College and Research Libraries


Letter 

To the Editor, 
C&RL and Ronald Bukoff, author of 

"Censorship and the American College 
Library" (C&RL 56 [Sept. 1995]: 395-407), 
were not well served by your editorial 
readers. The article could and should 
have been much improved if its conclu-
sions were to be given credence on such 
an important topic. As it is, the statement 
that "censorship is ... flourishing in 
American college and research libraries" 
cannot be regarded as proven and should 
not be further disseminated as fact. 

The statistical basis for the study is 
weak. The survey sample of 110 colleges 
(much less the actual sixty-eight respon-
dents) is too small to be taken seriously, 
and the author provides no indication of 
what the level of expected error is, a mini-
mum requirement. He indicates a misun-
derstanding of sampling work by saying 
in his conclusion that "one-third of the 
libraries surveyed" experienced censor-
ship. Not so: one-third of his sixty-eight 
respondents reported censorship. The au-
thor also fails to address the high likeli-
hood that nonrespondents will be less 
likely to have experienced censorship. 

Index to advertisers 

Ablex 8 
Archival Products 21 
Assn. of Amer. Univ. Pr. 34 
Assn. of Christian Libs. 34,57 
BIOS IS 2 
Blackwell cover 3 
EBSCO 5 
Library Technologies 22 
OCLC cover 2, 43 
PAIS 1 
Rand 34 
Readmore 58 
Todd Enterprises cover 4 

88 

But what is censorship? In 
such an article one would 
hope for a working definition 
(did he give one in his sur-
vey instrument? we don't 
know). Censorship may be 
variously defined as official 
attempts at suppression or as 
any individual expression of a viewpoint 
hostile to another's world view. As it 
turns out, Mr. Bukoff includes all of these 
as well as simple vandalism in his count 
of censorship events, and in fact, these lat-
ter acts turn out to be his largest single 
category. This is not helpful if we want to 
analyze coldly the more dangerous en-
croachments of official suppression. But 
for this author "it is not always easy to 
say" what is censorship even when, in the 
quoted instance, he is describing a title 
withdrawn "because of the faculty 
member's strong views in opposition to 
the ideas found in the book." An author 
this unsure of his ground should be 
helped to refine his views. 

The author laudably tried to make his 
study comparable with earlier studies in 
academic libraries. A similar effort would 
be valuable in carefully defining censor-
ship, and also perhaps in using such data 
to compare censorship in academic librar-
ies with that in public libraries. Our re-
ceived wisdom is that there is much less 
in college libraries; Mr. Bukoff could do 
us a service next time by telling us 
whether or not this is true. 

Let me add that I found Paula De 
Stefano's article on use-based selection for 
preservation, in the same issue (409-418), 
engrossing, well written, and persuasive; 
an excellent piece. 

Peter Graham 
Associate University Librarian for 

Technical and Networked 
Information Services 

Rutgers University