ALAlienation
Nancy Pearl and Me: Reflections on the Changing Ethos of American Librarianship. Part 3 in a series by John Wenzler for Freedom to Read Week.
John Wenzler, guest contributor.
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?”
And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
—David Foster Wallace (2005)
And Me
My direct experience of ALA alienation was more private and less dramatic than Nancy Pearl’s.
I’ve already told the end of that story. I’ve described the 2022 ALA as the climax of a growing sense of professional unease with Pearl’s brand of librarianship, but it also marked the climax of my own growing sense of unease with the values of the ALA and its thought leaders.
That story started at the 2015 ALA Convention in San Francisco when I attended the session: “‘But We're Neutral!’ And Other Librarian Fictions Confronted by #critlib.” The session description promised a discussion of various criticisms of traditional librarianship developed by librarians who were using the #critlib hashtag.1 At that point, I was unfamiliar with #critlib, but the session looked like it would be an intellectually challenging diversion from the pragmatic or tech-focused presentations common at library conventions.
When I went to the presentation, it puzzled me. The four presenters—Emily Drabinski, Kelly McElroy, Nicole Pagowsky, and Fobazi Ettarh—were young, earnest, and committed to various social causes. They talked about their efforts to improve society while working in libraries, but they never explained why they thought that library neutrality was a fiction. It seemed like they just assumed that it was an outdated idea that prevented librarians from making the world a better place.
At the end, several audience members shared stories about good things that they had done in their own libraries. Most of their stories also seemed tangential to the question of neutrality, but one was especially puzzling. I don’t remember the details, but the librarian talked about helping a patron whose conservative political opinions differed from hers. She was disturbed by his politics, but kept her opinions to herself and helped him find what he was looking for.
When this story was met with approval, I thought:
“Wait, wait, isn’t that a textbook example of library neutrality? The librarian distinguished between her personal political beliefs and her professional obligation to provide unbiased service to a patron despite disagreeing with him.”
If everyone in this room approves of her actions, why are they also telling me that library neutrality is a myth?
After going home and thinking about it, I decided that the #critlib librarians had adopted some of the postmodern rhetoric that had been popular back in the ‘90s when I was in grad school and everyone was reading (or pretending to read) Foucault, Derrida, and so on. Although postmodernism, deconstructionism, anti-foundationalism and the like sound progressive and rebellious, I believed that the rhetoric was inconsistent with the goals of librarianship.
It also seemed to be inconsistent with the actual practice of the #critlib librarians. The story about unbiased service told at the convention suggested that they wouldn’t really discriminate against people they disagreed with or suppress ideas that they considered politically incorrect despite rhetorical complaints about neutrality which implied otherwise.
At the same time, I realized that I didn’t have any counterarguments. I had intuitions that I assumed were shared by other librarians, but no theories. Before 2015, I had never really thought about these questions because they didn’t seem to be up for debate. Now, thanks to #critlib, library neutrality became an unavoidable question for me.
Much of my free time over the next three years was devoted to reading about it. In addition to library literature, I read lots of political philosophy. Through an accidental Google autocorrect, I discovered that “liberal (not library) neutrality” was an important school of American political philosophy in the post Viet Nam era that provided deeper philosophical justification for neutrality in libraries. That led me to John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, Martha Nussbaum, and other philosophers in that tradition.
I read Wayne Bivens-Tatum’s Libraries and the Enlightenment, which led me to arguments about the Enlightenment,2 such as Kant’s “What is the Enlightenment?”,3 Jonathan Israel’s Radical Enlightenment, and similar books.4
In 2018, I emerged from my reading to share an argument in favor of library neutrality with a half-empty room at the ALA convention in New Orleans. The audience listened politely and asked good questions. I didn’t hear much about it afterwards, either pro or con, but I remember now an interaction that I failed to understand at the time.
After everyone else had left the room, a very young librarian came up to me and said something like:
“I can’t say what you just said at work anymore. My colleagues won’t let me. I think I’ll have to quit librarianship because of this neutrality stuff.”
