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Educating from the Margins: Academic

Librarians and Academic Freedom
Alexis Logsdon and Danya Leebaw

Abstract
In this article, we highlight how academic librarians’ distinct and often precarious
role on campus, together with our profession’s focus on the parent concept of
intellectual freedom, complicates librarians’ ability to enact academic freedom in
their daily work. After a brief review of the literature, we share findings from our
original research into this topic. We then offer two scenarios that showcase how
the familiar, routine work of librarians is subject to scrutiny and pushback in
ways that have been normalized and rationalized by higher education colleagues.
Throughout the article, we attend to how social identity and positional power
affect higher education workers’ experiences of academic freedom. Ultimately, we
argue that academic freedom limitations for academic librarians matter in their
own right, and also illuminate problems with precarity in higher education as a
whole.

Introduction
Our goal in this article is to pull back the curtain on the topic of academic
freedom and librarians, and share why we think this issue has
implications for higher education professionals far beyond the library.
Academic librarians’ position in the academy is more precarious and less
well-defined than that of departmental tenure-line faculty. Some
librarians are protected by tenure and academic freedom policies, others
are completely unprotected, and most experience limitations to their
exercise of academic freedom in practice. Libraries are hierarchical

Copyright American Association of University Professors, 2021

AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom 2
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operations situated within research and teaching contexts. Most

librarians’ daily work is performed under supervision, and they are
expected to organize their work almost entirely in service of students and
faculty. Yet librarians have disciplinary expertise in library and
information science that informs their work. The work librarians do relies
on the enactment of independent, expert theory and knowledge, and
these daily tasks and choices are vulnerable to censorship, pushback, and
control. When librarians avoid purchasing certain books, change their
instruction, or cancel controversial exhibits, the academic mission is
deeply compromised. In our previous research on this topic, which
included surveying academic librarians on their experiences and attitudes
toward academic freedom, we found that librarians felt their academic
freedom is on shaky ground. This was particularly the case for librarians
from underrepresented or lower-status groups. This article explores these
issues, including highlights of our own research findings, and through
two scenarios informed by experiences of the authors, survey
respondents, and others whose stories we have encountered in news
articles and social media posts. These composite sketches illustrate how
the familiar, everyday work of librarians is subject to scrutiny and
pushback, practices that have been normalized and rationalized on many
campuses. How meaningful and useful is our traditional understanding
of academic freedom when it is increasingly reserved for a powerful few
on campus, and so much of the core work of the academy is excluded from
its protections?

At the Periphery
Academic librarians sit at the periphery of the academy, where their
academic freedom protections and experiences are complex, uneven, and
poorly understood even within the profession. Whereas faculty as a whole
began to professionalize their status in the late nineteenth century and
advocated for their academic freedom, academic librarians were unable
to successfully align with faculty and cohere around similar goals.1

1
Gemma DeVinney, “Academic Librarians and Academic Freedom in the United States:
A History and Analysis,” Libri 36, no. 1 (January 1, 1986): 24–39.
 3 Educating from the Margins
Alexis Logsdon and Danya Leebaw

Academic librarians occupy a myriad assortment of statuses and roles on

their campuses, ranging from positions nearly identical to those of other
disciplinary faculty to being designated “faculty-like” to some kind of
“academic professional” staff, among many other designations.2 This
highly variable status across institutions obscures any singular
understanding of academic librarians’ freedoms and inhibits the ability to
organize for better rights.3 Perhaps even more important, the absence of
tenure protections associated with many of these librarian positions
inherently limits the enactment of academic freedom. Even when
academic freedom protections are extended by written institutional policy
beyond tenure-line faculty to librarians or other kinds of staff, those
protections are regularly tested by administrative decisions and the latent
threat of job loss.4
Another challenge is that the library profession prioritizes long-
standing core values that reinforce existing power imbalances and
overlook structural inequalities, often at the expense of library workers
and marginalized community members. Librarians’ free speech advocacy
continues to be focused almost entirely on intellectual freedom for library
users, rather than library worker protections like academic freedom. For
example, the primary professional organization for librarians, the
American Library Association (ALA), has allocated significant resources
for decades to fight against censorship.5 The ALA is also vocal and strong
in its support of librarians caught up in censorship battles. However, the
ALA primarily focuses on the concerns of public librarians and even in

