Librarians Are Running for Office. Maybe They Should Have Done It Sooner.
There is a moment when you stop asking permission to do your job. Or at least, when you stop trusting that anyone else is going to give you that permission.
That seems to be happening with librarians across the United States. According to a Book Riot report published May 1, a growing number of library professionals are running for state office. The reason is not the salary. It is, more precisely, accumulated anger.
Because in recent years, the banned book stopped being a metaphor. In 2025, the American Library Association recorded 4,235 titles challenged or removed from circulation — the second-highest total in its history. Forty percent of those challenges came not from parents, as is commonly assumed, but from elected officials: school board members, principals, administrators. People with positions. People who can be replaced by other people with different positions.
So what does a person who has devoted their life to connecting books with readers do when the books start disappearing from the shelves? Apparently, they run for office.
There is something almost Borgesian about this. Borges said paradise would be a kind of library. Nobody asked him what hell would be, but we can guess: a library where someone has torn out pages, sealed off sections, wrapped spines in brown paper because the content is deemed inappropriate for the very people who need it most.
What interests me most about this phenomenon is not the heroic gesture — though it has that — but what it reveals about how censorship operates today. It does not arrive in uniform or with bonfires. It arrives as a motion at a school district board meeting, a cut budget, an ambiguous administrative directive. Bureaucratic. Incremental. Almost boring. Which is precisely why it is so effective.
The librarians running for office understand something that cultural debates sometimes forget: that freedom of expression is not defended only by writing brilliant essays or signing open letters. Sometimes you have to go to the school board and win.
