Editor’s note: We welcome a guest blog post from the academic librarians of #CripLib, which focuses on the intersection of disability and library work.

Note: The focus is on our concerns about the quality of the article and the editorial process that led to it being published as research – NOT on the author as a person.

In Brief

The authors of this letter are writing in regard to “Respecting Privacy of Thought in DEI Training,” an article published in the May 2025 issue of College & Research Libraries (CRL).

How did such an intellectually dishonest, poorly argued editorial get published in College & Research Libraries, a highly-regarded library journal? We will identify some of the most obvious problems within the text–problems that any competent editorial team should have addressed before publication. As part of this, we also ask: why did the editorial team not support this author in refining her argument before publishing it? Or alternatively, why did the editorial team not reject this article?

Full version

Reason for writing this letter

Despite approaching the article with curiosity, we quickly identified several issues which caused us considerable concern:

• The author neglects to engage with other scholarly critiques of DEI in library literature.
• The political bias is hidden.  
• The author appears to misunderstand or shallowly understand several of the cited sources.
• Citations are spotty – while some arguments provide adequate citation, other arguments lack evidence.

We are members of what are often referred to as marginalized populations–we all have different disabilities, and many of us are also LGBTQ+ and/or BIPOC, etc. We have been dismayed by the recent dismantling of DEI initiatives, which is operating hand-in-hand with the dismantling of our civil rights. We are also very open to critiques of DEI programs – we and people like us have often been at the forefront of critiques about DEI programs in libraries, expressing concerns about tokenism, lack of follow-through, ineffective “one shot” style training models, prioritizing white feelings over the material conditions of Black and Indigenous people or people of color, to name a few (see References). 

However, none of the many articles written by librarians articulating critiques of DEI initiatives are engaged in this article. Instead, the author focuses on engaging with a frankly odd mix of Wikipedia articles, shallowly analyzed law review articles and political theory books, and right-wing blog posts and media. We recognize that several of these right-wing media sources identify as libertarian and that Anglo-American style libertarianism often refers to itself as non-partisan, but that doesn’t mean it lacks an ideology (tone marker: neutral valence, see Roberts, 2025). Meanwhile, accusations of library DEI initiatives being “politically partisan” are made a few times, without evidence. (Note: no definition is provided for “politically partisan,” so we are working on the assumption that it refers to allegiance to a political party.) 

Frankly, we are concerned by the use of recent far-right talking points to argue against DEI initiatives in libraries without an honest acknowledgement of the political stance the author is taking. To be clear, we are not objecting to the author having a political stance, we are objecting to hiding it. Among those of us drafting this letter, we do not share the same political beliefs about everything, we just share the expectation of honesty and academic integrity, so we can actually work through those disagreements in a productive and respectful way.

Even with the current work being done to dismantle DEI, civil rights, and higher education at the direction of one political party, we would also be among the first to question political partisanship in libraries. That is because none of the dominant political parties in English-speaking North America reliably support us (see Anyangwe and Okoh, 2023; Dhenin, 2025 for two recent examples of bipartisan legislation that causes active harm to disabled and other marginalized peoples). 

However, whatever our feelings are about the author’s conclusions, what we’re really dismayed by is its failure to honestly engage with legitimate critiques of DEI initiatives in libraries. There are some elements of the piece that we may have agreed on, if they’d been presented with more academic rigor.

That leads us to wonder: How did such an intellectually dishonest, poorly argued editorial get published in College & Research Libraries, a highly-regarded library journal? We will identify some of the most obvious problems within the text – problems that any competent editorial team should have addressed before publication. As part of this, we also ask: why did the editorial team not support this author in refining her argument before publishing it? Or alternatively, why did the editorial team not reject this article? 

Problems identified within the text

Because the errors in argumentation and the questionable citations are so rampant within this article, we are puzzled by its publication. 

The article includes a lot of references. We wonder if that was required for it to be called research rather than a letter to the editor? In any case, it has resulted in a long list of cherry-picked, manipulatively quoted sources that support what the author wants to say. This piece does not demonstrate any honest engagement in ongoing conversations in the field or even the arguments made in the cited works.

Similarly, the author demonstrates limited understanding of the academic texts referenced. Some of the references are to right-wing blog posts. Note that we’re not condemning the use of blog posts or popular press books across the board, what we’re critical about here is the relative lack of academic citations and the lack of disclosure about the political biases of the rest of the sources that were used. When talking about DEI initiatives at a time when the US federal government is actively dismantling them, while simultaneously engaging in anti-Black, anti-immigrant, openly eugenicist, and anti-LGBTQ+ initiatives, this matters. The author does not clearly identify the partisan nature of many of her non-academic sources–partisan as in partial to an approach that is generally viewed in the US as right-leaning, is often critical of social justice causes, and in some cases openly advocates for the right to discriminate (e.g., Levy, 2016).

