About

In recent years we have observed with dismay and concern how publicly-funded libraries and related professional organizations have become a “battleground” in the culture war, with frequent public protests over books and events (aimed at both adults and children), authors and speakers being “canceled” for their views, and school board and city council hearings dominated by complaints regarding materials deemed inappropriate for young readers. Yet, rather than seeking to mediate these conflicts, the response from the library profession has been to “double down” on its commitment to promoting a particular suite of ideological positions and to condemn those who oppose them, leading to a growing alienation on the part of user communities, and a number of U.S. states formally cutting off ties with the American Library Association.

We believe there is another way: that our profession needs to re-commit itself to–and reinvigorate–its traditional professional values and institutional commitments described above. This starts with the recognition that our pluralist, multicultural societies (mostly located in the West) are too diverse for their publicly-funded institutions to endorse or promote any one political ideology; instead, they should aspire to neutrality.    

Libraries have long stood strong on the pillar of institutional neutrality.  The Library has been a place where a person can go to check out a book, search the Internet, or research a topic without being judged or encountering barriers to service.  The modern public library has been one of the few institutions that has been free from its own ideologies or agendas that seek to influence, persuade, or indoctrinate.  While a good library will have materials representing a wide variety of ideologies and agendas, the library patron should not be pressured, manipulated, or bullied into thinking or researching in a specific manner. 

In recent years, however, some libraries, library employees, and library associations have abandoned this commitment to neutrality and seek to use their position as a platform for the furtherance of their divisive ideologies and agendas.  In far too many cases, libraries are becoming less concerned with representing and responding to the needs of their user populations than they are with pushing the viewpoints of openly activist library employees, administrations, publishers, authors, professional associations, and/or governmental officials. 

For example, while ostensibly championing intellectual freedom and opposing censorship, many librarians have nonetheless been openly advocating – and more importantly, practicing – ”shadow banning” to ensure that certain controversial non-fiction titles are never collected in public and academic libraries in the first place, thereby denying adults the right to read and thus be able to make up their own minds about those issues.  At the same time, titles that accord to their political priorities are championed and defended, with the result that events like “Banned Book Week” will heavily feature the latter, but not the former. We consider this to be acting in bad faith.

Some library workers have also sought to undermine the rights of parents and legal guardians to guide their child’s education. Library professionals should stand, to the extent allowed by law and policy, with parents and legal guardians in their reasonable requests for information related to their children’s usage of library resources.

The issue regarding collections for young readers as we see it is three-fold: 

1.) many librarians seem to have lost sight of what is generally considered to be developmentally appropriate for certain ages and reading abilities, thereby risking the trust of their communities, particularly of members from faith traditions and diverse immigrant and cultural groups;

2.) parents and concerned community members are no longer seen as having a right to object to content in the children’s collection that they feel is developmentally inappropriate for children in their community; and

3) when individuals do object to items in the children’s collection, they are accused of doing so out of bad faith i.e., hate and bigotry, rather than out of care and concern. Again, we consider this to be in bad faith.

In short, many public and school librarians no longer regard the public as legitimate stakeholders in collection-building, which we fear is causing many members of the tax-paying public to lose trust in their libraries. 

ALP is also concerned that the library profession as a whole (including, but not limited to, our professional conferences and journals) has become so absorbed with the divisive ideologies embedded in DEI, anti-racism, and matters of ever-more fragmented group identities, that it risks losing sight of the actual practice of librarianship in a pluralist, multicultural society.  Again, by pluralism, we mean a society comprising diverse groups of people living together by a shared set of basic values that allow us when we disagree to do so respectfully and constructively.  A professional focus on identity politics, by contrast, has only accelerated polarization and the demonization of those we perceive to be political and ideological opponents, the “cancellation” of authors and speakers, curtailing the rights of adults to read what they choose, the intentional distortion of traditional professional values such as intellectual freedom and institutional neutrality, and the foreclosing of open inquiry—all of which, we believe, is harmful not only to the profession but to democracy itself.