How Librarians' New Social Justice Mission Goes After the Privacy of Library Workers

When libraries abandon institutional neutrality in favor of activism, the costs are not only borne by patrons but by the workers expected to conform.

Libraries have been advancing democracy and social justice long before they became consumed by critical social justice ideology a decade ago. They served that mission by providing free access to books and inculcating a love of learning in children, teens and adults of all socioeconomic backgrounds. University libraries supported the mission of their parent institutions, which was to build and transmit knowledge across generations. These goals have always been integral to advancing society by creating community spaces, more equitable access to education, and an informed population.

Unfortunately, many of today’s libraries reject the library profession’s foundational value of institutional neutrality: that is, the development of balanced collections, services and programming. The value that has displaced institutional neutrality is “social justice,” meaning that many librarians see it as the library’s job to educate people about what they see as the right way to think about contested social and political issues.

Tailoring library collections and programming to reflect their worldview, or not allowing certain groups to meet in the library, are the main tools librarians use to advance a “social justice” mission. But just as important for these librarians is to work with people who agree with them, and enthusiastically.

Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) staff trainings are one vehicle for communicating the social justice worldview—while at the same time encouraging staff to defer to the activists by raising the cost of disagreement. These trainings tend to be mandatory (whether explicitly or effectively). New training guidelines were developed in 2022 by the American Library Association’s College & Research Libraries division, replacing just ten-year old cultural competency guidelines that were based on longstanding library best practices. Instead of learning practical steps to serve populations who speak languages other than English, for example, the new Cultural Proficiencies for Racial Equity guideines encourage libraries to implement a staff training program that aims to develop only four competencies: awareness of racial identity, manifestations of racism, commitment to countering racism, and analysis of racialized outcomes.

“As LIS workers, our foundational growth is strengthened by an ability to identify and acknowledge ways in which whiteness and white supremacy have impacted the field of librarianship. Beyond this, Libraries and LIS workers must actively engage in practices that address and redress these inequities.” (Cultural Proficiencies for Racial Equity, ALA, 2022)

It is typical in these DEI trainings to elicit, and then to probe and challenge, the personal beliefs of individual library workers. You can see this proselytizing mission clearly by dipping into the content of any of these trainings (a good example is this account of a former longtime University of Virginia Library employee’s DEI training program). If a library worker challenges anything in one of these trainings it will be made clear to them that failure to embrace this content is unwelcome or even taken as a personal insult (e.g., “denying the existence” of the trainer’s identity); it may also result in a complaint to human resources or the library’s governing board, leading to an investigation or worse.

One staff training program in a university library asked workers “What are the last five books you read? What is the racial mix of the authors?” Those are questions that explicitly violate librarianship’s respect for privacy as articulated in the American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights: “All people, regardless of origin, age, background, or views, possess a right to privacy and confidentiality in their library use.” Do library workers not also have privacy rights? Is not one’s personal reading a private matter? Is it not an individual worker’s right to share—or not—their own beliefs without their employer trying to change those beliefs, or to cast judgment on them? Trainings such as these amount to forcing employer-endorsed political views on staff. They violate both library professional ethics and library workers’ personal privacy.

Just as how an organization treats its workers reflects the values of that organization, so does DEI staff training provide a window for outsiders to see into what a library culture is like. When a privacy-defending public service entity such as a library fails to protect the diversity of thought and privacy of its own employees it has shown itself to have profoundly lost its way.

Those librarians who build collections and workforces that conform to their own politics, and who subject their staff to a politicized workplace, jeopardize the position of trust their library has earned with its community. Trust in a library is built on its being useful and responsive to all segments of its community. Libraries are trusted because they help people think for themselves, without violating personal privacy and without opprobrium. They are big-tent institutions intentionally distanced from the tribal passions of the day. When librarians explicitly disavow institutional neutrality and privacy of thought in favor of becoming partisan institutions, the trust they have earned can be quickly eroded—as we are seeing now. Where we stand today, libraries are at risk of becoming simply another political pugilist in society instead of the glue that binds people together across our differences and between one generation and the next.

If the profession is able to reinvest in its core values, it may be strong enough to weather the damage. As in the broader society, there’s both a hunger and an opening for change right now in the library profession. This change is being pursued through an alternative professional association (the Association of Library Professionals), as well as FAIR for Libraries’ development of resources to support library board members and members of the general public who care about their libraries.

While undeniably weakened by politicization right now, libraries ranging from public libraries of all sizes and in nearly every community to multi-million-volume research libraries, still in meaningful ways embody the twin values of privacy and neutrality. Those values hold within them a profound democratic truth. And in that truth lies resilience.

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