BY DANYA LEEBAW

The years since the 2016 election have prompted reckoning and reflection among academic librarians about the integration of our professional, academic, and civic responsibilities. We are educators focused on information literacy, stewards of research and archival collections, and hosts to essential public and learning spaces on our campuses. In recent years, many of us have felt compelled to speak out against injustice, take action against toxic disinformation, showcase literature and archives of marginalized communities, recommend readings that may contextualize current events, and reassure students that our spaces are for everyone. These commitments, however, also bump up against some complex realities about our professional context. Librarians have long upheld the value of neutrality, especially in our collections but also in our public spaces. However, is neutrality the right goal, in alignment with other core values, or even epistemologically possible? Also, despite a long tradition of social activism among librarians, many of us haven’t known if we could speak up and take a stand. Specifically, what are the professional and personal risks for speaking up, especially for nonwhite and other historically excluded identities? Do academic librarians have academic freedom, in policy and in practice? Even more importantly, why does the answer to this question matter, not only to librarians, but for what it tells us about higher education more broadly?

These questions launched my and Alexis Logsdon’s years-long study of academic freedom for librarians. We reviewed the literature, conducted a nationwide survey of academic librarians, and published and presented on various aspects of our findings. Over time, Alexis and I would conclude that the answer to whether or not librarians have academic freedom protections was: “it’s unclear and it depends.” In our 2018 survey, we asked respondents to indicate their professional positions and socioeconomic identities, and then respond to a series of granular questions about experiences and perceptions of academic freedom. Within the relatively small body of literature on academic freedom and academic librarians, ours is the first study (of which we are aware) to correlate librarians’ socioeconomic and job status with perceptions and experiences of academic freedom. We focus on various, specific aspects of our findings in several articles and presentations on this topic, highlighting how academic librarians care about academic freedom but are uncertain about whether it applies to them, nonwhite librarians face greater barriers to their academic freedom, and librarians classified as faculty are more likely to experience and expect academic freedom.

Most recently, we published “Educating from the Margins: Academic Librarians and Academic Freedom” in the Journal of Academic Freedom to engage in conversation with our nonlibrarian faculty colleagues. We have come to believe that faculty and staff solidarity across departmental and classification boundaries is crucial to preserving the integrity of the academic enterprise. Over the years, I’ve realized that my faculty colleagues often have limited exposure to how academic freedom plays out for academic librarians. Also, they may not grasp the ways in which our experiences have broader implications for the broader project of protecting academic freedom on our campuses. To help bridge this awareness gap, Alexis and I provide a brief background of academic freedom for academic librarians and then bring these issues to life with fictional scenarios (amalgams of true stories from our survey and real life). In one of our stories, a librarian is directed to take down an online research guide she created for Black History Month in the face of public backlash. This story shows how in the absence of clear academic freedom protections for librarians, racist threats or the fear of these impede opportunities for meaningful learning and social justice. In the other case we present, a librarian tangles with a faculty member over pedagogy in the classroom. Teaching professors are invisible gatekeepers for librarians to directly engage students in the classroom, even though librarians have core curricular learning goals and are evaluated for merit and promotion based on metrics like numbers of instruction or reference sessions.

Core research, teaching, and governance—once safeguarded by academic freedom and tenure policies—are increasingly vulnerable in the face of drastic reduction of tenure-line faculty across higher education. When librarians, academic staff, and contingent faculty who lack academic freedom protections are unable to freely exercise their expertise, learning and research are deeply impeded. It’s imperative that all educators and researchers on campus join together to defend our expertise, our right to freely pursue research and teach students in our domains, and to participate with agency in departmental and campus governance. As you advocate for academic freedom on your campuses, notice whose voices might be missing but really matter and deserve inclusion. To quote countless library marketing campaigns, be sure to “ask a librarian!”

Danya Leebaw is the director of the Social Sciences and Professional Programs Department at the University of Minnesota Libraries.