That’s a fair question. During the 1990s I spent my summers teaching creative writing in a program for gifted and talented 17-year-olds. For several years there were few restrictions on the fiction we could assign and the films we could show. Quality, broadly defined, was the main criterion. When a right-wing governor came to power, things changed drastically. A story by Larry Brown was censored for containing the word “shit.” The teacher who assigned it was censured. All R-rated movies were banned. Preachers and legislators invaded the classrooms. The faculty was intimidated into a state of apathy; students were infantilized. A few pages from Lolita might well have closed the place down. No doubt this experience, and some comparable experiences at Cornell in the early 1960s, led me to use the word “censor.” On reflection, though, I think a weaker verb--“discounted,” perhaps, or “disparaged”--might have been preferable in the current context.

Jim Twiggs