’m trying to get closer to what that means.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. I grew up Christian because I’m a white middle class person in America, as most of those people do. But I always like the idea of what I understand from Judaism, where it’s always, you’ve got the holy word, the book, but the constant interpretation is what’s important. Like, you’re always reading it, and you’re always changing, and you’re always looking for a deeper version of it. As opposed, again, to this, here’s the words, read the words, they don’t mean anything other than what they say exactly. And that’s bled over into political life, too, of like there are Supreme Court justices that believe that now, that you just read it directly as written 200, 300 years ago, and you should still read it that way.
Emily Knox: Yes, originalism is based in this Scottish common sense philosophy. I have a brand new book on it that I’m excited about reading. It’s not one that we talk about a lot, this particular philosophical tradition, but it has an outsized influence over our political and our politics and society.
Steve Thomas: And probably not a surprise that as a bunch of very conservative Catholics get on the court that it turns into that.
One of the arguments that’s made is that for them, some of the group thinking about banning books, is that reading should always be good. Like, you talked about reading things to challenge you: they shouldn’t do that. That’s not what reading is for. Reading is to make you feel good and to make you feel nice and all that kind of stuff. And that’s really not where we’re coming from either ’cause I think you can read for fun obviously, but reading should challenge you a lot of times.
Emily Knox: Yeah. So what they would say is that reading should edify the soul.
I’m working with my doctoral advisee, Andy Zalot, looking at the arguments against Maus and how they wanted clean books on the Holocaust, which is, of course, impossible if you are centering the Jewish experience in the Holocaust, but this is very much part of American Christian culture to want clean books. Of course, almost all libraries have clean books. They have Christian romances. There are publishers dedicated to clean books. I’ve now been reading through a lot of their About pages, their author guidelines, and in fact, within clean book publishing, there’s a lot of wrestling about what does “clean” mean.
I have a lot of good treatises thinking about, well, does it mean that nothing bad ever happens? Or is it the response to something bad that happens? Does it mean that it can never have violence? Or does it really focus more on how do you understand the violence? Of course, what they mostly agree on is the outcome of a particular ethical stance at the end of the book, but it’s interesting to me that even within this particular subset of publishers, they don’t necessarily agree on what it means to have a clean book.
Steve Thomas: Well, for a long time, I think it was that it couldn’t have any of that stuff in it, but then you get successes of Left Behind where obviously it’s the end of the world in the Christian way, so obviously terrible things are happening, but it’s sitting there right next to all the little Amish romances on the shelf. So it’s sort of that challenge of, can you write adventure books without all that sex and violence and cursing and all that, and they manage to get books out.
Emily Knox: Yeah, but I would say that some of the younger publishers are less dogmatic about what it means. This is the thing, things change. One of my favorite authors is Brandon Sanderson. His books could be considered clean books, right? Even though he does not have some of the… although even, even his books do, even the grim dark ones have a certain moral compass to them but they’re not part of this clean Christian culture book genre.
So I just really like this stuff. I like thinking about like, how do we classify different types of books? How do we understand what we’re doing in libraries when we do the classification, why it’s so important. I just had someone ask me like, what if I don’t know where to put a book, you know, because it is a book for older teens. I was like, this is really hard, especially if you work in a middle school. You have 10 year olds and 14 year olds. The books that are appropriate for those two age groups are very different. People do not understand how difficult it is to provide reading for kids who have not yet hit puberty and are already through puberty. I can’t imagine being a middle school teacher or librarian. It seems like it’s just a lot of drama every day. And also, how do you reach all of these people in this, these very different points of their lives?
Steve Thomas: A lot of these reasons that you go into of, you know, why people say that they’re wanting to ban books, that there are people who are of course, I dunno if they’re true believers, maybe not the right word there, but they actually believe this, like that is why they want these outta here because they really believe that if their child reads this book, they’re gonna turn gay or whatever reason that they have, but then there’s the political reasoning behind it who are pushing this up and that’s why it’s such a big deal now ’cause here’s a culture war thing we can ramp up, so that’s always even more problematic because they’re pushing it and I doubt a lot of those politicians really care about these books, but it’s an issue that gets their voters riled up.
Emily Knox: Yeah, so I think Heather McGee’s work in the Sum of Us is the best for thinking this through. We are really in a fight about public services, public goods in this country. As we become a majority minority country, the public has radically changed, and in fact, people in this country under the age of 18 are already majority minority. Are older generations willing to spend taxpayer money to support those kids to have the same goods and services that they had? Heather McGee talks about how so many things are in our country are the outcome of racism, of Jim Crow, and we really see this when it comes to schools and libraries. And I guess what I’m saying is like, it’s not surprising that this is happening.
The kids who are in this younger generation are not the kids who came before. We already saw this happen in higher education. As more women and minorities started attending public universities, the public support for those universities went down dramatically. This is something that I think we need to keep talking about over and over and saying why it is important for us to support our public institutions, to have public schools. We’ve never been comfortable with public schools in this country. When the robber barons started them, they were very controversial. People think that education should take place in the home.
