SRRT (Social Responsibilities Round Table)

Reading the announcement for SRRT's 2026 Afternoon of Social Justice, I found myself asking a simple question: When did SRRT stop being radical?

I do not ask that nostalgically. I ask it historically.

SRRT was not created to make liberal democracy work more efficiently. It was not founded to encourage civic participation as an end in itself. It was born in the political ferment of the late 1960s by librarians who rejected the mythology of professional neutrality and understood that libraries are inseparable from the structures of economic, political, and cultural power. We challenged war, racism, McCarthyism, censorship, sexism, colonialism, corporate power, and the complacency of our own profession. We did not mistake reform for transformation.

Yet this year's "social justice" program is almost entirely devoted to voter mobilization, civic engagement, democratic participation, and strengthening democratic institutions. Worthy causes? Certainly. Radical politics? Hardly. Specific to SRRT's mission, analytic frame and values?  No.

The assumption underlying the entire event is that injustice results primarily from exclusion from the democratic process and that social progress follows from bringing more people into that process. That is the classic liberal reform tradition. It assumes the institutions themselves are fundamentally legitimate and need only become more inclusive. It asks how more people can participate in existing arrangements rather than whether those arrangements systematically produce inequality, exploitation, and domination.

The irony is unmistakable. An organization created to question power now celebrates participation in power's existing institutions.

What is missing is more revealing than what is present. Where is the discussion of capitalism as the organizing principle of inequality? Where is the analysis of corporate ownership of information, surveillance capitalism, union organizing, militarism, colonialism, or the political economy of libraries themselves? Where is the critique of the profession's own complicity in reproducing social hierarchies? Where is the willingness to ask whether representative democracy, under conditions of concentrated economic power, can deliver the justice being promised?

Instead we are offered a familiar parade of nonprofit executives, university researchers, policy advocates, and foundation-connected organizations. I do not question their commitment or the value of their work. But this is the language and politics of the nonprofit-industrial complex: partnerships, stakeholders, civic engagement, capacity building, democratic participation. It is the language of managing injustice, not dismantling the structures that produce it.

Even libraries have disappeared from the conversation. SRRT once insisted that librarians examine our own institutions critically-our collections, our labor practices, our governance, our funding, our relationship to state and corporate power. Today libraries appear merely as convenient venues for discussions about public policy. The profession itself is no longer subjected to the searching political criticism that once defined SRRT.

This is not an isolated event. It is the culmination of a long political drift within both ALA and SRRT. Over the years, radical analysis has steadily yielded to respectable advocacy. Structural critique has been replaced by professional programming. The language of liberation has been translated into the language of civic engagement. Conflict has given way to consensus. Politics has become administration.

Many younger members may assume this is what SRRT has always been. It is not. Those of us who remember the origins of SRRT-and who participated in the struggles that shaped it-know that social responsibility once meant challenging the assumptions on which institutions rested, not simply helping those institutions operate more fairly.

Voting rights matter. Civic participation matters. But if SRRT's vision of social justice begins and ends with expanding participation in existing political institutions, then it has abandoned the radical imagination that once made it unique within ALA.

The tragedy is not that SRRT has become liberal. Liberal organizations have an important place. The tragedy is that one of the few places within ALA that consistently challenged the profession from the left now seems content to echo the assumptions of mainstream progressive politics. That is not the SRRT many of us helped build, defended, and believed was necessary. And unless we are willing to recover that tradition of structural criticism and intellectual independence, "social responsibility" will become little more than a slogan attached to programs that never ask the most fundamental question of all:

Who holds power, in whose interests is it exercised, and what would it mean for libraries-and librarians-to challenge it rather than merely participate in it?

