Jon Gabriel @ Freedom Works:
This year’s Banned Books List included a few surprises.
The American Library Association’s annual report highlights those books saddled with censorious complaints from parents, educators and assorted bureaucrats. Mom and Dad understandably would be horrified to find Fifty Shades of Grey in the elementary school stacks, but some administrators objected to Dav Pilkey’s popular Captain Underpants kid-lit series.
It appears some paper-shufflers found the silly superhero too disrespectful of their efforts. “I don’t see these books as encouraging disrespect for authority. Perhaps they demonstrate the value of questioning authority,” Pilkey said. “Some of the authority figures in the Captain Underpants books are villains. They are bullies and they do vicious things.”
We learned over the weekend that school office bullies aren’t restricted to the K-12 world. Two California university professors seem to be creating their own list of books to ban, including any titles that dare question their disintegrating theory of apocalyptic climate change.
San Jose State University posted a photo of their Climate Science profs about to burn Steve Goreham’s book, The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism. Department chair Alison Bridger, Ph.D., is shown holding a match while associate professor Craig Clements , Ph.D., dangles the book above the flame.
Once the photo started going viral, university officials removed it from their website and insisted it was just a joke. Hilarious, no? Joke or not, while academia constantly warns of metaphorical right-wing book burners, academic arson is literally happening on the left.
Needless to say, the book-burning professors are paid by California taxpayers. I suppose hard-working Golden Staters should be thankful it was a printed title and not an ebook. (Despite the name, Amazon Kindles are tricky to burn.)
So much for open, honest debate on the issues. And here I thought that college and university was a place where diversity of ideas was fostered and encouraged.