To Think and Act Anew

Part Three: Renewing Libraries as Epistemic and Civic Institutions

Photo by Ryan Stone on Unsplash

This is the third in the series “To Think Anew and Act Anew,” addressing liberal democratic beliefs and current sociopolitical counter-currents, with implications for cultural and educational institutions, including libraries. If you haven’t already, consider reading Parts One and Two in this series.

“ . . . . if America is to become a great nation, these things must become true.”

(“I Have a Dream” speech, Martin Luther King)

Some moments in our lives stand out for us, when remembered, with electric immediacy.

One of those moments occurred for me on August 28, 1963, when as a young boy, I sat with my parents in our dining room watching our black-and-white television, listening to a strikingly eloquent leader speaking riveting words to an assembled crowd in Washington, D.C., and broadcast across the nation and around the world. My young mind could only dimly understand the issues and the personalities involved, of course, but the words uttered then by Martin Luther King Jr., were timeless, a soaring evocation of the best aspirations embodied in the country’s founding documents written by fallible Founding Fathers, contrasted with the enormous injustices of long-lingering Jim Crow laws, norms, attitudes, and practices which followed the long degradation of slavery. The moral injury perpetrated on the entire nation across generations by not living up to its founding creed was a searing reality that I could only faintly understand.

When the speech ended and the crowd roared in sustained applause, my mother turned off the television and looked at me and said, “He just recited the Declaration of Independence.” This was the beginning of a long education for me in civics, our country’s difficult history, much cross-cutting human complexity, and the need to avoid facile answers about both that history and that complexity—but also to gain clarity over time about both. Most of all, the words of Martin Luther King, who took inspiration from the Founders but also from Lincoln’s determination to sustain and renew the nation, became a touchstone for me in renewing trust in our best traditions and our civic institutions.

The Dissolution of Trust

One of the great moral acts of Martin Luther King was forging a multi-racial and multi-faith coalition, based on trust across divides, when there were so many reasons to distrust built up over generations—most notably from Black Americans, who suffered racial discrimination and mistreatment on many levels. Building up trust in demanding racial justice and dignity in that coalition was itself an act of collective intellectual virtue rare in that time, or in any time. The great accomplishments of passing landmark Civil Rights legislation was the result—the Movement itself was a sustained example of moral, social, legal, and cultural repair to “become a great nation”. Despite the turmoil of that period, along with the compounding divisions resulting from the Vietnam War, there was even then a bedrock trust in the country’s institutions that sustained it through searing conflict, and the social trust that emerged from the moral force of the Civil Rights movement was surely one of the foundation stones that sustained a divided country.

The decades since that time have seen a gradual and then more rapid dissolution of that trust—across Watergate and stagnation and economic woes of the 1970s; the increasing wealth disparities and socioeconomic divides of the 1980s and 1990s, with the rise of new thinkers about the role of race and discrimination in American life (Critical Legal Theorists and subsequently Critical Race Theorists); the rise of political correctness and canon wars in higher education during the same period, of which Greg Lukianoff of FIRE has written; and the shock of the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks and the conspiracy theories surrounding that terrible event, following by misdirected wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in the years following. The Great Recession of 2008/09 was also a searing experience for many Americans, who lost homes and livelihoods, further diminishing trust in institutions, economic experts, and political leaders.

The following years after the Great Recession have only further eroded trust in our leaders, our civic institutions, our universities. our press and media outlets, our political processes, our judicial system, experts in all professions, and anything or anyone associated with “establishment” institutions. The deepening distrust has in turn alienated large numbers of citizens from those mainstream institutions and previous reliable sources of information in favor, most recently, of social media sources, “influencers” and self-proclaimed experts who promote themselves through them. Without positing that there was ever a “golden age” of perfect consensus and a perfect shared reality in our country, I note that the much greater distrust that we now experience, and the affective polarization resulting from it, must surely cause us to reflect on ways of renewing that trust in order to address common problems affecting our nation and citizens in neighboring countries, and those spread across the globe—in climate change, in immigration challenges, in economic prosperity, in civic and international peace, in preparing for the challenges of artificial intelligence, and other challenges of our shared humanity.