I believe now that my response to her was totally inadequate because I assumed that she was asking me how to make an effective intellectual response to her colleagues. I suggested that she acknowledge that their beliefs emerged from a genuine desire to improve the world. If she started by showing them that she understood where they were coming from, they might be more open to listening to alternative opinions.
What I failed to see at the time was that librarians would ostracize a colleague for intellectual disagreement. Now, I sense that that was what was happening to her, but I didn’t get that in my gut until I saw what happened to Pearl in 2022.
The Pearl affair sticks in my craw because it’s made me cynical about my colleagues and the official propaganda of American librarianship.
In 2019, I wrote up my thoughts on neutrality for an article in portal: Libraries and the Academy that also received subdued, mostly polite, attention.5 One librarian, whose “Never Neutral” article I had cited, went on Twitter to complain that portal had made a horrible mistake in platforming me.6 How could such a respectable journal publish something so awful?
At the time, I saw her complaint as a half-formed intellectual critique rather than a serious attempt to cancel the article. That her Tweet immediately suggested suppressing ideas that she didn’t like just convinced me that Twitter was a bad environment for intellectual debate. The limited response to her Tweet, which went mostly unnoticed as far as I could tell, seemed to validate this view. But I wonder now what would have happened if I had been more famous, or more vulnerable (I had tenure long before I published the article), or more aggressive about promoting my views on social media.
Why was the response to Pearl’s improprieties in 2022 angrier and more intense than the response to mine in 2018 or 2019? Why did the attacks against Pearl affect me so much more? There are a couple of obvious answers.
First, what Pearl says and does gets noticed much more than anything that I say or do. If “America’s Librarian” expresses dangerous views, they have to be confronted. If I express similar views, they probably can be ignored and forgotten.
Second, Pearl chose a powerful example to make her point. If she had used the Flat Earth Society or some other crazy but politically anodyne theory to illustrate her view that we shouldn’t ban books that are wrong, the tension between her belief in intellectual tolerance and the profession’s growing anxiety about misinformation may have passed unnoticed. By choosing Holocaust denial as her example, she simultaneously exposed a deep contradiction at the heart of 21st century librarianship and offered anti-neutrality, anti-misinformation librarians an easy target to vilify on Twitter.
Another reason that Pearl fared worse in 2022 than I did in 2018 was the growing dominance of post-neutrality values among the movers and shakers of American librarianship. When I started my research on library neutrality in 2015, I already saw that critlibs, despite their self-perception as radicals and revolutionaries, were pushing against an open door. I had to go back to the 1970s for a robust defense of neutrality in the library literature because there was almost no response to the #critlib critique in the 21st century.7
I believe that #critlib became increasingly attractive after the market crash in 2008 because it responded to a general sense of dismay with American capitalism and made a powerful case for the value of librarianship at a time when many were concerned that the digital revolution had made libraries irrelevant. Enthusiasm for #critlib’s view of librarians as a moral vanguard for social justice grew as twopointopianism (the Annoyed Librarian blogger’s coinage for digital evangelism in librarianship8) faded in the 2010s.
But #critlib crested during the COVID lockdowns and George Floyd protests in 2020 and 2021. The resistance to public health measures due to misinformation (as many left/liberals saw it) and the brutal murder of a black man by the police seemed to prove that the #critlib view of America had been right all along. Librarians couldn’t sit on the fence and support the intellectual freedom of “both sides” when the disinformation being spread by one side and the deep racist intuitions of American society were getting people killed.
In 2022, Emily Drabinski, one of the librarians who had introduced me to the “fiction” of neutrality at the 2015 convention, was elected president of the ALA. In 2021 and 2022, ALA committees were rewriting old ALA guidelines based on #critlib ideas.9 Back In 2018, the ALA could still host a debate on the pros and cons of library neutrality. By 2022, post-neutrality wasn’t just the most popular view, but the only morally acceptable view. That’s why Pearl and Jason Reynolds felt compelled to recant immediately when they were criticized, and why I felt so dispirited as I watched what was happening to them.
Not only had I lost the argument against #critlib, but it seemed like it was no longer morally permissible to dissent.
