Required to Recite the Mainstream Narrative to Graduate

Are LIS programs educating or indoctrinating the next generation of information professionals?

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By an anonymous recent MLIS graduate.

I waited until I had my degree not only in hand but framed before I submitted this. In a previous world, my working assumption was that institutions follow the rules of fairness regardless of whether they agreed with your politics because what does it even mean for a university to “have politics?” And yet, of the three master’s degrees I have attempted, only one fostered a real sense of safety among students and professors to share minority ideas, and that one was not my MLS. If this essay had appeared before I had my degree safely in hand, I would be inclined to worry they were not going to confer it because of my refusal to tow the party line - my choice to stay silent, even, when I disagree with the reading or a classmate’s comment or an instructor’s offhanded remark categorizing things I believe as evil.

Like Luc Lelièvre wrote in When Collegiality Becomes Censorship a previous edition of this newsletter, I did not feel that the university fostered an open or inclusive environment in which to learn. Rather, earning my MSLIS felt like a prolonged hazing gambit, one in which I had to memorize the oppressor/oppressed belief system as if it were fact, be ready to recite all the reasons I hate everything about cultural and ancestral heritage since it’s Western (which, as Jonathan Lawler writes, is part of how most universities that provide librarian credentials train students, so it’s not like I can easily seek an education free of this ideology), and make sure I am providing proof that I hate the right people, including myself, my family, my husband, and anyone else who can be characterized as white. If I didn’t? I was racist. Fragile. Oppressing everyone who is not white. If I spoke up, I was centering myself. If I stayed silent, I was committing “violence.” My disability was deemed less oppressive, less painful, less burdensome, less real because I’m white. All of my challenges were demoted in the face of my whiteness. This was diversity, equity, and inclusion, and if I even asked questions - in an institute of higher education - about the contradictions I saw, I’m a fascist.

I experienced working toward a master of science in library and information sciences as professors and students alike believed that truth seeking is a pathology, especially if it encourages questioning the official narrative at all. Almost every instructor I had (though mercifully not all) assumed political agreement. Instructors regularly made aggressive comments demonizing and dehumanizing anyone who did not agree with the official narrative (that is, the Leftist ideology), and it was clear there was no room for challenge or difference of opinion. If instructors had fostered discourse and a balance of viewpoints, though, peers did not fail to ostracize or initiate struggle sessions.

At the same time I was being exhorted that librarians’ most important role is ensuring access to information for all patrons, my personal values were being openly and regularly disparaged by my classmates and instructors alike, labeled as that which patrons shouldn’t be encouraged to adopt and should be “challenged” or “questioned” about by librarians who come across them. The assumption in every class except one that I completed for my MLS was that everyone was Progressive/left leaning and the unspoken expectation was that no one should even speak to someone who doesn’t agree, not even if they are a fellow classmate or one’s student. If you are conservative, you are not only intellectually inferior, you are evil and existential dangerous.

How did people at my institution “know” you’re conservative? It wasn’t because many people said so directly; not one fellow student ever did that I experienced. No, people “know” you’re conservative if you asked questions. In other words, if you didn’t repeat what the instructor or other classmates said, you were outing yourself as an inferior human who should be ostracized and silenced. I made only one statement about being more balanced in our examples of “challenging patrons” instead of agreeing with how “traumatizing” it is when a conservative patron requests conservative information. I made no direct challenges to any of the material in class, though I wish I had (more below). In other words, I sharpened my self-censorship skills to a fine point (even now, I feel the need to write anonymously), even as class after class hammered home how librarians having to self-censor liberal/left-leaning material is leading to alarming rates of burnout among the profession. But this was graduate-level study. I wasn’t supposed to ask questions or challenge what I was reading or what others were saying at a university. I was meant to repeat after those who deemed to know better, which would be anyone who not only isn’t a conservative but is actively working against conservatives.

I also made no friends among my classmates and connected with only one of my instructors. When peer feedback was part of an assignment, classmates were quick to critique anything that sounded too Christian while expressions from every other religion were celebrated. If I asked any questions, I got the silent treatment, exclusion from group chats and the cold shoulder overall. It hurt, but more than that, it was scary.

One of the scariest moments of my degree was a student-led discussion to cap off the course at the end of the semester. Students suggested topics, voted, and then joined breakout rooms based on their interests. I joined the “disinformation” room, not because I believe that term means what the mainstream culture demands we believe it means, but because I don’t. I wanted to see if there was room to even suggest that the term “disinformation” is a propaganda term used to control who gets to speak (Leftists and those who emphatically disavow conservatism), what stories get told and how (those decreed as minorities and that they are beautiful, oppressed victims who should have every concession made for them, even if - especially if it breaks society), and who gets to have a career, a family, a life they want and demand safety in any space they enter (it is, despite what legacy media repeat ad nauseum, not conservatives so much anymore).

There was no room. My attempts to guide the discussion towards whether this term is even appropriate to use were shut down; “we need to be using our time to strategize about how we, as librarians, are going to handle what to do when patrons request materials that we know are disinformation.” Librarians as gatekeepers even as we are constantly extolled to always increase access? Chills. No, thank you. Librarians as shapers of patrons’ thoughts in the name of knowing what’s best for them? Who’s patronizing who now?

“How do we know what disinformation is, though?” I tried one last time to get my fellow future librarians, fellow controllers of the flow of information as my classmates are fancying themselves, to consider the implications not only of legitimizing the term “disinformation” and its ilk (“misinformation” and “malinformation”) but of appointing ourselves the appraisers of truth for all patrons. This is especially alarming given that, in many areas of the county, there is a large political gap between librarians and patrons, which many of my classmates see as a problem to fix by controlling what information certain patrons should access and doing that by labeling certain material disinformation.

Instead of responding with a logical process all information should be put through equally, a classmate responded with a list of topics that “we” “know” are “disinformation.” I decline to reproduce that list here because the point is not what is on that list but that there even is a list. That being able to rattle off a list of what topics we as librarians should “provide information on but also educate them about” is what masters-level librarians think is an appropriate answer to an epistemological question quite honestly scares me for the future of this profession. The fact that what comprises this list were all conservative viewpoints and no liberal/leftist ideologies should concern us all, wherever we fall on the political spectrum. Information may be inherently political, and that’s exactly why librarians need to maintain access to both/all sides, no matter how certain we are being trained to think that one side is always not only wrong but subhuman.