Project 2025, proposed by the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, serves as a model for the 2024 Republican nominee and now president in terms of institutional changes that can be implemented. The plan contains several initiatives that would challenge diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies. Less than a month after beginning his second presidential term, President Donald Trump signed a plethora of executive orders into the federal government in accordance with the Heritage Foundation’s policy agenda.
Trump and his previous administration supported the Heritage Foundation’s policy suggestions during his first term as president. In July 2024, he claimed to have no interest in enacting any of the proposed policies in Project 2025, yet his recently signed executive orders imply otherwise. Members of the Heritage Foundation, particularly those involved in creating Project 2025, are now part of Trump’s current administration like the Project’s architect Russell Vought as the White House’s budget director.
One way that Project 2025 seeks to “Make America Great Again” is by dismantling the Department of Education. This action would defund libraries, further ban books that have yet to be challenged and elevate this power to the federal government instead of local jurisdictions.
Trump has already begun to defund and dismantle the Department of Education. Doing the same to libraries would be beyond devastating to America.
Libraries offer support and services for local communities. They provide access to knowledge of all fields and specialties, provide technological resources and assistance with acquiring information, serve as a symbol of unity, preserve age-old cultural traditions and promote the right to everlasting education.
This is especially important given today’s political climate, where books that government representatives deem dangerous are banned. Books are being banned in schools for focusing on areas such as racism, rebelling against an authoritarian regime, sexual assault, LGBTQ+ experiences, advocacy for women’s rights and moral or religious beliefs that conflict with Christianity nationalism.
When a book is banned in a district, public libraries are not necessarily forced to remove it from their shelves; each library decides whether to remove the book from its collection.
The digital age, while aiding the preservation of banned books and topics by keeping them publicly available, has also contributed to the decline of the public use of libraries. As widespread as the internet is, information can easily become distorted and exploited.
For example, not even a week into Trump’s inauguration, many social media users on Facebook and Instagram who followed Democratic party representatives or hashtags found they no longer were, and were instead following Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance and their hashtags.
If policies enacted by the Trump administration continue mirroring Project 2025 initiatives, they would be hindering Americans’ educational access and awareness of social issues, therefore violating the constitutional right to freedom of speech and expression.
Elyse Graham, a professor in the Department of English, has “seen this movie before.” Her TIME article discusses the importance of Americans having access to physical knowledge and national security. Her novel, Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II, illuminates the American saviors of World War II: librarians.
She views the ongoing crisis of defunding libraries as critical, but not at its worst. Still, she believes that in a world with banned books and libraries unable to house all types of books, diversity and the quality of American socioeconomics drastically decrease.
“This [year] is the 80th anniversary of World War II, and World War II was won largely in part due to libraries. After the war, public and university libraries were recognized for their contributions to national security. It’s unfortunate to be [in this situation] now.”
She explained the impacts of libraries on American politics and citizens’ socioeconomic situations, regardless of race, gender or class. “Having a lot of information allows resistance literature to exist. All literature in all of its forms is always vital at the right moment to the right reader.”
April Masten, an associate professor in the Department of History, shares this sentiment.
She cited that the University’s library is suffering from being underfunded. She expressed that libraries are so much more than a place with books, attributing this to watching her daughter gain community from engaging with stories and libraries, prompting her to do the same.
“People who don’t go to libraries — who are not educators, who aren’t readers — have no idea what they can offer,” she said.
Masten cited the internet as playing a large role in underfunding libraries, along with the notion that people don’t read as much anymore. These misconceptions are consequential on local, national and global scales.
“Libraries are one of the few democratic institutions [in America]. Libraries are open to poor people and well-off people alike. They are also sanctuaries from loneliness, from war, from unhappy families, from ourselves. Libraries offer more than books to read and transport us. They are possibly the only free public spaces in our capitalist democracy.”
She is a firm believer in protecting history.
“Books do not indoctrinate. In a library, you can find every point of view or position on a subject. Indoctrination occurs when books are banned so that there is only one position offered. In a country that believes in equality and freedom, that sounds like a return to slavery.”
She explained that the books stored in public and academic libraries represent our nation’s values and offer unrestricted access to information, unlike the internet, which compiles query replies with an algorithm based on what other users find interesting.