Today—December 2024
When I visit Pearl’s Instagram and Twitter accounts today, I am pleased to see that she is enjoying a fulfilling literary life. She writes about her recent reads and recommends books. She hosts a monthly podcast for the city of Seattle where she interviews authors.10
I’m particularly envious of her puzzle habit. She posts pictures of “done and dusted” puzzles and tells us what books she was listening to while doing them. She looks so much happier today than she was as a child when dissatisfaction with her circumstances made reading her favorite escape.
A five-day Twitter controversy 30 months ago apparently has had no long-term effect on her life. It’s hardly a constraint on Pearl’s literary freedom that she has to listen to Jane Austen novels instead of David Irving’s histories while doing her puzzles. Nor have her concessions to the broader campaign against misinformation had much obvious effect.
I can hardly argue that Pearl was cancelled by the Twitter controversy in 2022. Actually, one could argue that her experience validates the virtues of free speech. She made a controversial statement in public and was heavily criticized for it. Then, she reflected on the arguments of her critics and changed her mind.
Speech and counter-speech gave her a new perspective and helped her understand the danger of misinformation in the 21st century. Isn’t that what free-speech advocates want? Why am I still thinking and it now? Wouldn’t I be happier spending my spare time doing puzzles while listening to the novels that I found in Book Lust instead of obsessing over a controversy that happened to someone else two years ago?
By writing my way through this, I’ve figured out that the Pearl affair sticks in my craw because it’s made me cynical about my colleagues and the official propaganda of American librarianship.
Today, the ALA constantly tells me that it supports intellectual freedom and opposes censorship. It celebrates Banned Books Week and the Freedom to Read Statement. It vilifies organized, right-wing groups that are trying to ban books that they don’t like. It defends lonely librarians in red states who get harassed for supporting intellectual diversity or even for giving patrons objective information about abortion.
The New York Times tells me that public librarians are superheroes11 for resisting the hate and vitriol directed against them for protecting the right to read.12 Activist library organizations like EveryLibrary send me weekly emails pointing to surveys which show that the vast majority of Americans oppose book bans and don’t want someone else telling them what they can and can’t read.13
All of that sounds great. I fully agree with the stated goals and principles. I’m happy that most Americans still want intellectual independence despite the increasing polarization of our politics. For me, the Freedom to Read Statement still is the most inspiring defense of literary freedom that I’ve ever read.
But—when I remember what happened to Pearl in 2022—can I still believe that most librarians are sincerely committed to it?
Yes, they are happy to defend authors they like against censorious right-wing fanatics, but right-wing fanatics are not the only ones trying to restrict intellectual freedom. In On Liberty, John Stuart Mill argues that the tyranny of collective opinion often is more dangerous to intellectual independence than restrictions imposed by political rulers:
Since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them.14
When right-wing groups try to use the power of the state to impose their views on libraries, the ALA does admirable work in protecting librarians against the tyranny of the magistrate, but I fear that librarians are losing the war against the tyranny of our own prevailing opinions and feelings.
I worry that we no longer even see the ideological consensus that is enslaving our souls.
John Wenzler is a librarian at Cal State East Bay.
Continue reading John Wenzler’s series for Freedom to Read Week, Nancy Pearl and Me: Reflections on the Changing Ethos of American Librarianship:
Part 1: From Action Figure to Antihero (February 20, 2025)
Part 2: Library Twitter's Push-Button Shushing Action (February 25, 2025).
References
Alter, Alexandra. “From School Librarian to Activist: ‘The Hate Level and the Vitriol Is Unreal.’” The New York Times, September 3, 2024, sec. Books. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/03/books/amanda-jones-librarian-book-bans.html.
Annoyed Librarian. “The Cult of Twopointopia.” Annoyed Librarian (blog), August 27, 2007. https://annoyedlibrarian.blogspot.com/2007/08/cult-of-twopointopia.html.
Berninghausen, David K. The Flight from Reason: Essays on Intellectual Freedom in the Academy, the Press, and the Library. Chicago: American Library Association, 1975.
