On Not Dismantling Libraries

A retrospective on Heterodox Libraries (HxLibraries)’s first four years.

A timeline of key developments in HxLibraries (top) juxtaposed with the American Library Association (bottom), August 2020 to present.

Turning Points

Academic libraries have a vital role in the scholarly community. …In carrying out their activities, the American Library Association professional code of ethics calls on library workers to uphold intellectual freedom, including freedom of expression, freedom of access to information of one’s choosing, and privacy.

Summer 2020: a time of great uncertainty and turmoil, with COVID lockdowns in place, and racial justice protests occurring in the US and across the world. Both the pandemic response and, to a larger extent, the racial reckoning, ignited a tinderbox of contested professional values and practices in libraries—none more significant than the activist movement to replace neutrality. 

Anti-neutrality activists exploited public outcry over the murder of George Floyd, a Black man, by police in Minneapolis in the American Library Association (ALA)’s Resolution to Condemn White Supremacy and Fascism as Antithetical to Library Work, which asserts that “libraries have upheld and encouraged white supremacy both actively through discriminatory practices and passively through a misplaced emphasis on neutrality” and resolves that ALA “acknowledges the role of neutrality rhetoric in emboldening and encouraging white supremacy and fascism.” The resolution also charged a Working Group on Intellectual Freedom and Social Justice to review neutrality rhetoric and identify alternatives. The working group hosted listening sessions on alternatives to neutrality—radical empathy, trauma informed response, and cultural humility—and issued a final report proposing an “approach based on these frameworks [radical empathy, trauma informed response, and cultural humility] that meets the goal of building trust with our communities rather than using neutrality as our guiding value.”

At the same time, the ALA’s Committee on Professional Ethics (COPE) created a Subgroup on Social and Racial Justice that crafted a new principle for the Code of Ethics:

“We affirm the inherent dignity and rights of every person. We work to recognize and dismantle systemic and individual biases; to confront inequity and oppression; to enhance diversity and inclusion; and to advance racial and social justice in our libraries, communities, profession, and associations through awareness, advocacy, education, collaboration, services, and allocation of resources and spaces.”

This revision to the professional code of ethics explicitly politicizes libraries, coopting library collections, educational activities, spaces, and other resources to interfere with the freedom of conscience (described as “individual biases”) and to chase the shifting goalposts of social justice. With the adoption of this ninth principle in summer 2021, COPE recognized the need for “revision of the preamble to the ALA Code of Ethics principles to add context for the racial and social justice principle;.. and guidance for collection development practices that balance the Code of Ethics’ second principle (censorship) and the proposed ninth principle (social and racial justice).” Such revisions are likely to further weaken, rather than enhance, libraries’ express commitment to “intellectual freedom and the freedom of access to information.”

Then an active member of the American Library Association (ALA)’s Intellectual Freedom Round Table, Sarah advocated fruitlessly against this systematic degradation of intellectual freedom and library neutrality in professional values and practice. She learned to grow a thick skin when fellow library workers casually accused her of racism and white supremacy by Zoom chat. The ad hominems stifled meaningful debate as expressions of support came privately by email while the same people kept their silence (and thus their reputations) in public forums. Sarah also grew increasingly disillusioned with the ALA’s Office of Intellectual Freedom, which publishes the Intellectual Freedom Blog where she was a regular contributor in 2020-2021. When two of her submissions were censored from publication—a critical review of Safia Umoja Noble’s influential treatise, Algorithms of Oppression (in which the author advocates for censoring web search results) and a piece warning of the long-term implications of surveillance and censorship during the COVID pandemic (for which she was accused of spreading misinformation)—she recognized that the profession’s flagship intellectual freedom organizations were ideologically captured.

