The library literature remains fairly resolutely unsilenced, as the Loon remarked earlier, though part of the story there is (judging from articles the Loon has read about situations with which she is familiar) quite a bit of self-silencing.

Even there, though, silencing attempts happen. An editor of the journal where the Loon published her first journal article relayed to her that one peer reviewer’s feedback had prominently featured the question “Can she say that?” (Thanks to that editor, she could, she did, and the article went on to decent success in its minuscule niche.) Some years later, the Loon removed fair and truthful critique of her then-workplace in a co-authored article about which she didn’t much care, to shut up the pearl-clutching editors long enough to get the thing published and out of her life. The critique exists publicly in a different form, so the Loon had little incentive to dig in her scaly heels over the silencing. (Remember the Loon’s silencing definition, by the way: “shut up or you will suffer harm.” The harm in this case would obviously have been an abandoned publication and disappointed co-authors.)

A former workplace of the Loon’s featured a rather odd behavior that in hindsight she should have interrogated more closely. Any discussion involving bad news or potential critique (of anything or anyone work-related) took place in an off-site coffeeshop or other external venue, never in the workplace itself. Part of this was doubtless the privacyless open-plan work area, but the building featured any number of small enclosed conference rooms, so open plans weren’t the whole story, either. The Loon isn’t sure what initiated this practice—it predated her—but she’d bet quite a few fish on a silencing or silencing attempt.

At that same workplace, an interim member of the Loon’s reporting chain repeatedly gave her feedback about her unacceptably unpleasant demeanor. The Loon duly implemented expedients that helped her hide her enormous and still growing frustration with her work situation, and the feedback ceased. She was never asked what was frustrating or displeasing her. At one point she was asked to explain formally why the service she ran was not producing results, which obviously offered opportunity to air some difficulties. The Loon did so as diplomatically and dispassionately as she knew how, and the reception for her effort seemed good… but none of her difficulties were ever addressed or even spoken of again, nor were any of her suggestions followed up on.

A semi-professional online group the Loon once belonged to contained a distressing (though hardly unusual) quantity of openly sexist discourse, culminating in a public announcement so sexist that several group members, male and female, remonstrated with its authors. The announcement was rewritten after significant heated argument; the sexist discourse in the group continued unabated. When the Loon referenced the announcement and its background on her then-blog, she was angrily accused of “airing dirty laundry,” told she should have consulted the same individuals perpetrating the sexist discourse before speaking of it (she had occasionally and obliquely expressed her unhappiness over it to the group, but that apparently did not count), and generally made to feel unwelcome.

Is the pattern clear? It is worse, in librarianship, to speak publicly of problems (with the understanding that “public” is to an extent contextual) than to create, harbor, or ignore them. Expressing negative emotion about problems is beyond the pale altogether. So we silence one another.

This pattern plays out in more public contexts as well. Often vendors are involved directly or in-, from the former Otter Group’s long-ago highly explicit silencing of librarian critique of ALA’s prototype Emerging Leaders program (a silencing so successful that the Loon can find no evidence to link to!) to Jenica Rogers’s recent experience with pushback. Many librarians of the Loon’s acquaintance have told her stories of vendors ringing up supervisors to tattle on that librarian’s public expression of dissatisfaction with the vendor. (Approaching the librarian directly to resolve a problem is good service. Discussing the problem as publicly as it was aired can be fine as well, though when done poorly it can approach astroturfing. Calling a supervisor is a barefaced silencing attempt.) Sometimes, it is true, the worm turns; the Loon has seen a few (unsuccessful, thankfully) attempts to silence Zepheira’s Eric Miller in the BIBFRAME process.

A common sleight-of-hand in silencing attempts is the well-worn tone argument: “it’s not what you said, it’s how you said it—you’re in trouble for how you said it, and because of that we’ll disregard what you said.” This is no less a derailing distraction in library-workplace environments than anywhere else. In the Loon’s experience, it is also an easily-graspable straw for librarians who desperately want to shoot the messenger rather than deal with actual issues at hand. Especially public silencing attempts may also feature the “harming the community” derailing tactic; in context, this often comes out as “making your library (or libraries generally) look bad,” and is connected with librarianship’s general fear of failure.

