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This chapter reveals how Keith Vaughan reconfigured his wartime journal-writing as a comprehensive autobiographical project that would record his memories and experiences and transform them into a creative product. Having declared a policy of full disclosure and a commitment to resist self-censorship, he embarked upon a programme of self-education, redolent of Bildung, that made his journal the record of a developing mind and that allowed him to fold influences from literature, philosophy, and modernism into his own writing. The first section of this chapter describes how Vaughan’s journal became a consciously literary autobiographical project concerned with time and memory, regarding the third volume as a distinct milestone wherein Vaughan first articulated his desire to write autobiography and began to fully recognize (and experiment with) the possibilities of life-writing. The second section focusses on Vaughan’s autodidacticism, which encompassed the reading of other life-writers and his discovery of seminal works (by such key figures as T. S. Eliot and Marcel Proust) that greatly influenced him and helped him to identify, albeit precariously, with Oxbridge intellectualism. The third section confirms the enduring importance of Vaughan’s journal as a continuous autobiographical document which he could refer back to and re-evaluate during periods of duress.

Robert Burns’s general reputation does not seem to be that of a political suspect, but his legacy has been bitterly contested in political terms ever since his early death in 1796. In this respect, he is a victim of Pitt’s policies of Alarm. He was dependent on local gentry and Edinburgh aristocrats, but had to hide his politics from them. His position in the Excise Office prevented him from political activity, forcing him to express his liberalism indirectly, including anonymous publication and coded language. Denounced by enemies, his political conduct was subjected to official inquiry. He was cleared, but the prospect of losing his job and facing debtors’ prison terrified him. He collected many Scottish folk songs, in which he could more freely express his opinions. He knew of Thomas Muir and the other ‘Scottish Martyrs,’ but his only poetical mention of them reveals his shame at having to keep silent.

This chapter analyses the intellectual responses to the structure of the censorship networks described in Chapter One. It considers a wide range of essays and books by prominent writers, lawyers, and philosophers that engaged significantly with the problem of modern censorship. Writers discussed include the American free speech lawyers Theodore Schroeder, Morris L. Ernst, and William Siegel, UK political and legal theorist Harold Laski, cultural commentators Clive Bell and Horace M. Kallan, as well as modernist writers T. S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, and Wyndham Lewis. The chapter reveals a preoccupation with the anonymity of censorship, as well as the way that the dispersed censorship structures of modern societies created acute and dangerous forms of psychic prohibition. It reads a number of these responses in the light of their acknowledged debts to philosophical explorations of censorship, repression, and the obscene by Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud.

Some of the hits taken by administrators will be delivered by those faculty members who have forgotten (or never knew) what their job is and spend time trying to form their students’ character or turn them into exemplary citizens. I can’t speak for every academic, but I am not trained to do these things, although I am aware of people who are: preachers, therapists, social workers, political activists, professional gurus, inspirational speakers. Teachers, as I have said repeatedly, teach materials and confer skills, and therefore don’t or shouldn’t do a lot of other things—like produce active citizens, inculcate the virtue of tolerance, redress injustices, and bring about political change. Of course a teacher might produce some of these effects—or their opposites—along the way, but they will be, or should be, contingent and not what is aimed at. The question that administrators often ask, “What practices provide students with the knowledge and commitments to be socially responsible citizens?” is not a bad question, but the answers to it should not be the content of a college or university course. No doubt, the practices of responsible citizenship and moral behavior should be encouraged in our young adults, but it’s not the business of the university to do so, except when the morality in question is the morality that penalizes cheating, plagiarizing, and shoddy teaching. Once we cross the line that separates academic work from these other kinds, we are guilty both of practicing without a license and of defaulting on our professional responsibilities. But isn’t it our responsibility both as teachers and as citizens to instill democratic values in our students? Derek Bok thinks so and invokes studies that claim to demonstrate a cause and effect relationship between a college education and an active participation in the country’s political life: “researchers have shown that college graduates are much more active civically and politically than those who have not attended college” (Our Underachieving Colleges). But this statistic proves nothing except what everyone knows: college graduates have more access to influential circles than do those without a college education.