Craig experienced some comparable interactions with colleagues in the field during this supercharged period of uncertainty. Those interactions suggested to him a move toward greater conformity around a morally charged valence of “harm” in the field that made open discussion much more difficult, and an increasing self-censorship among many colleagues as pennants of identity politics appeared across the professional landscape. His observations about major professional associations such as ALA and the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) grew out of his experience of thirty years’ membership in both, including participating in such signature initiatives as ACRL’s Immersion Program and co-chairing the ACRL Information Literacy Standards Revision Task Force. His experiences showed a throughline: that the intellectual underpinnings of information literacy as an educational agenda for inquiry and critical reflection into the information ecosystem have been enriched by a particular kind of diversity—intellectual diversity.  Over thirty years, multiple perspectives brought into the field from around the world, and from a wider range of practitioner experiences, have positioned information literacy as a meta-discipline spanning modes of inquiry and canons of evidence from traditional academic disciplines, but also beyond them—in workplaces and in the practices of informed citizenship.     

However, the last decade has also seen a driving impulse toward conformity from one camp of activists within the field. Some who call themselves “Critical Librarians,” who practice “critical librarianship,” or who teach “critical information literacy” have increasingly urged that it be the single perspective, the one lens, the all-explanatory framework, for teaching and learning. This urging of a “single lens” became obvious to him in some of the responses to drafts of the Framework for Information Literacy as it was written. However well-intended this infusion of social justice-inflected pedagogy may be, it shuts down intellectual pluralism, diversity of thought, and open-ended exploration in information literacy practice and research. The drive to create a sacred totem around identities and infuse the “oppressor/oppression” narrative into the practices of librarianship, has, in some cases, become a hegemonic force against the historic principles of the field, which have always elevated freedom of thought, free expression, and wide and curious reading, to foster open inquiry and discussion within a civil society. Creating a “counter” against this drive for a stultified ideological monoculture became, for Craig, a new professional horizon. 

We both began this search for heterodoxy in the field based on recent experiences with library professional associations in which the dismantling of core values and principles related to intellectual freedom, replaced with a new identity-driven approach to library practice, created an uneasy sense of a profession in intellectual crisis. A growing monoculture made open discussion and debate professionally untenable. This inchoate sense of tensions within the field, compounded by the knowledge that colleagues were self-censoring because of the assumed moral imperatives for the profession, the resulting suppression of possible alternative explanations for complex social inequities, and accelerating news about cancellations of fellow academics, oriented us toward a common understanding about the core HxA values of open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement. A community committed to these core values provides a place for library professionals to renew themselves, connect with others experiencing the same challenges, and create a test bed or “idea lab” for new practices in the field grounded in the historic values of the profession, but with a renewed commitment to intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity in a time of great polarization and epistemic division.

This sense of unmooring from professional life inspired us to independently contact the Director of Membership at Heterodox Academy (HxA) to explore the possibility of starting a librarians community within HxA. Until that time, HxA had a number of disciplinary or regional interest groups to promote the HxA values of open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement, but no librarians group existed. HxA’s Director of Membership put us in contact, and we quickly met and discussed our own “origin stories” for moving toward a “heterodox” form of librarianship, and agreed to collaborate as co-moderators of the HxLibraries group. 

In our proposal to form HxLibraries, we wrote:

“Academic libraries have a vital role in the scholarly community. Academic librarians and library workers deliver research instruction and consult on student and faculty research; select, make discoverable, and ensure access to knowledge resources in their collections; collect and steward primary sources; perform research data management; facilitate open access and open education initiatives; and operate academic presses and other scholarly communications platforms. In carrying out these activities, the American Library Association professional code of ethics calls on library workers to uphold intellectual freedom, including freedom of expression, freedom of access to information of one’s choosing, and privacy.”

We committed HxLibraries to “provide an HxA member forum to explore heterodoxy in the context and practice of academic librarianship,” and to undertake activities including

• “current events awareness and discussion, 

• journal / book reading clubs, 

• expert panels or townhall discussions, 

• scholarly and professional communication collaborations, 

• library policy reviews and updates, 

• workshopping the development of lesson plans and teaching materials, 

• heterodox bibliography and resource selection, and 

• outreach to other professional associations.”

HxA staff approved our official status as an HxA community, and HxLibraries went live on August 27, 2020.

