Notes on the 2024 PLA Conference

By an Anonymous Public Librarian

Photo by Oz Seyrek on Unsplash

As a public librarian, I often have the opportunity to attend conferences around North America, and this included the recent Public Library Association (PLA) conference in Columbus, Ohio (April 2-5, 2024). PLA, a division of ALA, holds these conferences every other year to provide a public library-focused learning experience. 

In planning my itinerary, I was dismayed to note that according to my rather unscientific scan of the conference program, as many as one third of the sessions would be inspired by DEI orthodoxy, identitarianism, and/or critical social justice theory. But having committed to going, I went along to see if my impressions were correct. 

The short answer is they were. The sessions I attended frequently exhibited left-progressive bias in sometimes subtle and sometimes explicit ways. I was only able to attend a small portion of the programming on offer, and some sessions I attended were irrelevant to questions of social justice, so my notes here cover a couple of the keynotes and several sessions on intellectual freedom. However, I resisted the temptation to attend the most obviously “woke” sessions solely for the sake of quenching my oppositional thirst. Here’s what I heard.

Opening keynote with Shola Richards

The keynote was introduced by PLA president Sonia Alcantara-Antoine, who set the tone with some standard talk about social justice being the mission of libraries. Richards, however, mostly stayed away from that topic, but the left-progressive bias was evident in his framing of the need for “kindness” in the workplace. His examples of unkindness included gaslighting someone after they’ve experienced discrimination. He also stressed the importance of being kind to yourself, such as by setting boundaries and saying no, as well as removing yourself from toxic relationships even when they are family.

The talk also emphasized the importance of “psychological safety” in the workplace. As he convincingly said, workplaces need to ensure employees do not fear humiliation for their questions, ideas, or mistakes, and should choose curiosity over judgment. However, he strayed back into SJ territory when he opined that “all bad behavior is an unskilled expression of an unmet need” and talked about the need to speak up when others are mistreated. He also encouraged the audience to reimagine resilience: don’t “suck it up”, instead find someone to stand with you.  In sum, he was an engaging speaker but his embrace of a culture of safetyism and a mantra of “just be kind” was clearly aimed at a progressive (young) audience, who lapped it up eagerly.

Big Ideas Keynote with Bettina Love

A last-minute replacement for scheduled speaker Ta-Nahisi Coates who cancelled due to illness, Bettina Love is a self-described “abolitionist educator” who clearly has a passion for serving underprivileged K-12 students, but who cloaked her entire speech in an outdated racialist portrayal of the United States that left many questions unanswered.

The first of these is, what exactly is she trying to abolish? It was never clearly defined, but it appears she takes aim at the so-called “school to prison pipeline” as well as several education reform initiatives such as charter schools, teacher merit pay, and standardized testing.  But her scattershot aim was a litany of complaints with very little evidence to support them. She complained that while her generation is the first post-Civil Rights cohort, they were all called “crack babies” and “super predators” while the real predators are the testing companies who are “snatching up Black kids and disappearing them”. She broached the topic of “book bans” in schools by asking the question, who is banning them? Her answer: Black teachers make up less than 10% of educators, so do the math: it’s white women.

The second question is, how does she propose to abolish these things? Other than describing how her organization provides resources to help parents opt out of testing (for which she provided no evidence of negative consequences), there was little in the way of concrete examples. She exhorted the audience to “go for broke” by fighting to prove that Black and Brown kids are full humans, going so far as to say that the very fact that she has to fight for these things is of itself racist. She talked about the importance of teaching kids to use their own voice and helping them to find their identity. 

Love did present some food for thought when she talked about the inequities in education funding between school districts, reasonably pointing out that a child’s ZIP code is a reliable predictor of school success. Her comments about Avanced Placement courses often being unavailable to kids who qualify was sobering. But her highly politicized and catastrophizing tone was frequently untethered from reality. Her concluding remarks: young people today give us hope because they live in a world that denies their identity, yet they wake up every day and resist. The audience, of course, loved it.

