Workplace Speech

The main reason I (briefly) joined the CFLA Intellectual Freedom committee back in 2019 was to try to help spur some movement in the area of workplace speech. It has long been a problem in Canadian libraries that “Intellectual Freedom” applies to library users, but not to employees. Library workers are constrained by various considerations - most of them adopted from capitalist private enterprise, such as brand protection - to avoid “free expression” on a number of topics once the ukaz from the CEO has been passed down.

I was nonetheless pretty surprised to see the following statement included in an internship posting for Edmonton Public Library:

“Professional commitment to the CLA [sic] Position Statements on Intellectual Freedom and on Diversity and Inclusion is essential.”

Now, commitment to the Diversity and Inclusion statement is understandable, to a certain extent; but to require “professional commitment to the [CFLA] statement on Intellectual Freedom” in a job posting is one of the most egregious uses of state power I have seen in this profession. What this point is saying is that employment will be offered or withheld based on commitment to an article of faith. It’s essentially a loyalty statement, which I find personally disturbing.

But more to the point, it is in conflict with the CFLA Intellectual Freedom statement. The statement reads:

the Canadian Federation of Library Associations affirms that all persons in Canada have a fundamental right, subject only to the Constitution and the law, to have access to the full range of knowledge, imagination, ideas, and opinion, and to express their thoughts publicly.Only the courts may abridge free expression rights in Canada.

The Canadian Federation of Library Associations affirms further that libraries have a core responsibility to support, defend and promote the universal principles of intellectual freedom and privacy.

All persons in Canada have a fundamental right… to express their thoughts publicly. Libraries have a core responsibility to support, defend and promote the universal principles of intellectual freedom and privacy. I submit that by including that bullet point in the internship posting, EPL is violating the CFLA IF statement the bullet point is meant to force employees to adhere to. What kind of defence of Intellectual Freedom is that?

I suspect that the inclusion of this bullet point passed muster because libraries do not have a particularly sophisticated power analysis (if they have one at all). In this case, they see this bullet point as eliciting a spontaneous, voluntary commitment to an abstract principle, rather than understanding that the hegemony of the library schools and the labour-capital power of the libraries themselves exert enormous pressure on precarious workers in need of a job.

So the question that occurred to me is this: why did EPL include this bullet point? I’ve never seen something like that in other library postings. I suspect it is because over the last few years the hegemony of Intellectual Freedom has begun to be seriously challenged. In Foundations of Public Law, Martin Laughlin argues that the idea of “fundamental law” - the law that gives the king or government its right to rule - was hidden by British jurists for centuries because British political institutions were so strong that they didn’t need to refer to it, and referring to it would only bring up the vexxed question of by what right the British government ruled at all. Better to leave the question unanalyzed.

I think the same has been true of Intellectual Freedom for decades. The rise of Social Responsibility was usually (though not always) seen as a complement rather than a challenge to the dominant view of Intellectual Freedom. The lack of theorization of the concept (i.e. ignoring the questions what is “intellectual”? what is “freedom?” what really is the relationship between IF and democracy? what is “democracy?” etc) was due to the real hegemonic control exerted on librarianship by IF. It could remain untheorized because it was rarely challenged. By the same token it did not have to be insisted upon (or forced on anyone). It could be taken for granted - there is no higher mark of ideological success than that.

One reason for this is, I think, the odd relationship between LIS as an academic discipline and librarianship as a professional field. One thing I’ve noticed about academic disciplines (at least in the humanities and social sciences) is that every scholar has to, in effect, be working in two areas. On the one hand, there is their empirical field of study (a political scientist might study election promises in UK general elections, for example) but at the same time, they also need to study their own field. The political scientist needs to understand what “politics” means, what the alternatives are, what is meant by the state, what is the history of political thinking, etc, etc. This isn’t a rule, of course, there are problem plenty of scholars who occupy themselves solely with their empirical work. But only because they already have settled opinions about those theoretical questions.

In librarianship, we tend to leave the academic discipline to the LIS researchers, while the practitioners take care of “operating information agencies”. LIS researchers ought to participate in the dual kind of scholarly work I just described, but in the profession we tend to ignore it. In some contexts it is actively discouraged or punished. We ought to be constantly interrogating “core responsibilities” of the profession rather than treating them as transhistorical, god-given articles of faith. We are doing ourselves and our users a grave disservice by not undertaking that kind of interrogation.

(Indeed, all this applies to EDI as well, which raises questions about requiring a commitment to a single EDI formulation in the EPL posting).

But I think the age of taking a single IF formulation for granted is ending. That bodies such as the CFLA continue to simply repeat the old justifications rather than engaging with the very real critiques emerging from the profession is one sign. Inclusion of a bullet point like this is another. Rather than trying to shore up its professional power in the guise of an article of faith required for employment, the professional leadership could begin to engage with critique in good faith. It is all right that our understanding of IF changes. It is good that we consider moving away from a discredited liberalism (the liberalism that brought first the invasion of and then the shameful withdrawal from Afghanistan).

To that end, I also encourage people to read the open letter to the CFLA about Intellectual Freedom drafter over the weekend by a number of dedicated library workers. If you agree with it, and feel safe and comfortable enough to do so, please consider signing it.