Academic Libraries, Legal Infrastructure, and Information Politics

By Allison Jennings-Roche (Associate Director of Digital Initiatives & Collections, RLB Library, The University of Baltimore

and Paul T. Jaeger (Professor and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher, The University of Maryland)

The United States, over the past hundred years, has built a remarkably robust knowledge sharing infrastructure, full of institutions and personnel that work and often collaborate in increasingly innovative ways to meet the needs of our communities and researchers. Public, academic, school, and special libraries not only collect resources, but they build tools and systems (consortia) to share those resources between each institution. The invisible yet essential backbone of this knowledge sharing infrastructure is the legal infrastructure, everything from the Constitution to copyright laws, which both protect intellectual property and academic freedom, but also allow for fair use and collaboration.

Issues of law directly impacting library activities — particularly freedom of expression and fair use — have been extensively addressed in policy making and through courts. While policies regarding specific kinds of fiscal allocations and even some levels of collection development vary from institution to institution and sometimes even state to state, librarians were able to operate under the assumption that the protections afforded by the law, as understood by the pillars of our field, would remain inviolable. For example, courts have consistently upheld the rights of librarians who work in public institutions to express their opinions on issues related to the library so long their opinions do not negatively impact the operations of the library, but the laws that now exist in many states creating criminal liabilities for librarians seem to indicate otherwise in practice.

Recent developments in the political landscape in the United States have completely destabilized the foundations of the practice of librarianship, both in terms of financial support for the institutions of the field and in terms of presumed protections of library professionals. It is now a felony in many states for librarians to provide access to certain types of books to their communities, libraries have been completely defunded and replaced with Sheriff’s offices in some communities, many state legislatures have seriously considered shuttering their state libraries, and librarians across the country are navigating censorship movements, disinformation flows, and attempts to erasure entire cultures from collections (Jaeger, Jennings-Roche, et al. 2023).

This current aggressively anti-library political climate has roots in many eras, and the politicization of information has been building for nearly a century. The collections of libraries of all types were threatened and frequently censored during the anti-communist Red Scare of the 1950s. The tactics of McCarthyism were then transferred to the civil rights movement. By the 1980s, the election of Ronald Reagan ushered in the era of neoliberal economic policy — in which we still reside — that significantly devalues anything that is not a capitalist venture, including the institutions of the public good and the community good (Buschman, 2020). The Clinton administration in the 1990s expanded this philosophy to include rebranding the government itself as a business. George W. Bush’s administration brought curtailments of information access in many libraries through the requirements for computer and network filters from the Children’s Internet Protection Act and the removal and classification of much material under the USA PATRIOT Act (Jaeger, 2007; Klosek, 2025).

Tying these threads together, the first Trump administration repeatedly expressed intentions to end all federal funding for libraries, other cultural heritage institutions, and information access and literacy programs. These intentions are abruptly being brought to crushing reality in the second Trump administration, with federal funding through the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and other sources has disappeared.

As of the writing of this article, public libraries and school libraries remain most publicly in the crosshairs of the far-right as they seek to exert control over American society through control of materials in library collections and school curriculums. These kinds of libraries thus far have received the brunt of the censorship, criminalization, book bans, and defunding efforts.

However, academic libraries are not immune and should not operate as if their larger institutional affiliation will save them or their users. While the states that have passed criminalization laws have focused them on public and school libraries, the laws in many of these states are written so that they could potentially be applied to more institutions, like publicly-funded museums and libraries at publicly-funded higher education institutions. Along with the range of other challenges brought by disinformation and cultural erasure movements, academic freedom, as an ideal and as a practice, is directly under threat from the federal and state involvement in curtailing student and faculty speech under the current administration. Just as the threats to imprison librarians are an extreme extension of censorship, so are threats to deport international students and faculty members for voicing opinions that the administration does not like.

Information politics has already significantly infiltrated our institutions. Academic library workers and the publishers and vendors we rely on (and who profit from our success) would do well to take seriously our responsibilities to our researchers and to the protection of knowledge itself. The recent extreme accelerations of information politics make it profoundly unwise to act as though this will all blow over or to believe that operating under the previous status quo will serve as an effective shield.

Data, Privacy, and Social Justice

Libraries, especially academic libraries, have handed more and more of our systems, processes, and collections over to third party companies and vendors, taking for granted that those organizations would share our values and priorities, such as protecting the privacy of patrons. Recent technological developments have made searching faster, collection development less labor intensive, and even research more targeted and specific. However, the success of these tools and technologies relies on the release of massive amounts of data about our researchers, our institutions, and our students to the companies. Unfortunately, such companies could also decide to — or be forced to — hand over this data to the government.