Wayfinding

Our first year was a quest to invite others to join us, to provide opportunities for discussing common concerns in the field, and to create programming that would open lines of inquiry for defining what our original idea for “heterodox librarianship”  could become.  We began with a dedicated online forum for posting and sharing resources, event announcements, reading lists, and other information to help forge a new conception of heterodoxy in the field. We also started monthly virtual Happy Hour meetings to give members an opportunity to share informal professional updates—whatever was occurring in their institutions that fostered, or preempted, open inquiry and other core HxA values; conferences or workshops they attended that they found especially germane to discussions of intellectual freedom; or scholarly activities in which they were engaged that might be of interest to other members of the group.  We quickly discovered common interests through these monthly Happy Hours, and more importantly, learned to trust each other in creating this virtual community.

One particular point of inspiration for us was HxCanada’s symposia, where members of that community give presentations on topics related to HxA’s mission in the Canadian context. We adopted that model and began offering internal symposia with HxLibraries group members leading discussions and giving presentations, in addition to our informal monthly Happy Hour meetups.

During this early phase, we developed a shared vocabulary by now familiar to many “heterodox” academics and others, informed by our individual experiences as well as  scholarship drawn from general social sciences, philosophy, psychology, political science, education, and various creative interdisciplinary thinkers, such as by-now classic writers like Orwell and Hoffer.  The terms that emerged to characterize our experiences and observations included groupthink, concept creep, Overton window, cancel culture, preference falsification, and safetyism. We also had these discussions in the context of broader debates occurring in the academy and elsewhere about Critical Race Theory, gender ideology, DEI mandates, COVID policies, and numerous other contentious issues.   Our more library practice-focused discussions often pointed toward these “culture war” flashpoints in the broader sociopolitical landscape.  

More recently, discussions in our HxLibraries portal have included the largely discredited ideas of implicit bias and microaggressions, which are staples in certain forms of diversity training; the definitional problems and practical implications relating to  mis-/dis-/malinformation; critical librarianship, often known as #CritLib, and its very politicized agendas for library practice; censorship beyond banned books, including skewed library selection practices and upstream trends in publishing and book reviews as well as the wider (and contested) “censorship-industrial complex”; discussions related to gender ideology; and the impact upon libraries of self-censorship and internal “cancellations” directed at individuals or viewpoints of groups. We strive to open lines of inquiry not often found elsewhere in the profession, at conferences or in library journals.

On Not Dismantling Libraries

HxLibraries is by no means a safe space for traditionalist librarians to bemoan the state of the profession in an echo chamber of privileged self-pity. HxA asks its members to take action for the values of open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement in education and research, and we strive to do so in the domain of librarianship and library and information science (LIS). HxLibraries is an incubator and accelerator for initiatives that advance open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement in LIS with connections to Heterodox Academy (HxA) and its network of members and allied organizations working toward the conditions that best promote teaching, learning, and research.

HxLibraries members bring a diverse array of educational backgrounds, professional roles and experiences, expertise, and personal perspectives. The only thing we can say with confidence that we all agree upon, by nature of our common membership in HxA, is the mission of open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement. We’ll also venture the guess that fellow HxLibraries members are invested in not dismantling libraries.¹ For all their imperfections, libraries and other epistemic institutions are foundational to human flourishing in self-governing societies. To paraphrase symposium keynote Sigal Ben-Porath, solutions to shared problems can only emerge from shared epistemic foundations and the freedom to candidly discuss ideas. Libraries, by nature of their intellectual freedom mission and their role and position in society, serve both our shared epistemic foundation and freedom of expression. To dismantle libraries is to extinguish the light of enlightened society as a whole.

Instead of dismantling libraries, HxLibraries members take up the work of restoring and strengthening them. Independently and in collaboration, members engage in scholarly and professional communication, host symposia, develop pedagogical projects, guest appear on podcasts, create alternative professional associations, and more.

HxLibraries member Michael Dudley and collaborator John Wright’s work on the virtue of multidimensional neutrality in libraries provides a case-in-point. Michael and John co-presented their then work-in-progress for an internal HxLibraries Symposium in spring 2022. Their scholarship presenting library neutrality in the context of political science and city planning ethics informed 

• an open letter to the ALA Working Group on Intellectual Freedom and Social Justice arguing against the replacement of neutrality as a value in librarianship, 

• a practical application of their framework for library neutrality to managing library spaces, 

• a professional manifesto on library neutrality, 

• a practitioner primer based on their academic paper, and 

• an invited keynote talk for the inaugural Association of Library Professionals (ALP) Summit. 

