McKinzie, 'Clinton's Trimmed Library Budget: A Wake-up Call to Libraries Everywhere', LIBRES v4n04 (December 31, 1994) URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/libres/libres-v4n04-mckinzie-clintons LIBRES: Library and Information Science Research Electronic Journal ISSN 1058-6768 December 31, 1994 Volume 4 Issue 4 Quarterly LIBRE4N4 MCKINZIE _____________________________________________________________ Clinton's Trimmed Library Budget: A Wake-up Call to Libraries Everywhere by Steve McKinzie Dickinson College Clinton's proposed library budget cuts of this February could have been the best library news in a decade. By recommending a 25.9 million slash in monies earmarked for the library community, the President offered librarians and the institutions they serve a rare opportunity. He gave us the chance to rethink our growing attachment to the federal dollar -- an attachment that is as dangerous to libraries as it is detrimental to librarianship. Consider the administration's February 1994 plan. Clinton and Gore proposed radical and far-reaching spending reductions. Numerous library programs fell to their whacking. The administration's suggested budget shortchanged library building programs, reduced resource sharing options and cut off the literacy program altogether. Librarians were aghast and the public seem puzzled. The irony of the situation gripped the national imagination. The recommended cuts had come from the quarter and at the juncture that no suspected. Everyone remembered that no presidential ticket in modern history had enjoyed the support of the library community as much as these two polished Southerners. Clinton was the smooth- talking education governor. He cared so much for common, work-a- day Americans. Gore was the visionary technocrat. He spoke of a revolutionary super-highway of world-wide communication and of electronic wizardry. Much of the rhetoric and vision of these two was as much to the library community's liking as anyone could have imagined. At last, here were the candidates that understood us and the information needs of future Americans. We librarians (as quiet and self-effacing a lot as you are likely to find anywhere) flocked to their support with undisguised enthusiasm. Whatever may have been our suspicions about some of their other policies, we had no reservations about their support for libraries and their respect for the library profession. Then came the President's recommended federal library budget of 1994 -- a parsimonious and belt-tightening cadre of restraints that shocked even the most ardent Clinton advocates. Yet Clinton's stingy decisions respecting his administration's support of libraries only illustrated all too well the ugliest of realities, the risk at which we place libraries when we wed them to a volatile budget process of the federal government. By permitting libraries to become dependent on the presence or absence of these condescending handouts, we have made our institutions increasing vulnerable. We have allowed the nation's access to information -- and all that means to us intellectually and personally -- to become subject to the routine slings and arrows of outrageous political fortune and bureaucratic infighting. Libraries have become just one more player in the great national free-for-all of American politics. Only heartache and futility can follow. Consider the President himself. When faced with harsh economic choices and wrestling with tough political realities, even this high-minded country boy from Arkansas sensed that he had no choice but to turn his back on his old library friends. The situation was tinged with irony -- replete with pathos. How difficult it must have been for a man of Clinton's high-moral sensitivities and personal commitments. And need we remind ourselves that Clinton will not always hold office? What will we do when men of reportedly less solid principles gain access to the high oval office -- as indeed they most assuredly will? Are we really so naive as to think that the process will be any easier or our dependence on the federal assistance any less hazardous? But you counter that only the Federal government really has the kind of financial resources necessary to ensure information access for all Americans? We can't be expected to depend on our own resources. We need the tax dollars of middle America. It's all for the collective good of the nation. And don't librarians themselves, you add, benefit from an increasingly aggressive political posture. If we are out there fighting for library funds, won't people begin to take our profession more seriously? What nonsense! What balderdash! Are we really that bereft of our critical faculties? Are our collective imaginations as librarians so stunted that we can only mouth the political platitudes of the talk show host? Next you'll be telling me that there is an "information crisis" -- a threat to the nation's information infrastructure that only a massive new program of federal control and management can offset. I am sure we can rest assured that the men and women of Congress will also manage this new crisis with the same high level of financial expertise that they have brought to bare on the federal deficit. And as for the notion of earning the nation's respect by entering the political fray, you need only look around you to observe what comes of such self-interested political involvement. Don't forget that at one time the National Education Association only cared about raising SAT scores. Or remember that not too long ago the National Rifle Association never thought about anything much more than backwoods firearm safety. The increasing tendency to politicize librarianship bodes ill -- just as it has for other groups. It likely means lowered public esteem just as it will likely produce heightened uncritical uniformity of thought within our ranks. No, we shouldn't be appalled or even surprised by the President's proposed library budget. We should rather rejoice. He has afforded us a choice opportunity. We ought to view Clinton's proposals as one might regard the discovery of a generally interesting and literary paragraph from the pages of AACR2 -- or as one might regard the seemingly inexplicable news of a lowered cost of a science journal subscription. We ought to be singing with delight. Of course, most of our colleagues in the profession may be too busy adjusting their hair buns (those of us who, at least, have enough hair to wear it that way), fingering their horn- rimmed spectacles, or worrying about food and drink in the reference section to consider the uniqueness of Clinton's proposal. Maybe we are just too wedded to tradition to give such matters much thought. Yet I continue to hope there are just enough independent thinkers among us to rethink the specious wisdom of Federal library funding. Why don't we just have done with the whole notion of federal library assistance? While we still live within an era in which library world continues to enjoy a measure of freedom, let's cultivate local support, explore alternative resources and encourage private sector funding? Why not avoid the risk to library budgets that a high- cholesterol federal diet ensures? And as librarians why not resist the temptation to become just another easily manipulated special interest -- another over-politicized professional organization? We owe the rethinking of these issues to ourselves as professional librarians, our colleagues in other disciplines, and more than anything else, we owe it to our patrons -- the people who need free libraries and free people to run them. Clinton's proposed library budget is great news -- great news indeed.