Librarians Are Heroes With a Code of Ethics. Here Is What Is Happening to Them.
By Laurence A. Pagnoni, MPAAuthor, The Nonprofit Fundraising Solution | Former Faculty, NYU Heyman Center for Philanthropy, School of Professional Studies
Executive Summary
I want to tell you about a profession under siege — and about why it matters to your work as a nonprofit leader. Librarians are bound by a formal code of ethics that most professions never match, and they are currently under coordinated political attack by well-funded organizations that have nothing to do with concerned parents. In 2025, 92 percent of all book challenges in the United States were initiated by pressure groups, government officials, and political decision makers — not parents. (American Library Association, April 2026.) The same political infrastructure behind this campaign is expanding its targets. If you lead a nonprofit that serves communities these groups have named as adversarial, you are not a bystander to this story. You are a potential next chapter in it.
Did you even know that librarians had such a nuanced code of ethics? I did not, and was impressed to learn they did.
The American Library Association's Code of Ethics, first adopted in 1939 and most recently updated in 2021, contains nine core principles organized around a single foundational commitment: intellectual freedom — the right of every person to hold any belief and access any information, free from restriction based on origin, viewpoint, or content. A librarian who removes a book because of its political content is in violation of their professional ethics. The Library Bill of Rights makes this binding: materials may not be excluded because of the origin, background, or views of those contributing to their creation. These are not suggestions. They are the ethical spine of the profession.
Understanding what librarians stand for requires understanding what libraries actually are — because the answer surprises most people. Most public libraries function as government entities, funded by local tax dollars and governed by trustees appointed by elected officials, though some operate as independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporations. As of the third quarter of 2024, the United States had over 7,500 libraries and archives, including nearly 5,000 local public libraries. (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, April 2025.) What all of them share is this: they are free to enter, free to use, and free from any requirement to purchase. They are the last genuinely open public institution in most American communities.
They became that institution largely because of one man. Andrew Carnegie — a Scottish-born steelmaker who taught himself by borrowing books as a boy — funded the construction of 2,509 libraries worldwide between 1883 and 1929, of which 1,689 were built in the United States. (Carnegie Corporation of New York.) His condition was simple and his covenant clear: he would build it if the community would maintain it, writing in The Gospel of Wealth that "a free library occupies the first place, provided the community will accept and maintain it as a public institution." That covenant has held for more than a century. It is now being tested in ways he could not have anticipated.
Who Is Driving Book Bans in America — and How Well-Funded Are They?
The testing began in earnest in 2021, when Moms for Liberty was founded — initially as a campaign against mask and vaccine mandates, then rapidly transformed into a political organization targeting school and library collections. Moms for Liberty is registered as a 501(c)(4) social-welfare nonprofit, and I find that troubling given what it has done with that designation. As a 501(c)(4), it has no donor disclosure obligation whatsoever — not even to the IRS — which is precisely why organizations operating in political advocacy frequently choose that structure over a 501(c)(3). Their funding is entirely opaque by design. The group self-reports more than 130,000 members in 48 states. (GLAAD, 2023.) Between July 2022 and June 2023, 81 percent of school districts that banned books were within or adjacent to a county with a local Moms for Liberty chapter. (PEN America.) Their tactics include infiltrating school boards, circulating lists of targeted titles, and flooding district administrators with removal demands. The targets have included books about the civil rights movement, LGBTQ+ experiences, racial justice, and Anne Frank's diary.
The 2025 data from the ALA documents what this campaign has produced. Sarah Lamdan, Executive Director of ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom, stated in April 2026: "In 2025, book bans were not sparked by concerned parents, and they were not the result of local grassroots efforts. They were part of a well-funded, politically driven campaign to suppress the stories and lived experiences of LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC individuals and communities." The ALA tracked 4,235 unique titles challenged in 2025, the second highest total ever documented, with 39 percent representing the lived experiences of LGBTQ+ people and people of color.
Patriot Mobile — a Texas-based cellphone company that markets itself as "America's only Christian conservative wireless provider" — funded Patriot Mobile Action, a political action committee that backed 11 school board candidates in North Texas in 2022. Ten of those candidates won. The newly installed school boards immediately began exercising oversight over library collections, removing dozens of previously available titles. (NBC News, August 2022.) Steve Bannon, the former Trump adviser, described the strategy explicitly: "The school boards are the key that picks the lock." In 2025, organized community opposition reversed some of those gains — all three Mansfield ISD trustees backed by Patriot Mobile Action lost their reelection bids. (Texas Tribune, May 2025.)
In Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District v. Pico — decided by the United States Supreme Court in 1982 — Justice William Brennan wrote that local school boards may not remove books from school library shelves simply because they disagree with the ideas in those books. The ruling was narrow, applying to removal rather than initial selection, and the current wave of book challenges has been structured to work around it — through selection policies, curriculum restrictions, and state legislation. But Brennan's principle remains the controlling federal precedent, and it is what librarians invoke when they resist.
Our cherished libraries embrace nonprofit values of open access, public benefit, service regardless of ability to pay. The attack on libraries is an attack on those values wherever they live.
If you want to understand the human cost of this campaign — the death threats, the grocery store confrontations, the professional isolation that librarians are absorbing in communities across the country — I recommend The Librarians, a documentary directed by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Kim A. Snyder and executive produced by Sarah Jessica Parker, which premiered February 9, 2026, on PBS's Independent Lens. You can watch it now at pbs.org/video/the-librarians-ubgpbk/. Librarian Amanda Jones, who appears in the film, told the New York Times: "I've received death threats for the crime of giving a speech at the public library about how libraries are for everyone." The film will make this post come alive with the actual voices of the people I mentioned here.
What Nonprofit Leaders Can Do Right Now
There are three things I urge you to do:
Support your local library's Friends of the Library organization financially. Most are independent 501(c)(3) nonprofits that accept tax-deductible contributions and fund programs the library's government budget cannot cover.
Show up when library budgets are threatened in local government. Library funding decisions are made at town meetings, city council sessions, and county commission hearings that most people never attend. If we want others to be there for us, we must also walk the walk.
Say publicly what is happening. The coordinated removal of books from libraries and schools is a political project, not a parental one, and the data is unambiguous. Nonprofit leaders have the standing and the platform to say so clearly.
Carnegie's covenant was that communities would maintain what he built. Maintaining it now requires more than tax dollars. It requires showing up for the people who are holding the line.
Are you prepared for the unthinkable?
The coordinated campaign that has produced 4,235 challenged titles and captured school boards across the country did not begin with libraries. It began with a political strategy — identify vulnerable public institutions, flood them with organized pressure, and reshape them from the inside. Libraries were an accessible early target. Nonprofits that serve LGBTQ+ communities, immigrant populations, racial justice causes, or any constituency these same organizations have named as adversarial are not watching from a safe distance. They are next in the sequence.
If the public tide turned against your organization — if the pressure groups that have overwhelmed library boards arrived at your funders, your government contracts, your community relationships — what would you do? Do you have a board that would hold? A donor base that would sustain you? A communications strategy that would let you speak clearly under pressure? These are not abstract questions but questions you should have a plan at the ready to address.
Share your experience and your response in the comments section at laurencepagnoni.com.
This post is offered freely for educational purposes. Please share it with executive directors, board members, development staff, and community leaders who may find it useful — provided the author's byline remains intact: By Laurence A. Pagnoni, MPA. For more on nonprofit fundraising, governance, and strategy, visit laurencepagnoni.com.