The underlying assumptions of institutional neutrality and academic freedom, not to mention consistent federal funding, that have built the culture of academia today are being challenged in real time by an administration that is openly nationalist and anti-intellectual in its aims to reshape the work of American scholars and students (Stanley, 2024).

The looming threats for academic libraries are being previewed in public and school libraries right now. Book bans are being used as a tool to specifically remove the perspectives and experiences of traditionally marginalized populations from collections, including Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC), lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, intersex, asexual and beyond (LGBTQIA+), Jewish, and disabled (Knox 2015, Jaeger, Jennings-Roche et al. 2024). Library workers in many states face potential prison sentences of ten years for failing to adhere to the book bans. In some locations, databases have been removed from public access and police check the shelves of the library for banned books. If legislatures are willing to impose these kinds of draconian measures on public and school libraries, there is no reason to think that the same state legislatures would hesitate to extend the measures to public institutions of higher education.

In higher education, the federal government has been actively promoting goals of cultural erasure through the collection of information from universities about international students and employees, removing federal funding if institutions do not end programs deemed related to diversity, inclusion, and equity (DEI), cancelling grant funds for projects deemed DEI, and even deporting some international students whose views were too publicly in contrast to the policies of the administration.

In all of these circumstances, the data of the library could be used to further administration goals at any institution of higher education. As a result, understanding the data collection practices of the tools being used in libraries is of utmost importance. It can no longer be something that we can trust others to have secured.

When vendors offer new databases/subscriptions/journals based on the research interests of our users, we must immediately question what data is being collected in order to make that determination. We are already seeing how the second Trump administration is pulling funding based on programs or courses; the ability to quickly access data about the top search terms at any one academic institution would be a treasure trove for those seeking to target institutions where “unacceptable” topics are being researched.

Libraries must know from companies that they work with:

• What data is being collected?

• Where is it being stored?

• How long is it being retained?

• What security protocols are in place?

• What are the politics of the organization should any governmental agency seek access to this information?

All of these questions must be taken incredibly seriously when considering resources.

Often in marketing demonstrations and sales calls this information is not shared and representatives are not fully knowledgeable on the details of their tools. The use of algorithmic and machine learning recommendations offered by many of the AI “upgrades” for these resources fundamentally requires training data about the research being done by students, employees, and faculty members — including the library professionals, of course — at each institution.

At the time of writing this article, attacks by the federal government on academic institutions are only becoming more extreme. Limits on collections, like at the Naval Academy, are horrifying, but they are only the beginning of what will likely be much wider attacks on research, knowledge creation, and academic freedom (Alonso, 2025). Third party resources have troves of data that could potentially be wielded to target those using tools based on their research topics.

The overall shift to digital collections has allowed for seamless and real-time access to many materials for researchers and library users. However, when information is politicized, licensing and subscription based models are even more precarious than physical collections. Additionally, physical copies of materials are readily shared between institutions; not all eBooks are interoperable or allow for intra-institutional lending (Halperin, 2025).

Sales trends have also reflected broader shifts in culture; and vendors and publishers kept pace by offering resources reflecting the social justice consciousness that arose in the Black Lives Matter (BLM), #MeToo, and related movements. However, having subscriptions to such products now would seem to make a library more likely to be targeted by the administration, either through direct action like cutting federal funding to the institution or through collection of the usage information of those databases from the vendors offering the databases. Ironically, as vendors will likely seek to avoid being seen negatively by the government for offering social justice products, they may cease to offer not only social justice specific products but a much wider array of products for fear that they might be labelled “social justice,” resulting in further cultural erasure.

Social justice is not an “add-on” and should not be siloed away from other resources about various populations and epistemologies that can be easily monitored or removed, but data products reducing justice to marketable buzzwords have done exactly that. In the movement to capitalize on trends, isolating these collections in such as way not only reinforces that this information is outside the norm and therefore needs to be opted in to, but it also allows for outside political forces to target libraries based on these subscriptions and could subtly reinforce self-censorship by precarious library workers. The only ethical and reasonable solution, though perhaps not the most lucrative one, would be for libraries to include these collections as a part of their larger packages, not siloed and labeled in a way that facilitates cultural erasure and literal erasure.

Because of their inherently electronic nature, eBook lending and interlibrary loan (ILL) could seemingly be readily harvested should the government so desire. In the pre-Internet age, government programs to monitor the reading habits of specific individuals or entire communities — like the FBI”s Library Awareness Program (LAP) from the 1950s through the 1980s — relied entirely on agents physically visiting libraries and interviewing library workers (Jaeger, 2025). The difficulty of such efforts offered a fairly strong protection that is now gone.