Declining trust in institutions and leaders is amply documented in Pew Research surveys , scholarship such as that of political philosopher Kevin Vallier, and the widely available Edelman Trust Barometer, a metric that looks at trust through straightforward questions asked of citizens in multiple countries. Notably, Richard Edelman of Edelman Communications points toward a coalescence of numerous causes across decades that have created a “culture of grievance,” with rising populisms, and he points toward reforming our media and information systems to overcome some of the declining trust problems, not to diminish freedom of speech, but to identity “commonsense solutions” among multiple parties—political leaders, technology/media innovators, and citizens—to rebuild a shared reality.

Renewing Trust and Libraries’ Role

The long trajectory from the awakening of the nation’s moral conscience, inspired by Martin Luther King and other Civil Rights leaders, based on a shared consensus reality of the imperative to remake the nation’s civil rights laws and promote aspirations for economic fairness, now stretches into the fractured reality of the present. The decline of social trust now calls for a renewed shared civic culture, one that is built on epistemic and civic institutions available to all citizens in their pursuit of a better life. Among those civic institutions are the nation’s libraries, public, academic, and school, which are essential linchpins of historical memory, sound scholarship, diverse understandings of complicated realities of the human and natural worlds, and generative spaces for thought, reflection, and community-building. Because they are not only repositories for collections, but also key knowledge-generative institutions, libraries perform an active epistemic role as well that coalesces with the civic one, to promote a more informed citizenry with greater capacities for collective sense-making in a liberal democracy.

Libraries of all types are, in effect, part of the “social infrastructure” of which Eric Klinenberg writes, and social laboratories for both individual and community knowledge-generation. They are also part of the network of epistemic institutions of which Jonathan Rauch writes that are bulwarks against the “assault on truth”, which provide avenues for truth-seeking in achieving provisional understandings of a shared reality which can build greater trust over time. Libraries can renew trust as hubs of meaning-making for a distracted culture with fleeting impulses toward either truth or trust.

Our collective memory in the field of some important attempts at defining the role of libraries, especially public libraries, sometimes falls short—and we should return to such texts as Robert D. Leigh’s The Public Library Inquiry, as described by Caroline Nappo in another post on this substack. Nappo describes the origins and recommendations of this report from the late 1940s, which was commissioned by the American Library Association, and how its primary findings could comprise a “library faith.”

Among some assumptions about the role of the library in the Public Library Inquiry were classic ones such as “opportunity to learn” (a tenet surely part of the educational pathways available through the nation’s great Carnegie libraries); and “freedom of communication” (a classic tenet of intellectual freedom and freedom to read); and another intriguing one, noted by Nappo as especially resonant for our times: “special groups and the mediating function.” This assumption, as imagined by Leigh, involved the role of the library as “mediator” in democratic communities, to bring together different groups with varied viewpoints, to put them into conversation with each other. As Nappo writes, this is a keystone for democratic discourse that Leigh imagined, and a crucial function of the library. This is both an epistemic and a civic role that Leigh proposes—both with knowledge-generation (the epistemic role) and ”social infrastructure” (the civic role) in a mutually reinforcing relationship.

One Inflection Point and its “Dismantling”

The past several decades, however, have seen two great inflection points in the definition of library roles and the library profession that both militate against this conception of the necessary epistemic and civic roles for libraries. Both of them have undermined trust in libraries as epistemic and civic institutions, in very different ways.

One of them is the technocratic/economic/utilitarian role described as an assault on the “public sphere” by LIS scholar John Buschman in his aptly entitled Dismantling the Public Sphere,¹ which discusses with cogent detail the redefinition of libraries as custodians of information as a commodity, with a drive toward privatization of many public institutions by the Reagan administration in the early 1980s. Buschman describes this development as the “new public philosophy” flowing downstream from the neoliberalism of that era. Its underpinnings were “information capitalism” dictated by the U.S. federal government regarding government information itself, with imperatives for outsourcing and for reconceiving of libraries as potential profitable agencies with “customers” rather than as shared “common good” spaces, with collections and services for the citizens of a community at large. Buschman also describes the trendiness of fashions that arose in that era, with management nostrums about the “Information Society,” the “paperless library,” “knowledge management,” and a library management literature saturated with futuristic clichés akin to those found in Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock and John Naisbitt’s Megatrends. The “information capitalism” of that time, and the accompanying under-evidenced management trends and fashions, speak to an ongoing lack of clear professional ethos among some leaders in the field, a lack of a better intellectual foundation for ethics and professional practice, and a sense of core purpose.

