Academic Libraries Are Not Neutral: Moving from Toxic Culture to Action

Academic libraries are often imagined as welcoming, thoughtful, even progressive spaces. But anyone who has worked in them long enough knows that libraries are not immune to the same inequities, exclusions, and toxic dynamics found across higher education.

That is an uncomfortable truth, but it is a necessary one.

In At the Existentialist Café, Sarah Bakewell describes Jean-Paul Sartre’s challenge to see the world from the perspective of those most oppressed. That idea still matters. It asks us not only to feel empathy, but to rethink power, responsibility, and action. Ruha Benjamin’s Viral Justice extends that challenge by showing how inequity spreads through institutions in quiet, normalized ways. And in Toxic Dynamics, Michalak, Dawes, and Cawthorne bring that reality into academic libraries, naming the patterns that harm workers, silence voices, and limit what libraries can become.

Taken together, these works push us toward a difficult but necessary question: What would it look like for academic libraries to stop managing harm and start building healthier cultures on purpose?

Toxicity in Libraries Often Hides in Plain Sight

Toxic workplace culture in academic libraries does not always announce itself dramatically. More often, it appears in everyday patterns that become normalized over time: rigid hierarchies, unequal workloads, dismissive leadership, hidden labor, poor communication, and an “us versus them” divide between faculty and staff.

These dynamics especially affect those with the least institutional power. Women, people of color, staff in lower-ranking roles, and those doing behind-the-scenes operational or technical work often bear the brunt of cultures that reward visibility while ignoring the labor that makes visible success possible.

That is part of what makes toxic culture so persistent. It thrives in silence. It survives when people are told to be grateful, stay quiet, or accept inequity as simply “how things are.”

Hidden Labor Is a Justice Issue

One of the strongest points in your draft is the connection between toxic culture and invisible labor.

Libraries rely on work that is essential but frequently overlooked: cataloging, metadata creation, archiving, digitization, systems maintenance, troubleshooting, preservation, and other forms of operational labor. This work keeps collections usable, services running, and institutional memory intact. Yet it is often undervalued because it happens out of public view.

When labor is consistently invisible, the people doing it can become invisible too.

That invisibility is not just a management problem. It is an equity problem. It affects morale, advancement, recognition, and compensation. It also reinforces a culture in which some contributions are celebrated while others are treated as secondary, even when they are foundational.

Libraries Cannot Claim Equity Without Examining Power

If academic libraries want to be serious about inclusion, they have to do more than issue values statements. They have to examine how power actually operates inside the organization.

That means asking harder questions:

• Who gets heard in meetings?
• Who gets credit for collaborative work?
• Whose labor is assumed rather than recognized?
• Who advances into leadership?
• Who is expected to absorb extra emotional or service labor?
• Which tensions are addressed directly, and which are quietly tolerated?

These are not abstract questions. They shape workplace climate every day. And they determine whether a library becomes a place of shared purpose or a place where burnout, resentment, and inequity are allowed to deepen.

What Moving Forward Can Look Like

If this is going to sound like an IKS blog post, the piece needs to do more than diagnose the problem. It should offer pathways forward. Transformation will not happen through one workshop or one policy revision. But there are concrete ways academic libraries can begin to shift culture.

1. Make hidden labor visible
   Leaders should name, document, and celebrate behind-the-scenes contributions as core library work, not peripheral support. That includes incorporating this labor into evaluations, reports, strategic priorities, and recognition practices.
2. Revisit power structures
   Libraries need to examine where decision-making lives and who is excluded from it. Staff voices should not be invited only after decisions are made. More inclusive leadership means building structures where input matters early and consistently.
3. Address inequity directly
   Pay disparities, title inequities, uneven workloads, and advancement barriers should not be treated as individual complaints. They are organizational issues that deserve transparency and action.
4. Stop rewarding silence
   Toxic cultures often persist because speaking up carries risk. Libraries can create healthier environments by normalizing honest feedback, protecting dissent, and building accountability into leadership practice.
5. Build cultures of recognition and repair
   Recognition matters, but so does repair. When harm happens, institutions should not default to defensiveness or avoidance. A healthier culture requires naming harm, listening well, and responding with integrity.
6. Align values with daily practice
   If a library says it values inclusion, justice, and collaboration, those values must show up in supervision, hiring, communication, committee work, and resource allocation. Culture is built through repeated actions, not slogans.

A Call to Reflection and Action

Academic libraries are often described as engines of opportunity. They can be. But they can also reproduce the very inequities they claim to challenge.

That is why this conversation matters.

Seeing libraries through Sartre’s existential lens and Benjamin’s call for viral justice reminds us that neutrality is not enough. If we want healthier, more equitable academic workplaces, we have to center the experiences of those most affected by exclusion and harm. We have to notice what has been normalized. We have to name what has been hidden. And we have to act.

The goal is not perfection. The goal is movement.

Movement toward libraries where staff are valued, labor is visible, leadership is accountable, and justice is practiced internally as seriously as it is proclaimed externally. That kind of transformation is difficult. But it is possible. And it begins by refusing to look away.