According to PEN America, the movement to censor books in public schools across the United States is growing at an alarming rate. Texas is the unquestioned leader in this red-state wave of book banning, with, as of the 2021-22 school year, more than 800 books proscribed across 22 school districts. Its neighbor Oklahoma ranked fifth — although recent legislation makes clear that it has its eyes on the medal stand. But with the inaugural Switchyard Festival, “six days of music, literature, and ideas,” the University of Tulsa is jabbing its thumb right in the censors’ prurient eye.
“Switchyard” in fact names a three-pronged cultural initiative — a literary magazine, its spinoff podcast, and an accompanying annual festival — that debuted at the University of Tulsa, its sponsoring institution, at the end of May. “Switchyard will invite people to cross the tracks that once divided this city to explore our complicated histories, seek new points of connection, and activate the transformative power of art,” the festival’s website proclaims.
The agenda for the festival’s first three nights could hardly have been more pointed. Art Spiegelman, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus, spoke on opening night (Maus was banned by the McMinn County, Tenn., School Board in 2022). The festival’s second night featured a keynote address by Maia Kobabe, whose comics memoir Gender Queer has been banned in Tulsa’s public schools. A disappointing, but not surprising, honor: Gender Queer is the most frequently banned book in the country, according to PEN America.
On the third night the festival shifted a very significant three-quarters of a mile for the public debut of new work by another Pulitzer Prize winner, the former U.S. poet laureate Natasha Trethewey. The programming moved offsite from the downtown Hyatt Regency to the Greenwood Cultural Center, just north of I-244 and, more important, north of “the tracks.” The flourishing Black enclave of Greenwood, known in the early years of the 20th century as the “Black Wall Street,” was the scene of what may have been the deadliest episode of racial violence in U.S. history. On May 31, 1921, a white mob massed at the courthouse, marched from Tulsa to north Tulsa, and burned Greenwood to the ground. As Ted Genoways, editor of Switchyard magazine, writes, “Switchyard” — the magazine, festival, and podcast — “will invite people to cross the tracks that once divided this city into north and south.”
One of the earliest such invitations was the one Genoways extended to Trethewey: to come to Tulsa and write new poems about the massacre for the magazine. Trethewey agreed, traveling to Tulsa in November 2022 to meet with those excavating a mass grave that preserves the remains of some of the massacre’s numberless victims. The resulting poems are, Genoways told me, texts that could not under current law be taught in Oklahoma’s public schools. A new state law, HB 1775, which was enacted in May 2021, says no one in a classroom “should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex.” If the legislation has a nickname, like Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, I haven’t heard it. The “Defense of Heteronormative White Fragility Act” just doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.
In the festival’s opening panel, the director of PEN Across America, William Johnson, suggested that “these bills are vague on purpose,” and certainly HB 1775 casts a wide net. But arguably there’s something more going on here: The legislation cleverly parrots the progressive language of “safe spaces” while bending it to altogether different purposes. What began on the left with content warnings intended to prevent students from being retraumatized through classroom materials slowly deteriorated into the rather anodyne notion of “harm” — or, in the terms of the Oklahoma legislation, “discomfort.” By definition, no public-school student in Tulsa risks having to re-experience the trauma of the race massacre. But “psychological distress”? As Trethewey writes in “Notes for a Poem on the Tulsa Race Massacre,” “feeling bad for the actions of people in the past” is “a feeling akin to empathy.”
That’s not necessarily how state officials in Oklahoma see it. Last summer, Tulsa’s public schools had their accreditation downgraded by the State Board of Education under HB 1775 after one teacher objected to being forced to attend a 20-minute implicit-bias training session.
The strategic vagueness of such legislation creates a climate of fear; as the festival’s director, Sean Latham, commented, the risk is that “you’re never quite sure if you’re violating this law until, all of a sudden, you’re yanked from a classroom.” It creates an environment in which, for entirely understandable reasons, teachers and administrators start to police themselves — and to err on the safe side.
