How did we support academic freedom in 2022?
“Free expression and education are inextricably linked—wide access to quality education is only possible when educators and authors can also express themselves freely. And you can’t have a vibrant society without both of these things.”
— Sage board member and former CEO David McCune
We are firm believers that research and education can only benefit societies where there is wide freedom to read, learn, and teach.
In 2022, across the US, we saw an increase in bans of materials that would promote an equitable future in education. PEN America, a nonprofit that advocates for free expression, reported more than 2,500 instances of book bans in the 2021-2022 school year, affecting over 1,600 titles. Of those, over 40 percent featured LGBTQ+ themes, and another 40 percent featured “protagonists or prominent secondary characters of color.” Corwin, a Sage company and K-12 professional development publisher and service provider that is working to dismantle injustice, cohosted a webinar with PEN representatives and the equity author community. The event helped to raise awareness among staff and kicked off an effort to work toward a coalition with like-minded associations and publishers to stop the banning.
In a year when threats to academic freedom also hit close to home, Sage was the main sponsor for the Robert B. Downs Intellectual Freedom Award, joined the Unite Against Banned Books Campaign, and put together two panels of intellectual freedom experts to discuss the role the academic community can—and should—play amid institutionalized censorship and an increasing tempo of book banning.