2
Shin Freedman, “Faculty Status, Tenure, and Professional Identity: A Pilot Study of
Academic Librarians in New England,” portal: Libraries and the Academy 14, no. 4
(2014): 533–65, https://doi.org/10.1353/pla.2014.0023.
3
Richard A. Danner and Barbara Bintliff, “Academic Freedom Issues for Academic
Librarians,” Legal Reference Services Quarterly 25, no. 4 (July 23, 2007): 13–35,
https://doi.org/10.1300/J113v25n04_03.
4
Henry Reichman, The Future of Academic Freedom (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2019).
5
American Library Association (ALA), “Banned Books Week,” Banned and Challenged
Books, http://www.ala.org/advocacy/bbooks/banned, accessed February 3, 2021; ALA,
“Freedom to Read Foundation,” http://www.ala.org/aboutala/affiliates/relatedgroups
/freedomtoreadfoundation, accessed February 3, 2021.
AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom 4
Volume Twelve

that arena struggles to balance tensions between the interests of libraries

and librarians, managers and workers.6 The few professional
proclamations issued by library associations concerning academic
freedom are out of alignment with those of the AAUP,7 ’whose 1940
principles of academic freedom claim academic freedom to be “essential”
protections for faculty in their teaching and research duties, and also
defend faculty’s right to speak freely as citizens and representatives of
their institution. The AAUP also links tenure to academic freedom
protections.8 Librarian Gemma DeVinney, in her history of academic
librarians and academic freedom, argues that the implication for nearly
all statements issued during the twentieth century is that “academic
freedom is seen as necessary for academic librarians in performing their
collection development responsibilities, so that professorial faculty and
students are able to exercise their academic freedom.”9 More recent
statements from the Association for College & Research Libraries (ACRL)
proclaim academic freedom to be “indispensable to librarians in their role
as teachers and researchers,” and also support tenure for academic
librarians. However, ACRL still does not connect tenure to academic
freedom and continues to give primacy to collection development by
stating, “Censorship of any type is unacceptable whether individual or
organizational. All librarians must be free to provide access to
information regardless of content.”10

6
DeVinney, “Academic Freedom and Academic Librarians in the United States”; Noriko
Asato, “Librarians’ Free Speech: The Challenge of Librarians’ Own Intellectual Freedom
to the American Library Association, 1946–2007,” Library Trends 63, no. 1 (2014): 75–
105, https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2014.0025.
7
DeVinney, “Academic Freedom and Academic Librarians in the United States.”
8
American Association of University Professors, “1940 Statement of Principles on
Academic Freedom and Tenure,” https://www.aaup.org/report/1940-statement-
principles-academic-freedom-and-tenure.
9
DeVinney, “Academic Freedom and Academic Librarians in the United States,” 33.
10
Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL), “ACRL Statement on Academic
Freedom,” approved June 2015, http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/academicfreedom,
accessed May 7, 2021; ACRL, “ACRL Standards for Faculty Status for Academic
Librarians,” revised October 2011, http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/standardsfaculty,
accessed May 7, 2021.
 5 Educating from the Margins
Alexis Logsdon and Danya Leebaw

The library profession’s elevation and codification of the concept of

neutrality is another impediment to librarians’ academic freedom.
Neutrality is typically framed in librarianship as an objective good,
something to declare proudly, and necessary for rigorous research and
public service. According to this understanding, librarians’ neutral
position is in service of the intellectual freedom of our users. At its most
extreme, insistence on neutrality leads some librarians to defend the rights
of hate groups to use library spaces for their events.11 However, this
absolute deference to the intellectual freedom of users suppresses the
academic freedom of librarians and other users in our spaces. Running a
library involves making difficult choices that require librarians to exercise
their expertise at every turn: what materials to acquire, to withdraw, how
to respond to reference questions, what programming to support, and
how to create an inclusive and welcoming space. To uphold neutrality as
a core value is to ignore its ontological impossibility and also the way
neutrality is weaponized to silence our most marginalized and targeted
workers and community members.12 As a result, librarianship’s so-called
neutral enactment of academic freedom can directly interfere with its
stated commitment to social justice.13
The meaningful enactment of academic freedom is also inextricably
linked to professional and socioeconomic status. Librarians’ position as
“third space” professionals on their campuses, particularly their positions
in rigidly hierarchical workplaces (unlike disciplinary faculty), inherently
limits their experiences of academic freedom.14 Librarians of color and

