CASE STUDY ETHICAL TOPICS FOR LIBRARIANS
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On a bright, sunny, clear Tuesday morning in September, I slept in late as I was scheduled to work only at 1 PM that day. While I slept and dreamed of Martha Stewart on what Tom Snyder called the ‘colortini’, a hijacked jumbo jet carrying nearly 10,000 gallons of jet fuel crashed into the World Trade Center’s North Tower, killing all on board. If Pierre Trudeau had not died the previous year, he would have said about the event, “Well, welcome to the twenty-first century!” for a completely new reality had exploded upon the world.
Seventeen minutes later, a second hijacked jet crashed into the World Trade Center’s South Tower. By this time I was awake in bed in the upper level of the two-family home where I lived in Brooklyn’s Bath Beach neighbourhood and not long after that, I received a phone call from my colleague Prabhu at work, telling me to stay at home and not come in to work that day as Brooklyn Public Library’s Central Building was closing for the day. Little did I know the staff were not being granted ‘Emergency closing’ but would later be required to enter ‘Excused time’ on their time sheets. Most people had already selected ‘Emergency closing’ on their triplicate time sheets but were told that since the emergency did not take place in the library, it would have to be just ‘Excused time’. Many saw the Library’s callous failure to consider the September 11th terrorist attacks an emergency across New York City as a lack of compassion for the victims by the Brooklyn Public Library’s administration in light of the situation.
It was also inconvenient for many people to change it back three times as the Brooklyn Public Library was reportedly the only American company of its size or larger to require three different timesheets (paper sheets, computer sheets and bubble sheets) from each of their more than 1,800 employees for each week of the calendar. Speaking of calendars, the Brooklyn Public Library were also unique at the time among companies for starting its work week on Saturday and ending on Friday each week. They required of all employees in neighbourhood branches to work two Saturdays out of each month then take a subsequent day off from a weekday which most people thought of as next week but was really the current week when Saturday is your starting point. Those who failed to take a day off were paid overtime, to which they were not entitled. Naturally, this caused massive confusion and timesheet corrections were backlogged for years and took years to resolve on company time and at the expense of the public. Thus, to expect consideration from such ”buroturds” is unrealistic.
The next day, September 12th, I returned to work in the library’s Central building at Grand Army Plaza in downtown Brooklyn. The Central library’s Director, Rhea Brown Lawson, has sent out a general broadcast e-mail inviting all to attend a prayer service in a large meeting room on the ground floor. A large contingent of the library’s staff could be at Central on any given day. Additionally, members of the public might wander in as well.
Rhea Brown Lawson is the same uppity liberrian who, several weeks earlier, had ambushed me in the children’s division while I entered from the Eastern Parkway entrance before 9 AM to begin my work day. She hid behind an area recessed from the wall and, when she saw me pass in front of her, I heard behind my neck ”You be that CA?-NA?-DIAN? LIBERRIAN who be writin’ so many complaints about the LIBERRY!” she intoned plaintively while reserving a heavy disdain for the word ‘Canadian’. Feeling targeted by this impudent loudmouth, I turned around to face her and ask her name. ”Rhea Brown Lawson” she told me immediately and continued complaining to me about multiple complaints I had made about the library. This was true. I had made several complaints about poor treatment I had received as a professional from library staff and management. Included in these were harassment for being Canadian.
I never met the woman before yet somehow she knew who I was and where I could be found at that time of day down to the particular doorway. I told her I had to report to my division office to start work and excused myself. Recounting this incident to my office mates in the EJIC division two minutes later, they told me ”Rhea Brown Lawson? Oh, she’s the Director of the Central Library. She is in charge of this entire building. She has a PhD.” Remarkable, isn’t it, the kind of agitated brutes they get to run public institutions and the way they arrange to meet their professional staff for the first time? Doubtless, her PhD is piled higher and deeper.
Curious about the ecumenical nature of such group prayers in an ostensibly multicultural city like New York, I stood outside the door listening and watching for a few moments, just to see. The assembled group were 90% Black women and their prayers were not ecumenical but entirely Southern Baptist through and through. Rhea Brown Lawson led the service by calling out to Jesus and invoking his name over and over, much like Eddie Murphy’s Aunt Bunny when she’s falling down the steps at the family barbecue.
Returning to my desk in the EJIC division (Education and Job Information Center), I wondered why our division director Jan Alfred Maas, a librarian and ordained Anglican minister (they call it Episcopalian in the States) wasn’t invited to lead the prayer service since he works right there in the same building and had been a priest for many years, since 1973. Jan Maas was an educated and decent man who had much to offer the library, including a degree in music and Masters’ degrees in both divinity and library science. Still though, Maas often cut corners when it came to the moral standards we normally expect from priests and could sometimes be described by what New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani called ‘ethically challenged.”
I asked Father Maas the question and he said he wasn’t invited. I restated my query this time going into more detailed reasons.
He grit his teeth and angrily insisted ”I WASN’T INVITED!”
”Oh dear”, I said. Now I got the message! Reverend Jan Maas was denied an opportunity to lead a prayer service in a public building controlled by the City of New York because he is a white man (of considerable Dutch heritage). The exclusion of Jan Maas from the 9/11 prayer service held on September 12 was a deliberate oversight and racist slight by Rhea Brown Lawson who has since moved on to inflict her racist mismanagement upon the DEE-Troit Public Liberry and currently in Houston, Texas. Jan Maas did not deserve the treatment he got in Brooklyn on September 12th, 2001. I witnessed it and I report it now.
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PRACTICE QUESTIONS FOR YOUNG LIBRARIANS
- What was Rhea Brown Lawson’s responsibility to Jan Maas, a division chief and priest in her library not to humiliate him?
- What kind of librarian hides behind pillars or other furniture to ambush her staff when they enter the building in the morning in place of a formal first introduction?
- Was Rhea Brown Lawson’s hostility toward Canadian professionals in violation of the spirit of the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement?
- What would the people of New York say if they knew how their public funds are wasted?
By Frederick Klein
Reference:
https://www.nytimes.com/1973/06/24/archives/rev-jan-maas-miss-shepherd-married-here.html