Far from screaming into the void nor the HxLibraries echo chamber, Michael and John’s work was acknowledged by the ALA Working Group on Intellectual Freedom and Social Justice’s final report, and the ALA Intellectual Freedom Round Table featured their article in an IFRT Reads event.

Much of Michael and John’s work on library neutrality is (re)published on HxLibraries’ substack, Heterodoxy in the Stacks (HITS). HITS is home to heterodox views on LIS and features writing by HxLibraries members alongside guests posts on topics like DEI and #CritLib as threats to free speech; Banned Books Week, library challenges, and censorship; collection development (and decolonization / decanonization / decentering); ethics and professionalism; history and culture; and much more besides. HITS has a steadily-growing subscriber base of nearly 800 readers with posts that regularly receive upward of a thousand views, having welcomed 150 thousand visitors in the past two and a half years. 

HxLibraries evolved our symposium model from private, internal meetings to open scholarship events that welcome HxA members from across the disciplines, other academics, LIS and higher education professionals, journalists, and members of the public. Our most recent symposium in May 2024, Curiosity, Controversy, and Intellectual Courage,² featured an invited expert panel, peer-reviewed lightning talks, a keynote, and a common read discussion. Dr. Sigal Ben-Porath, author of common read title Cancel Wars: How Universities Can Foster Free Speech, Promote Inclusion, and Renew Democracy, delivered a keynote on upholding freedom of inquiry and inclusion on university campuses as part of higher education’s role in establishing the shared epistemic foundations necessary for democratic society. Dr. Beatriz Villarroel, winner of HxA’s 2023 Open Inquiry Award for Intellectual Courage; Samantha Harris, Esq.; and Dr. Tabia Lee provided panel remarks and engaged in Q&A on the symposium theme. Colleagues delivered peer reviewed lightning talks discussing the practical implications of curiosity, controversy, cancel culture, privacy, and intellectual courage in higher education and librarianship. Participants ended the day with a discussion of the common read title, keynote Ben-Porath’s Cancel Wars. HxLibraries published our first symposium proceedings, making session recordings and contributed papers easily discoverable, publicly accessible and freely licensed for reuse. Our symposia have engaged nearly 300 live participants and 800 registrants along with countless recording views in the past three years.

On the pedagogy front, Craig and Sarah collaborated with a third contributor on the grant-funded Open Inquiry Toolkit developing an epistemic virtues-based approach to information literacy and library research instruction. The Open Inquiry Toolkit presents curriculum, course, and assignment design guides informed by intellectual virtues and cognitive biases. Librarians and other teaching faculty can use these learning design guides to enrich curricula, assignments, class discussions and learning activities with open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement. Funded by the Mercatus Center’s Pluralism and Civil Exchange Program, this collaboration

• produced Creative Commons-licensed open educational resources,

• delivered three workshops to promote the open inquiry model,

• released self-study materials based on the workshops, and

• organized a new repository for librarians and faculty to share open inquiry-based course materials.

Craig and Sarah discussed the Open Inquiry Toolkit with Drew Perkins on the ThoughtStretchers Education Podcast. The three project consultants have also been invited to lead a discussion on the open inquiry project, as well as pluralism in libraries in general, at the second Pluralism Summit hosted by the Mercatus Center.

Partnerships

As an HxA Community, we have learned much about the network of organizations which also promote intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity.  These include: 

ACTA (American Council of Trustees and Alumni). A particular focus of the ACTA is education for citizenship along with excellence in scholarship and teaching, along with educating governing board members about key issues in the academy.  Maintains a ranking system for parents to compare institutions, based on analysis of courses, “What Will They Learn?”

AFA (Academic Freedom Alliance). A nonpartisan association led by faculty champions of academic freedom and faculty expressive rights, for other faculty. Membership currently by nomination.   

