“Woke” librarians do more than go after the privacy of library workers—they attempt to destroy library workers. A librarian at University of San Francisco (USF), Randy Souther, turned a bibliography of heterodox black authors created by an org I am part of (Free Black Thought) into a resource with links to full texts for the USF community. For the sin of making writing by heterodox black authors more widely available, he was “labeled a racist, placed on administrative leave, and targeted for firing.” His fellow “woke” librarians viciously persecuted him and attempted to destroy his life. He did in fact lose his position and now works in a much less desirable position. These intolerant left-wing fascists cannot be allowed to continue to control libraries and library work culture. Read about the case here:
Inclusion as long as it strictly adhers to the party line. Historically left unguarded , the far right degenerates into authoritarian , and the far left into totalitarian ; your choice of Hitler or Stalin. This is how you undermine credibility for educational institutions and “liberal” causes. It’s how NPR did itself in.
Yeah, I'm reading through this and it is a quite one-sided account. We also know that the institution or the people involved can't really respond to these claims. Personnel matters are confidential after all, the university isn't supposed to discuss a leave decision, and the unnamed colleagues in question can't publish their version for a number of obvious reasons. This amounts to "believe all non-woke academics" essentially in its reasoning.
So, since you're not intellectually honest to provide any more detail than what Souther's personal account details, I did some sleuthing myself. This is how I would describe what occurred, taken into account what little we have as evidence from those other than Souther.
So, first, let start off and make notice of what is obvious from the get go. A LibGuide is not a personal project, it is in fact a library speaking in its institutional voice, and Souther, whose liaison assignments run to STEM subjects, published a curated bibliography on Black political thought without consulting a single colleague with subject expertise, then announced it to them as a finished fact. That is not a minor breach of etiquette; selection and curation are the core professional judgment librarians are paid for, and he exercised it in someone else's domain, using a list assembled by an outside advocacy organization whose framing he adopted wholesale rather than evaluating himself.
When colleagues raised that objection, his response was to explain his intellectual curiosity, cite Heterodox Academy's principles, and offer an apology carefully limited to the handling, reserving the substantive question, whether the guide's contents were defensible, to his own unilateral judgment. Which is frankly weird at best. Let's imagine the reverse scenario where the librarian in charge of say poetry wrote a LibGuide about biology and evolution which was influenced by say the Discovery Institute. Also, let's be frank, Souther's account concedes he was wrong about his role in the process while treating the content as beyond challenge, which is precisely the asymmetry in question his colleagues named as the problem in the first place according to Souther. And the essay itself completes this entire pattern. An internal professional dispute, in which he was cleared and reinstated from what I can tell, has been converted into a symposium keynote and a movement artifact, told entirely in his own voice, before an audience predisposed to receive it, the unnamed colleagues rendered as an anonymous chorus of accusers with no opportunity to respond.
In sum, your characterization of what occurred is not I would say born out by the record.
Your tribalistic refusal to even countenance the possibility that any aspect of his account has merit is why we have Trump. Congrats on being part of the problem.
No, I'm discussing your discourse, not the librarian in question. I mean, duh. Here, let me quote you: "These intolerant left-wing fascists cannot be allowed to continue to control libraries and library work culture." You're commentary is full of this boilerplate right-wing language.
Of course Fascism isn't a left-wing ideology. Which is why it attracts so many right-wing adherents. I understand a lot of right-wing types like to claim that Fascism is a left-wing ideology, but you've never had a successful Fascist state without it being allied with conservative political parties. Fascism is simply the end stated of right-wing populist politics. See Paxton's work on the issue.
The fact that you've been unwilling to provide a neutral source for the claimed events in question tells me a lot about you.
The fact that you think I'm rightwing is laughable. I've never voted Republican and have frequently voted Green. But unlike you, I have the eyes to see that my side of the political spectrum has become intolerant, totalitarian, and, like you, utterly blind to realities that are self-evident to everyone else.
This is one of the issues that pops up regularly in institutions that put activism first.
