Mark Rosenzweig writes “I am sorry that, of all people to take the brunt of the criticism in the article below by anthropologist Prof David Price, it falls upon my friend ALA President Mitch Friedman.
But that is the risk of being a public representative of an organization and perceived spokesperson for its policies.
I take the article as an indictment, not of Freedman, but of the permanent organization of ALA, the Executive Board and akso the elected Council. It is also an indictment of ALA’s organizational culture and of the ‘perceived’ versus the ‘real’ role of “President”.
Mark Rosenzweig writes “I am sorry that, of all people to take the brunt of the criticism in the article below by anthropologist Prof David Price, it falls upon my friend ALA President Mitch Friedman.
But that is the risk of being a public representative of an organization and perceived spokesperson for its policies.
I take the article as an indictment, not of Freedman, but of the permanent organization of ALA, the Executive Board and akso the elected Council. It is also an indictment of ALA’s organizational culture and of the ‘perceived’ versus the ‘real’ role of “President”.
Mitch Freedman would be the first to agree to the truth of the accusations of fundamental violation of our code of ethics by our position on the USA PATRIOT Act — _if_he were not President and, as such, somehow (I’m not quite sure how) constrained to represent ALA in a ‘positive light’. It would be easy for me to say, that, in his shoes, I would have resigned my position (which I would have) since it is absolutely unthinkable that I would ever find myself in that position.
But the act of public resignation would have been an unprecedently, powerfully dramatic and widely acknowledged and discussed statement of what I (and many other librarians) know to be his unequivocal opposition to the PATRIOT Act, the Homeland Security Act and the coming war.
Freedman categorically should not have been the target of Dr. Price’s ‘J’accuse”, but Price does raise the question of how ONE act of absolute opposition could have immense impact, especially when it involves a fuindamental principle and effects the thinking and behavior of tens of thousands of professiopnals.
I think that even a progressive like Freedman underestimates the potential significance of what the President of ALA stands for, if the President represents anything at all to the public. I believe librarians ‘taking a position’ is consistently underestimated by members and are encouraged to do so by the whole ethos of ALA.
Please read the below editorial and think of it not in terms of defending Mitch, but of what it says about our organization, the profession and the person who publicly represents both to the public. Is the Presidency just a PR position or is it an ethical platform from which to address the profession and the public?
I DO think Mitch can, at this crucial moment in history, differntiate his own position from that of the statement made by the Council and from how that plays out in practice and how it appears to the public. I wouldn’t hold it agianst him if he didn’t take this opportunity, but I surely wish he would.
An unreconstructed friend of Mitch,
Mark Rosenzweig
ALA Councilor at large
The article can be read at
CounterPunch
March 6, 2003
Prostrate to the Patriot Act
Librarians as FBI Extension Agents
By DAVID H. PRICE
The FBI is back in our libraries, and librarians and their professional associations are doing nothing to directly obstruct their access to private records of what we read. As American librarians’ choose to not resist the FBI’s intrusion into our private lives this choice necessarily transforms their functional position from that of ally to suspect FBI minion.”
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