Response to the 2022 Intellectual Freedom Spotlight

Yesterday morning, I presented on “The Carrier Bag and Intellectual Freedom” at the OLA Superconference. In that talk, I briefly untangled some of the philosophical background of the dominant conception of IF, but what I was mainly interested in was drawing on Ursula K. LeGuin’s “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” to open up alternative perspectives to intellectual freedom.

In the afternoon, I attended the annual Intellectual Freedom Spotlight, a panel convened by James Turk of the Centre for Free Exception at X University. The panelists were Mark Williams, CEO of Milton Public Library; Rabia Kokhar, Education and Equity Consultant and Teacher with the Toronto District School Board; and Erin Patterson, Head of Research Services at Acadia University.

The Intellectual Freedom Spotlight is an annual part of the OLA conference, and it always exclusively takes the part of the dominant liberal conception of IF. Despite Jim Turk’s insistence that both defenders and critics of the dominant conception of IF should be speaking to each other, no critic is ever invited to be part of the panel. The critics don’t have a platform like an annual slot at OLA.

One of the consequences of the fact that there are no critical voices on the panel is that the various critical perspectives are on the one hand misrepresented and on the other hand dismissed without opportunity of rebuttal. This blog post is my rebuttal. What follows is necessarily selective.

To begin with, the defenders of traditional IF take a lot for granted: that we live in a democratic society; that their view of intellectual freedom is one of if not the fundamental safeguard of that democracy; they have an unspoken theory of the state; they have an unspoken social and political theory. None of this is ever enunciated, it is simply presumed that everyone agrees on these things.

Critics of IF tend to be very outspoken about these things, we don’t take them for granted. As a Marxist, I have a very definite social, political, and state theory; I have a theory of democratic society I can (and do) articulate, and my conception of what I unfortunately have to call intellectual freedom follows from these things. Ask me about them, I can explain them; no one ever asks Jim Turk to justify his theory of democracy or his theory of the state.

Because there is no one on the panel to rebut the mischaracterizations of IF critics, it is all too easy for the panelists to argue that we don’t understand intellectual freedom. We do understand it, we simply disagree with it. I find it laughable, however, that the response to this purported lack of understanding of IF is more and better IF courses in library school, because then (naturally) we will all agree with the dominant IF perspective. What kind of theory of IF is it that promotes indoctrination of a single perspective? So much for pluralism.

In addition to the idea that we don’t understand intellectual freedom, there is the related idea that critics of IF are all younger, inexperienced library workers who don’t fully grasp intellectual freedom and will learn the truth when they’re older (presumably from their more knowledgeable older colleagues). This is offensively patronizing to the many newer library workers I know who have a solid grasp of the political theory involved as well as the social issues. And it dismisses those of us who have been in this profession well over a decade and who understand and disagree with traditional IF. The absence of a voice on the Intellectual Freedom Spotlight allows this kind of dismissisiveness to occur with impunity.

Finally, the lack of a critical voice in the Spotlight means that when asked “why are academic librarians so vocal about intellectual freedom, when they don’t have to deal with IF very much?”, an academic librarian can a) suggest that because academic libraries don’t have to deal with book challenges as much, we are free from considerations of IF and and b) not mention the fact that the intellectual freedom of public library workers is consistently withheld in by library management so that public library workers cannot speak openly about their views of IF. Every time an academic librarian speaks about IF in public libraries, we are open to the charge of speaking on behalf of someone else, when they should be speaking for themselves. But this ignores the very real power dynamics of public libraries which purport to extent intellectual freedom to their patrons, but not to their staff.

There were a lot of other things to take issue within in the Spotlight, but I think this is enough to be going on with. Hopefully it will demonstrate how the lack either of critical voices or of rank-and-file public library workers maintains a single hegemonic view of IF, allowing the defenders of that view to misrepresent, patronize, and dismiss those of us who challenge the dominant perspective of intellectual freedom.