FIRE (Foundations for Individual Rights and Expression). The leading organization (now replacing ACLU) as the champion for freedom of expression and First Amendment rights, for timely updates on court cases and examples of both good and bad reasoning about free expression rights.   FIRE promotes networks for faculty, students, and alumni, and sponsors an annual conference for faculty to showcase scholarship on freedom of expression and academic freedom.  

HxA (Heterodox Academy). The parent organization to HxLibraries dedicated to restoring the truth-seeking telos of universities through robust open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement.

IHS (Institute for Humane Studies). A classical liberal institute supporting broad conversations and scholarly collaboration among faculty, especially early career scholars and graduate students.  The IHS promotes the classical liberal values of individual rights, open inquiry, and intellectual pluralism through an active program of research seminars, symposia, member-led discussions, and coordinated events with other professional associations such as the HxA.

ILV (Institute for Liberal Values). A champion of liberal values in all types of organizations and within communities.  The ILS works against censorship and promotes free expression without regard to political or cultural views, and offers toolkits, a podcast series, and regular programming.

Mercatus Center, Pluralism and Civil Exchange program. Aimed at fostering pluralism and civic dialogue, the Mercatus Center’s Pluralism and Civil Exchange program funded the Open Inquiry Toolkit project and invited project consultants Craig, Sarah, and collaborator Christina LaRose to lead a breakout discussion at their 2024 Pluralism Summit.

NAS (National Association of Scholars). The National Association of Scholars promotes the traditional values of the academy focused on scholarly rigor, sound teaching, and the pursuit of inquiry without politicization, with a particular emphasis on renewing liberal arts education.

We promote symposia and the Open Inquiry Project through the IHS and the ILV, and are learning how to connect with various associations in order to advance our own programming and also support partner institutions’ missions. In this network of groups promoting the general HxA values, HxLibraries is becoming known for making connections and building capacity toward Jonathan Rauch’s conception of the web of “epistemic institutions” that create an “epistemic commons” that preserve and advance an intellectually free, liberally ordered society in the midst of many other divisions, political, cultural, and epistemic. We believe that libraries of all types can renew themselves and contribute to human flourishing made possible in liberal democracies. 

Honored (and Humbled)

The HxLibraries community received the Heterodox Academy Open Inquiry Awards 2024 HxA Community Excellence Award, and the group was recognized at the 2024 HxA conference in Chicago. The HxA Community Excellence Award recognizes “the Heterodox Community that has done the most to advance or sustain open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement in their discipline.” In the award announcement, HxA recognized HxLibraries

for elevating discourse about open inquiry and viewpoint diversity in the library sciences. Launched in 2020, Heterodox Libraries provides a forum for addressing the culture war challenges facing libraries to ensure that libraries continue their work of providing access to information and diverse viewpoints to academic communities and the public. The community also hosts regular virtual symposia examining a range of issues facing librarianship, intellectual freedom, and information culture that feature a keynote address, small breakout group discussions, and Q&A to promote sharing information and perspectives across lines of difference. The group also launched Heterodoxy in the Stacks on Substack to share issues of viewpoint diversity in the library sciences with a broader audience. Many Heterodox Libraries members are also charter members of the Association of Library Professionals, a new organization dedicated to library neutrality, open inquiry, and intellectual freedom.

On Not Reading the Tea Leaves

Our four years’ experience in HxLibraries shows what is possible in group formation and new thinking within our field. With a small and dedicated group sustained by growing interest and membership, we have found ways to advance the discipline and provide new opportunities for librarians who want to develop professionally and connect with others in doing so.

We could venture some guesses as to where HxLibraries goes next—but we’d rather discover these directions alongside you. The future of HxLibraries will be decided by our members and the effort they invest. We invite prospective members enthusiastic about endorsing—and working toward—the HxA values of open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement in LIS and education. If shaping the future of heterodoxy in LIS interests you, please contact Craig Gibson or Sarah Hartman-Caverly and join us at HxLibraries.

1. They can correct us in the comments here (or better yet, contribute a contrariwise post to Heterodoxy in the Stacks!)

2. This project was supported in full by Heterodox Academy. The opinions expressed at this event (or through such activities) are those of the individual Grantees, organizers, speakers, presenters, and attendees of such events / activities and do not necessarily reflect the views of Heterodox Academy.

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