11
ALA, “Are Libraries Neutral?,” American Libraries Magazine, June 1, 2018,
https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2018/06/01/are-libraries-neutral/.
12
Amelia N. Gibson, Renate L. Chancellor, Nicole A. Cooke, Sarah Park Dahlen, Shari A.
Lee, and Yasmeen L. Shorish, “Libraries on the Frontlines: Neutrality and Social Justice,”
Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal 36, no. 8 (2017): 751–66,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/EDI-11-2016-0100.
13
Sam Popowich, “The Antinomies of Academic Freedom: Reason, Trans Rights, and
Constituent Power,” Canadian Journal of Academic Librarianship 6 (2020): 1–28,
https://doi.org/10.33137/cjal-rcbu.v6.33980.
14
Danya Leebaw and Alexis Logsdon, "Power and Status (and Lack Thereof) in Academe:
Academic Freedom and Academic Librarians," In the Library with the Lead Pipe,
AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom 6
Volume Twelve

those from marginalized backgrounds have been targets of harassment

campaigns in recent years.15 Librarians from underrepresented
backgrounds also encounter a pervasively white and elitist environment
where they experience discrimination and microaggressions, leading to
self-censorship and worse.16 This mirrors the experience of faculty of color
for whom, as higher education scholar Holley Locher argues, self-
censorship is the primary barrier to academic freedom; for these faculty,
tenure protections are more effective than institutional academic freedom
policies.17
In this article and our previous work on the topic, we make the case
that academic freedom limitations for academic librarians illustrate the
problems with precarity in higher education as a whole. Increasingly,
institutions of higher education are dispersing what was once the work of
tenured faculty to a range of contingent faculty and academic staff.18
Researchers, lecturers, part-time faculty members, librarians, academic
advisers, and others are taking on the core research, teaching, and service

September 16, 2020, http://inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2020/power-and-status-

and-lack-thereof-in-academe/.
15
Lara Ewen, “Target: Librarians: What Happens When Our Work Leads to
Harassment—Or Worse,” American Libraries Magazine, June 3, 2019,
https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2019/06/03/target-librarians-harassment-
doxxing.
16
Angela Galvan, “Soliciting Performance, Hiding Bias: Whiteness and Librarianship,” In
the Library with the Lead Pipe, June 3, 2015,
http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2015/soliciting-performance-hiding-bias-
whiteness-and-librarianship/; Jaena Alabi, “Racial Microaggressions in Academic
Libraries: Results of a Survey of Minority and Non-minority Librarians,” Journal of
Academic Librarianship 41, no. 1 (2015): 47-53,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2014.10.008.
17
Holley M. Locher, “Academic Freedom for Whom? Experiences and Perceptions of
Faculty of Color” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2013), 207,
http://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/150960.
18
Celia Whitchurch, “Shifting Identities and Blurring Boundaries: The Emergence of
Third Space Professionals in UK Higher Education,” Higher Education Quarterly 62, no. 4
(October 2008): 377–96, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2273.2008.00387.x.
 7 Educating from the Margins
Alexis Logsdon and Danya Leebaw

work that in decades past was the purview of traditional faculty.19

Academic freedom has long been understood to be an essential protection
for research and teaching, but many people undertaking this work on
college campuses do not have meaningful academic freedom protections.
It is also important to keep in mind who on college campuses is most likely
to occupy precarious positions. Women, Black and Indigenous people,
people of color, and other groups are less well represented in the most
secure positions on campus and far more likely to be faculty members
holding contingent positions and academic staff.20

Survey of Librarians and Academic Freedom

Many librarians are unclear about their academic freedom protections but
say they experience pushback and silencing in their work. In a 2018
survey, we asked academic librarians about their perceptions of academic
freedom, experiences with academic freedom, and also about their
socioeconomic status.21 Do they have protections, do they care about these
protections, and have they experienced freedom in their work? Our
hypotheses when we began our research were that academic librarians
are unclear about their academic freedom protections, that academic
freedom matters to them, and that experiences of academic freedom will
vary depending on respondents’ socioeconomic status.
The degree to which academic librarians perceived themselves as
having academic freedom, and experienced academic freedom, varied by
the workplace activity and type of silencing or punitive measure we asked
about. Librarians felt the most free to perform their collection