Here are a few sections that we have selected to highlight, just for demonstration. This is not an exhaustive exploration of all the weaknesses of this article.

Does not engage with other scholarly critiques of DEI in library literature

Tracking attendance at trainings is one new data point, especially where participation is required or assessed in performance reviews.¹¹⁰ DEI action plans, rubrics, “temperature checks,”  climate surveys, equity audits, assessments of impacts, and so on, in aggregate contribute to  shifting the library’s culture away from the academic and toward the bureaucratic.¹¹¹ The message they send to the library workers is that their own independent thoughts and autonomy  in their jobs is secondary to data-collection tasks. 

One example of decentralized, bottom-up control is known in the organizational management literature as “concertive control.” Under concertive control, organizations employ  cross-functional and self-organizing teams.¹¹² Library DEI trainings, while potentially administratively sponsored, are often delegated to a team that is responsible for their content and that  may also conduct the trainings. Library administrators will naturally delegate DEI training  to those who are motivated and well-versed in the ideas. These trainings, and the teams that  lead them, are a mechanism for non-hierarchical, concertive control over employees. Teams  that do not have authority over library policy may be given wide latitude to develop trainings,  especially when they can be based on profession-wide guidelines…. (p. 442)

The author has not engaged with any of the many and varied library articles about managerialism, workplace climate, library assessment, etc. The implication of this section appears to be that library administrators should not delegate DEI trainings, in fact should not be using concertive control to delegate anything, because to do so means they lose all responsibility and control. If this is indeed what readers are supposed to take from this section, we would have liked a clearer articulation of — everything, frankly. If the author is not arguing that library administrators should not delegate work, that raises even more questions. Also, again, if the author had wanted to build on arguments made previously by other librarians critiquing various management tendencies, we think that would have enhanced and clarified her argument. 

Does not disclose political bias

While this sort of statement is not required, it matters for this discussion because we are talking about issues where people hold a wide range of conflicting values and beliefs, and the argument is presented as if it is coming from some sort of objective place. 

Pretending that you can talk about race and racism from a place absent ideology is weird. But if you take the perspective of someone who doesn’t want to think or learn about racism, it starts making more sense. 

The author praises the 2012 Diversity Standards for demonstrating “non-ideological language” while criticising the narrower focus of the 2022 Cultural Proficiencies for Racial Equity (p. 439). Shortly afterwards she claims that “…. imperialism and colonialism, mass incarceration, disparities in  access to healthcare, the achievement gap in education, and disparate outcomes for “BIPOC  populations.”⁹⁵ None of these topics has more than an indirect link to library work.” (p. 440) There is plenty of evidence out there identifying how each of these points connect to each other (see References). A good place to start looking is within the Cultural Proficiencies. This section provides one of many examples of the author pushing back specifically on training that requires attendees to learn about racism. We can’t help reach the conclusion that this is not an absence of ideology, this is a refusal to acknowledge one’s own.

Misunderstand or shallowly understood source material

Much of the article centers on the idea of privacy of thought, the author’s definition of which is:

Privacy of thought is an instinctively understood concept because everyone experiences it every  day. Most would consider being forced to share private thoughts an invasion of privacy. In  this way, the idea that privacy of thought should be considered a human right feels intuitively correct. How this intuition is reflected in society via laws and culture, however, is inseparable from the influence of Enlightenment ideas about how we understand individual liberty…. (p. 432)

The author then goes on to use various references to argue that freedom of thought is a universal value, followed by a reference to cognitive liberty. We assume that the author has done the internal work of synthesizing these concepts, and that’s why they’re presented in conflated form. However, that work is not replicated on page, so we as readers are confused about why these different terms are treated as interchangeable. 

Also, nowhere in this section is an acknowledgment that the Farhany discussion about cognitive liberty is specifically in reference to tort law, the legal doctrine of avoidable consequences, and emotional distress injuries. This is a really different context than workplace DEI training. We recognize that a link could be made here, but the author did not actually make it – for us this raises the question about whether the author read and understood the source material. This is a rich enough area for investigation that she could have made a whole paper focused on this idea. Instead, the paper immediately moves on to mostly unsubstantiated claims about DEI trainings (almost exclusively focused on critiquing anti-racism trainings), with yet more under-explained theoretical frames added to the discussion. And as we observed earlier, there are articles published by librarians on these issues, none of which are engaged here.