Buschman describes library history at the time of his writing (2003), when he was already looking back at the Reagan era, as a more or less continuous “climate of crisis”, because of the lack of clarity about the role of libraries. That rolling sense of crisis Buschman describes as the epiphenomena, the “spume and froth” of the deeper epistemological issues within the profession. Clearly, that sense of crisis has led to perennial issues in funding, status issues for librarians, an attachment to ephemeral trends outside the field in a search for core purpose, leading up to the present day.

Bushman’s Dismantling the Public Sphere is a searching examination of how libraries might place themselves on a better foundation away from the epiphenomena, the “spume and froth,” of his time. He points toward the philosophy of Habermas as a generative locus for positioning libraries as “public good” institutions—as sense-making institutions serving the democratic common good of a community rather than narrow economic or utilitarian interests. Habermas’s construction of a “democratic public sphere” model, for Buschman, points toward libraries as a specific exemplar of that model. In contrast to the “new public philosophy,” the Reagan-era model of privatization and commodification of public goods, Buschman points toward libraries’ vital public role:

In adapting Habermas’s ideas, I have proposed that librarianship, in many important, thorough, latent, and concrete ways, embodies and enacts the public sphere idea in the form of rational organization of human discourse, a resource to check validity claims, and so forth. Therefore, library collections, services, values, and traditions—probably because of their residual bulk and residual conservatism in the field—still contain within them many of the characteristics—and possibilities—of the public sphere. The new public philosophy trends and practices capitalism trends—in librarianship represent not merely another variation on the corruption of the communicative processes that make the democratic public sphere but also its dismantling in the ways it has been enacted and embodied in the field. Our acceding to the new public philosophy model is, in many ways, an active deconstructing of the public sphere discourse that libraries represent. (Buschman, p. 170).

Buschman’s call for placing libraries on a higher plane of intellectual and civic discourse, away from the economic, privatized realm, promotes what he refers to as the possibilities for “public reasoning” (Buschman, p. 173). That capacity for “public reasoning” depends in turn upon cardinal principles of librarianship such as equity of access, integrity in promoting diverse and balanced collections, and fair, impartial, and neutral provision of services to a community. In effect, Buschman calls for elevating the classic purposes of libraries, but with a much better foundation in understanding how democratic institutions in communities should enable discussion and debate, rational argumentation, diverse viewpoints, and a better integration of the library as both physical space and “social infrastructure” into a community. This view of the civic role of libraries, as counterpoint to the economic function and individualistic “consumer values,” is one that can renew social trust needed in our broader culture today.

Another Inflection Point and Another Dismantling

The search for a better foundation for libraries in the democratic public sphere described by Buschman has persisted for several decades since the push for privatization and seeing information as a “commodity.” This constant search for new ideas outside the field created the ongoing rolling crisis where first principles were—and still are—rarely discussed or debated. Waves of technological change, have caused perennial reactions in the field, in working with vendors (part of the “information capitalism” of which Buschman wrote) toward ever more user-friendly, colorful, and seamless information “products” and “experiences” that have multiple generations of interfaces and differing technical requirements which require more specialized knowledge from information technology specialists to manage. The bundling of content, in e-journals and e-books, has also created a sense of dislocation for many libraries, where students, faculty, and community members find resources in their own way through the well-known disintermediation process, and where the “law of least effort” obtains.

The convenience of search engines and rapid satisficing with any results has supplanted more deliberative inquiry processes for most citizens and even for many seasoned inquirers. The “clicks and views” behavior that rules in the world of social media and information systems in general is too often the default behavior of the wider user community. In effect, the epiphenomena that Buschman describes is a constant in the profession, and too often, an “accelerationist”, distractible unsettledness results. The deeper public purpose of the library attenuates in this way of operating within the world of information, discourse, and public debate. Brilliant public spaces and innovative buildings may restore some sense of the grandeur of the library as intellectual hub, but the role of democratic public sphere, as a place for forging a common public discourse, has often faded out of awareness of many in the field itself.

Within the past two decades, however, a new movement has sought to restore a sense of purpose to the field—that of social justice activism. This search for a specific activist role for libraries—and librarians—has been grafted onto the older, attenuated classic role of library as repository and service hub, and sits uneasily alongside, and often clashes with, the economic/technocratic role that Buschman describes. As with the technocratic “consumer” role which “dismantled” the more robust public sphere possibilities imagined by Buschman, the new mission of social justice activism has sought to “dismantle” the public sphere possibilities, by proclaiming that particular ideologies must determine the library’s core mission. The very language of Critical Librarianship uses the “dismantling” and “disrupting” metaphor with much frequency, in pointing toward a mission well beyond the capacities of libraries to enact.