19
Bruce Macfarlane, “The Morphing of Academic Practice: Unbundling and the Rise of
the Para-academic,” Higher Education Quarterly 65, no. 1 (January 2011): 59–73,
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2273.2010.00467.x.
20
National Center for Education Statistics, “Characteristics of Post-secondary Faculty,”
Condition of Education, May 2020, https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_csc.asp.
21
For details on our survey methodology and a summary of our findings, see Danya
Leebaw and Alexis Logsdon, “The Cost of Speaking Out: Do Librarians Truly Experience
Academic Freedom?,” ACRL Conference Proceedings, 2019,
http://www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/files/content/conferences/confsandpreconfs/
2019/TheCostofSpeakingOut.pdf; and Leebaw and Logsdon, “Power and Status (and
Lack Thereof) in Academe.”
AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom 8
Volume Twelve

development activities, in line with the literature cited above.

Unsurprisingly, librarians felt the least protected in social media
activities. It was more surprising to discover that fewer than one-third of
respondents felt secure “all of the time” in their research and publishing
activities. The most common infringement on academic freedom for our
respondents was an informal penalty (such as being scolded or shut out
of opportunities) for questioning a workplace decision, while the least
common experience was a formal penalty (such as being demoted, written
up, or fired) for the same act. More than 20 percent of our respondents
reported being directed not to participate in a particular workplace
activity and slightly less than 20 percent were told to change their
teaching or another aspect of their work.
Librarians with higher socioeconomic and professional status
responded differently than librarians with marginalized status and less
security. For instance, white librarians were more likely than nonwhite
librarians to perceive that they have freedom of expression in a variety of
work-related tasks and adjacent contexts. This difference was more
pronounced when it came to activities that are both more visible but also
less circumscribed, including workplace interactions, social media, off-
campus activities, and programming. Nonwhite librarians reported more
infringements on their freedoms in all scenarios compared to white
librarians, except for complaints from the public. Librarians who reported
less financial security also felt less protected and reported more
infringements on their academic freedom. Librarians with faculty status
were more likely in every single job task to feel protected.
In the open-ended comments, librarians told us they felt particularly
constrained by their workplace hierarchies. One commenter said, “It feels
like our library leadership wants it both ways: librarians that will be active
in high-profile research, publishing, professional and community orgs,
etc., but also never say anything leadership doesn’t like.” Another
commenter stated, “There is a silent understanding that [academic]
freedom really only means ‘Freedom to uphold the “party” line.’”
Another commenter said their “institution embraces social justice, but the
library does not.”
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Alexis Logsdon and Danya Leebaw

Academic Librarians Need Freedom to Contribute to the Academic

Mission
Academic librarians contribute to the academic enterprise through their
disciplinary expertise in all sorts of ways. Some of these are quite familiar
and well understood, while others are likely invisible to anyone outside
the library. Libraries are central to the research and teaching mission of
universities. Librarians are experts in library science, with skills and
knowledge across the spectrum that this entails. We create and maintain
vast systems to organize materials and make them findable and
accessible. We preserve library collections, which requires technical
expertise to repair and protect fragile books and other materials. We
create and maintain archives and special collections. We teach students
how to find and evaluate information for their classes, and we aid faculty
in pursuit of their research projects. We visit classes to teach students how
to conduct a literature review, how to find secondary data, how to identify
a scholarly article, and much more. We answer questions from students,
faculty, and staff about resources and research topics. We manage
budgets in the tens of millions of dollars, some of the biggest outlays on
university campuses, to license subscriptions for the institutional
community to essential journals and databases. We maintain important
professional networks and consortia in order to facilitate the borrowing
and lending of materials from all over the world, to coordinate collection
development, to ensure acquisition and preservation of rare and foreign-
language materials. In all of these and many more tasks, we apply the
disciplinary expertise of librarianship. Much like social work, educational
studies, public health, and other fields, librarianship is an applied social
science. Many, but not all, librarians also contribute to the development
of librarianship as a discipline by conducting research into the core
problems of the field. Library science scholarship employs a variety of
methods, from the highly quantitative to the purely theoretical. In
addition to subject area and functional and technical expertise, many
librarians come to the profession with rich backgrounds in other fields
and industries. Additionally, an increasing number of professional staff
in libraries do not hold master of library and information science degrees
AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom 10
Volume Twelve