Latham and other organizers of the festival experienced such self-censorship firsthand: “When we were advertising Switchyard,” Latham said, “we created an email and a discount code that would let 100 Tulsa public-school teachers attend for a steeply, steeply discounted rate. The school district refused to send it out to the teachers because Maia Kobabe is on the schedule … That was enough that every administrator that we approached in the district said ‘no.’ They just don’t want to draw the wrong kind of attention.”
In an interview with Genoways for Switchyard magazine, Spiegelman suggested another motive behind the push to ban books: “They want to defund public schools. Their goal was to get people out of public schools, use public funds to thereby fund religious schools and charter schools, and thereby have more control over their children.” In the three years since the murder of George Floyd, we’ve gone from “Defund the Police” to “Defund the Public Schools.”
Organizers hope that the new festival and magazine might symbolize fertile artistic and cultural exchange, and defiance against the crackdowns of deep-red states competing for the title of Most Authoritarian Regime. The festival also suggests an increasingly important role for private institutions of higher education and public instruction, including museums and theaters. If public schools, public libraries, and arts and humanities organizations that receive public dollars are being scared away from challenging subjects, or being expressly forbidden to engage with them, then private institutions have an opportunity — and perhaps an obligation — to fill that void.
I sat down with the University of Tulsa’s president, Brad Carson, to talk about his vision for the university and the opportunities for a private university in a place like Tulsa. Carson left a faculty position at the University of Virginia to assume the presidency in the summer of 2021; he had served in the U.S. House of Representatives from Oklahoma’s Second District from 2001 to 2005, and as acting under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness during the Obama administration. A literary magazine like Switchyard, it turns out, is something he’d been dreaming about for a long time. “Even though I’m a politician by practice and a defense official,” he told me, “I grew up admiring what was happening at Kenyon College, or Sewanee, those great literary reviews.” He continued:
When I came to TU, I knew of course that [literary magazines] were in deep decline and disfavor and being eliminated at some places, or radically downscaled. And I’m a believer that they’re a key part of our mission. So I wanted to do that at the University of Tulsa, create kind of a journal like that, to lean into the winds that are wiping this kind of literary culture away.
I asked Carson whether Tulsa’s status as a private university was part of the calculation when wading into these culture wars — whether it has some opportunities that the University of Oklahoma and Oklahoma State, for instance, do not. He pushed back gently. “Not so much part of the calculation as kind of a serendipitous thing,” he told me.
We’re at a place where Texas has now banned DEI offices, for example; Oklahoma will probably do that. We’re a fast follower of Texas in politics, and culturally we’re very similar to that. We’ll certainly keep our DEI office — but OU and OSU won’t. We do have more latitude to explore things as a private institution. And so we have a FIRE chapter here; we don’t care that Ryan Walters is the state superintendent of education and has opposed these books. We do have a lot more latitude, but it’s almost serendipitous. We’re trying to be just a great university.
Me, I’m a three-degree graduate of the University of California system and spent the first 17 years of my tenure-track teaching career at state universities, before coming to my current position at Pomona College, a private institution, 15 years ago. I’m a strong believer in our nation’s public universities, the greatest public-university systems in the world; I’ve sometimes felt like a traitor to the cause in my current uncomfortably comfortable perch. But what’s happening at Tulsa does serve as a reminder that, in these times of assault on public education, private institutions have a critical role to play.
Switchyard won’t perpetually be engaged in programming against the current wave of censorship; one hopes the time is not too far off when that will no longer be necessary. But whether or not that comes to pass, Switchyard’s platforms appear ready to embrace the historical role of the university as truthteller — a role that public institutions in some red states, hamstrung and gagged, are finding increasingly impossible to perform.
Whatever topics the magazine, podcast, and festival decide to feature in coming iterations, one can only hope that they will be as courageous and timely as the conversations they’ve tackled in their auspicious inaugural year. As Genoways writes at the close of his introduction, “It is a dangerous time. Many of us, as we look around today, see a world on fire, but by renewing our commitment to our shared purpose and an honest engagement with the truth, we have an opportunity to extinguish the flames of rage and to rebuild stronger communities and a better country.”