Graham’s article is a grim example of how a lack of historical and political knowledge can damage America’s diversity beyond DEI initiatives. People, the way the Constitution is enforced and the social and cultural associations and regulations that Americans impose and integrate into their daily lives are only a handful of categories that would suffer with reduced diversity.
“Drastically lowering information sources [such as defunding libraries] has disastrous consequences for the educated populous, diversity and national security,” Graham wrote.
Political climates like these are perfect breeding grounds for authoritarianism. Such governments have a strong hatred for outside regimes and practice intellectual pathology — the mindset where members of a society only believe in like-minded thinking, overestimating their beliefs and resisting backlash. Such examples are Nazi Germany’s ban on books that intermixed with “Jewish ideas,” as well as the People’s Republic of China actively policing what content its citizens can engage with. The latter government often demands movies to be edited to exclude any disagreeable content and outright bans an extensive list of fictional works written by authors worldwide.
She described these regimes as catastrophic since they lack diversity in both appearance and ideology. She brought up studies that the United States military conducted that proved that combat readiness benefited from diversity physically, socially and intellectually.
“The more people are aware, the more choices and ideas they can make for themselves, and the more chances people’s decisions benefit themselves, which benefits America’s working class,” she pointed out.
“Information is never the enemy. It can be weaponized, as can misinformation,” Graham stated. She likened the circulation of misinformation on social media to whispering, a World War II tactic where the criteria for spreading information was whether it was interesting, not if it was correct. She illustrated that this is why “a healthy and diverse information diet” is required and emphasized the importance of public institutions that allow people to study history to understand storytelling and how the power of the word influences various social spheres.
“Stories will affect us. We’ll be affected and we won’t know how.”
Masten elaborated on this idea, stating that she doesn’t believe information is dangerous. Rather, the people who make it so gain power over the ordinary citizen.
“Which books are banned depends on the historical context. The danger posed by books is nothing compared to the danger posed by the internet. We are living at a time when people can publish almost anything on the internet, a time when the capitalists who own social media sites are lifting their bans, ridding their sites of any censorship,” Masten said. “Banning books in a society that condones the reading of hate speech and untruths seems ridiculous. Besides, banning books is not really effective because it makes people want to read them to see what is in them.”
The first book ban in the U.S. was in 1637 in Quincy, Mass. when the Puritans found Thomas Morton’s “New English Canaan” violating their culture and customs. The reaction to Morton’s work resulted in his exile. The novel touches on drinking, social pleasure and doing the unthinkable during this period — “building social and economic ties with Native people.”
Both Graham and Masten agree that protecting libraries is a big issue. Graham highlighted how important this is on both macro and micro levels, and that without people being able to see how knowledge has evolved, ideas, free will and the essence of democracy will diminish rapidly.
“Libraries are good physical evidence of data,” Graham said. “They have all kinds of data and no AI. [The data] took many years to put together and is [a culmination of] history. Libraries demonstrate that people can read and interpret large quantities of information.”
Masten shared this defense, stating that “libraries do not govern the information in their stacks. Librarians do not base their answers to your questions on stupid algorithms decided by some mathematical procedure. They help you find books and let you decide for yourself what is important to know.”
Regarding Project 2025, Masten views the proposal of federal book-banning regulations as short-term and ineffective in the long run.
“Ordinary people did not write Project 2025. People who want power wrote it. They want ordinary people to believe that it is in their interest to rid the world of alternative ways of living, of people who are different from them, rather than seeing that it is in the interest of those with power to do that […] what the Project 2025 people really want is to keep [the] masses ignorant. To keep them from rising up. What better way to do that than to rid our society of books and libraries so that everyone has to rely on social media’s algorithms. I don’t think it will work in the long run because of history. They simply cannot get rid of every history book, every novel, every idea that they deem subversive. People will just keep writing them.”
She relayed that censoring information forces people to take the truth they know from living in a modern society and hold it in conjecture to the “untruth,” or what she calls the “information” presented in the reduced data collection.
“It’s simply not possible,” Masten said. “They simply cannot get rid of every history book, every novel, every idea that they deem subversive. People will just keep writing them.”
In any time, place or culture, banning books can be deadly. Books preserve knowledge, and ideas are fundamental to the progression of individual lives and society. A single book is powerful enough to change the trajectory of one’s life, let alone their worldview. Ultimately, libraries house the richness of American diversity and culture.
