Based on the video and what you read in the chapter for this week, do you believe that intellectual freedom in libraries is an absolute good or one with certain limitations? Do you believe it is equally important in all kinds of libraries or information organizations or more relevant in certain types over others? In addition to offering your thoughts on the above, please respond to at least one classmate's posting this week.
Short answer - Intellectual freedom is not an absolute good and its relevance/importance varies with the type of institution being examined and when it is being examined.
Long answer - Intellectual freedom in libraries like any institutional value faces constraints that are institutionally imposed as well as externally imposed. These constraints will vary depending on the type of library – primary and secondary libraries face constraints on their collection practices that are different from academic libraries, corporate libraries, prison libraries, special collections & archives, or the Library of Congress. These configurations of constraints both define and limit the scope of practice, mission, and actions of each institution. Constraints of course evolve and change as the social environment changes. Funding availability, changes in the legal system, changes in social norms and demographic shifts, as well as technological transformations, mean that at any particular time period an institution may be relatively stable or experiencing disruptive change.
The most fundamental constraint for any American institution (and citizen) is the United States Constitution and, in this context, specifically the First Amendment of the Constitution which reads:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Libraries are not specifically mentioned in the text. Public libraries didn’t even exist at the time of the Constitution’s composition. Library practice has co-evolved with the changing meaning and legal interpretation and enforcement of the First Amendment. As discussed in Rubin, the American Library Association created strong institutional constraints beginning in 1939 with the adoption of the Library Bill of Rights and the establishment of its Intellectual Freedom Committee (IFC) and further evolved the institutional constraints with the 1951 Statement on Labeling and the 1953 Freedom to Read Statement. The ALA has continued to make more public pronouncements for even more contextually specific institutional statements and policy guidelines up to the current day covering censorship, social responsibility, and standards of ethical practice for all librarians of all kinds of institutions. As new technologies, legal rulings, and social mores change the social constraints libraries operate within, you can be sure the ALA will be offering institutional guidance with a policy pronouncement.
When the video for this week’s discussion was created, one of the legal constraints affecting the public library had changed as a result of provisions of the USA P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act which was a legal response/opportunity to the coordinated 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States. Section 215 dealing with FISA courts, was modified to allow domestic surveillance of United States Citizens. Constitutional protections were weakened with the proposed justification being the need to protect US citizens from possible future terrorist actions in the United States or upon United States citizens. The normative legal practice of probable cause with its enabling mechanism of a subpoena was replaced with a more immediate, and less easily challenged enabling mechanism of a judge-issued search warrant. This was a disruptive change.
The safeguards of patron privacy were being weakened in the name of public safety. ALA’s Director of the Office of Intellectual Freedom, Judith Krug, used her institutional position and power to challenge the constitutionality of the USA P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act, the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA), as well a previously coordinating the opposition to the Clinton-era Communications Decency Act (CDA) of 1996 which was an early attempt to censor internet content and curtail First Amendment protections for the new communication channel.
As the public library evolved over the last 150+ years in the United States, one of the governing constraints of the public library was the premium placed on free and unfettered access to all legally available information that the library chose to select. Explicit pornography, films of extreme violence, and other categories determined through local collection standards along with classified government secrets have largely been excluded from library collections as a matter of institutional policy. Books such as James Joyce’s Ulysses and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover were once considered pornographic and were not even legally available in the United States. Today they are largely uncontroversial selections of most large library collections. Books denigrating particular ethnic, religious, cultural, sexual orientations, etc., are more likely to be judged unwelcome in public library collections of the 21st century.
The opposite of intellectual freedom is usually considered to be censorship. Censorship is also a constrained value and co-evolves with the changing social environment. And like intellectual freedom, censorship is not an absolute value. There are perfectly acceptable reasons to censor information. This is a standard legal protection given to guardians of minors – whether they are parents or acting in loco parentis, as is the case with school library media specialists. Journalists can protect sources. Governments can bar dissemination of material deemed to be in the national interest and the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution protects citizens from being compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against oneself. In the context of libraries, censorship is most acceptable in primary educational libraries, less tolerated in secondary education libraries, and considered most intolerable in public and academic libraries with the caveat that because minors are patrons in public libraries there can be some restrictions on collection access however grudgingly promoted.
Intellectual freedom is always at risk.
Examples from history make this abundantly clear. Intellectual freedom has been denigrated and curtailed by various political, religious, cultural, and intellectual ideologies in all continents and all times. And today even the First Amendment itself is coming under attack by groups who deconstruct all “texts” into ultimately meaningless human constructs that are only reflections of unequal power relationships. This pernicious form of nihilism is antithetical to human progress and is the usual precursor to repressive periods of human history with the ultimate consequence being the death of millions as an ideology that claims exclusive access to “The Truth” fills the human need for meaning. Exclusivist religions in their fundamentalist configurations, messianic ideologies like Communism and Fascism, and ethnic & racially-based political states have all waged war on heresy, blasphemy, biological difference, class origin, lifestyle, etc. with the resulting loss of intellectual diversity, stoppage of human progress, and the blood millions spilled.
Let me end by quoting Supreme Court Associate Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in his dissenting opinion from the case United States v. Schwimmer [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Schwimmer (Links to an external site.) ]
He wrote that “if there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other, it is the principle of free thought—not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.”
I’m glad to be joining a profession that believes this and swims against the tide that would willingly trade security for liberty and public collectivist uniformity for private individual anarchy.