(Incidentally, the Loon parts from many pop-psych workplace-demeanor books on one extremely salient point: an employee’s behavior is a function of the employee’s personality and the employee’s environment. A frustrated employee is not automatically a bad person, nor is frustration necessarily an intrinsic personality trait! In her current workplace, the Loon laughs spontaneously and often, helps out gladly, is genuinely pleased to talk to the people she works with and for, and leaves her office door invitingly open except when there is specific cause to close it. Over time, she and her obvious delight in her work have become marketing tools the school uses to entice prospective applicants, a situation the Loon approves and even encourages. Her former colleagues would not recognize this engaged, productive, amiable Loon from their memories of her as a sullen, brooding, disaffected washout! Yet if those former colleagues could have imagined this better Loon as a possible Loon, they might have been able to ask what was preventing her emergence, listen to the answers, and perhaps improve matters all around. Instead, the Loon’s disaffection was considered personality-based and therefore unchangeable. Perhaps blaming the Loon was a mere convenience; it certainly meant no one took the work issues frustrating her seriously.)

The Loon has not been speaking much of gender as yet, but now she will: this phenomenon is heavily gendered, with women bearing the brunt of the silencing. Both women and men perpetrate this variety of silencing, though the Loon will timidly (and with great willingness to be wrong) hypothesize based on her own experience that it may be commoner in venues with mostly or exclusively male leadership.

Obviously prevailing socialization and expectations in the larger culture inform this phenomenon. The incessant injunction to smile aimed at women is the flip side of the injunction never to show frustration or anger or upset; nor is it coincidence that tears are frowned upon in a culture where boys are straitly trained young not to cry whereas girls are not. In general, the accepted range of expression for women in the workplace barely budges from neutral, and exceeding that range in any direction invites a variety of punishments from ostracism to foregone promotions and raises. Moreover, research suggests that the number of women present in a room, as well as the number of times they speak and how much they say, is routinely mentally exaggerated; women are therefore unfairly perceived as “talking too much” and made vulnerable to silencing. Interrupting another speaker is acceptable from a man, not from a woman. And so on.

Incidentally, “but silencing isn’t unique to librarianship!” is a derailing tactic the Loon has every intention of ignoring. So what? It’s still a problem librarianship needs to deal with. Moreover, American librarianship has a history of highly-gendered demeanor demands it shouldn’t ignore; Dewey and the “Boston brahmins” jumpstarted American librarianship in search of pretty, polite, harmless hostesses for the rash of Carnegie libraries a-building¹.

Oft-noted passive aggression in library work environments falls out of silencing as naturally as breathing. Where open expression is repeatedly punished, and discouraged by threat of punishment, how could it be otherwise? Repeated silencing also helps explain why library and information-issue advocacy—particularly at an individual or workplace level—is so often painfully anemic. The curious pluralistic ignorance around implementation of new initiatives in libraries may partly be explicable by restrictions on frank discussion of challenges and failures. Lastly, insofar as forthright speech is a valued leadership characteristic, its repeated discouragement may explain why so few librarians lead major information initiatives or move up into non-library positions of leadership (e.g. on campuses or in government), and insofar as discouraging forthright speech is gendered, why so many of those leaders are men despite the library workforce’s decided female majority.

A more subtle disadvantage to libraries in this form of silencing is the way it disadvantages change and change agents. Communication is key to change management; a key element of change communication is the expression of a problem, or other situation needing improvement, which the change is intended to improve. It is precisely the expression of problems that finds itself silenced in the library. How, in such an environment, can change flourish, or indeed happen at all? How can change agents do their jobs if they cannot speak? Assessment, too, is threatened and damaged in environments where speaking of problems is verboten.

When she was invited to discuss the service she ran that was not working, the Loon explicitly invited her interlocutors to shut it down and fire her if certain structural problems afflicting the service could not be addressed. (Yes, really. She still has the slidedeck. That particular slide features a photograph of a baby albatross.) That didn’t happen, any of it. The Loon eventually fired herself, instead. The service shambles along zombielike, less successful than ever.

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