Last week, Calvin University celebrated Banned Books Week. Aimed at raising awareness and starting new conversations, the week included programming in Hekman Library, a featured lecture, and displays. 

Amanda Matthysse, librarian and researcher at Hekman, said, “Banned Books Week is really fun. It’s one of those literary holidays that probably not a lot of people know about, but it’s a big deal in the library world.” The library also announced a month‑long reading group culminating in an Oct. 28 discussion of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and displayed banned or challenged works by past Festival of Faith and Writing guests.

Professor Eric Washington of the history department spoke in the Meeter Center Lecture Hall on Tuesday, Oct. 7, about the banning and challenging of books from authors of color. He defined the terms: “A book challenge is when a person or a group objects to a book’s content, raises some kind of objection, and calls for its restriction…” He explained that when he first came to Calvin, he hesitated to assign controversial texts but concluded that “this is still a university … I would be shortchanging my students if I did not assign certain texts that are important for us to understand and talk about.” He added, “Reading good books that press against these dominant narratives … that are historically informed, historically grounded [gives] us a critical lens.”

Matthysse explained that challenges often focus on “concerns about inappropriate content for minors.” Matthysse continued, “So the interesting thing about that, of course, is that inappropriate content can mean a lot of things to a lot of different people.” Matthysse suggested that this is why libraries don’t remove contested titles: the role of the library is not to decide for readers. “Libraries stand for access. We are not here to instill any kind of requirements or ideology, or philosophy in our readers. They make their own decisions.” 

On student action, she added, “Continuing to read and to seek out more information about the books that cross your path and taking an active role in looking for those things is a great thing that we can all do.” With this, every act of reading a controversial book becomes a refusal to let others determine what boundaries are to be put on knowledge. 

Professor Sabrina Lee of the English department built on Washington’s lecture by emphasizing historical continuity: “It’s not something that’s new … it’s something that’s much longer, dating back even to the colonial period.” 

Freshman student senator Sophia Nelson commented on the event, saying, “I like Banned Books Week, I think that it’s really important, especially during this time of political unrest, we need to be drawing attention to banned books because we need to be asking certain questions and raising certain ideas.” 

Rather than remaining an idle bookshelf with an explanatory poster, Banned Books Week has taken on a fundamental question: who decides what stories are told, and who gets to take part in those stories?