Bivens-Tatum, Wayne. Libraries and the Enlightenment. Los Angeles (Calif.): Library Juice press, 2012.
Drabinski, Emily, Fobazi Ettarh, Kelly McElroy, and Nicole Pagowsky. “‘But We’re Neutral!’ And Other Librarian Fictions Confronted by #critlib.” San Francisco, 2015.
EveryLibrary. “EveryLibrary.” Accessed October 13, 2024. https://www.everylibrary.org/.
Farkas, Meredith. “Never Neutral: Critical Librarianship & Technology.” American Libraries, January 3, 2017. https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2017/01/03/never-neutral-critlibtechnology/.
Gibson, Craig, and Sarah Hartman-Caverly. “On Not Dismantling Libraries.” Substack newsletter. Heterodoxy in the Stacks (blog), August 27, 2024. https://hxlibraries.substack.com/p/on-not-dismantling-libraries.
Israel, Jonathan I. Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650 - 1750. Repr. Oxford: Univ. Press, 2003.
Kant, Immanuel. An Answer to the Question: “What Is Enlightenment?” London: Penguin, 2009.
Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty. 1901st ed. New York: Walter Scott Publishing Co., Ltd, 1856.
Parrish, Shane. “This Is Water by David Foster Wallace (Full Transcript and Audio).” Farnam Street, April 28, 2012. https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/.
Renkl, Margaret. “Looking for a Superhero? Check the Public Library.” The New York Times, September 23, 2024, sec. Opinion. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/23/opinion/book-bans-librarians.html.
Seattle Channel. “Book Lust with Nancy Pearl Episodes.” Accessed October 16, 2024. https://www.seattlechannel.org/BookLust/episodes.
Wenzler, John. “Neutrality and Its Discontents: An Essay on the Ethics of Librarianship.” Portal: Libraries and the Academy 19, no. 1 (January 2019): 55–78. https://doi.org/10.1353/pla.2019.0004.
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Drabinski et al., “‘But We’re Neutral!’ And Other Librarian Fictions Confronted by #critlib.”
Bivens-Tatum, Libraries and the Enlightenment.
Kant, An Answer to the Question: “What Is Enlightenment?”
Israel, Radical Enlightenment.
Wenzler, “Neutrality and Its Discontents.”
Farkas, “Never Neutral: Critical Librarianship & Technology.”
Berninghausen, The Flight from Reason.
Annoyed Librarian, “Annoyed Librarian.”
Gibson and Hartman-Caverly, “On Not Dismantling Libraries.”
“Book Lust with Nancy Pearl Episodes.”
Renkl, “Opinion | Looking for a Superhero?”
Alter, “From School Librarian to Activist.”
“EveryLibrary.”
Mill, On Liberty, p. 12.
Thanks, John, for an excellent concluding piece in this series--which highlights the groupthink and the subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) tyranny underpinning it. The censoriousness that accompanies "rightthink" and being "On the Right Side of History" is very much with us now. In a way, #Critlib has become the new hegemon that can't be questioned in a profession supposedly dedicated to intellectual and academic freedom and freedom to read. #CritLib champions need to question their assumptions about the ethos of librarianship, and likely, their entire worldview.
The young librarian who approached you after your talk at the ALA conference was manifesting "preference falsification" in dealing with his or her colleagues in the workplace. That is, by now, a familiar phenomenon for too many in the field who have reservations, or who want to ask questions, or who have more complicated views, about the idols of #CritLib. A great irony of our times is how the "critical" attached to "CritLib" may not mean "critically reflective" at all, or interest in real critical inquiry, but induction into groupthink itself in order to be part of the socially acceptable group in the field. Independence of thought, whether about the anti-empiricism of either woke Left, or populist Right, now requires summoning a lot of courage and stamina in order to avoid self-censorship, and to ask some of the searching questions you've asked.
Thanks again for writing these courageous and necessary articles.
"John Stuart Mill argues that the tyranny of collective opinion often is more dangerous to intellectual independence than restrictions imposed by political rulers"-- incredibly pertinent.