When talking about a self-assessment conducted as part of a racial equity training, the author notes that: 

“Even if your employer does not see your responses, these ninety-six questions are presumptuous and invasive. Asking about a person’s  thoughts in this way violates privacy of thought…” (p. 435).

Is learning something new or considering new approaches an invasive violation of privacy? It seems absurd on its face. Is having to think about challenging things – not having to publicly disclose your thoughts, just having to think about them – a violation of privacy? What are the boundaries of this argument – is it only when people are expected to work towards ending racism that it becomes a violation? This is a really strange argument that none of us understand. There may be a sensible rationale behind this argument, but it needed to be explained within the article before publication.

Also the source referenced in the above excerpt was a right-wing/libertarian blog post, rather than a direct reference to the assessment tool itself or a first-hand account. It’s unclear whether the library worker quoted within that blog post had actually taken the assessment. It is possible that this blog post was writing about one employee who just didn’t like how the Inclusive Excellence frameworks were implemented at UVA. In other words, the author’s argument here relies on unclear secondhand information provided by one person. 

This section included a side point that “(Suggesting a redirection  back to race and racism here implies that other marginalized groups are not appropriate DEI topics.)” – but all the citations in this section are to anti-racism trainings. Asking people to stay on topic seems like a reasonable request for a training session. Even if one wants to make this point about DEI trainings in general, which some have (see References), to once again make the focus of the argument a pushback against anti-racism training is noticeable. Again, why did the editorial team not catch this? Spotting this problem does not even require anyone to dig into citations, it’s self-evident just from reading the text itself.

Next steps

We are asking for a public statement from the CRL board articulating how they will rectify this situation and make improvements to prevent a recurrence. 

Problems identified:

• The author neglects to engage with other scholarly critiques of DEI in library literature. There have been innumerable articles, books, and presentations that talk about DEI in relation to the concerns brought up in this article (e.g., assessment of DEI programs, managerialism, the tensions between intellectual freedom and social justice) but none of that body of research was used here.
• Instead the author uses sources that broadly fall under the spectrum of political theory that, as demonstrated in the text, appear to be misunderstood or shallowly understood. 
• The citations provided are plentiful but poor in quality, including more wikipedia articles than library research articles. While some arguments provide adequate citation, other arguments lack evidence.
• We all have biases. Pretending that we or the systems we work with don’t operate in biased ways does not erase those biases, it just prevents those biases from being acknowledged or addressed. This article talks about DEI in libraries while pretending at objectivity in its framing, but the arguments presented and the citations referenced demonstrate a clearly biased point of view that is never acknowledged. 

Because of the degree and pervasiveness of the problems we identified as well as the potential negative impacts on the field if this article is taken at face value, we are asking CRL to retract this article. We would also like an explanation: how did this make it through editorial review? Is there a peer review process at CRL? Are you having subject experts conduct peer review? Are you outsourcing peer or editorial review to artificial intelligence?

References

Anyangwe, D. and Okoh, C. (2023). The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act: A dangerous new chapter in the war on Black youth. The Center for Law and Social Policy. https://www.clasp.org/publications/report/brief/the-bipartisan-safer-communities-act-a-dangerous-new-chapter-in-the-war-on-black-youth/ 

Courtland, S.D., Gaus, G. and Schmidtz, D. (2022). Liberalism. In Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2022 Edition). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberalism/ 

Dhenin, M. (2025, May 9). Escalating anti-homeless policies fall hardest on disabled people in the US. Truthout. https://truthout.org/articles/escalating-anti-homeless-policies-fall-hardest-on-disabled-people-in-the-us/ 

Joint ALA/ARL Building Cultural Proficiencies for Racial Equity Framework Task Force. (2022). Cultural proficiencies for racial equity: A framework [White paper]. ALA. https://www.ala.org/pla/initiatives/edi/racialequityframework 

Levy, R.A. (2016). Libertarianism and the right to discriminate. CATO Institute Policy Report. https://www.cato.org/policy-report/march/april-2016/libertarianism-right-discriminate# 

Roberts, W.C. (2025). Ideology. In Zalta & Nodelman (Eds.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2025 Edition). https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ideology/#ValIde 

(see References) note: We had originally referenced the work of respected librarian-scholars who’ve published research in this area. However, because we value them so much, and because we recognize the risk of speaking out publicly like this, we decided not to publish their names. Those new to this sort of work may not know the history of librarians doing DEI work being targeted by harassment campaigns and death threats – especially women of color – but those of us who have been around for a few decades don’t want to see that happen again.