Louisiana Voice

Last July, LIVINGSTON PARISH LIBRARY BOARD OF CONTROL President Jonathan Davis, installed on the board as a puppet of Citizens for a New Louisiana Chairman Michael Lunsford, declared, “A DEGREE IS A DEGREE” (he’s the dude with the beard. Turns out he doesn’t know much about conducting a public meeting. More on that later) in justifying his position that a special Master’s degree was not needed to qualify for the position of parish library director.

That was right after he’d led the charge to fire the incumbent director against whom no complaints had been lodged except by Davis’s small group of self-appointed overseers of public decency and censorship (I used lower-case letters because the title, while appropriate, is still unofficial).

Davis obviously had his own candidate in mind and let that slip by suggesting that the new director could be “especially former principals that have managed schools and know exactly how to do a job very, very similar to this.”

It turned out, of course, it was all done illegally because one member (she’s the one on the far right) left prior to the board’s voting not to renew incumbent director Michelle Parrish, leaving the board without a quorum. Attorney General Liz Murrill subsequently sued the board for conducting an illegal meeting at which official action was taken.

Well, now it seems this particularly confused and dysfunctional board is almost a year into its rumbling, bumbling, stumbling mismanagement of the business of appointing a new library director and there is still no decision on that touchy little matter.

In fact, just today, I received in my email inbox a posting of available jobs at the Livingston Parish Library. There was only one job opening. Want to guess what it was?

Yup, the good ol’ Livingston Parish Library Board of Control, those fabulous five who probably know about as much about the true needs of a public library as I know about cross-stitching is soliciting applications for a …(wait for it)…library director.

The position begins in the early fall of this year and applicants, the announcement says, “are subject to public interview processes.”

That last time they tried that—you know, that meeting that was deemed to be illegal—an acquaintance did apply and he got a response the very next day politely rejecting his application. Did I mention it was the next day? That, my friends, was one helluva fast interview process.

But get this. Among the required qualifications are:

• A Master’s degree in Library Science. (Uh oh, I guess a Master’s degree is necessary, after all.).
• Four years of progressively responsible experience in professional library work.
• Certification by the Louisiana Board of Library Examiners—to be achieved within the first year of hire.

Here is the library board’s solicitation in full:

Davis, with egg all over his face, looks rather inept, uninformed and unqualified in retrospect—much like the other four members.

Folks, if it seems I’m being a tad harsh it’s because it’s time parish councils get the hint that we don’t want them or uninvited outsiders like Michael Lunsford sticking their noses into operations they know nothing about and that is precisely what is occurring here and around the state with the hysteria over literary content of classics like To Kill a Mockingbird, The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men and 1984. I ask in all earnestness: what is happening to us?

These people constitute a minority in our communities. A couple of years back, Livingston school librarian Amanda Jones stood up to these do-gooders and paid a price she should never have had to pay.

She was brutally (and I do mean brutally in the truest sense of the word) attacked and libeled by online trolls. One of those went a little too far and she sued him, winning a judgment and a public apology.

But that’s what happens when narrow-minded people allow their imaginations and fantasies to run amok and allow themselves to believe any propaganda they are spoon-fed.

Our libraries are for the public and that right must not be revoked in the interest of any person’s puritanical idea of propriety and decency. If you allow that to creep into our standards, we will quickly find that we will no longer have standards, but a set of arbitrary rules instead, enforced by those few who appoint themselves as police, prosecutor, judge and jury. And once they taste that power, we must ask ourselves, what they will demand next—because there will be a next. And a next and another next…