Kyle Sammin: Do one job and do it right

No one in the Philadelphia area is likely to be a big fan of Bill Belichick, but plenty of people in our region will nod in agreement with the former Pats’ coach’s quotidian mantra of “Do your job.”

It’s a pretty simple concept: when you have a task in life, whether it be at home or at work, just do the thing you’re supposed to do. Do it. Then, when it’s done and everything is as it should be, you have time to take on other tasks that you may find more enjoyable.

“Do your job” is what many government employees need to hear when, even as their primary missions are failing, they insist on taking on more responsibilities in the social justice arena. 

One prominent example of that was highlighted at The Free Press this week in Zac Bissonnette’s article, “The Death of the Public Library.” In it, Bissonnette profiles the increasing tendency of librarians to see their job as that of a social worker, not a guide to (and guardian of) books and periodicals. Many of our nation’s free libraries are becoming de facto day shelters for the homeless, to the detriment of their actual mission of serving the whole community.

Bissonette talked to Ryan Dowd, a leading library trainer who has been at the vanguard of using libraries as social justice phalanxes. “In Dowd’s book,” Bissonette writes, “some people who complain about the homeless are ‘everyday sadists.’ As for the body odor that permeates so many public libraries, he writes that ‘There is a certain amount of odor that we can expect whenever we go out in public. Other people use odor as an excuse to vent their prejudices. Don’t let someone’s hypersensitivity or bias rule the day if the smell really isn’t that bad.’”

Progressives are fond of citing the analogy of the “Nazi bar” — the idea that once a Nazi starts drinking at your bar, it will inevitably turn into a tavern for white supremacists because tolerating the presence that sort of extremist will attract more of them, and drive away normal people in the process. (This is a folksy repackaging of radical left philosopher Herbert Marcuse’s ideas on so-called “repressive tolerance.”)

There are flaws in that theory, but one big problem is that they never turn it on themselves (indeed, Marcuse specifically meant his theory to be anti-right and pro-left, not a universal principle.) But the general idea — if antisocial people hang around in a place, normal people won’t — is pretty sound. Libraries are great places for readers of all ages and backgrounds, but all of them are less likely to show up there when a pungent, unmedicated schizophrenic is sleeping in the stacks. 

If the libraries were fulfilling their basic mission and doing it well, and the librarians needed something else to do, we could understand that they might possibly take on new missions. But library attendance is down. “Per-resident visits to public libraries fell by 56.6 percent in the ten years ending in 2022,” Bissonette writes. “Meanwhile, a report from the Urban Libraries Council found that between 2019 and 2023, security incidents rose at its 115 member libraries, even as visits fell another 35 percent.”

The job is not getting done. 

Public schools have shown the same tendencies in the past decade or so. Their core competency — the reason we have schools — is to educate children in the basic life skills they need. Reading, writing, math, history, science, and so on. All the stuff that schools have taught for generations. And all the stuff that they are increasingly failing to teach, at least in this state.

My colleague Beth Ann Rosica laid out the problem earlier this year: “Pennsylvania spends more than most states in the country on education and ranks at the bottom in academic outcomes. Yet, Governor Shapiro continues to throw money at the problem expecting different results.”

The spending goes up every year. It will probably go up again this year, if the state ever decides to pass a budget. But the test scores go down. “Pennsylvania spends more money than most other states on education and ranks in the bottom third in academic achievement — only twelve states in the nation scored worse than the Commonwealth,” Rosica writes.

So the job is not getting done. But schools are increasingly taking on other tasks. Social emotional learning. Social justice lessons. Diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. Even if you support left-wing instruction, you must see the problem of schools taking on new tasks while not even getting the basics right. 

Why are we doing this to ourselves? Why let public institutions degrade?

It is partly a problem of governmental cowardice – everyone in Harrisburg and the county seats is afraid to cut funding for anything. So they just pour more money into sections of government that are not only not getting the job done, but are increasingly uninterested in even trying — not if trying comes at the cost of not doing all the new trendy stuff.

The employees themselves are the issue here in many cases: instead of the people funding it making decisions, the staff are. And the staff wants to do what is rewarding to the staff, whether the customers (us and our children) agree or not. Librarians and schoolteachers used to be staid professionals, not political activists. They weren’t looking to start a revolution, they were trying to educate and elevate the next generation of Americans.

Activists (and philosophers like Marcuse) would say that not being political is political, in that it enforces the status quo. But that’s not how most people see politics. For most of us, the personal is not political. We don’t want activism in our schools and libraries any more than we want it in our supermarkets, pizzerias, or accountants’ offices. 

More to the point: what we really don’t want from any of these professionals is for them to push their weird agendas while simultaneously failing to do the job for which they were hired. Everyone has a right to their politics in a liberal democracy. But the first duty when you’re at work is to do your job.

Kyle Sammin is the managing editor of Broad + Liberty.