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Dear Colleagues:</div>
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Many of us had the wonderful opportunity to hear incoming ALA President Emily Drabinski speak at the recently held 9<span><sup>th</sup> Annual Herb Biblo Invitational Conference at the Half Hollow hills Community Library. Much of her presentation was about
the current state of censorship activities around the Nation. The following article appeared in the latest issue of Academe, the publication of the American Association of University Professors, and I invite you to read this remarks that are a clarion call
for librarians in the fight to preserve the right to read for all Americans and others in this country.</span></div>
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<span>Sincerely,</span></div>
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<span>Art Friedman</span></div>
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The Fight for Libraries</h1>
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<div class="field-item even ContentPasted0">Libraries and higher education face a shared battle.</div>
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<div class="field-item even ContentPasted0">By Emily Drabinski</div>
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<p style="margin:0px 0px 1.2em"><img alt="" style="outline:0px;max-width:100%;height:300px;width:300px" class="ContentPasted0" src="https://www.aaup.org/sites/default/files/37451911455_1d6834313f_o.jpg"></p>
<p style="margin:0px 0px 1.2em" class="ContentPasted0">When I was elected president of the American Library Association in spring 2022, I tweeted excitedly that I could not believe a Marxist lesbian—who believes that power can be built and wielded collectively
on behalf of the public good—won the election. These are, after all, much-vilified identities in contemporary US life. Despite decades of struggle and the gradual incorporation of LGBTQ+ people into American institutions like marriage, attacks on queer life
abound. Red-baiting is on the rise, bringing echoes of the McCarthy era along with it. My excited utterance, meant to be shared with the comrades who worked alongside me in my campaign, was immediately picked up by the right-wing press. A photo of my face
and screenshot of my tweet showed up in Breitbart’s extremist media networks and in the pages of the<span class="ContentPasted0"> </span><em class="ContentPasted0">New York Post</em>. A day later I was called into a meeting with senior leadership at my university
and advised that these attacks reflected poorly on my institution. The administration asked me to stop tweeting “for days, weeks, even months,” until the fervor died down. It was my first direct encounter with higher education leaders whose commitments to
intellectual freedom, to free speech, and to their faculty hold strong only until extremists attack.</p>
<p style="margin:0px 0px 1.2em" class="ContentPasted0">My acute encounter was short-lived. There are plenty of targets for hate, and the Right’s news cycle is as short as any other in the current media landscape. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t remained a bludgeon
in the Right’s ongoing attack on library workers. A screenshot of my tweet showed up in a petition to the Virginia court demanding that Maia Kobabe’s<span class="ContentPasted0"> </span><em class="ContentPasted0">Gender Queer</em><span class="ContentPasted0"> </span>and
Sarah J. Maas’s<span class="ContentPasted0"> </span><em class="ContentPasted0">A Court of Mist and Fury</em><span class="ContentPasted0"> </span>be declared obscene. (My tweet was not at all germane to the case.) In Campbell County, Wyoming, the library board
voted to “no longer have any association” with the American Library Association or the Wyoming state chapter in part because of my election to a leadership position. And in St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana, extremists attacked a library director, claiming she
conspired with me to peddle pornography to children in the community. (That director and I do not know each other, have never met, and, indeed, have never even corresponded.) In the hands of extremists, I am a weapon. The project for me now is to find out
how I can be a tool.</p>
<p style="margin:0px 0px 1.2em" class="ContentPasted0">There is, of course, a material difference between being mobilized rhetorically on behalf of extremists and being subject to their attacks. Louisiana attorney general and presumptive gubernatorial candidate
Jeff Landry went to St. Tammany to<span class="ContentPasted0"> </span><a href="https://lailluminator.com/2022/12/02/librarians-fears-ag-landrys-tip-line-will-create-weird-witch-hunt/" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 122, 173);" class="ContentPasted0" data-loopstyle="link">announce
a new tip line</a><span class="ContentPasted0"> </span>for reporting on librarians, teachers, and other public-sector workers who have been targeted by the highest echelons of state government. In Florida, school librarians are subject to<span class="ContentPasted0"> </span><a href="https://news.wjct.org/state-news/2022-12-08/disagreements-surface-over-the-training-of-public-school-librarians-in-florida" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 122, 173);" class="ContentPasted0">new
state-mandated training</a><span class="ContentPasted0"> </span>aimed at removing books that include age-appropriate discussions of gender and sexuality. Library workers in Jamestown Township, Michigan, will lose their jobs when the community’s library closes
