This page was created by Anonymous. The last update was by Kim Stathers.
Why don't librarians "Just say No"?
We started this page laughing about anti-drug campaigns (DARE and "Just say No") and then found ourselves returning to a circumstance that will not shock anyone who has ever worked in a library: libraries and librarians are often complicit in their own silence, organizationally so desperate to prove their worth, that refusal is not an option.
Morgenstern's Starless Sea takes things quite a bit further. Reviewers describe the book as a beautifully written and compellingly imagined book that introduces a mystical library. These librarians are physically and emotionally inculcated to their vocation, devoting themselves entirely to serving the library.
The librarians will be blindfolded with their hands tied behind their backs and then either be branded or de-tongued before they can start work. The mutilations are the critical prerequisites that mark the point at which the librarians in the Starless Sea can be trusted to do their jobs.
Why elinguation? Because, borrowing from Popowich (2019), their role is to be caretakers who can't say "No." Not meaning makers.
In the 1995 film Party Girl, Mary gets fired from her job at the public library and her godmother, the librarian, goes on a rant about the demands of the profession. She tells Mary that "Melvil Dewey hired women as librarians because he believed the job didn't require any intelligence! It was a woman's job! That means it's underpaid and undervalued!" (Mayer 1995)
The feminization of the profession plays a big role, but there is of course no single reason librarians don't "Just Say No." But it is worth remembering that even Bartleby in all his mental anguish was able to voice that he "preferred not to"—surely this is a language we can adopt more? Scarcity scenarios have been playing out at universities worldwide, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic situation which drives counter-intuitive decision making.
For example, some libraries unnecessarily delayed closing during the COVID-19 pandemic, as other academic libraries closed to protect their patrons and their staff (Hinchliffe and Wolff-Eisenberg 2020). The rationale for those that remained opened was that the library staff were up for the risk and that their sacrifice was worth it.
- Were library administrators able to just say "No" and refuse to send their people to work without PPE during a pandemic situation?
- Were library staff able to say "No PPE? Then I'm not coming in to work/I'm not working where I don't feel safe [around co-workers who won't practice social distancing or around maskless patrons]?"
- Were library staff able to refuse to work when they found themselves denied surveillance or diagnostic testing offered to other members of the campus community like students living in dormitories or professors doing classroom instruction?
- Were library staff able to say "if you want us to stay open/re-open without COVID-19 testing available, I'm not coming in to work"?
