Twanna Hodge always felt seen in libraries growing up on her native St. Thomas. So when she decided in middle school to become a librarian, she didn’t realize she was going to be a rarity in her profession.
While colleges are working to make their campuses more diverse, librarianship remains overwhelmingly white. The AFL-CIO estimated that more than 77 percent of librarians were white and non-Hispanic in 2018. A little under 7 percent of librarians identified as black or African American.
When higher education was being built, it was not built with women in mind. It was not built for people of color, not built for people of different abilities.
Hodge has worked in academic libraries across the United States. At many of her stops, she says, she’s encountered both a lack of diversity and an abundance of microaggressions. Now, Hodge is both a professional librarian and diversity advocate. She started a new librarianship in February with an unorthodox goal: to make her job obsolete.
Hodge was recently named the University of Florida’s first diversity, equity, and inclusion librarian. Colleges across the United States are looking for ways to promote diversity in their student bodies, and Florida hopes that Hodge can support historically underrepresented groups on its campus.
But Hodge says her work will have to extend beyond the walls of the library to have a real impact. The systemic exclusion of students of color, LGBTQ students, and students with disabilities is ingrained in higher education, she says. Librarians aren’t necessarily trying to exclude a certain group, but some practices — like library fines — can sometimes have a disproportionate impact on less-advantaged groups.
“This is why you see the terminology ‘traditionally underrepresented minorities,’” Hodge says. “When higher education was being built, it was not built with women in mind. It was not built for people of color, not built for people of different abilities. It was not built for the people that we are striving to make sure are included today.”
Hodge says that she can’t do it alone, and that she expects a fair amount of pushback in her efforts to change academic libraries from the ground up.
Stereotyped Expectations
Nicole Cooke’s career of more than 20 years as a librarian has taken her to a range of institutions. She’s worked in public, medical, and now academic libraries, and she’s often been the only black librarian in her workplace.
When Cooke, an associate professor in the University of South Carolina’s School of Library and Information Science, moved into a teaching role, many of her students told her that she was their first professor of color. She says some students became difficult to deal with because she didn’t meet their expectations of what a college professor should look like.
“I started teaching three classes about diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice,” she says. “I really felt like if the students were having difficulty dealing with me, they weren’t going to be able to deal with the diverse populations that we know are in libraries every day.”
Advocacy in libraries is experiencing a sort of renaissance, Cooke says. Diversity, equity, and inclusion librarians aren’t a new concept: Multicultural librarians were once more commonplace and helped to advocate for diversity, but the title faded away.
People were still doing diversity work, but without a formal title, Cooke says.
JJ Pionke, an applied health-sciences librarian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is one of those advocates. A person with disabilities, Pionke has dedicated his life to making libraries more accessible, despite not having “accessibility” in his title.
Much of Pionke’s work involves educating faculty, staff, and students about the reality of disabilities. A narrow view of what makes a library accessible might mean simply adding wheelchair ramps, but Pionke says his work goes beyond the physical barriers people with disabilities face in libraries.
Disabilities can be invisible, Pionke says. Post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, depression and other conditions can change the way people approach libraries. Much of his work centers on training librarians how to work with people who have disabilities.
Pionke recently surveyed library graduate students on their preparedness for addressing accessibility as they enter the work force. More than half said they weren’t ready.
“Libraries have really become more than just books,” he says. “They’ve become community centers. That’s not a bad thing, but it does mean that we have to be more educated and more prepared to navigate doing things alone.”
Debunking the ‘Bootstrap Narrative’
Hodge says that the University of Florida is taking a step in the right direction by promoting diversity work in its libraries but that real change requires a team effort. Higher education, she says, is at a “turning point” in realizing that traditional approaches to inclusivity are dated and, in many cases, outright wrong.
“There is the myth of meritocracy,” she says. “The bootstrap narrative is incorrect. How could you pull yourself up by the bootstraps if you don’t have any boots?”
A diversity librarian can advocate and make people aware of inequities in a library, but only top-to-bottom collaboration can lead to meaningful change, she says. Hiring a diversity librarian is only one of many steps in making a campus more diverse. She cautions that universities can’t just “check off a box” and think the work is done after the hire.
“People think that it is minorities’ problem to solve, when they’re really not who made the structure of the system to begin with,” Hodge says. “Avoidance is not a position. Being silent is almost more equal to being complicit.”
Hodge charges that the entirety of American higher education needs to undergo a metamorphosis in order to actually be equitable to all students. That starts with faculty, staff, and students’ being open to acknowledging and reducing their biases, she says.
For now, Hodge plans to use her position in the library to educate. In addition to serving as a liaison for the library’s diversity committee, she’ll be holding workshops and training on bias and taking a critical look at hiring policies.
More than anything, she wants to prove that diversity isn’t just a trend. Rather it can be a sustainable way for struggling colleges to move forward. Some institutions, like Augsburg University in Minneapolis, have prioritized creating a more diverse student body as a way to lift enrollment and improve the student experience.
Most higher-education institutions in the United States have been predominantly white for centuries, Hodge says, and increasing visibility in the library isn’t the only thing that needs to be done to drive change on college campuses.
“Libraries are a reflection of the society that we live in, and there was a time where people of color weren’t allowed in libraries,” Hodge says. “There was a time where libraries were not federally funded, higher education was not for everyone, certain groups could not even use the same bathroom.”
Universities have come a long way, Hodge says, but making diversity librarians a thing of the past will require “hard work, dedication, and internal motivation.”
