What keeps intellectual freedom experts up at night—or causes them to wake up screaming? At “Free Expression in 2025: Challenges for Libraries,” a session on June 28 at the American Library Association’s (ALA) 2025 Annual Conference and Exhibition in Philadelphia, several leading voices on intellectual freedom shared insight on major issues facing libraries of all types in the US.
Martin Garnar, director of Amherst College Library, highlighted the ways that libraries are facing government funding cuts and challenges to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) activities. Of particular note are Title VI challenges against universities. According to Garnar, Title VI—which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin—is being used to challenge support and advocacy for Palestine by conflating such support with antisemitism. “Let’s say a class on Palestinian literature wanted to display zines that they created,” he says. This might be challenged for creating a hostile environment. And, he adds, the person filing the complaint does not need to be affiliated with the university or even located in the same state. Garnar also points to a breakdown in the normal remedies to these complaints: While in the past there was a review process and remediation, now funding is frozen soon after a complaint. “And then you can sue and maybe get it back,” he says.
The federal government has also stated its intention to use the False Claims Act to fine and sanction universities for “illegal DEI activity,” according to Garnar. Under the act, recipients of federal grants who are found to be out of compliance with the Civil Rights Act can be fined for triple the amount of the grant, with whistleblowers receiving a percentage of the fine. “That sucks! This is horrible!” he says.
Funding from the federal government through the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) is also in limbo. In its first term, the Trump administration proposed cutting IMLS in each of its budget proposals, so this year’s executive order eliminating the agency was “no surprise,” according to Lisa Varga, associate executive director of ALA’s Public Policy and Advocacy Office and former executive director of the Virginia Library Association (VLA). However, the confusion it has created as libraries and other organizations attempt to find out whether they will be able to claim frozen funds is impossible to track. “Haphazardness is the point,” she says.
Shifts in the political climate have also put public-facing library workers in difficult situations. Marcellus “MT” Turner, a former library director and industry observer, says staffers now face a public that feels like it can come in and say anything to them. When Virginia passed anti-DEI laws, they had an almost immediate effect, as policies were pushed through school boards and citizens groups began challenging books in public and school libraries, according to Varga.
Policymakers who don’t understand how libraries work keep Turner up at night, he says. “They think it’s just an easy fix. ‘Don’t say this. Don’t buy that.’” But he urges libraries to be ready to push back. He believes that organizations that comply with demands right away create a more difficult situation for others in the future. “Just fight for five minutes longer so I can get my resources in order,” he says.
For example, proposed laws in several states, including Ohio and Virginia, could force public libraries to create restricted sections for adults only. However, Varga notes that advocacy has stopped the Virginia bill from proceeding after Virginia Library Association lobbyists worked with the state senator who proposed it to help him understand how the library worked and what the proposed law’s effects would be. “He could’ve let the subcommittee kill the bill and he could’ve just blamed it on those people,” Varga says, “but he struck it himself.”
The basic mission of libraries to provide information to citizens is also in question. A late-May decision in Little v. Llano County may mean that “there’s no right to receive information at the library, [and] elected officials can dictate what we read in libraries,” says Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF). Caldwell-Stone expects that the case will go to the Supreme Court, and notes that it is an existential threat to the very basis of public librarianship in the US.
Caldwell-Stone also warned about bills currently in consideration in some states that would replace library worker expertise with citizen and parent committees and eliminate the legal exemption from prosecution for library workers and educators in the course of their jobs. She highlighted a bill that was passed in North Dakota that would have allowed an individual, from any state, to complain about a book in a library and start a process that could withhold funding from the library and hold the offending librarian criminally liable. This bill was vetoed by the state’s governor, however. “We have people on our side. We need to think about how we reach out to them, how we strategize, how we push back,” Caldwell-Stone says. “This is an authoritarian movement that we’re being swept up in.”
Resources are available to libraries and individual library workers in need, from OIF and state-based helplines to Unite Against Book Bans and tools that allow citizen groups to organize around library issues.
Meeting this moment will require coordinated efforts from many library advocates and the tireless belief in the core values of libraries. “Let the laws come,” says Turner. “I just need to figure out how to push back on it.”
