Outgoing US Senator for Illinois & Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin is pressing the White House for answers after the Republican administration fired Librarian of Congress Dr. Carla Diane Hayden this past week.
Hayden, who earned a Ph.D. in library science from the University of Chicago in 1987 after working 15 years for the Chicago Public Library system, has variously served as Chicago’s Chief Librarian, CEO of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, as well as president of the Illinois-based American Library Association; in her capacity at the ALA she was a strong opponent of broad surveillance and public information changes pushed through by the highly controversial 2001 Patriot Act. At the ALA, Dr. Hayden helped spur a number of scholarship programs and promote youth reading.
When President Barack Obama nominated Dr. Hayden to serve a ten-year term as Librarian of Congress in 2016, over 140 public library systems across the United States wrote to the US Senate Rules Committee in support of her appointment, leading to an overwhelming vote of approval during a particularly immobile period of Republican Senate majority.
Carla Hayden served as Librarian of Congress without issue through the remainder of Obama’s term, then during the first Trump term, and then again during the Biden administration. Dr. Hayden worked throughout the first half of her decade at the Congressional Library to modernize the Library’s systems, creating publicly available digital facsimiles for much of the tens of millions of items in the archives.
Then, in a two-sentence email this past week from the White House deputy director of presidential personnel, Dr. Hayden was unceremoniously fired without cause:
Carla,
On behalf of President Donald J. Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as the Librarian of Congress is terminated effective immediately. Thank you for your service.
Shortly after the firing was made public, Senator Durbin released the following statement after the firing:
“To fire Dr. Hayden, a highly respected professional who has done an upstanding job as our nation’s Librarian of Congress, in a two-sentence email shows the depravity of this administration. The heartlessness of this President knows no bounds.
“The Library of Congress is America’s library—not Donald Trump’s. The next Librarian of Congress must emulate Dr. Hayden’s example of expanding the Library for all and not embolden Donald Trump’s efforts to whitewash history and restrict Americans’ access to knowledge, information, and culture.”
While no response is known to have been issued to Senator Durbin’s letter, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Friday, “We don’t believe that she was serving the interests of the American taxpayer well, so she has been removed from her position. And the president is well within his rights to do that.”
The 27-year-old Leavitt suggested that Dr. Hayden, whose career as a librarian spanned over 50 years, had been dismissed a year before her term as Librarian of Congress was set to expire as part of the administration’s opposition to “DEI.”
The Washington Post noted that Hayden was additionally the subject of a recent social media attack by conservative groups, leading to speculation that the posts, deriding the Congressional Librarian a “quota hire,” may have drawn the White House’s attention to her.
Beyond Durbin, numerous other congressional democrats and American artists denounced the firing.