Both the data about library users and the collections related to social justice are open to literal erasure. As academic library resources have been attempting to cater to trends instead of integrating this vital information into existing data sets and resources, foundational information and the users of that information have been made far, far more vulnerable.

Managing Risk and Protecting Academic Freedom

Academic librarians and publishers would do well to consider the larger political forces at play when making decisions about the resources that they want to provide for their communities and what data is collected and shared through those resources. Recently, increased threats to information access — and even the freedom of librarians — amplify the pressures on the field that derive from existing social biases that are inherently dismissive of professions perceived as feminized.

Librarianship as a field, especially many professional library organizations, also are contributing to the current multitude of challenges facing academic libraries by trying to adhere to the impracticable concept of neutrality. It is not possible for an item, a collection, a person, an institution, or a profession to be neutral, and no library has the physical or financial resources to actually encompass every perspective on every important issue.

Neutrality has also become a truly self-destructive stance politically. The concept of neutrality poorly served the profession for nearly a century by telling librarians not to defend their institutions or speak up about issues of importance to the library and the community it serves (Jaeger & Jennings-Roche, 2025). However, censorship and disinformation movements that have captured much of the country have also seized upon neutrality as a weapon to use against libraries. Neutrality not only hampers the ability of librarians to effectively speak up against these movements, it also gives purveyors of book bans and disinformation the impression that their opinions about information are as equally valid as those of library professionals (Jaeger & Jennings-Roche, 2025).

Preserving academic freedom — and perhaps even keeping the library open — in the current political context demands clear demonstrations of the contributions of the library and understandable articulations of the values that the library will defend. As the changes since the second Trump administration began amply demonstrate, we cannot rely on legal infrastructure to protect our institutions, let alone our more vulnerable users, during this authoritarian and anti-intellectual turn in American history. Collectively, librarians and publishers alike must reckon with our new reality and attempt to find practical ways to reduce harm in the face of genuine threats to the safety of the people we serve.

References

Alonso, J. (2025, April 3). 400 Books Removed From Naval Academy Library. Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2025/04/03/400-books removed-navalacademy-library

Buschman, J. (2020). Education, the Public Sphere, and Neoliberalism: Libraries’ Contexts. The Library Quarterly, 90(2), 154–161. https://doi.org/10.1086/707671

Buschman, J. (2023). Libraries, Democracy, and Citizenship: Twenty Years after 9/11. The Library Quarterly, 93(2), 181–201. https://doi.org/10.1086/723850

Buschman, J. (2024). Equal Respect: The Civic Engagement Libraries (Already) Perform for Democracy. The Library Quarterly, 94(1), 101–116. https://doi.org/10.1086/727817

Halperin, J. R. (2025, February 25). Library Futures | Call for Interoperable Ebook Standards in the Academic Book Market. https://libraryfutures.net/post/call-for-interoperable-ebookstandards

Jaeger, Paul T. (2007). Information Policy, Information Access, and Democratic Participation: The National and International Implications of the Bush Administration’s Information Politics. Government Information Quarterly, 24, 840-859.

Jaeger, Paul T. (2025). The Immortality of Hatred and Revenge: The Interconnections of Censorship, Disinformation, and Cultural Erasure in the Book Bans Targeting Marginalized Populations. The Library Quarterly, 95(1), 4-41.

Jaeger, Paul T., and Allison Jennings-Roche. (2025). Clarifying Intellectual Freedom, Neutrality, and Professional Expertise to Better Defend Libraries from Books Bans, Disinformation, and Defunding. Political Librarian, 8(1), 89-96. https://doi.org/10.7936/pollib.9032

Jaeger, Paul T., Allison Jennings-Roche, Natalie Greene Taylor, Ursula Gorham, Olivia J. Hodge, and Karen Kettnich. (2023). The Urge to Censor: Raw Power, Social Control, and the Criminalization of Librarianship Political Librarian 6(1), 1-20. https://doi.org/10.7936/pollib.8711

Jennings-Roche, Allison. (2025). Gender, Politics, and The Public Library: How Polarization and Feminization Conspired to Destabilize One of “The Most Trusted Professions.” Political Librarian 8(1), 147-159. https://doi.org/10.7936/pollib.9017

Klosek, K. (2025). Recognizing and Resisting Censorship in Online Safety Bills: A Framework for Libraries. The Political Librarian, 8(1), 24-30. https://doi.org/10.7936/pollib.9008

Knox, E. (2015). Book banning in 21st-century America . Rowman & Littlefield.

Stanley, J. (2024). Erasing history: how fascists rewrite the past to control the future (First One Signal Publishers / Atria Books hardcover edition). One Signal Publishers / Atria.