For those who promote what we now call #CritLib, that mission focuses entirely on removing inequitable power structures in society, in rectifying injustices and focusing on particular forms of group identity as core to the library’s service and outreach missions. This impetus is well beyond, for example, the traditional age-demographic-focused arrangement of collections in public or school libraries. Instead, it reaches for a new mission in social justice that lives in the “liberatory imaginaries” of which Freire wrote, now used by some Critical Librarians as trope and revolutionary slogan. While there may be laudable intentions here, they quickly veer into the realm of unreality and under-evidenced, misguided activism.

The particular forms of activism and inculcation of monocultural beliefs for library staff, ironically through diversity trainings focused on identitarianism have, in recent years, instigated self-censoring among many librarians themselves, or preference falsification, which in turn create staff and organizational conflicts and morale issues, as well as potentially authoritarian classroom teaching practices that defy “liberation” of any type, and mandated belief systems about critical pedagogy and “social justice” at conferences. The lack of empirical evidence for particular forms of social justice activism, found more generally in academia, adds to the reality that some libraries are becoming conformist in their intellectual outlook—in a profession supposedly dedicated to intellectual freedom and openness toward multiple perspectives. Particular forms of social justice activism therefore do not increase trust within communities, but actually diminish it.

The rise of Critical Librarianship from 2006 to present is well-known by now in such works as Elmborg’s article on critical information literacy, which was one inspiration for the movement, but which has expanded enormously beyond Elmborg’s laudable intentions for a more critical, humane, and reflective pedagogy and climate for learning. The focus on “power structures,” derived from Foucault and others in Critical Theory, has pushed Critical Librarianship into more dogmatic directions. More ideological, identitarian examples include the work of Tewell and Drabinksi; the continuing work of Leung and Lopez-McKnight; and the burgeoning literature and practices showcased in recent years at the Critical Librarianship and Pedagogy Symposium. This extended inflection period is what might be called the “social justice” turn in the profession.

Apart from advocating for one particular version of “social justice”—that promotes an identity-driven approach to collections, services, and programming, around marginalized identities--the Critical Librarianship model seeks to supplant other possible models in forging connections within intellectually pluralistic communities. This drive undercuts possibilities for wider discussion, debate, and a “public sphere” that will create, or reawaken, wider social trust among an increasingly distrustful and dubious public. This “critical” turn in the field has, ironically, created a decidedly uncritical, unreflective frame of mind among some of its most determined advocates. The lack of continuing curiosity, open-mindedness, and intellectual humility is striking, and often the opacity of the language used and the determined dogmatism do not engender trust.

The general public has often trusted libraries in the past—but now are increasingly distrustful of all epistemic, cultural, and knowledge-generating institutions. Libraries are therefore often swept up in society-wide layers of distrust that cause more people to retreat into private silos of social media ecosystems, and their own networks of family and friends, with a lack of wider intellectual resources and pluralistic discussions. This growing alienation from libraries from what were once called “the third place”, into individualized information universes, creates an ironic echo of the Reagan-era drive for privatization of public goods and government information. Hence the rolling crisis of which Buschman wrote in 2003 continues to the present day.

A Way Forward: Restoring Trust

These two “dismantlings” of a larger epistemic and civic purpose for libraries, layered upon each other over the past forty years, now summon the profession to reflect upon its foundations. Better intellectual foundations, more collectively virtuous habits of mind in the field, and surer scholarly contributions to a wider academic and public communities, will be necessary for libraries to become the epistemic and civic institutions that they should be, in renewing liberal democratic norms.

Several large strategies should guide librarians in renewing trust within their own profession, and with their communities. The overarching goal of renewal for libraries is to become active in supporting the democratic public sphere, but not in supporting narrower forms of activism that detract from the epistemic and civic mission.

