Blatant Berry: The Politics of NCLIS

Appointments are nearly always rewards for party loyalty

By John N. Berry III, Editor-at-Large, jberry@reedbusiness.com -- Library Journal, 3/15/2007

President Bush's budget for fiscal 2008 went to Capitol Hill on February 5. It included a recommendation to “consolidate” the U.S. National Commission on Libraries and Information Science (NCLIS) into the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). Although few others seem to care how this last gasp of NCLIS turns out, current and former members and leaders of the commission have voted resolutions and found other ways to resist the proposal from the federal Office of Management and Budget (OMB). They see consolidation as the equivalent of “doing away with NCLIS,” as Bob Willard, a commissioner for four years and executive director of NCLIS for six, put it.

NCLIS was not on my mind two weeks later as I rushed into line for the free breakfast at my hotel in Tucson early on a Sunday morning. I was hurrying to a weekend class I teach at the School of Information Resources and Library Science (SIRLS) at the University of Arizona. As I grabbed a peeled hard-boiled egg from the stack, I bumped into the woman in front of me on the chow line. The jostling made the free breakfast ten times more valuable. It made my day.

To my surprise, I had run into the indefatigable Martha Gould, the retired director of the Washoe County Library, NV. She's a crusty New Englander with roots in the small New Hampshire town whose usually better high school football team was the arch rival of the Towle Tigers, my high school team from a smaller town ten miles away.

Martha and I didn't know each other in high school, but we deeply understand each other by that awareness you get from living in and knowing the same places. We've been jostling each other in the comfort of that knowing for quite a few decades. So, I wasn't surprised when she launched into a quick critique of the American Library Association (ALA) during our meal. Of course, she didn't mention ALA's lukewarm support for NCLIS, but she had been a member and vice chair since 1994 and was designated chair in 2000, under Bill Clinton. She served until 2003.

Martha, Bob, current NCLIS chair Beth Fitzsimmons, and many others from the distinguished cadre of educators, librarians, industry leaders, and political operators who have served on NCLIS are still fighting consolidation. But their claims that NCLIS is the “voice of the citizens” and is an “independent” on the federal scene don't have the ring of reality. From its beginnings in 1970 until the present, NCLIS has been and is a creature of the White House appointments apparatus. It is inherently “political.” The results have sometimes been good for librarianship, but they also have been awful. They have always been partisan and often driven by ideology. (I remember Newt Gingrich telling the audience at one NCLIS White House Conference that the way to get kids to read is to pay them for each book they finish.)

NCLIS membership, and especially the post as chair, has been a reward for party loyalists from day one. There was the Reagan chair, Ken Tomlinson. He was the guy who, just two years ago, tried to politicize the actions of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. You certainly can't say Jean Simon, Clinton's great choice for NCLIS chair, wasn't a classic liberal Democrat. Or how about Charles Benton, Jimmy Carter's NCLIS chair from 1978 to 1982? His family is one of the most prominent among the Democratic Party leadership in Illinois. Indeed, current chair Fitzsimmons is a Republican, and her husband, Joe, was once a Republican candidate for Congress. Nearly every chair and most members of NCLIS were and are loyal to and often active for the party in power when they were appointed.

Even if NCLIS goes out of business, we're not losing our only “independent” voice of the citizens on library and information policy. The ALA lobby is more “independent,” and groups like Friends of Libraries USA or ALA's Association for Library Trustees and Advocates are closer to the citizenry.

I'm not sure NCLIS is needed, but if it survives, it will be safer for libraries and information policy as an integral part of the federal bureaucracy. There, at least, the political process and congressional oversight mean that someone is watching. It is unlikely, but the millions of words of policy advice NCLIS has produced for decades could actually be applied to federal action inside IMLS. And like that free hotel breakfast, that free advice from NCLIS is worth every penny.