Fighting Words
by Maria Bustillos
Following their eradication of the school’s gender studies program and their closure of its thirty-year-old student Gender and Diversity Center, the far right-wing trustees of New College in Sarasota, Florida kept right on going with their barbarian rampage last week, as the Gender and Diversity Center’s books on LGBTQ+ topics were dumped, yes, into a dumpster.
The Gender and Diversity books were a student-curated collection, and not formally part of the library, but the books were dumped simultaneously with a culling of books from the main library. That gave New College president Richard Corcoran the opportunity to sneakily write, in a note to the campus community, “The administration at New College has never been involved in deciding which books are selected or deselected from the library’s collection”—conveniently omitting that the discarded LGBTQ+ books weren’t technically part of the library’s collection. In what appears to be related news, faculty board representative Amy Reid, former chair and founding director of the gender diversity program, announced on Thursday that she is taking a year-long leave of absence.
On the service formerly known as Twitter, New College board member Chris Rufo gloatingly claimed responsibility for both the book dumping and the abolition of the gender studies program, explicitly linking the two.
All this happened because in 2023 Florida Governor Ron DeSantis installed a herd of his prurient Republican creepo pals on the board of trustees of New College, including Rufo. That’s right, the guy who tweeted all that gross stuff about trans people two weeks ago—the guy who stoked the conflagration of outrage that resulted in the resignation of former Harvard president Claudine Gay!—was put in charge of a once-revered public liberal arts college in Florida, along with a few of his fellow creepos. More than a third of the faculty, about 40 professors, had quit within the year.
“The fact that these books…were discarded in the dead of night, without transparency, and without giving students the opportunity to preserve them, should outrage every Floridian and every American who values democracy and free thought,” Bacardi Jackson of the Florida ACLU responded.
The slow-motion intellectual demolition of New College is part of an escalating far-right campaign to inflict damage on educational institutions through book bans, board takeovers, and attacks on professors and curricula, all focused on curbing or reversing decades of progress on diversity, access, and freedom of thought. Earlier this month, books by Judy Blume, Margaret Atwood, Rupi Kaur, and Sarah J. Maas were ordered to be removed from every public school classroom and library in the state of Utah. A report published in March by the American Library Association showed a nearly twenty-fold increase in challenges to library books in the last three years.
How to fight back? Through public accountability, through yelling, and through the development of better protections for libraries and their collections.
There’s loads of video and detailed photos of the New College books in the dumpster, and some of the books were reportedly rescued by students and others. There are named witnesses who can produce this evidence, along with what I hope will be demands for accountability in the days to come.
Reading about the book dump at New College freaked me out on this whole other level, too, because I am a longtime activist on behalf of digital libraries and archives. Ebooks can be destroyed much more quietly than paper books; invisibly, even. You can’t photograph ebooks that have been destroyed. You can’t pull them back out of the trash.
But while those who control the servers that house digital library collections can and sometimes do vaporize them, vast quantities of digital records can also be copied and recopied and backed up in multiple spaces in ways that physical media cannot. For the future of libraries, the digitization of books can serve as both sword and shield.
The fate of the New College library’s digital collections had gone unremarked in media reports, so I investigated a bit. In an email, New College comms director Nathan Hill told me that the “repurposing” of the space that previously held the Gender and Diversity Center had nothing to do with the library or its repository of digital collections, adding, “There are no plans to take down or remove anything from the repository at this time.”
Because the far right has gone clean off the rails in its campaign to destroy intellectual freedom, libraries—lots and lots of libraries—need to be able to own and secure their own collections. And it’s important that libraries own, rather than just license, their ebook collections, because then they can be stored locally, backed up, and archived, rather than potentially being subject to the control of a publisher or distributor or Ron DeSantis.
This is part of the reason the Brick House cooperative is developing BRIET, an app that independent publishers can use to sell their ebooks to libraries, for keeps. The books a library owns are protected legally in a number of ways that rented materials are not. Copyrighted ebook files need extra safeguards against unlawful copying, and that requires a bit of extra tech. Nevertheless it is essential: ebooks are books, and they need to be protected the same way as paper books.
Last week the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) announced its own new program offering some 38,000 ebook titles for sale to libraries, representing about three percent of the 1.2 million books on offer in their partner organization, the Palace Marketplace. These ebooks are offered for sale in partnership with the Independent Publishers Group (IPG).
Progress from our colleagues at DPLA in the direction of securing inalienable digital ownership rights for libraries is excellent news, and we were proud to present an update on BRIET alongside them at the recent Ebook Friday at the annual conference of the American Library Association. As these new projects come online, it’s important to keep our ultimate goal in view: to preserve for ebooks all the rights and protections afforded to paper library books, so that libraries will be able to own, preserve, and loan them freely.
Micah May, Director of Ebook Services at DPLA, has generously answered some, but not all, of our questions about the condensed published terms of DPLA’s new ownership model. We look forward to continuing to examine and refine our ideas, working together to ensure, and to increase, library ownership of ebooks.
Brick House, as an independent publisher, wholeheartedly offers and sells its own books to libraries through BRIET. The BRIET Bookmarket we’re building stocks ebooks from Hydra members who want libraries to loan and circulate their works, plus a whole vivid and brilliant world of amazing ebook titles from other independent publishers who likewise understand the stakes, including Punctum Books, Silver Sprocket, PM Press, and Sideshow Media Group. Participating BRIET publishers share a vision of wanting our ebooks to live and flow through libraries and schools.
Years ago, you might have used a Xerox machine to make fuzzy greyish paper copies, page by page, of a rare book; today, the stolen PDF of a valuable book could potentially be copied and distributed to millions of people in a matter of minutes. Though we are slowly and carefully making use of reliable open source solutions, the endgame of translating protections for copyrighted ebooks directly into the digital environment is a little tricky. BRIET’s strategy, so far, is to connect only with independent publishers who (like us!) are willing to trust the libraries we work with to protect and loan our ebooks exactly the same way they always have with paper ones, loaning one book to one patron at a time.
The preservation of a rich, healthy literary and academic culture relies directly on the true preservation of traditional library rights—and that means reestablishing trust between publishers, librarians, and readers.