This is an opinion column.
Hush! Shhh! No talking.
This is a library.
That’s pretty much what Birmingham’s library board said to employees who gathered Tuesday evening to beg them to pay attention to what’s happening across the system. Before it’s too late.
Shhh! Don’t make noise.
Which tells you exactly what you need to know. Or where you need to go to find it. Like the Dewey Decimal System.
A diverse group of librarians and other employees wanted to come before the board to talk about bullying by management, lack of security and an environment, as longtime archivist Jim Baggett planned to say, that is “soul-sucking and oppressive.”
About 20 of the employees – maybe a couple dozen – wanted to tell board members about the way they perceive life under the system’s executive director, Floyd Council.
Council has been on the job about 11 months, and employees like Baggett and Russell Lee and Christina Zink and Monica King Slater and all those others wanted to talk about a “volatile and vindictive” environment they say has overtaken the system. The board can fire Council for any reason before his one-year anniversary, and employees – who call him a bully and a despot -- want him gone.
But they didn’t get a chance. Because ...
Shhh!
Library Board President James Sullivan decided it would be too time-consuming to listen to all those employees, so he told employees to pick a rep to speak for all of them. They chose Slater, and the board gave her two minutes to talk.
Two minutes. Sullivan cut her off at the two-minute mark and sent her packing.
Because listening would take too much of the board’s valuable time.
This from a board that then spent 15 minutes debating the two-minute limit. This from a board that discussed for 10 minutes whether it could spend $400 on cakes for patron appreciation day. This from a board that, inexplicably, listens along on the budget as the finance officer reads off the month’s revenues and expenditures. This from a board that does not mind for a minute wasting everyone else’s time.
The message was loud in the library.
Hush.
Library Board President James Sullivan, left, and Executive Director Floyd Council.
The board finally did decide it had been wrong to cut Slater off, and asked her to come back to finish her statement. She did. It took about a minute. She spoke of bullying and said the library had become “a dreary dark place” and an “empty vessel.”
She left without getting a response.
The board, then, went into executive session to talk about personnel issues, which presumably meant Council. But they took no public action.
I asked Council for his perspective. What does he say to claims of bullying and spite and retribution? He looked shocked, as if he couldn’t imagine. He said he was not authorized to comment, and I could talk to his legal counsel.
Hush.
The Birmingham Library System, long the best and sometimes only example of regional cooperation in this too-often fragmented metro, is in disarray. Facilities have suffered, security has become an issue and the digital-first changing world has affected libraries as much as it has publishers and media.
That’s part of the distress, to be sure. But it is only part of it.
Council, after the executive session, told the board that people “don’t want to take any level of change and said there are days when he hears what people say about him that make him feel “I could spend the whole day crying.”
And the board took no action. Not yet. Not publicly,
The message was clear.
Shut up. This is a library. This is our library.
John Archibald, a Pulitzer Prize winner, is a columnist for Reckon by AL.com. His column appears in The Birmingham News, the Huntsville Times, the Mobile Register and AL.com. Write him at jarchibald@al.com.