The Lankes Corollaries: Librarians, Learning, Activism, and the Communities They Nurture

When my mother took me for my initial visit to a bookmobile, I met my first activist: Mel Turner, the librarian who brought that vehicle to our neighborhood once every two weeks. Mel probably would have laughed at the idea that he was an activist, but his job of connecting books with readers—and readers with books—to open worlds up to us was as revolutionary an act as any that a five-year-old child could have imagined. Mel brought that bookmobile and my own world to life. He helped my mother inspire in me a lifelong love of reading, learning, and exploring the world. And he became a cherished friend—one I continued to visit whenever I went back to my hometown during a college break or, years later, to be with my family in that mid-sized Central California Valley city during holidays.

I think of Mel, his role as a lifelong-learning advocate, and all he brought to me through a friendship that eventually extended far beyond the walls of that tiny, miraculous vehicle again as I read scholar-speaker-writer-educator-advocate R. David Lankes’s fabulous article “The Lankes Corollaries.” Not surprisingly, the depths and passion with which Dave consistently addresses the role of libraries, librarians, and the communities they serve in contemporary society—as in his decade-old presentation “The Faithful and the Radicals” and so much of what he offers through his presentations and publishes in his books and on his blog—are fully on display here and certainly go a long way in reminding us that a) to ignore libraries is to ignore a community resource we continue to need and cherish, and b) to ignore the people who work in them—and use them—to actually make them libraries leaves us (mistakenly) believing that libraries have little to do with advocacy and activism, community-building, and supporting the common good.

There is much to unpack, admire, savor, and act upon in the article, but one part that makes me think of Mel—and Dave, and so many others who work in libraries and help make them what they are—is Dave’s contention that “a room full of books is a closet, but an empty room with a librarian serving their community is a library” (the third of his five corollaries); the bookmobile without Mel would not have been a library in its broadest, richest sense, and libraries onsite and online without the people who help us navigate them would be something far less transformative than they are. It isn’t as radical a concept as it might at first appear to be, and it helps us understand the difference between those lovely, ubiquitous little free libraries that have become neighborhood gathering places for readers and those spectacular “real” libraries where people nurture, support, and influence communities in positive ways—just as any activist/advocate attempts to do.

If you haven’t spent much time talking to librarians about what they do and how they attempt, through their day to day work, to change the world, it might be helpful to you to be introduced to a simple set of precepts that continues to influence and guide their work, and see how the Lankes Corollaries build upon those precepts—S. R. Ranganathan’s five laws of library science (from 1931):

1. Books are for use.
2. Every person his or her book.
3. Every book its reader.
4. Save the time of the reader.
5. A library is a growing organism.

To these precepts, Lankes adds his corollaries:

1. The  mission  of  librarians  is  to  improve  society  through  facilitating  knowledge  creation in their communities.
2. To be a librarian is to be a radical positive change agent with your community.
3. A room full of books is a closet, but an empty room with a librarian serving their community is a library.
4. Bad libraries build collections, good libraries build services, great libraries build communities.
5. A library should be a safe space to explore dangerous ideas.

All of this goes far beyond the constraints of any particular political point of view. Libraries and librarians, in spite of all the conflict they are currently experiencing through book challenges and disruptions to public programming, remain incredibly committed to doing all they can to provide access to a variety of perspectives and resources—that is part of what members of library staff do as activists, and that’s part of what I do through my involvement in the California Library Association’s Ursula Meyer Library Advocacy training program (named after the librarian who for many years ran the public library system in the same town where Mel worked and where I grew up). As Dave notes in his Corollaries, this does not mean that libraries and librarians are neutral: “Picking what tools and services a community needs is not a neutral act and it never has been. Before the 1970s public libraries wouldn’t carry paperbacks. Before the 1910s many didn’t carry novels. Before that public libraries didn’t carry fiction at all. Libraries have always depended upon specialists to use limited resources to best meet both the needs and aspirations of the community. That is not a neutral act. Ranganathan  might  have  written EVERY book its reader, but in reality, no library can collect EVERY book (or DVD, or 8mm film, or database subscription, or large print edition, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera).That’s  obvious, but this corollary is more than recognition of the obvious, it is about action and activism. Librarians are people of action; actively seeking to make a better society one community at a time”—with the involvement of the community members who contribute to making a library a library.

So once again I think of Mel, of Dave, and all the other first-rate librarians I know or have known. I think about how through the work they do, they remain some of the most influential activists/advocates I have encountered. And I’m left with what Dave writes at the conclusion of his Corollaries: “In the United States library leaders often talk about libraries as more than books. I’ve never been a fan of this line. It implies that things the library does beyond books are still  build on the foundation of materials. Yet the foundation of libraries should be the community libraries are seeking to serve. Ranganathan’s words talked about books and readers, but the spirit of his work was in service and communities.” And that’s where we all need to be. As activists. As citizens. And as fully participating members of our onsite and online communities.