Sessions on intellectual freedom

Given the current panic about “book bans” it was not surprising that several sessions were planned on the topic, and it is certainly of interest not only to myself but to public librarians broadly. But what I found was that all the sessions were undergirded by an assumption that the current wave of book challenges is motivated solely by bigotry and extreme right-wing and anti-LGBTQ views. There was no acknowledgement that perhaps library acquisitions are perceived as ideologically captured, or that some works perhaps are age inappropriate. Quite the opposite: there was much pearl clutching about the need to protect minority identities and the underlying suggestion that the LGBTQ community needs sexually explicit content in a way the cishet world does not. 

Certainly, the sessions used data to correctly identify the rising quantity and the organized nature of reconsideration requests for library books. They also convincingly pointed out that while parents have the right to choose the books their own kids read, they do not have the same right over what others’ kids read. 

But the overriding message was that would-be book banners are working against the inclusion and equity your library is so desperately working towards. Libraries are simply scapegoats, innocent non-political institutions working for an objectively defined concept of access to information. The challengers, according to many presenters, are not concerned about a particular book, but about the ideas it contains, and these are always ideas that are favorable to marginalized groups (or at least to a progressive-left perception of what’s good for them). 

Some sessions talked about initiatives to preserve access and fight against censorship, which also occasionally exemplified the bias towards defending only progressive content. For example, the Books Unbanned project from Brooklyn Public Library, which provides access to eBooks for anyone in the US affected by a local ban, was described explicitly as having been founded to resist book bans that come from a “heteronormative point of view”.  Another library framed complaints against age-inappropriate content as “homophobia” by definition, and reacted by separating their children’s classifications into two, creating a separate K-grade 2 section. They called that “playing ball with conservatives” but I would imagine it did little to allay fears about sexualized content.

There was, however, some acknowledgement of the nuance of the situation, including admissions that perhaps age restrictions are not totally uncalled for. In reference to the Arkansas legislation that puts reconsideration decisions into the hands of politicians and not librarians, it was suggested that perhaps moving a contested kids book to the adult section was not a form of censorship. One speaker talked about how the reconsideration process can be positive, allowing a library to check to ensure a title meets their selection criteria, and often may result in buying other titles to satisfy the complainant's need. There was also a good fact-based discussion about how, under US law, the challenged books do not generally meet the definition of “obscenity” even when the more stringent underage criteria are applied.

In addition, some speakers indicated that not all the complainants are extremists that can be dismissed. They have the right to exercise their First Amendment rights too, and we should try to appeal to our shared values, because we are all interested in what’s good for kids. 

But this was counterbalanced by an almost mocking tone in reference to the complainants, referring to them variously as antigovernment extremists, privileged, people who can’t pronounce the sex acts they are complaining about, people who “breathe different air than us”, and in one case, comparing them to a particularly laughable and incompetent Pokémon character.

The overall conclusions in relation to controversial kids' materials seemed to fall back to the ALA party line: libraries cannot act in loco parentis, and parents who object to certain content need to take their own steps to shield their children from what they find objectionable. There was no suggestion that the ALA’s Library Bill of Rights, which asserts that minors have the same intellectual freedom rights as adults, might be outdated; in contrast, there was some trepidation expressed regarding the LBOR’s call for “multiple points of view”. 

At no point was there any whiff of dissent among the attendees, and it is doubtful if any would have been comfortable in expressing a contrary point of view (I certainly wasn’t). Instead, these sessions, and what I took in of the whole conference, seemed designed to reinforce the left-progressive views of most participants. The most telling example was when one attendee, without a hint of irony and to knowing nods from those assembled, proudly told the story of filling out a reconsideration form at their own library for a book deemed “transphobic”. It all added up to one message: we want intellectual freedom, diversity, and inclusion, but only for the right viewpoints.

---

To promote viewpoint diversity, Heterodoxy in the Stacks invites constructive dissent and disagreement in the form of guest posts. While articles published on Heterodoxy in the Stacks are not peer- or editorially-reviewed, all posts and comments must model the HxA Way. Content is attributed to the individual contributor(s).

To submit an article for Heterodoxy in the Stacks, submit the Heterodoxy in the Stacks Guest Submission form in the format of a Microsoft Word document, PDF,  or a Google Doc. Unless otherwise requested, posts will include the author’s name and the commenting feature will be on. We understand that sharing diverse viewpoints can be risky, both professionally and personally, so anonymous and pseudonymous posts are allowed.

Thank you for joining the conversation!