As has now been widely reported, the White House has sent a number of universities, including the one I work at, a set of terms it wants them to agree to, which indicate that not doing so may mean they “forego federal benefits”. It’s not entirely clear what criteria were used to select the universities, though I suspect in my university’s case it may have had something to do with its recent willingness to give in to earlier demands from the Trump regime when it looked like the only community members they’d have to sell out were their transgender student athletes.

Now, as Martin Niemöller’s readers could have predicted, they’re coming back for more. As I write this, I’ve heard no word from our university administration, either in response or acknowledgement, but we also didn’t hear a lot from them before they made their previous deal with the White House. (Another university’s board chair, though, suggested eagerness to comply.)

I am happy to see that a number of our faculty have been quick to call attention to the proposal’s threats to the academic freedom it claims to champion. Notable early responses include the AAUP-Penn Executive Committee’s statement (with its accompanying petition that Penn community members can sign) and Professor Jonathan Zimmerman’s op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer, which notes some of the traps the agreement would set for universities that sign on to it.

But it isn’t just university faculty and research centers that would be muzzled by the agreement. The libraries would be too. That’s the implication of section 4 of the proposal, which mandates that “all of the university’s academic units, including all colleges, faculties, schools, departments, programs, centers, and institutes” comply with what the White House calls “institutional neutrality”. University libraries are among those centers, and the proposal says they would have to “abstain from actions or speech relating to societal and political events except in cases in which external events have a direct impact upon the university.”

Academic libraries are full of speech relating to societal and political events that don’t have.a “direct impact on the university”. It’s obviously in many of the books in our collection, which deal with societal and political events of all kinds. But it’s also in what we do to build our collections, put them in context, and invite our community to engage with them. It’s in the exhibits we create, the web pages we publish, the events we host, and the speakers we invite. Much of it is usually not particularly controversial; I’ve heard no protests about our Revolution at Penn? exhibit, for instance. But exhibits honestly dealing with revolution cannot avoid talking about political events, and while that might be welcome when they discuss how Revolutionary leaders fought for America’s freedom, we’ve seen how the White House reacts when they also discuss how they denied some Americans’ freedom. (I’ll note that a similar subject is also addressed in another exhibit our library hosts.)

The proposal also calls for “transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully… belittle… conservative ideas”. Many of the recent calls to ban books in US libraries and schools are the ideas of self-proclaimed conservatives, and libraries of all kinds speak out against these “societal and political” events. To date, most American research libraries have not yet been directly impacted by these bans, which have largely been imposed on public and K-12 school libraries. But they still have every right to object to them, and this proposal could easily be used to chill such objections. Indeed, much to my chagrin, even without this agreement my university’s library has already taken down online statements championing other important library values, out of concern over government reaction. I hope the statements will return online before long, but agreeing to the White House’s new terms would increase, rather than reduce, an already unacceptable expressive chill.

Research libraries also cannot assume their own collections will be safe from censorship, should their universities sign on to the White House’s proposal. Recently a controversial Fifth Circuit court decision upheld a book ban in part by accepting an argument that “a library’s collection decisions are government speech”— which is to say, official speech. The White House could use this argument to interfere with collection decisions they also consider to be official institutional speech on societal and political events, should a library’s sponsoring institution sign on to this agreement.

A university might argue that some of these restraints on library activities and collections aren’t a reasonable interpretation of the terms of White House proposal. But the agreement takes the decision on what’s reasonable out of the university’s hands. Instead, “adherence to this agreement shall be subject to review by the Department of Justice”, which has the power to compel the return of “all monies advanced by the U.S. government during the year of any violation”, large or small, whether in the library or elsewhere. The Department of Justice is not an agency with particular expertise in education, librarianship, or research. And it’s also no longer an agency independent of the White House, and a number of commentators (including some former GOP-appointed officials) have noted that it is now carrying out “vindictive retribution” against Donald Trump’s enemies.

Academic libraries are often called “the heart of the university” because of how their collections, spaces, and people sustain the university’s intellectual life. As I’ve shown above, both the terms of the White House’s proposed agreement and its context threaten to cut off the free inquiry, dialogues, and innovation that our libraries sustain. Universities that accept its extreme demands even as a basis for negotiation, rather than completely rejecting them, risk being distracted about the shape of the noose they are asked to get into. They should refuse the noose outright.