They set aside the training to get the nuts-and-bolts of service to patrons (language facility, resource accessibility) in favor of ideology. You cannot ride a bike safely without making sure that the components work smoothly!
Well said! I spent most of my childhood in libraries and loved my school librarian and those who ran bookworm clubs in the summer. To see the political takeover makes me so sad. It is bad enough that many independent bookshops push the agenda - the libraries need to remain neutral.
At our library almost all the employees, including at the reference desks, work in pairs. This makes it even more difficult to speak freely with patrons. They are also hiring employees who know little about libraries and how they work because they are more concerned with ideological conformity than competence.
Well, at least they're doing their part to train our future intellectual leaders to save the world from Climate Catastrophe at the world's leading STEM university.
MIT librarians train climate catastrophists to control the Wikipedia narrative
Just like teachers' and nurses' unions , this is overwhelmingly being promoted and enforced by women. Patriarchy not needed. And these young women are the future of what was once the Democratic Party.
Most violent crimes are “promoted“ by men. No matriarchy needed I guess to calm down those angry male impulses. See, these types of statements do nothing but lead towards divisiveness.
One part of the annoyingness of the question about the "racial" composition of the set of authors of the last five book that you read is that it presumes you're reading all the way through fiction or pop history or something like that. When I pick up a technical book, even if it's about vintage Lego robotics, I don't even know the author's _name_, and have taken _no_ time to explore their life history or parentage.
The question was invented by people who only understand books as ideology fodder, not sudden-need-to-mine-somebody's knowledge tools. Some of us are bent on actually doing something, not forever morphing ourselves into the most acceptable ideological contortion.
The question pointing to the racial identities of the authors of the last five books you read is deeply problematic. Not because we shouldn’t have to share that with others, but because we shouldn’t allow the idea to persist that if the authors are white males that is something to be condemned. My last five authors were Orwell, John Le Carré, Shakespeare, Homer, and Agatha Christie. I prefer the classics, but it doesn’t matter. Each person’s list will include whatever authors they feel inclined to read.
This is a genuinely bad article. Every load-bearing claim is a prevalence claim, and prevalence is the thing that the article does not establish. "Many libraries," "many librarians," trainings that "tend to be mandatory," etc., well you can't get there from two documents and one guy's blog post about UVA. The piece leans on all of these ambiguities a lot. "Many" is doing enormous work while committing to nothing falsifiable. And the closing move about trust eroding "as we are seeing now" is worse, because trust in libraries can actually be measured (and I imagine it is give all of the surveys we have for other institutions), so declining to cite like that it looks like a choice rather than a mere oversight IMO. If you're going to play in the realm of substantive claims you need load-bearing evidence to demonstrate such.
It is also the case that libraries can be less resistant to pressures to shut down talks that they have scheduled, if their sympathies are not with the talk. This has happened twice in my local Massachusetts area, most recently in Tewksbury, MA where a talk about sex differences and how they matter in sport by a sports physiologist was cancelled, the reason given being "staff bullying". I believe that the staff were being bullied, but I'm also pretty confident that they did not feel any strong internal conviction that made them want to be valorous; they were being bullied by the good people, after all. https://insidelowell.com/un-cancelled-a-victory-for-free-speech/ . Something similar happened at the library in Chelmsford, MA. https://www.christianpost.com/news/library-allows-pastor-story-hour-event-after-previously-canceling.html . I think both incidents involved the threat of lawsuits, but in the Tewksbury case a number of courageous Tewksbury citizens spoke up in defense of their free speech rights, also.
“Woke” librarians do more than go after the privacy of library workers—they attempt to destroy library workers. A librarian at University of San Francisco (USF), Randy Souther, turned a bibliography of heterodox black authors created by an org I am part of (Free Black Thought) into a resource with links to full texts for the USF community. For the sin of making writing by heterodox black authors more widely available, he was “labeled a racist, placed on administrative leave, and targeted for firing.” His fellow “woke” librarians viciously persecuted him and attempted to destroy his life. He did in fact lose his position and now works in a much less desirable position. These intolerant left-wing fascists cannot be allowed to continue to control libraries and library work culture. Read about the case here:
https://psu.pb.unizin.org/hxlibraries24curiositycontroversycourage/chapter/the-cost-of-free-black-thought/
Inclusion as long as it strictly adhers to the party line. Historically left unguarded , the far right degenerates into authoritarian , and the far left into totalitarian ; your choice of Hitler or Stalin. This is how you undermine credibility for educational institutions and “liberal” causes. It’s how NPR did itself in.
