Once upon a time, library inclusivity was something to commend. I recall a local interest reporter for Milwaukee's Journal (yes, after the merger but before the name change) doing a compare-and-contrast of Milwaukee's Central Library with the nearby Marquette University library. My memory is hazy as this is an old story, the reporter characterized the students going about their business at Marquette, including using the card catalog, as somehow creating a more elite environment than was the case at Central Library, where people down on their luck came over from the Rescue Mission to look at the classified advertisements. (How many things did I just name that the younglings have no knowledge thereof?)
These days, laments Mr Bissonette, the libraries are so inclusive nobody goes there any more.
I was excited about the Mandel Public Library when I moved to West Palm Beach, Florida, in early 2023. The city was on the rise, and Fodor’s Travel had named Mandel the fourth most beautiful public library in America.Library usage might also be affected by people maintaining online subscriptions to dailies and periodicals and downloading books to their electronic readers. And help wanted advertisements, are those even a thing in the print newspapers any more? Mr Bissonette argues, though, that it's more evidence of woke turning things lousy.
Then I started going there.
I watched a security guard tell a man who appeared to be homeless that he wasn’t allowed back for another month. In the new books section, a guy yelled into his phone that he’d been kicked off the bus for arguing with a driver. Other homeless people slept in chairs and snored; the smell made you hold your breath.
Beautiful though it was, with high rounded ceilings and a coffee shop in the lobby, I wondered how people could use this library as a place to read and study. The answer, I soon discovered, is that increasingly, they don’t.
Between 2012 and 2019, according to the Institute of Museum and Library Services, visits to the Mandel Library declined 27 percent, and total circulation—the number of items, including e-books, borrowed by library patrons—fell 26 percent.
And even as newcomers poured into South Florida, the trend has not reversed, with visits falling another 31 percent since 2019, meaning that visits have declined a staggering 50 percent. The statistic showing a dramatic increase, on the other hand, is not the one you want to see. According to the library’s director, Lisa Hathaway, “behavior incident reports”—everything from sleeping in the library to harassment of other patrons as well as staff—have risen by 41 percent since 2019.
It’s not a coincidence, of course, that visits are down while incidents are up. When librarians talk about the decreasing visit numbers—which they prefer not to—they say that fewer people are coming to libraries because Americans are reading less. But with print sales up and bookstores making a comeback, that explanation doesn’t make sense. Rather, a major reason libraries are in decline is that, as a former librarian wrote in the Los Angeles Times in 2007, libraries have become “a de facto daytime shelter for the city’s homeless.” Indeed, when libraries research what people dislike about their institution, they often find that the homeless population now congregating in the library is the biggest complaint.Undoubtedly, there will be Enlightened Types to argue that "quality of life" is a "social construction" that's probably oppressive, and that it is Our Comradely Duty to always think like a social worker.
In recent years, as it has become clear that progressive solutions to quality of life problems have usually backfired, cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco have begun retreating from them. But not librarians. Rather than resisting their emerging role as social worker and first responder to the homeless, they have embraced it, to the detriment of everyone else who wants to use a library.
If there are two people who represent competing visions for what libraries should be, they are librarian trainers Ryan Dowd and Steve Albrecht. The two are friends, but their approaches are very different. Dowd, who once ran a homeless shelter in Aurora, Illinois, is the author of The Librarian’s Guide to Homelessness: An Empathy-Driven Approach to Solving Problems, Preventing Conflict, and Serving Everyone. He told me he originally wanted to title the book How to Run Your Library Like a Homeless Shelter. When I asked if he was joking, he said he wasn’t sure. He has given seminars for roughly half the nation’s librarians, including most of the largest systems. His influence is unquestioned."Jerks with homes." And people on the lunatic left wonder why there are Militant Normals who refer to a lunatic left. It's the same mind-set that has destroyed higher education. Let's rephrase that "essential belief" as "not only do the unprepared have every right to spend their days in college but that professors should be trained to view their needs as a critical part of the job."
Dowd’s essential belief is that not only do the homeless have every right to spend their days in libraries but that librarians should view their needs as a critical part of the job. He believes librarians should be trained to dispense Narcan. One of his seminars is called “Jerks with Homes: How to Deal with Members of the Public Who Are Being Jerks About Homeless Folks.” His scripts for addressing problematic behaviors include examples like, “Hey, I don’t care if you urinate on the Harry Potter books, but the politicians have a no-urinating policy. Therefore, I have to ask you to stop.”