but rather come with graduate degrees or experience from other

disciplines and fields.22
When protected by academic freedom policies and norms, academic
librarians are able to apply their expertise freely and thus to the greatest
benefit of our community. To understand why this matters, it helps to
consider specific cases where it is obvious that interference with librarian
expertise would be detrimental. Collection development, as noted above,
is often the easiest library task for nonlibrarians to recognize as in need of
academic freedom protections. Censorship of library materials inherently
limits the academic freedom of not only librarians but also anyone on
campus who would wish to encounter or use censored materials. Another
case where academic freedom matters for librarians is in our one-on-one
work with students to aid them in their research assignments and other
library-based coursework. Librarians should feel free to introduce
students to whatever resources they deem relevant to students’
assignments, to be able to speak freely about these resources, and to help
students understand them in a comprehensive way. Another area where
academic freedom is essential in libraries is library cataloging. Catalogers
should feel free to describe materials in their collections in ways that,
drawing on their expertise, make them both accurate and easily findable.
Academic freedom is also key when archivists are processing a collection
or helping researchers work with it. They must be able to collect the
materials they deem important for the historical record, and then describe
contents in a way that provides access to the collection from a number of
approaches, including in ways the original donors had not anticipated. In
the following scenarios, we attempt to provide further illustration of why
academic freedom matters for academic librarians and the significant
limitations librarians bump up against in this arena.

The DEI Exhibit

Josephine, a librarian at a small private college in the Midwest, is part of
a campus committee on improving the campus climate when it comes to

22
David Lewis, Reimagining the Academic Library (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield,
2016), 61–74.
 11 Educating from the Margins
Alexis Logsdon and Danya Leebaw

diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). The DEI committee decides to

engage in education and outreach on campus for Black History Month
that February. They arrange to bring several Black speakers to campus
and conclude the month with a panel composed of faculty and staff.
Josephine decides that the library can contribute in two ways: a special
exhibit and a research guide on the library website. Josephine works with
another librarian who is responsible for the Black studies collection to
stage a small exhibit in the library featuring Black authors from their
collection. One of the items they display is The Autobiography of Malcolm X
(a frequently challenged book in libraries).23 Josephine also pulls together
a research guide featuring books recommended on the Charleston
Syllabus, a crowd-sourced reading list on race and racial violence
assembled by academics in response to the Charleston church killings in
2015.24 She carefully finds links to catalog records or journal articles for
each of the items held by the library and uses her small budget to purchase
a number of items the library did not yet own. When this guide is posted,
many faculty members and students share their appreciation of the guide.
Several faculty members develop assignments based on the guide,
encouraging students to read a minimum number of articles featured and
write about them.
When the exhibit goes up, a community member sends an email to the
library director complaining about the Malcolm X book specifically but
also the exhibit as a whole: “I bet the library won’t do an exhibit on white
history!” The library director responds politely but dismisses the
complaint as meaningless and a form of “trolling.” Josephine, however, is
a bit shaken by the email and her library director’s lackluster response.
She wishes he had more forthrightly stood behind the exhibit and called
out this community member for their racism. Then, a right-wing student
group publishes articles in the student newspaper complaining about the
research guide, especially the readings about whiteness and racial