100%
FBT is a wonderful organization. Shame on the commissariat destroying America's libraries, one at a time, and bit** by bit**.
Yeah, I'm reading through this and it is a quite one-sided account. We also know that the institution or the people involved can't really respond to these claims. Personnel matters are confidential after all, the university isn't supposed to discuss a leave decision, and the unnamed colleagues in question can't publish their version for a number of obvious reasons. This amounts to "believe all non-woke academics" essentially in its reasoning.
The "there's nothing to see here" crowd weighs in!
Let me guess. I should just accept the right-wing "lived experience" as "truth." ;)
The fact that you assume this librarian is rightwing tells me everything I need to know about you.
So, since you're not intellectually honest to provide any more detail than what Souther's personal account details, I did some sleuthing myself. This is how I would describe what occurred, taken into account what little we have as evidence from those other than Souther.
So, first, let start off and make notice of what is obvious from the get go. A LibGuide is not a personal project, it is in fact a library speaking in its institutional voice, and Souther, whose liaison assignments run to STEM subjects, published a curated bibliography on Black political thought without consulting a single colleague with subject expertise, then announced it to them as a finished fact. That is not a minor breach of etiquette; selection and curation are the core professional judgment librarians are paid for, and he exercised it in someone else's domain, using a list assembled by an outside advocacy organization whose framing he adopted wholesale rather than evaluating himself.
When colleagues raised that objection, his response was to explain his intellectual curiosity, cite Heterodox Academy's principles, and offer an apology carefully limited to the handling, reserving the substantive question, whether the guide's contents were defensible, to his own unilateral judgment. Which is frankly weird at best. Let's imagine the reverse scenario where the librarian in charge of say poetry wrote a LibGuide about biology and evolution which was influenced by say the Discovery Institute. Also, let's be frank, Souther's account concedes he was wrong about his role in the process while treating the content as beyond challenge, which is precisely the asymmetry in question his colleagues named as the problem in the first place according to Souther. And the essay itself completes this entire pattern. An internal professional dispute, in which he was cleared and reinstated from what I can tell, has been converted into a symposium keynote and a movement artifact, told entirely in his own voice, before an audience predisposed to receive it, the unnamed colleagues rendered as an anonymous chorus of accusers with no opportunity to respond.
In sum, your characterization of what occurred is not I would say born out by the record.
Your tribalistic refusal to even countenance the possibility that any aspect of his account has merit is why we have Trump. Congrats on being part of the problem.
No, I'm discussing your discourse, not the librarian in question. I mean, duh. Here, let me quote you: "These intolerant left-wing fascists cannot be allowed to continue to control libraries and library work culture." You're commentary is full of this boilerplate right-wing language.
Of course Fascism isn't a left-wing ideology. Which is why it attracts so many right-wing adherents. I understand a lot of right-wing types like to claim that Fascism is a left-wing ideology, but you've never had a successful Fascist state without it being allied with conservative political parties. Fascism is simply the end stated of right-wing populist politics. See Paxton's work on the issue.
The fact that you've been unwilling to provide a neutral source for the claimed events in question tells me a lot about you.
The fact that you think I'm rightwing is laughable. I've never voted Republican and have frequently voted Green. But unlike you, I have the eyes to see that my side of the political spectrum has become intolerant, totalitarian, and, like you, utterly blind to realities that are self-evident to everyone else.
Wow. What a novel idea. Demanding evidence of a claim. Do you have any of that, or do you just have more brain dead ham-handed insults?
Absolutely profound article detailing what we have all sensed in what should be the most neutral of all institutions, the PUBLIC library.
