Censorship Archives - Public Seminar

Education

The Words We Learn to Fear

How authoritarianism begins with the policing of language

December 4, 2025 • by Maria B. Olujic

The Polish poet Czesław Miłosz once wrote, “Language is the only homeland.” I didn’t understand that line until my own country broke apart. Now I see what he meant—when people learn to fear their own words, it is its own form of exile. Two of my uncles learned this early: ...

Activism

Should Universities Just Leave?

How can institutions fostering open inquiry survive authoritarian assaults?

October 23, 2025 • by Anastasija Mladenovska

Over the past year, I have tracked the journeys of five universities caught in the crosshairs of authoritarian pressure: Central European University (CEU) in Hungary; the Higher School of Economics (HSE) and the European University at St. Petersburg (EUSP) in Russia; Nazarbayev University (NU) in Kazakhstan; and the American University ...

Education

Intellectual Violence

The militarization of education in Russia

October 22, 2025 • by Andrei Kolesnikov

In the age of mature Putinism, violence and control, accompanied by a new morality based on so-called “traditional values,” have become crucial instruments for managing Russian society. The use of the education system and cultural institutions to indoctrinate the population—above all young people—is a form of violence, only intellectual rather ...

Education

Academic Dialogue Against the Background of War

There are currently no conversation partners for Western academics within the Russian academy

October 1, 2024 • by Nataliia Viatkina

A recent issue of Aeon featured an article entitled “The Missing Conversation,” with the subtitle “To the detriment of the public, scientists and historians don’t engage with one another. They must begin a new dialogue.” The article amounts to a conversation between the famous scientists and historians of science, professors Lorraine Daston and ...

Academic Dialogue Against the Background of War

Democracy

Can Art Reimagine Freedom of Speech?

Curators Carin Kuoni and Laura Raicovich discuss Studies into Darkness

November 1, 2022 • by Carin Kuoni, Laura Raicovich and Lindsey Scharold

Building up to the Trump presidency in the U.S. and, at the same time, coinciding with the rise of authoritarian regimes in democracies in Europe, Hungary, and Italy years prior to that, it seemed very important to look at the Right and its complete embrace of freedom of speech in ...

Higher Ed

Is Emma Camp Correct That College Students Silence Themselves?

Perhaps she is, perhaps she isn’t. But the core issue may not be free speech, or even education, but more enduring American fears about the dangers of conformism

March 11, 2022 • by Claire Potter

Free speech undergirds democracy. I am uncompromising on this point and dislike being distracted by concocted hysteria about free speech. All the same, a guest essay in the New York Times by Emma Camp engaged me. Camp, a senior at the University of Virginia, argues that students and faculty on ...

Is Emma Camp Correct That College Students Silence Themselves?

Politics

Did Judith Butler Really Say TERFs Are Fascists?

No—Butler did something far more useful. They asked us to think more deeply about body politics

October 19, 2021 • by Hannah Leffingwell

The latest Judith Butler story goes like this: Butler, a renowned philosopher and queer theory bigwig, did an interview with Jules Gleeson of The Guardian. The interview was published on September 7, 2021: social media instantly exploded over Butler's assertion that so-called “trans-exclusionary radical feminists” (otherwise known by their opponents ...

Did Judith Butler Really Say TERFs Are Fascists?

Politics

Censorship Is Now so Broadly Defined as to Mean Anyone Disagreeing with Me Is Censoring Me

Free speech and counter-speech are not “cancel culture”

July 26, 2021 • by John Stoehr

_____ Newspapers and magazines and any kind of media in printed form have always, and I mean always, reserved the right to publish or not publish whatever they feel like publishing or not publishing for whatever reason—even just because. I come from printed stuff. This belief is baked into me. When ...

Censorship Is Now so Broadly Defined as to Mean Anyone Disagreeing with Me Is Censoring Me

The Internet

Glenn Greenwald Punches Down

Worse, when he attacked an intern for USA Today, this established and wealthy journalist also threw the truth under the bus

April 1, 2021 • by Claire Potter

My disappointment with Glenn Greenwald, who I once admired for his work on the Snowden revelations, escalates. Watch as Greenwald, who has 1.6 million followers, deliberately exposes a recent college graduate, a woman, to a screaming mob of trolls on March 28, 2021: Screenshot via Glenn Greenwald's Twitter @ggreenwald. What a bully. More importantly, ...

Democracy

The Seamy Side of the Politics of Small Things

Turkey Poland, China, the United States and beyond

December 22, 2020 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

I recognized that the reviewer had a point and decided to answer the question by adding a chapter: “2004: The Church, the Right and the Politics of Small Things.” In it, I showed how micro-politics, politics in the details of social interaction, in churches with links to the Republican Party, ...

The Seamy Side of the Politics of Small Things

Education

Language Matters

How do we teach classic literature if we cannot discuss offensive words?

September 2, 2019 • by Laurie Sheck

Since the spring of 2016, I have taught a seminar in the New School’s MFA program on writing and literature as radical questioning. As I put the syllabus together, I sought out texts that would challenge our most basic assumptions (for instance, that a novel has a plot; an author’s work must ...

Feature

Orban’s Government vs. The Social Sciences

Censoring scientific lectures in Hungary

November 5, 2018 • by Balazs Vedres

A public talk that a PhD student, Orsolya Vasarhelyi, and I were scheduled to give on November 8, 2018 at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences’ (HAS) “Hungarian Day of Science” was censored by the Academy’s deputy secretary-general Beáta Mária Barnabás. In English, our talk’s title could be translated as “The ...