Rarer than a spotted owl

A conservative librarian. David Durant writes about the politicization of the American Library Association.

The ALA's annual conferences have become akin to MoveOn.org meetings, where Bush bashing and liberal groupthink are the order of the day. At the association's June 2003 convention, in Toronto, the lineup of speakers included Ralph Nader, U.S. Rep. Bernie Sanders, Naomi Klein, and Gloria Steinem. That was merely a warm-up, however, for the blatantly political event that was the 2004 convention in Orlando, Fla.

The featured speaker in Orlando was Richard A. Clarke, once a member of the Bush administration and now its bitter foe. Others included E.L. Doctorow, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Amy Goodman, the left-wing radio host. The highlight was a special benefit showing of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, which drew a capacity crowd of over 2,000. The association's own magazine, American Libraries, described the proceedings with the headline "Opposition to Iraq War Pervades ALA in Orlando."

The politicized atmosphere in Orlando included clear intolerance toward dissenting viewpoints. Whitney Davison-Turley, a liberal, spoke at the membership meeting against a resolution condemning the war in Iraq, arguing that it was inappropriate for the ALA to take a stand on the issue. Her comments got a hostile response. Later she wrote: "Protecting the freedom of speech is a core tenet of librarianship, and this tenet was violated during the Membership Meeting. Shaming alternative opinions into silence is the same as placing a gag over our mouths, and this is not what librarians supposedly stand for."

Paul Pennyfeather has more. I must say his graduate school experiences certainly beat mine.

My class on Bibliographic Description listed as "required reading" no less than six works by the radical writer Michel Foucault. I never figured out what this had to do with bibliographical description of rare books.

This same prof complained that the Library school should not take our picture, as they did at the beginning of the program, claiming that "this is the way the apartheid government in South Africa stifled dissent and crushed rebellion." As far as I know, no student ever had to endure electro-shock for their revolutionary views. He also claimed, seriously, that the small windows in the Rare Book and Manuscript Depository of the university were deliberately constructed that way to allow them to function as machine gun platforms should the university every experience any real rebellion. I offered the view that maybe the size of the windows was related to the desire not to expose the rare books and manuscripts to sunlight, as this tends to hasten their deterioration. He ignored me. Probably for the best.