23
Princeton Library, “A Dozen Notable Challenged or Banned Books by African American
Authors,” https://princetonlibrary.bibliocommons.com/list/share/
140796781/199921233, accessed February 3, 2021.
24
African American Intellectual Historical Society, “#Charlestonsyllabus,”
https://www.aaihs.org/resources/charlestonsyllabus/, accessed February 3, 2021.
AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom 12
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violence. They name Josephine specifically, and soon her name, the
library, and the college find themselves under attack on social media. At
this point, Josephine is frightened. Caught off-guard by the foment,
college leadership instructs the library to take down the guide. Josephine
feels like she can’t push back because her supervisor has made it clear she
won’t have his support, and she worries about her job security. Librarians
are at-will employees at the college. While she thinks it unlikely that she
would actually be fired for taking a stand, she relies on her small annual
discretionary merit increases in pay and also wants to continue being
given opportunities to take on important projects. These will add to her
CV should she want to seek a new job in the future.
Coming out of this experience, Josephine decides to keep a much
lower profile. She needs this job and she also wants to avoid trouble, so
that she is positioned well professionally for something new in the future.
She steps down from the DEI committee after her term is up that spring
and avoids college committee work for the time being. When Black
History Month is over, she takes down the exhibit and vows to not do
anything in the future, even if asked, for that month. After the Charleston
syllabus was taken down, no one in the library takes the initiative to
replace it with another guide in Black studies. Josephine and other staff
don’t have the stomach to go up against the social media outrage again,
and they don’t want to anger the college president. The library is regularly
targeted for budget cuts by the college leadership, and the staff knows
they were expected to do everything possible to make their work valuable
to the administration controlling the purse strings. The self-silencing
described here echoes comments we received on our survey. One
respondent, for instance, said, “I am definitely at a place where keeping
my head down in situations that might bring the attention of campus
leadership is the survival method that I, and others here, have adopted.”
In this scenario, the silencing of the librarian—who lacked formal
faculty status, tenure, and sat outside the college’s academic freedom
policy—had a clear and negative impact on the scholarly, educational
enterprise of the college. Applying her expertise as a librarian, Josephine
acquired important resources for the library and provided educational
opportunities. She encountered pushback on multiple levels, from
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Alexis Logsdon and Danya Leebaw

community members to her own supervisors, and felt unsupported. Even

though she was never threatened with even a formal reprimand, she felt
vulnerable and unsafe in her job and in general. Students and faculty lost
out on her library expertise and consequently missed opportunities to
learn, specifically on topics related to anti-Black racism. While this
scenario is a composite sketch and not based in any one reality, aspects of
it were taken from the real experiences of the authors as well as other
librarian colleagues. One comment on our survey captures how
suppressing the academic freedom of librarians interferes with
educational opportunities in this way: “My colleagues and I created a
research guide in conjunction with a midterm election literacy panel on
our campus and were told that the guide was ‘unbalanced.’ We were then
given the option to make specific changes or take down the entire guide.
We did not agree with the specific changes being asked of us and decided
to take the whole guide down.” We did not assign Josephine a specific
racial identity, but it is worth noting that the literature and our own
research shows that if she were Black, Indigenous, or a person of color,
she would be more likely to encounter pushback and silencing than if she
were white. Similarly, we know from our own experience and other
stories in the news that topics around race and white supremacy in the
United States are a particular target for community backlash and right-
wing media outrage.

The New Professional

Marisa is a newly hired, early career instruction librarian at a public state
college, where librarians have faculty status and a tenure and promotion
process that resembles that of most faculty on campus. Alan Paterson, a
member of the history faculty who has long relied on library instruction
sessions in his courses, asks Marisa for one for his 300-level Early
American History seminar. Paterson has strong feelings about how
library instruction should be conducted, based on previous sessions
conducted by Marisa’s predecessor: he expects that Marisa will stand at
the front of the room, laptop projected to the screen, and go through a list
of databases and tips and tricks for using the library catalog. The library
has a number of video tutorials and static guides that cover this kind of
AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom 14
Volume Twelve