• Develop mission statements that reflect active roles for promoting liberal democracy (individual and group dignity; truth-seeking, not ideology promotion; respectful debate and dialogue; open and critically reflective inquiry); activist roles and agendas that constrain open inquiry and viewpoint diversity should be avoided

• Adopt better intellectual foundations within the field based on key philosophical concepts underpinning liberal democracy

• Create a climate within libraries among staff, and with the communities served, of truth-seeking pluralism

• Develop active partnerships within a network of epistemic institutions also dedicated to these same principles

• Create spaces and opportunities for emergent knowledge-generation within the communities served (build on such activities as poster sessions, talks and book reviews by community members, joint presentations by local experts in a field with interested citizens or students)

• Foster opportunities for dialogue about local challenging or “wicked problems” without easy answers but with data and evidence for deliberation; serve as sites for “public reasoning” about those “wicked problems” without pressuring or influencing community members

These are strategies practiced by other epistemic and civic institutions (Interfaith America, Lyceum Movement, Centers for Public Deliberation, Urban-Rural Action, Civic Switchboard, and citizens’ assemblies are all examples) based on pluralism and bridge-building, and not on particular ideologies and political agendas that more often divide and polarize.

Six Big Questions

In renewing their purpose, libraries will need to address six major questions with major societal import—because these questions affect libraries’ own programs and services, and affect the quality of thinking in the field. More robust discussions in professional associations addressing all of them are essential, along with staff development in individual libraries and consortia. (I will address each of these in more detail in a future post on this substack).

1. The deep literacy and attention crisis: how can we address the challenges of shallow reading, declining literacy rates, and social media effects? This attention and reading challenge has obvious implications for libraries as collectors and organizers of the cultural record

2. The gender divide: the emerging gender divide in culture, politics, career aspirations, and presence in higher education and in many professions is now commented on frequently: how should librarians plan for the future with this growing gender divide? Within the field itself, how does the gender imbalance (generally described as 80 percent female, 20 percent male) create certain mindsets about the inclusion and social justice imperatives?

3. The citizenship/civic knowledge crisis: how do librarians think about participating in their communities, when data and evidence show a declining commitment to knowledge about civics, knowledge of public affairs, ability to interpret data and charts, geographical knowledge of the world, and declining commitment to liberal democratic norms?

4. The media ecosystem and its corruption: how do librarians think better about the politicized, fragmented, and often toxic media ecosystem? How do they make better use of the emerging research about it to offer better alternatives for pointing toward more reliable information sources? How much is the media ecosystem itself an accelerant for growing distrust, or is it revealing deeper social problems?

5. Activist scholarship further divides us from a shared sense of reality: activist scholarship with pre-determined agendas and lacking sound methods is now replete across multiple academic fields. How should librarians resist this trend in their own research, while also contributing to counter-trends against the corruptions of activism?

6. Evidence-based culture: what is our culture of evidence within librarianship? Related to the several of the large questions here, what is our epistemic foundation for an evidence-based culture of inquiry within librarianship?

The new large strategies described here, addressing a renewed “public sphere” model for libraries, should create possibilities for honest investigation of these six large questions. They have reinforcing and compounding dimensions, and librarians should pursue new partnerships in addressing them. New opportunities may emerge for renewing trust, through civil discourse, within the “social infrastructure” of which libraries are a part.

A Large Future Role for Libraries

The call for renewing the nation’s foundations for racial justice, greater fairness, and economic opportunities, and a shared citizenship, in Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963, and echoing through the Civil Rights movement of that era, lives in personal memory for some, and only through recordings, photographs, and archival artifacts for many others. The trust engendered then made for a renewed America, just as Lincoln had done a century earlier in the Emancipation Proclamation and his call for national “remaking” in the Gettysburg address. These words live in the great vault of our collective memory, not only inscribed in stone and available in recordings and textual documents. They are the inheritance that may help us renew trust and find common ground in a shared reality, despite the many forces—tribal, political, cultural, and technological—that divide us today. The “web of mutuality” of which King spoke in 1963 is now dormant, and needs reawakening.

That inheritance must become activated through reformed epistemic and civic institutions across our nation, away from performative activism and toward a search for truth in a pluralistic society. Libraries can become much more active civic agents in “truth-seeking pluralism”, with citizens of all faiths, ethnicities, outlooks, professions, and experiences forming themselves as participants in the ongoing experiment of liberal democracy.

As Martin Luther King urged sixty years ago, in a great inflection point of that time, “If America is to become a great nation, these things must become true.” Our libraries, in the midst of our current divisions and fractured society, can contribute to that quest for collective renewal. The words of Lincoln and King together, calling for that renewal, live as our civic scripture, as long as our nation shall endure.

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1. John Buschman, Dismantling the Public Sphere: Situating and Sustaining Librarianship in the Age of the New Public Philosophy. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2003.