Dowd advocates for “inclusion,” even when it seems to come at the expense of the library’s environment. In Dowd’s book, some people who complain about the homeless are “everyday sadists.” As for the body odor that permeates so many public libraries, he writes that “There is a certain amount of odor that we can expect whenever we go out in public. Other people use odor as an excuse to vent their prejudices. Don’t let someone’s hypersensitivity or bias rule the day if the smell really isn’t that bad.”
If I had wanted to be a special education teacher, I would have sought a special education certificate. I sat a Ph.D. in economics. Why was my discontent a minority position in higher education? Why are librarians reluctant to police their libraries? "Most librarians I spoke with were nervous about discussing the homeless problem because they’ve seen the consequences of bucking the progressive tide that swept America’s libraries."
Change the culture, maybe the progressive tide will ebb.
Albrecht, a former San Diego cop who has done library security training for 25 years, takes a tougher approach. He advises librarians to “stop apologizing” for measures designed to make their libraries safe and appealing environments. Some topics he covers in his webinar program include Our List of Challenging Patrons: From Pets to Pedophiles, and Issues Enforcing Our Code of Conduct.You can't be so inclusive nobody goes there any more, and you ought respect specialization and a division of labor.
“We are losing control of a facility that has always been benevolent and peaceful for the community,” Albrecht told me.
In 2018, Fobazi Ettarh, an academic librarian, wrote a paper in which she coined the term vocational awe. The paper, which quickly went viral among librarians, is a sharp takedown of what it calls a popular belief that “libraries as institutions are inherently good, sacred notions, and therefore beyond critique.”Sometimes you have to let librarians be librarians and emergency medical technicians be technicians; sometimes you have to let professors be professors and special education teachers strut their skills; and sometimes you have to vote to dismiss the unhappy members of the Millpond congregation to East Millpond.
Although Ettarh is a progressive—she described herself as a “radical librarian”—she doesn’t shrink from discussing the failings of libraries.
Ettarh grew up the daughter of a pastor, and she told me she hears echoes of the church in the ways librarians talk about libraries: Conflicts and contradictions are dismissed, and tough questions are sidestepped.
For instance, Ettarh wondered how librarians can dispense Narcan and then host story time. “Library workers—who are already overworked and have little to no medical training or mental health support—are expected to repeatedly take on this issue, and are celebrated for it as if adding this very charged task to their job expectations is natural or uncomplicated,” she said.
Tim Coates, who ran the British bookstore chain Waterstones in the 1980s, calls the decisions made by libraries a “complete misdiagnosis” of what the public wants. Since 2019, he has published surveys called the Freckle Project that gauge changes in reading habits and how they affect libraries. He says that the data shows that people want libraries to be about “books and a nice place to study.”Democracy? Let's try this challenge? A community petitions its city council to close its public library unless said library implements a behavior code that might exclude either stinking up the joint or loitering. Isn't that what democracy is supposed to look like?
He finds the state of things agonizing. “They’ve taken all the things they’re good at and lost them in the pursuit of something they’ll never be good at.”
Librarians, for the most part, are not open to this critique. When the American Library Association had its annual meeting last week, the discussion wasn’t focused on these depressing statistics. Rather, the group’s incoming president spoke about the role librarians play in preserving democracy.
“How on earth can a librarian’s role be to preserve and protect democracy?” Coates asked in a post on X. “Their role is to help people find what they want to read.”
“I’ll say circulations and visits are down,” Coates told me. “And they’ll say that’s not a measure of what we do, because we transform people’s lives. But if people aren’t coming, then you’re not transforming their lives.”
When I asked Lisa Hathaway, the director of the Mandel Library, whether she found it a challenge to serve both her traditional library patrons and the homeless population who spend their days there, she disagreed with the premise. “We don’t necessarily see serving our diverse population as a challenge. It’s a core position. Challenge is not a word we use here at our library.”
Summing up: in that “They’ve taken all the things they’re good at and lost them in the pursuit of something they’ll never be good at,” don't we have an epitaph for the lost world of bourgeois norms generally?
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