Libraries are one of the last places where it’s so magical. I mean, I just moved, and I walked into my new library, there were books on the shelf. I don’t have to pay anything to get my library card to take out library books. There are so few places like that in our society. No one asked me what I was doing there, you know I could have just sat and looked at the newspapers because they’re still newspapers, of course. What other place is there like that? People do not always want to support something that is so open to everyone, no matter who they are. I just highly recommend the Sum of Us by Heather McGee because she talks about the history of why we are like this as a society and she goes through many different things, talking about health care and she has the famous example of the public pool that was closed rather than be integrated.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. I just read something about that recently that the public pool is not a thing because now people in their little HOAs and their neighborhoods and their gated communities, they have their pool and then they close their gates and they don’t have to go to a quote unquote public pool anymore. And public pools obviously have some, there was a lot of racial stuff going on with that in the middle part of the 20th century as well of like, I can’t get in a pool with a black person because they’re whatever, you know, it’s one of the spaces that was just, when you think back to it, it’s like, it’s hard for me to grasp sometimes that the world was like that, like not long before I was born. That and like the “Whites-Only” water fountains and stuff like that, because I grew up in the south. So I mean, like all this stuff would have been around me 30 years earlier before I was born. And it’s just sometimes you’re baffled by how quickly the world can change.
Emily Knox: But I think one thing to remember is that there are people who still live in worlds like that. It may not be codified into law, but we still have students at the University of Illinois who have never been in a class with a non-white person. They come from the very small towns around us or even some of the small towns in Southern Illinois. They’ve never encountered people who are not superficially like them. And so, if you think about that, then it can be jarring for people to suddenly be in a place where there are people from all over the world who are in class with them. And, I think we need to be aware of that that there are people who are not comfortable with that. We have to do what we need to do to make sure that they understand that white people are not the majority of people in the world and will not be the majority of people in this country.
The election of Barack Obama was, I think, a shock for many people across our country, and we are really seeing the fallout of that. I also talk about the protests against the George Floyd murder as being a shock for many people. Those happened in those very small towns that I was talking about, often run by young people and led by young people, and so you would have all white protesters in these tiny towns walking around their courthouse in the middle of the square, and I think a lot of parents were like, where did this come from? How did my children learn about this? I’ve never trained them to be protesters. So, all of these things are coming together at once, and we just have to see what comes out of it.
This type of reactionary politics, the reason why people are targeting public schools and public libraries is because they are so local. There’s not much you can do on a national level, or even your state level, but you can show up at your local school board, your local public library board and say, I don’t like this. You’re thinking, I’m going to start small and then go big. If I make this change in my community, then maybe it will move out from my community, and we can continue to have people who are essentially keeping a minority rule in our local, state, and federal governments. I really believe that these are all intertwined.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, and the internet accelerates all that because you can connect so much easier with people and then not that I won’t say helped is the right word for COVID, but us all being at home when the George Floyd stuff happened, allowed us almost to pay attention more. I always wonder if that if COVID hadn’t happened, would it have been as big? I hope it would be, but I wonder since our attention was kind of elsewhere, because obviously he’s not the first person who’s been murdered by police.
Emily Knox: Yeah, I think the video made a difference for George Floyd, but also what COVID did was bring the school home. I often talk about the anecdote of my dad saying, you went off to school, and then you came back, right? Like, who knew what happened at school, but when school was at the dining room table, people really heard how pedagogy has changed, how there’s social emotional learning in school. I think a lot of parents were not aware of the changes in educational practice over the last 20 or so years, and I think a lot of them were very upset about it.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. Cause before you always just heard, oh, new math, I can’t help my kid with their homework. That’s all they thought it was different about school, but it’s like, no, they’ve changed how they do it, and, you know, kids aren’t going to come home and talk about that part of it.
Emily Knox: They also don’t know that there’s been a change.
Steve Thomas: Correct. Right. It’s not something different to them. Right. Yes. Yeah. Whereas you try to help them with their homework, you’re like, what the heck? I don’t know how to use little blocks. And how do you add now? I don’t even know how to add anymore.
Emily, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I think it was a really interesting discussion. And again, I think it’s an interesting way to look at book banning of looking at the reasoning because again, understanding their side is really important. Again, there’s the political people who are pushing it for bad reasons. Most of the people are doing it because they legitimately think it’s a bad thing, but if you can talk to them in a certain way, you can convince some people. I mean, that’s not maybe the goal is to convince people, but it’s just to do the right thing. I’ve found there are times that we’ve explained like our collection development policy to people and they go, Oh, okay. And it’s like, you know, you just say, Oh, we collect for the entire community. Oh, okay. And that’s the end of the conversation. It doesn’t turn into a challenge that gets into a record somewhere because I dealt with it at the branch, and they walked out fine. Anyway, I think that’s really important to be seeing their side of things for us to be able to address properly.
Emily Knox: Well, thank you. I always like to end by telling people to read banned books. There’s lots of them out there and to be prepared and be organized. Don’t be complacent and think I live in a blue place so this isn’t going to come to me. Make sure you know your policies. Make sure your entire staff knows policies and who to communicate different issues to. Also, if you are being targeted, realize that you are not alone. Please reach out to your local library association, people online, the ALA, the NCAC just please don’t feel like you have to respond alone.
Steve Thomas: Yes, very important. We are a community that will help each other out and start reading with Judy Blume when you’re going to read those banned books.
Emily Knox: Yes.
Steve Thomas: All right, Emily. Thank you so much. I encourage everybody to go out and read this book and Foundations of Intellectual Freedom too.
Emily Knox: Well, thank you so much.
Circulating Ideas 