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Locked in Conversation: The College Library Collection and the Pluralist Society
Robert L. Houbeck, Jr.
Do academic libraries buy conservative journals of opinion less frequently than liberal journals? Are academic collections in this area tilted to the left? Or has our collecting been evenhanded, consistent with our professional ethos of building balanced collections, uncontaminated by the ideological battles raging in the Academy and the larger society? How could we tell? And would it matter anyway? These are the questions I'd like to explore.
I've had this topic in mind for a while. A 1983 editorial in the FRANKFUERTER ALLGEMEINE1 was one of my first prompts. The writer, Kurt Reumann, was commenting on the decay within universities of what he called a “Kultur des Streitens,” a culture of disputation. Argument within the Academy, he contended, had deteriorated into sloganeering. Rarely did he observe a genuine attempt to engage the spirit and substance of one's antagonist. Reumann recommended, as a remedy, the recovery and adaptation of the scholastic mode of argumentation. The rules of such disputation included the responsibility to re-state an opponent's position as dispassionately as possible and to offer arguments for that position that were even stronger than those advanced by one's adversary. The goal of debate, he argued-ideally, at least-should be the alignment of both participants with the truth of the real. Public disputation might then become an occasion at once for vigorous disagreement but also for the building up of civic amity, a form of the virtue of friendship. Instead, ideology, Reumann believed, had corroded that ideal and demanded the destruction of not only argument but also opponent. Might libraries, I wondered, reflecting on this editorial, be able to make a modest contribution to the recovery of civility in public disputation, both within the Academy and the society? It seemed to me that we might, so long as we lived up to our commitment to collect the documents of the disputing factions in an evenhanded manner. But were we doing that?
William Sheerin's recent piece in AMERICAN LIBRARIES2 again brought this question to mind. Sheerin, you'll recall, relates his experience at an American Libraries Association meeting on patron access. The main speaker, a self-described “First Amendment purist,” cataloged “a variety of censorship threats to libraries, all of them coming from right-wing groups.’’ During the question period, Sheerin asked the speaker whether the refusal of a state-funded agency to accept donations of videotapes expressing an anti-abortion point of view might be, in principle and assuming the tapes met the agency's selection criteria, a form of censorship. Sheerin had in mind such a situation in his own region. The speaker's response, in contrast to his earlier passionate condemnation of censorious behavior, was “a bemused shrug of the shoulders.” Sheerin goes on to relate the reactions of a couple of audience members who, trying to be helpful, offered various reasons one might use for rejecting such pro-life materials. What distressed Sheerin was the “wink and grin” attitude that seemed to prevail among his colleague-participants. “Were political or ideological perspectives,” he asks, “leading these people to create rationales for the very sort of “covert censorship’ that they claimed to find intolerable?”3 A fair question. And, coming at just about the moment Sul called to ask if I'd agree to speak on collection assessment at this conference, an irresistable one.
Others have taken a whack at this particular stump. Stephen Hupp in a recent article4 examined the question of bias in collection development in Ohio libraries. Hupp used as the basis for his study two lists of books: 37 conservative titles which Moral Majority had used for one of its own surveys of American library collections; and 32 liberal/leftist titles used for a survey of academic libraries in three Southern states. Hupp found that conservative titles appeared more frequently in Ohio academic, public and special libraries than did liberal titles, casting “doubt on claims by (Jerry) Falwell, (Cal) Thomas, and others that American libraries ignore publications supporting conservative views.”5 But, he also reports, since “books from either bibliography are in no more than 15% of all Ohio libraries, it appears the state's libraries have done a poor job in collecting controversial political materials.”6
Hupp's study did seem to support the conclusion that Ohio libraries could have done better at selecting materials from both sides of the spectrum. But what of his finding that those libraries held more conservative than liberal monographs (specifically 1,211 copies of the conservative titles vs. 529 copies of the liberal)? The two lists he used to investigate the problem and which he published as appendices do not seem to be truly comparable. About half of the 37 titles on the conservative list, as Hupp acknowledges, were issued by small publishers. The other half were issued by “larger trade presses and university presses.” Yet all the titles on the left/liberal list were from small presses. And what he does not specify is that 14 of those 32 left/liberal titles were published in Great Britain, 12 by a single firm (Zed). So is it really surprising Ohio libraries would have more titles from the conservative than the left/liberal lis...