altogether following<span class="ContentPasted0"> </span><a href="https://www.audacy.com/1010wins/news/local/right-wing-activist-to-protest-si-drag-queen-story-hour" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 122, 173);" class="ContentPasted0">a defunding
campaign</a>. Library workers from<span class="ContentPasted0"> </span><a href="https://www.audacy.com/1010wins/news/local/right-wing-activist-to-protest-si-drag-queen-story-hour" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 122, 173);" class="ContentPasted0">Staten
Island, New York</a>, to<span class="ContentPasted0"> </span><a href="https://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/2022/10/drag-queen-story-hour-at-oregon-pub-draws-gun-carrying-protesters.html" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 122, 173);" class="ContentPasted0">Eugene,
Oregon</a>, and<span class="ContentPasted0"> </span><a href="https://www.kqed.org/news/11916918/sheriffs-investigating-hate-crime-after-alleged-proud-boys-disrupt-drag-queen-story-hour-with-homophobic-slurs" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 122, 173);" class="ContentPasted0">San
Lorenzo, California</a>, face attacks for hosting Drag Queen Story Hour. In<span class="ContentPasted0"> </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDWaa3NshyM" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 122, 173);" class="ContentPasted0">Boundary County,
Idaho</a>, the library director resigned after armed extremists began showing up at the library, at library board meetings, and even at her home.<span class="ContentPasted0"> </span><a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-stochastic-terrorism-uses-disgust-to-incite-violence/" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 122, 173);" class="ContentPasted0">These
attacks</a><span class="ContentPasted0"> </span>constitute violent threats to the lives and livelihoods of library workers. It can be a frightening time to work at the library.</p>
<p style="margin:0px 0px 1.2em" class="ContentPasted0">The project for those of us committed to the freedom of expression, the right to read, and to the persistence of public institutions is to intervene when we see those institutions under attack. The endgame
is not simply the removal of a particular book from a particular library. Anti-LGBTQ+ attacks led queer staff at the Vinton, Iowa, public library to quit, for a time<span class="ContentPasted0"> </span><a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/small-town-library-shut-say-culture-wars-closed-rcna39816" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 122, 173);" class="ContentPasted0">shuttering
the library</a>. The current spate of censorship attempts comes at the end of decades of neoliberal disinvestment in public institutions that have left us ill-equipped to fight back. Library workers on the front lines also contend with short-staffing, reduced
salaries, crumbling buildings, and declining materials budgets. Diminished state capacity has left libraries among only a handful of institutions that continue to steward shared public resources on behalf of their communities. Widening inequality makes our
jobs harder than ever. Standing firm against violent attempts to censor materials while also maintaining the only public bathroom in town is a tall order. Attacks on freedom of speech, expression, and the right to read generate a lot of smoke, but the fire
has been smoldering since the 1970s.</p>
<p style="margin:0px 0px 1.2em" class="ContentPasted0">Those of us in higher education know this too well. Ongoing adjunctification leaves many in our field without sustainable wages and working conditions. Rapidly increasing tuition costs put higher education
out of reach. Public support has cratered, leaving ostensibly public institutions like the University of Michigan and the University of California more dependent on private monies than ever before. When they ask us to quiet our speech, our administrations
are defending institutions that have moved farther and farther away from the project of inquiry and ideas that drew most of us to this profession. Like the metric-obsessed testing regimes that crept from K–12 to higher education over the past decades, these
extremist attacks will come to our doors, too. The connection between the decimation of public institutions and the horn-blowing, armed-to-the-teeth extremists shutting down a library in northern Idaho means the solution is bigger than defending the individual
book on the individual library shelf. A robust defense of free expression requires an equally vociferous defense of the institutions where that speech is most widely celebrated. The fight for higher education must be a fight for the library as well. </p>
<p style="margin:0px 0px 1.2em"><em class="ContentPasted0">Emily Drabinski is critical pedagogy librarian at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and 2023</em><em class="ContentPasted0">–24 president of the American Library Association.</em></p>
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<p align="left"><font size="3" face="Book Antiqua"><span style="font-size: 16pt;"><em>Arthur L. Friedman</em></span></font><span style="font-size: 14pt;">,</span><span style="font-size: 14pt;">
</span>Ed.D., MLS, MS(Ed)</p>
<p>Professor, Library </p>
<p>Nassau Community College</p>
<p>One Education Drive</p>
<p>Garden City, New York 11530-6793</p>
<p>516-572-7401 ext. 26028</p>
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<div style="margin-top: 13px; margin-bottom: 13px;"><a href="https://library.ncc.edu/infolitclass" title="https://library.ncc.edu/infolitclass"><b><i>Book an Information Literacy session</i></b></a><br>
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