Omg so many thoughts about this (see previous tweets). Indeed, one of the main goals of my dissertation project is to invigorate conversation about public good and public goods in academic libraries. 1/ https://twitter.com/MUALA_CA/status/1199016227911417859

First, it's important to be critical about the idea of "public good." It's a dangerous term, it can easily be misused by authoritarians, and in the 19th century it meant something like "what's best for owning class white men" among librarians. Always be critical.

Also, we didn't talk about public good so much in libraries (or higher ed) before the advent of neoliberalism. We assumed we were doing it, but we didn't really talk about what it meant. In that way, threats of privatization have actually been kind of good for public good.

However, while there was a flurry of literature on libraries and public good and higher ed and public good from the 1980s to the 2000s, it's true that the discourse has kind of died out over the course of this decade.

During those decades when we were rhetorically fighting privatization with rhetoric about public good, we were loudly asserting things like "we serve the poor! we represent minoritized perspectives!" and a lot of that wasn't fully true.

But, by saying that we serve minoritized communities, we were asserting that we value service to those communities, even when we didn't fulfill our promises. And that opened the door to a lot of valuable critical perspectives that we're just starting to hear in libraries*.

*Those critical perspectives have been around, but those with dominant identities are just starting to hear them.

So while "public good" is a dangerous concept, I think it's an important one, because it opens a space for discourse about values. Academic librarians are a super pragmatic and technical group, and sometimes we overemphasize the practical at the expense of talking about values.

And in 2019, with austerity budgets in full effect and a dominant academic administrative culture that believes they are saving the institution by aligning with neoliberalism, academic librarians are in a funny position.

Academic librarians want to enact the public good, and they have thoughtful and critical ideas about how to do so, but they do not have support from their parent institutions. So the pragmatic question is: how do we get support? And the answers aren't simple.

I'm super punchy today and I never thought of a good way to wrap this thread up, but I'll just say I think we're living in great times, politically, to talk about what it means for academic libraries to serve the public good and provision public goods.