baseline instruction, but Paterson is not convinced students will look at

them, so he wants Marisa to cover it in the session. Not wanting to alienate
a faculty member on first contact but skeptical of this approach, Marisa
attempts to split the difference by doing some “point and click” content
at the start of the session. As students’ eyes glaze over, she quickly pivots
to a more engaging strategy: small group, task-oriented, hands-on
methods. Throughout the activity, Paterson repeatedly tries to redirect the
session back to database “show and tell,” resulting in an awkward class
session where Marisa toggles between visiting the small groups to offer
advice on their research strategies and running to the lectern to show
them a primary sources database that Paterson recommends. Marisa
leaves at the end of the session frustrated and somewhat nervous because
she feels like she failed both herself and the students, and maybe their
professor, too.
Part of what makes Marisa’s experience so fraught is that even though
she and Paterson are both faculty, the power differential is stark. Paterson
has tenure, while Marisa is very early in the probationary period of her
career. There is an unspoken understanding that Paterson is a domain
expert in the subject matter, while Marisa is there to serve a narrowly
defined function. Marisa is not a historian, but she is trained in
information literacy learning outcomes that are designed to integrate with
the course subject and materials. Much of this had to be suppressed in
order to appease the instructor of record. Marisa had no choice but to
acquiesce to the faculty member’s wishes to some degree, because she is
evaluated on her ability to successfully do outreach to her liaison
departments.
For many librarians concerned about their academic freedom, the
classroom is the site of interference but for different reasons than for
traditional faculty. Whereas faculty are subject to student evaluations of
their teaching, which can also be in tension with academic freedom,
librarians depend on faculty permissions to meet their own teaching and
learning goals. If Paterson doesn’t invite her back to his class next year, or
expresses his dissatisfaction with her teaching methods to other
colleagues in his department, Marisa might struggle to demonstrate her
progress to her supervisor, leading to poor performance reviews, stalled
 15 Educating from the Margins
Alexis Logsdon and Danya Leebaw

pay increases, and worse, potentially impeding her progress to tenure.

There are other, subtle ways that Marisa might be punished. As one of our
survey respondents described informal punishment: “Often the
chastisement is silent, carried out over several months, and you don’t
realize right away that it is connected to your incident.” Scenarios like this
play out in library instruction sessions all the time. Librarians have
sophisticated and important learning goals around information literacy
and research inquiry but typically lack their own credit-bearing courses.
We must integrate into the established curriculum through its assigned
gatekeepers, the instructors of record. This often requires performing
invisible emotional labor: placating, deference, and gentle suggestions.25
When we reject this model of behavior in favor of asserting our expertise
and bringing our authentic selves to the classroom, it can result in
negative response, even bullying. Indeed, several studies have noted that
the precarious position of librarians in the academy puts us in prime

25
Many scholars both within and outside librarianship have discussed the role of
emotional labor in feminized professions like librarianship, and how it can lead to
burnout if not acknowledged and mitigated where appropriate. See, for example,
Tatiana Bryant, Hilary Bussell, and Rebecca Halpern, “Being Seen: Gender Identity and
Performance as a Professional Resource in Library Work,” College & Research Libraries
80, no. 6 (2019), https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.80.6.805; Lisa Sloniowski, “Affective Labor,
Resistance, and the Academic Librarian,” Library Trends 64, no. 4 (2016): 645–66; Ean
Henninger, Adena Brons, Chloe Riley, and Crystal Yin, “Perceptions and Experiences of
Precarious Employment in Canadian Libraries: An Exploratory Study,” Partnership: The
Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research 14, no. 2 (2019),
https://doi.org/10.21083/partnership.v14i2.5169. Many authors have discussed
emotional labor in context of low morale and burnout among librarians of color, notably
Fobazi Ettarh, “Vocational Awe and Librarianship: The Lies We Tell Ourselves,” In the
Library with the Lead Pipe, January 10, 2018,
http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/; Kaetrena Davis
Kendrick and Ione T. Damasco, “Low Morale in Ethnic and Racial Minority Academic
Librarians: An Experiential Study,” Library Trends 68 no. 2 (2019): 174–212,
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/746745; and Tarida Anantachai and Camille Chesley, “The
Burden of Care: Cultural Taxation of Women of Color Librarians on the Tenure-Track,” in
Pushing the Margins: Women of Color and Intersectionality in LIS, ed. Rose L. Chou and
Annie Pho (Sacramento, CA: Library Juice, 2018).
AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom 16
Volume Twelve

position to be bullied, with dramatically worse consequences for

librarians of color.26
Discussions about librarians and academic freedom are almost always
outwardly focused on our ethical principles around protecting the
academic freedom of others. Paradoxically, librarians’ own academic
freedom is primarily addressed within the framework of our position as
precarious workers. This tension between librarians as instructors with
academic freedom and librarians as conduits for academic freedom of
others is attendant even in this special issue’s call for papers: “How does
academic freedom function for precarious faculty and staff, for students,
for tenured and tenure-track faculty from marginalized groups?” This
question includes librarians as precarious staff, while the category that
explicitly names librarians asks, “How do issues around collections,
catalogs, access, reference, and information literacy affect academic
freedom? How have librarians expanded academic freedom in fights
against austerity budgets, profit-driven publishers, and surveillance, and
in fights for open access, privacy, and freedom from harassment?” The
latter framing squares with the ALA’s aforementioned focus on the
freedom to read—that is, the support of the intellectual freedom of our
faculty colleagues and students (through privacy rights and in other
ways)—but it leaves out important questions about our own academic
freedom rights.