Hmm, there is very little detail. It's an argument built upon a handful of anecdotes.
Modern-day commissars, dispatched from the hive, and all women. Hmm...
Careful, Richard. Your manosphere is showing!
You should see it first thing in the morning!
This is one of the issues that pops up regularly in institutions that put activism first.
They set aside the training to get the nuts-and-bolts of service to patrons (language facility, resource accessibility) in favor of ideology. You cannot ride a bike safely without making sure that the components work smoothly!
Well said! I spent most of my childhood in libraries and loved my school librarian and those who ran bookworm clubs in the summer. To see the political takeover makes me so sad. It is bad enough that many independent bookshops push the agenda - the libraries need to remain neutral.
At our library almost all the employees, including at the reference desks, work in pairs. This makes it even more difficult to speak freely with patrons. They are also hiring employees who know little about libraries and how they work because they are more concerned with ideological conformity than competence.
Well, at least they're doing their part to train our future intellectual leaders to save the world from Climate Catastrophe at the world's leading STEM university.
MIT librarians train climate catastrophists to control the Wikipedia narrative
https://babblingbeaver.com/2023/02/02/mit-librarians-train-climate-catastrophists-to-control-the-wikipedia-narrative/
Just like teachers' and nurses' unions , this is overwhelmingly being promoted and enforced by women. Patriarchy not needed. And these young women are the future of what was once the Democratic Party.
Most violent crimes are “promoted“ by men. No matriarchy needed I guess to calm down those angry male impulses. See, these types of statements do nothing but lead towards divisiveness.
One part of the annoyingness of the question about the "racial" composition of the set of authors of the last five book that you read is that it presumes you're reading all the way through fiction or pop history or something like that. When I pick up a technical book, even if it's about vintage Lego robotics, I don't even know the author's _name_, and have taken _no_ time to explore their life history or parentage.
The question was invented by people who only understand books as ideology fodder, not sudden-need-to-mine-somebody's knowledge tools. Some of us are bent on actually doing something, not forever morphing ourselves into the most acceptable ideological contortion.
A question we should ask: Are libraries even relevant anymore?
404...
The question pointing to the racial identities of the authors of the last five books you read is deeply problematic. Not because we shouldn’t have to share that with others, but because we shouldn’t allow the idea to persist that if the authors are white males that is something to be condemned. My last five authors were Orwell, John Le Carré, Shakespeare, Homer, and Agatha Christie. I prefer the classics, but it doesn’t matter. Each person’s list will include whatever authors they feel inclined to read.
This is a genuinely bad article. Every load-bearing claim is a prevalence claim, and prevalence is the thing that the article does not establish. "Many libraries," "many librarians," trainings that "tend to be mandatory," etc., well you can't get there from two documents and one guy's blog post about UVA. The piece leans on all of these ambiguities a lot. "Many" is doing enormous work while committing to nothing falsifiable. And the closing move about trust eroding "as we are seeing now" is worse, because trust in libraries can actually be measured (and I imagine it is give all of the surveys we have for other institutions), so declining to cite like that it looks like a choice rather than a mere oversight IMO. If you're going to play in the realm of substantive claims you need load-bearing evidence to demonstrate such.
It is also the case that libraries can be less resistant to pressures to shut down talks that they have scheduled, if their sympathies are not with the talk. This has happened twice in my local Massachusetts area, most recently in Tewksbury, MA where a talk about sex differences and how they matter in sport by a sports physiologist was cancelled, the reason given being "staff bullying". I believe that the staff were being bullied, but I'm also pretty confident that they did not feel any strong internal conviction that made them want to be valorous; they were being bullied by the good people, after all. https://insidelowell.com/un-cancelled-a-victory-for-free-speech/ . Something similar happened at the library in Chelmsford, MA. https://www.christianpost.com/news/library-allows-pastor-story-hour-event-after-previously-canceling.html . I think both incidents involved the threat of lawsuits, but in the Tewksbury case a number of courageous Tewksbury citizens spoke up in defense of their free speech rights, also.