Heterodox Libraries

Join FAIR Board Member @HBlakeslee in conversation with @BretWeinstein at the Heterodox Libraries @HxLibraries Spring Symposium: HUMAN AUTHORSHIP. This Friday, April 10th, 2026 from 11am - 3pm U.S. CT (convert time zone) via Zoom. Join us for this FREE virtual event to celebrate creativity and the human experience. Read the full event description and register here: open.substack.com/pub/hxlibr…

This 🇨🇦Canadian Library Month, 𝗙𝗔𝗜𝗥 𝗶𝗻 𝗟𝗶𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗿𝗶𝗲𝘀 commends all librarians who stand for library neutrality and viewpoints diversity. FAIR will continue to support you to ensure libraries remain a place for free exchange of knowledge and ideas. Here's our full statement: 𝖢𝖺𝗇𝖺𝖽𝗂𝖺𝗇 𝖫𝗂𝖻𝗋𝖺𝗋𝗒 𝖬𝗈𝗇𝗍𝗁 𝗙𝗔𝗜𝗥 𝗶𝗻 𝗟𝗶𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗿𝗶𝗲𝘀 𝗦𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 On the final day of Canadian Library Month, FAIR in Libraries celebrates the critical role libraries play bringing all viewpoints to their communities.   As a nonpartisan network advancing fairness, understanding, and humanity, FAIR in Libraries supports libraries in their mandate to offer diversity of perspectives in collections, programs, and daily operations. This diversity of perspectives is key to library neutrality, the professional stance that libraries and library workers cannot impose their values and worldviews on users.  Western societies are home to many different cultural, racial, ethnic, and faith groups making neutrality the only ethical position a publicly funded library can adopt.  There are too many community members with their own priorities, values and political causes for the library to endorse any one of them and still hope to provide a welcoming environment for all. Library neutrality serves as a defense against pressure from across the political spectrum to censor information.  Some within the library profession propose to replace neutrality with social activism or radical empathy but such a change would undermine public trust and lead funders to question supporting libraries that fail to represent the full diversity of interests in their communities. We applaud library board and staff members who uphold the principles of neutrality, viewpoint diversity, free speech and intellectual freedom.  It takes courage to defend citizens’ rights to access the world’s ideas and information.  This Canadian Library Month, we applaud and celebrate libraries as one of the most important foundations of our liberal democracy. @LaLONeill @RhoadsDane9734 @Monica_Y_Harris