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Browsing University Libraries by Subject "academic freedom"

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    The Cost of Speaking Out: Do Librarians Truly Experience Academic Freedom?
    (2019) Leebaw, Danya; Logsdon, Alexis
    Academic librarians might believe they are protected by academic freedom policies, but how extensive are their protections and what is their lived experience when it comes to freedom to speak and act in the workplace or in public? In the United States, the 2016 election and the rise of the Far Right and state oppression of marginalized communities brought urgency to these questions. Many librarians feel compelled to speak and act against oppression in and outside of the library. Academic freedom protection for librarians is far from settled practice, and is complicated by the profession’s focus on the broader concept of intellectual freedom for library users. The authors are interested in studying the experiences and perceptions of academic freedom among academic librarians, a topic which has not been widely studied. We are also interested in studying the relationship of social identity and financial status to academic freedom for library staff. Doing so raises interesting questions about academic freedom more broadly, such as the extent to which academic freedom policies matter when library staff stay silent out of fear of negative repercussions. In order to study these questions, we developed and issued a survey to academic librarians in the Fall of 2018. We hypothesized that most academic librarians would value academic freedom but not believe they are completely protected by academic freedom policies. We also hypothesized that librarians who belong to socially marginalized groups and/or are economically insecure would experience fewer freedoms in the workplace. In this paper, we provide a preview of our overall findings and also a more detailed analysis of the relationship of race and financial security to freedom of expression and experiences of infringement. Our initial findings support our hypotheses: academic freedom is very important to a sizeable majority of academic librarians. However, the degree to which they experience or perceive their own freedoms varies by scenario and by their racial identity and financial situation. Indeed, we find that non-white librarians and financially precarious librarians feel less free and experience more infringements than their white and financially secure counterparts.
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    Power and Status (and Lack Thereof) in Academe: Academic Freedom and Academic Librarians
    (In the Library with the Lead Pipe, 2020-09-16) Leebaw, Danya; Logsdon, Alexis
    Academic librarians do not experience full academic freedom protections, despite the fact that they are expected to exercise independent judgment, be civically engaged, and practice applied scholarship. Academic freedom for academic librarians is not widely studied or well understood. To learn more, we conducted a survey which received over 600 responses from academic librarians on a variety of academic freedom measures. In this article, we focus specifically on faculty status for librarians and the ways this intersects with academic freedom perceptions and experiences. Even though all librarians who answered our survey share similar experiences when it comes to infringements on their freedom, faculty librarians are more likely to feel they are protected in their free expression. We find it useful to situate librarians within a growing cohort of “third space” academic professionals who perform similar duties to traditional faculty but lack tenure and its associated academic freedom protections. We argue that more attention needs to be paid in the library profession to academic freedom for librarians, and that solidarity with other non-traditional faculty on campus is a potential avenue for allyship and advocacy.