WHAT GIVES : Finding a solution
Posted on Sunday, August 28, 2005
Fayetteville's raging debate over which books deserve a place on the shelves of Fayetteville public school libraries is reaching a fever pitch as school gets under way and school officials recognize they will have to deal with parents who want changes made.
Local mom Laurie Taylor has led the charge over books she viewed as pornographic and/or inappropriate for the eyes and minds of our local students, but this has developed into far more than one woman's outcry. Forces on both sides are marshaling, turning the battle into perceptions that one must either be for pornography or for censorship.
Somewhere in the rational middle, there is common ground.
This community cannot get into a fight that stretches on for months or years as we go painfully, book by book, through the current collection. With 314,000 titles in the local school libraries, that seems an insurmountable task. This is an important matter, but not one that needs to overshadow everything the school district and its student population does for the foreseeable future.
I like school board President Steve Percival's plan to hold a town hall meeting to let people concerned about the issue speak out to their school board representatives. It appears to recognize that this matter needs to be resolved through policy changes, not by a word-for-word scrutiny of every book that ever offended someone.
Questions need to be asked, such as whether we're satisfied with the process that resulted in explicit books being on the shelves in the first place, or whether that book selection process can be broadened to include more people, thereby increasing the odds that the process will result in good purchase decisions within the limited funding available for library books.
It's beyond argument that the existing selection process has placed within reach of local students some books that never deserved to be there. The people crying "censorship"would do well to recognize that just because something gets published does not make it appropriate for public school libraries. For bookstores? Yes. For ordering online? Yes. Perhaps even for public libraries.
Reasonable minds can agree that it's not censorship to tailor public school libraries to the audiences they serve and to the mission of the school district. Heck, even public libraries have children's sections where their librarians decide one book is appropriate for children, while another should be placed somewhere else in the library.
The crusade to purge the library shelves of objectionable books, it must be said, has also cast its net far too wide. If parents want to work toward some sort of national rating system for books like those in place for movies and videos, that fight needs to be taken elsewhere. It's not a fight for the Fayetteville School System, which has no authority or capacity to establish such a rating system and cannot afford to have its attention focused on such issues.
Our elected school board members will witness why their positions are not for the meek at heart as this policy matter is discussed, for they must discern a way to effectively engage parents in the school lives of their children while not letting one segment of the population dictate what is appropriate for all.
Newly purchased books should be reviewed by more than one or two librarians. The broader-based the evaluation can be - the more people involved, within reason - the more likely it is that an inappropriate title will make its way onto the shelves. There ought to be a way to achieve that.
Clearly, Fayetteville is a community unwilling to accept arbitrary application of one group's morality to the library system within the public schools. But is it possible that a librarian might, on occasion, make a purchasing decision that is inappropriate? If one accepts that, then creating a system that seeks to better balance the national reviews and critiques with local sensibilities is not objectionable, but desirable. Finding the right mix, however, will prove elusive. But just because something's difficult is no reason not to attempt it.
Setting the record straight Last week, I wrote a quickly drafted column about the purchase of the Northwest Arkansas Times by Little Rock's Walter Hussman Jr., owner of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. The purchase was announced Friday, the same day I usually finish up my column. In that column, I offered that it would be the second time someone from Little Rock had purchased the Times. I was wrong when I said the earlier Capital City purchaser was Jay Fulbright, who bought what was then the Fayetteville Democrat in 1912. My history lesson stemmed from an advertisement placed by the newspaper's owners back in 1960 marking the 100 th anniversary of the Fayetteville paper. The Fulbright family still owned the renamed Northwest Arkansas Times. Their ad recounted the newspaper's history and said it was bought in 1912 "by Jay Fulbright and Allan Gates of Little Rock."
Erroneously, I read that to mean both men hailed from Little Rock when Gates, a co-owner, was the only one from there. A former newspaper colleague who always had a strong appreciation and knowledge of local history called Tuesday to point out my error. Researching it further proved he was correct.
The Fulbright family owned this newspaper from 1912 to 1968. Roberta Fulbright, mother to famed U.S. Sen. J. William Fulbright, served as editor and full owner of the paper after Jay Fulbright's death in 1923.
The family arrived in Fayetteville around 1906 from Missouri, where Jay Fulbright had been a banker but wanted to look elsewhere for business opportunities. He moved his family south to Fayetteville, but continued further south himself in search of those opportunities. His venture took him not to Little Rock, but to Memphis. Eventually, he returned to Fayetteville to seek his fortunes and the family became quite prominent not just through ownership of the paper, but by ownership of other key businesses and their civic involvement.
My appreciation for history is apparently more significant than my ability to recount it, so here's to setting the record straight.
The Little Rock-based Stephens family also had ownership interest in the Times for a few months in 1995 before a federal judge ruled their ownership violated federal law. The same family has ownership in the Morning News in Springdale.
Greg Harton is executive editor of the Northwest Arkansas Times. His column appears on Sunday.
FEEDBACK:
Something to say about this topic? Submit a Letter to the Editor online