Strengthening Our Communities: Robert Fuller on the “Rankism” of Somebodies and Nobodies

We spend quite a bit of time trying to strengthen our communities by discussing and attempting to address diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice. We also, in our better moments, pursue the concept of the common good, as I recently wrote in a set of reflections centered around Peter Block’s new book, Activating the Common Good: Retaining Control of Our Collective Well-Being. In the best of situations, we seek positive solutions, promote and provide training, and attempt to inspire inclusion by listening as much as speaking when identifying ways to foster the levels of transformation we recognize we need to achieve. But then we often look around and throw our hands up in despair over our apparent lack of significant progress.

Writer-physicist-educational reformer Robert Fuller, more than two decades ago, attempted to lead us beyond what he referred to as the “isms”—racism, sexism, ageism, and numerous others that by now we can easily rattle off in our sleep: “In the U.S., perhaps twenty percent of us have suffered directly from racism, and about fifty percent from sexism,” he suggested in Somebodies and Nobodies: Overcoming the Abuse of Rank (published in 2003 by New Society Publishers). “But virtually all of us suffer from rank-based abuse—which I shall be calling ‘rankism’—in one context or another, at one time or another. Sooner or later, everyone gets taken for a nobody. Sooner or later, most of us treat someone as a nobody.”

His writing in Somebodies and Nobodies and the sequel All Rise: Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity remains clear, compelling, and inspirational, which suggests to me that perhaps its time to circle back to what he suggested and see how it might push us a few steps along in our efforts to change the world around us with small, steady doses of empathy and a desire to do more than talk—in essence tackling rankism as the overall element that encompasses all the other isms: “Attacking the familiar isms singly, one at a time, is like developing a different chemotherapy for each kind of cancer” he writes in Somebodies and Nobodies. “To go after rankism directly is to seek to eliminate a whole class of malignancies.”

In the early sections of that initial book, he links rankism to assaults on personal dignity, and he explores that theme more fully in All Rise: Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity: “To be ‘nobodied’ carries the threat of being deprived of social and material resources critical to our well-being,” he writes in that sequel. “Such threats are tantamount to blackmail or extortion, forcing people to subordinate themselves so as to avoid the fateful consequences of ostracism. The need for dignity is more than a desire for courtesy. Dignity grounds us, nurtures us, protects us. It’s the social counterpart of interpersonal love.”

None of what I have written so far is in any way meant to denigrate the great work that so many colleagues are doing in the area of diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice. Nor is it meant to detract from the work of the many writers whose work I continue to absorb and admire. But what I do find in Fuller’s work is an invitation to look at a larger, less commonly examined field of play to think about the underpinnings of so much of what challenges us and to quickly move it into a personal, story-based level that pushes theory into the background and invites us to feel the impact of what rankism produces.

It’s personal for Fuller, as it should be for us. When he tells us how he went from holding positions of authority (where respect was a given) to a position where, without a formal, impressive title, he found himself receiving short shrift from those around him, he calls up our own recollections of times when, because we were “outranked” by someone else, we were made to feel insignificant. It is not a large bridge to cross: by employing even a modicum of empathy and thinking about how those around us feel when subjected to the stings of rankism we ourselves have experienced, we take a small yet essential step toward understanding the terrible impacts rankism has on those whose age, race, gender, and other elements of who they are subjects them, in turn, to rankism.

He leads us further down this painful path of reflective inquiry by reminding us that one of the more pernicious effects of rankism is burnout—the absolute loss of all that a person might bring to our communities because, having been rankismed to death, that person no longer cares enough to attempt to share what they might otherwise have contributed to what Peter Block and John McKnight call our “abundant community.”  The implicit challenge here is to catch ourselves in those awful moments when we are subjecting someone to rankism (or any of the other isms) in our workplaces, our learning spaces, our social gathering places, and all the other onsite and online spaces we inhabit; stop ourselves; acknowledge what we have just done; and attempt to reverse the damage we are causing to ourselves, our colleagues, and other members of our precious, struggling communities that benefit from what a commitment to inclusiveness in all its forms is capable of producing.

It’s a lofty, difficult to achieve goal, and Fuller invites us to rise to the challenge through his own optimistic, soaring prose—an invitation to strive for a set of interconnecting communities capable of producing what we so far have not managed to produce: “As rankism, like racism, falls into disrepute, the partisan insults, put-downs, and smears we have become accustomed to will find less favor with the electorate,” he writes with tremendous hope in All Rise. “Sneering at opposing views, contempt for nonbelievers, and personal attacks will all backfire, discrediting the purveyors and not their targets. There is no reason to expect dignitarian politics to be less argumentative, but there’s every reason to believe it will be more civil.”

And that remains the challenge we must pursue if we are going to bring the best of ourselves to the Sisyphean task of creating the communities of our dreams.