Union Defends Speaking out in LIS Program

A LIBRARIAN AT EVERY TABLE
December 1, 2004. No. 227.

Sources & Sites for Community Building. Click here and for more information. Click here to access the A Librarian At Every Table blog.

Dear sister and brother ALAET subscribers,

I began A-LIBRARIAN-AT-EVERY-TABLE in 2001, not long before the tragic events of September 11. As a professor working at a Florida university (Jeb Bush is governor), I have experienced a sustained shrinkage of the public sphere since 9/11/2001. The student discussion list at the School of Library and Information Science (where I teach) was shut down when the students and some faculty discussed the war in Iraq in March 2003. The union defended the right to use this list, but prudence suggested the list move off-campus. Just before the 2004 election Terry Tempest Williams, an environmentalist, was banned from speaking at Florida Gulf Coast University because she was critical of the governor’s brother’s environmental policies.

To ensure that I can continue to identify community building sites without administrative censorship I am moving ALAET to a blog called, “A-LIBRARIAN-AT-EVERY-TABLE.”

I used the ALAET website as an interface to alert until December 2008 as an archive and to sign up new readers, but the actual annotations will be at “A-LIBRARIAN-AT-EVERY-TABLE”

Thank you for your interest and contributions over the past 227 issues of A- LIBRARIAN-AT-EVERY-TABLE. I hope the blog, “A-LIBRARIAN-AT-EVERY-TABLE” ,” will carry on the same spirit.


Yours in solidarity,

Kathleen
Proud member, United Faculty of Florida, USF Local