Conclusion
Academic librarians’ experiences with academic freedom are complex
and distinct from others on our campuses. Librarianship has long been
focused on fighting censorship on behalf of our users and promoting an

26
For more on bullying in academic libraries, see Jo Henry et al., “Incivility and
Dysfunction in the Library Workplace: Perceptions and Feedback from the Field,”
Journal of Library Administration 58, no. 2 (February 17, 2018): 128–52,
https://doi.org/10.1080/01930826.2017.1412708; Shin Freedman and Dawn Vreven,
“Workplace Incivility and Bullying in the Library: Perception or Reality?” College &
Research Libraries 77, no. 6 (November 1, 2016): 727–48,
https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.77.6.727; and Kendrick and Damasco, “Low Morale in Ethnic
and Racial Minority Academic Librarians.”
 17 Educating from the Margins
Alexis Logsdon and Danya Leebaw

ideal of neutrality as an ethical, foundational principle for librarianship.

This framing dominates librarians’ professional discourse while
simultaneously decentering the experiences, professional expertise, and
rights of librarians. The fact that academic librarians occupy such a wide
range of job statuses on their campuses and work within rigid hierarchical
bureaucracies further muddies the water. When we surveyed academic
librarians on their academic freedom experiences and values, they
reported significant limitations and confusion around what they could
even expect. In the comments, many of our survey respondents described
supervisors interfering with their work and telling them what they were
allowed to research. Since we asked about sociodemographic variables,
we can also see that librarians who have less status and power have it
worse. They are more likely to experience pushback in their work and feel
less free to express themselves in many areas.
We suspect that many faculty members outside the library have only
a superficial awareness, at best, of how academic freedom plays out for
their library colleagues. It is perhaps easiest for nonlibrarians to grasp
why academic freedom matters for libraries when it comes to our
collections. Yet there are many other ways that barriers to academic
freedom negatively affect academic librarians and our ability to do our
best work as educators and researchers in our own right. Our goal in the
scenarios we shared was to highlight implications for academic freedom
in day-to-day library work, especially situations that might be less
familiar to nonlibrarians. We also wanted to illustrate and discuss the
ways that social identity and status influence academic librarians’ ability
to truly enact their academic freedom. It is worth noting that we could
also have developed stories that illustrate challenges to cataloging,
archival, or reference work. Ultimately, we hope that these stories and the
context we provide at the outset of this article help make more tangible
the real issues at stake here. As we stated in the introduction, it is unclear
how these challenges should be addressed. Fighting for broader tenure
protections for academic librarians feels misplaced when challenges to
these protections continue to rise. However, we hope that simply
unpacking academic librarians’ experiences with academic freedom
brings new insight and clarity to begin imagining a way forward. The
AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom 18
Volume Twelve

specific issues that affect librarians also have an impact on contingent

faculty and nonfaculty academic staff on our campuses. Many roles once
performed by traditional faculty have been dispersed to other contingent
faculty and academic staff on campus, leaving the core work of teaching
and research increasingly unprotected. This has implications for shared
governance on campus, independently directed academic work, and
labor rights for all academic workers. Overall, the experiences of
librarians demonstrate that protection of academic freedom for all
academic staff and faculty is essential to the educational mission of
universities.

Alexis Logsdon is a former academic librarian currently working in UX design

in the private sector. During her twenty-year stint in academia, her research
interests included invisible, undervalued labor in many forms, from emotional
labor in digital humanities partnerships to prison labor in the service of library
projects to narrative structure in working class literature. Danya Leebaw is the
director of the Social Sciences and Professional Programs Department at the
University of Minnesota Libraries. Her research focuses on academic library
management practices and worker experiences, informed by critical management
studies and principles of academic freedom.