------------------------------
Mark Rosenzweig
------------------------------

Thank you for the feedback. Some responses:

• It is impossible to cover all the social issues that SRRT covers in one event. The election focus was my pushing. We have received several requests from SRRT members for an event on elections and civic engagement and I thought it would be a good tie-in with the upcoming midterm elections. We did try to include both people who do voter engagement and advocacy and people who are critical of voting as a means to change social issues. 
• The final program isn't exactly what we planned. Unfortunately, at least 30% of the people we tried to contact did not respond to us. Some people that I wanted involved, like Wayne Wiegand, were not available. That said, even if it's not what we initially envisioned, I still think it's a good program. 
• The event got dangerously close to being canceled or rescheduled. With declining SRRT membership, we have less money for honorariums and programming. Additionally, all the members of the SRRT Programming Committee are really overworked right now with their jobs and other commitments. We really did the best we could with the time and finances available to us. 
• We are already planning additional programming for the fall. We're looking at one session on the history of SRRT activism and its impact on libraries and ALA and another session on how social justice and activism is being taught, or not being taught, in current LIS curriculum. These are still in very early planning stages. 

I'm sorry that this year's event does not meet expectations. I hope that SRRT members will still give the program a chance. There are some really great speakers on the schedule. 

April

Dear April,

Thank you for your thoughtful response, and thank you for explaining some of the circumstances behind this year's program. I appreciate the work that you and the Programming Committee have put into organizing it under what sound like very difficult conditions.

I also think Rory Litwin captured my intent very well when he wrote that my comments were "less about this specific event than what it represents." That is exactly what I was trying to convey.

My criticism was never meant as a judgment on the committee's efforts, the quality of the speakers, or the practical constraints under which you were working. Nor was it based on the fact that some topics inevitably had to be left out.

Rather, I was responding to what I see as the broader political direction reflected in the program. As I read it, the event is organized around a liberal-progressive framework that emphasizes elections, civic engagement, and democratic participation as the principal means of advancing social justice. Those are important concerns, but they are different from the tradition of structural critique that I believe once distinguished SRRT.

For that reason, I suspect that even if every speaker you originally envisioned had been available, I would still have raised essentially the same questions. My concern is with the overall orientation rather than the particular lineup.

I'm glad to hear that you're considering future programs on SRRT's history and activism. I hope those conversations can also address SRRT's political trajectory and ask what distinctive role it should play today. That, ultimately, was the question I hoped to raise.

Thank you again for engaging so respectfully and thoughtfully with my comments.

Best,

Mark

Dear Julie,

Thank you for your thoughtful response and for your invitation.

I appreciate your suggestion, and I would certainly be interested in participating in a discussion about SRRT's history and its role within librarianship. However, I would hope such a panel would not be simply an exercise in institutional memory or celebration. What interests me is the relationship between SRRT's history and its present political direction.

My concern in writing the piece was not primarily historical but political. I believe SRRT emerged from a tradition of structural criticism that asked difficult questions about power, political economy, and the role of libraries within larger systems of domination. My sense is that much of that critical orientation has gradually given way to a more conventional liberal approach centered on civic engagement, public policy, and institutional reform. Whether one agrees with that assessment or not, I think it is an important conversation for SRRT to have.

So sure, I'd be very interested in discussing the possibility of organizing or participating in such a panel, provided it encourages genuine debate about SRRT's trajectory and not simply a retrospective on its past.

Thank you again for reaching out.

Best,

Mark R

Dear Don,

Thank you for your thoughtful comments and for taking the time to read the piece so carefully.

I think I may not have been clear about what I was trying to do. My argument wasn't intended to rest on formal definitions of "radical" and "progressive." Rather, it was a historical argument about SRRT's political trajectory.

When I referred to "mainstream progressive politics," I was describing the familiar politics of democratic reform-voter participation, civic engagement, institutional inclusion, and policy advocacy. My point was that this differs from the tradition that historically defined SRRT: a politics of structural critique that questioned the underlying distribution of economic and political power, including the institutions in which librarians work.

So I wasn't contrasting "radical" and "progressive" as abstract categories requiring precise definitions. I was arguing that SRRT has moved away from the kind of structural criticism that once distinguished it and toward a more conventional liberal-progressive approach to social change.

I assumed that long-time SRRT members would recognize that historical distinction. If I revise the piece, I may make that historical context more explicit-not by defining the terms themselves, but by saying a bit more about the political tradition from which SRRT emerged.

Thanks again for the thoughtful suggestion. It has given me something useful to think about.

Best,

Mark