i am keeping this extremely vague in public b/c i don't want to be identified publicly for raising a fuss b/c i don't want to be out of a job but this is really messing with me because the decision is... it's not even a best practice thing, it's... morally and ethically wrong.
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this is really messing with me. i'm not the only one here mad/upset but we have no recourse here or room to protest, it's coming directly from the uni's president.
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i will give you all a hint, basically someone up in admin decided that instead of being open they want to remove all public access to evidence of the racism that runs through the uni's history, and now i'm being tasked with deleting everything
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so my boss pressured me to do this today & when i said "manually withdrawing form the IR takes TIME" card (b/c it WILL) he said "i see this as something a student could do" & i absolutely blew up & said i wouldn't ask my students to engage in censorship/be complicit in erasure &&
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i asked point blank "what if i said no, i wouldn't do this. what happens then." and he's not answering have a staff meeting at 2 on this, ah oh god
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look it's... there are so many other options that are not being considered here. if admin is telling us "take them down" why can't we counter w/ "no. we're not engaging in censorship. also, here are the ways other institutions have handled this."
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i'm just saying do you really want to be THE ONLY school in VA to respond to racist imagery found in yearbooks by... removing access to them? & he's acting like he's against it but is refusing to push back on any of it & is keeping staff in the dark. tbqh it's cowardice.
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hi! yes! to be clear this is about the admin of a university in Virginia demanding the removal of public access to yearbooks in order to hide instances of blackface and racist imagery instead of reckoning w/its racist history.
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AND ALSO at the same time by doing this engaging in erasure of queer history! in danger of giving too much info but we're a women's college & the early yearbooks have a fuckton of references to romance/romantic-type relationships between women and also cross-dressing and AHHHHHH
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UPDATE: holy hell this is a mess. tl;dr is that the president hasn't even met w/the library director, he was told to do all this through the VP he reports to. this was literally a decision made by admin w/no input from *anyone* w/in the library
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rn the library is unified in opposition to this and i have support to *not* remove anything till after the library director meets w/the president; we're pushing for her to meet w/the entire staff but idk if that's going to happen. i'm still mad that this is being kept hush-hush.
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we're not issuing a statement or anything rn (i wish we would) but would if it got to the point where the president still pushed for this after actually talking to the library + the uni's working group on slavery & its contemporary legacies
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also i'm like we're just as complicit if we issue a "statement of opposition" and still remove access and said as much in the mtg & i was asked point-blank in the meeting if i'd still refuse to withdraw the materials if it meant i'd lose my job & i said YEP
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UPDATE MY BOSS JUST GOT A CALL FROM PRESIDENT AND SHE'S ORDERING THE YEARS THAT HAVE BLACKFACE BE TAKEN DOWN IMMEDIATELY
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IM REFUSING BUT NOW MY BOSS IS SAYING HE'S GOING TO TAKE THE FOUR YEARS DOWN HIMSELF
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okay so i've been pushing back/firm that the rest of staff needs to be involved asap not that we're getting a direct demand to do this now and i've been sent out of his office so he can "make a few calls" before we do anything and holy hell
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boss agreed to an emergency staff meeting at 3:30 on this, I've told one other librarian who has told another one, we'll see what happens next
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my boss just walked into my office and asked my to show him how to take them down himself b/c he can't seem to access them and i refused that too and he just walked back out
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UPDATE my boss is proceeding with taking down four issues that have blackface in them, even after staff objected. I have .pdf copies of all of them and wayback machine has crawled them. the president is aware of this and STILL wants them removed from the IR
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At this point I'm not hiding where this is happening. It's at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia, and the university president has unilaterally decided to remove online access to four yearbooks that have people wearing blackface & that contain racist imagery.
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I'm the IR manager there and I did NOT agree to this or carry this decision out. I refused to. The decision has been taken out of my hands. My boss just contacted bepress directly and is removing access to these materials himself.
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At this point I have no problem contacting the media and advocacy orgs about what's happening. So I'm going to figure out the best way to do that now.
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wanna be super clear that i’m only speaking for myself here! & that i’m not the only one objecting to this, that ppl who work at the library aren’t the only ones objecting to this & also that a lot of ppl are just now finding out about this decision & figuring out how to respond
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since a lot of ppl are asking, here are the years that were removed from the IR. 1919: https://archive.org/details/The_Spinster_1919 … 1950: https://archive.org/details/The_Spinster_1950 … 1969: https://archive.org/details/The_Spinster_1969 … 1985: https://archive.org/details/The_Spinster_1985 …
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also, I’m trying to keep up with all the replies/input from everyone on this as best as I can! and want to be clear again that this is all my response to this as the IR admin/one who was initially tasked with carrying this out
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i still have no idea why this decision came down so fast, with so little discussion. we’re missing a lot of context from admin, but we’re not really being given any of it. rn it all feels like a very fast and very awful kind of like a game of telephone.
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regardless i do not think the right answer to any of this was to make a decision *without* listening to staff tasked w/ implementation or consulting other campus groups/individuals who have just as much (or more) a stake in all of this
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...or apparently without considering the ways other institutions have approached this. also, the statement from admin was drafted before the yearbooks went down. it’s not a reaction to any of what’s unfolding right now. a draft of it was circulating as of friday. so there’s that.
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also thanks to everyone here who shared all the resources for/on fighting this! using all of this to inform how to keep responding to this/what to do next, and hope it helps anyone else who runs into somehting like this, too.
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hey all, brief update: there are a bunch of racist cartoons and at least one other blackface photo in some yearbooks that are *still* up in the IR. I have no idea why admin only wanted to pull the four that they did.
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