Summary Of Intellectual Freedom Is Not Social Justice By Kyle Shocky

Shockey, K. (2016). Intellectual Freedom Is Not Social Justice. Progressive Librarian, (44), 101-110.

Kyle Shockey is a Resource Description Specialist at the American University. His article discusses academic freedom and its relationship to the LIS Curriculum. He begins by discussing Professor Steven Salatia losing his tenured position at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign after the professor used Twitter to criticize the Israel Defense Force during the summer of 2014. Given that one of the ALA’s core values is academic freedom, Shockey argues that the ALA and ALA-accredited schools and institutions should’ve done more to defend Professor Salatia.

He gives examples of the tension between the ALA’s view of intellectual freedom and the social responsibility value it upholds, claiming that this conflict is not taught enough to LIS students. Intellectual freedom as a core ALA value began narrowly focused on book
censorship. The history and development of intellectual freedom by the ALA is detailed in the article. As did Laura Childs in her article, “To Uphold and Resist: Protecting Intellectual Freedom through Progressive Librarianship", Shockey writes about the contradiction of neutrality and advocacy for social justice. Shockey emphasizes the need for change in the education of future librarians to encourage “an advocacy focused conception of librarianship”.

Sturges, P. (2016). Intellectual Freedom, Libraries and Democracy. Libri, 66(3), pp. 167-177. Retrieved 10 Sep. 2017, from doi:10.1515/libri-2016-0040

This is an interesting article that was based on a keynote presentation the author, Paul Sturges, gave at the BOBCATSSS (an acronym where the first letter of the cities of the universities that initiated the conference make up the acronym) Conference in Lyons, January 2016.
It does contain references, but it is primarily an opinion piece, based on the author’s forty year career in Library and Information Science research and teaching. Article 19 on Freedom of Expression of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights is at the beginning of the discussion of how intellectual freedom is related to and essential to a progressive (and democratic) society. “Intellectual freedom begets and supports democracy, and democracy in turn provides appropriate conditions for the further development intellectual freedom”, Paul Sturgis writes. This is a succinct summary of the symbiotic relationship between democracy and intellectual freedom that I found useful in framing the importance of this topic to the values of individual
libraries.

The library as a radical institution is discussed, the conclusion being that while few libraries are openly radical, they are all implicitly radical. A radical user is what makes a library radical, according to Sturges. I found the section of the paper on people and libraries less useful, but I do see the point that the author is making – that having access to a library gave radicals, Karl Marx and Peter Kropotkin, an advantage (by making their intellectual journeys simpler) than were Mary Wollstonecraft and Emmeline Pankhurst’s journeys (who had to find their sources of information elsewhere).

The coverage of intellectual freedom and the library profession provides a context of the importance of the librarian’s role in nurturing intellectual freedom. Overall, this would be a useful source for writing about intellectual freedom and it offers a worldview which is enlightening.