Meet Dan Montgomery

Dan Montgomery will start his role as the American Library Association’s (ALA) new executive director on November 10. He will become the first nonlibrarian to serve in that position in the Association’s nearly 150-year history, overseeing a membership of 45,000 people and 180 staffers.

Montgomery comes to ALA from the Illinois Federation of Teachers (IFT), where he served as president of the 103,000-member organization for the past 15 years, advocating on behalf of public education and the rights of workers. He also spent 18 years as a high school English teacher and has taught in the City Colleges of Chicago and at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

Montgomery spoke with American Libraries about his goals for the Association, his union activism, and how library spaces can build lifelong memories.

What is your earliest memory of a library?

I think it’s probably my elementary school library. I went to public school in a suburb of Detroit called Bloomfield Hills—Pine Lake Elementary. It was this really beautiful building. The classrooms were all round. In my memory, we’d be in the library a few times a week. The librarian would read a book, tell us about books, and then we’d have time to go out into the library and find stuff to read. And there was a race to get these little whistle-shaped foam chairs because you could move them around. And if you got one of those chairs, you’d find your little nook and read.

The other thing I remember is my dad would often take me on Sundays to the Bloomfield Township Public Library on Lone Pine Road. Neither of my parents went to college, but they were very literate people who read all the time. Neither of them was ever without a book. So the public library was a regular thing for me. I loved it. We could check out everything.

The chairs must have been special to remember them.

God, the whistle chairs, I know. I find that spaces are very tied to memory, right? You think of early things in your memory, and you think of places and spaces and how you felt there. When my kids were young, we would vacation on an island in Ontario. There’s a children’s library there, and it’s one of the most beautiful places in the world. It’s in an old house on a hill. The main room has a fireplace and a real bearskin rug, and it’s lined with books and smells like pine. We’d bring our kids there every vacation, and they’d find a place to nestle and read, and it was just idyllic.

You’re the first nonlibrarian to become ALA executive director. What do you think the advantages and disadvantages will be?

I have a steep learning curve on a lot of the terminology. And, aside from a little work-study job in my middle school library, I’ve never worked in a library. So those things, I guess you could argue, are somewhat of a disadvantage.

One of the advantages, though, is having a fresh set of eyes. I think the [ALA Executive Board] was interested in that. IFT is a big organization, with over 100,000 members and 100 staff members statewide in Illinois. We hired people from within the ranks who’ve been teachers and members, but we also hired people from outside who haven’t been.

You definitely want balance, in my opinion. When you come into an organization and ask, “Why are we doing it this way?” the answer is often, “Well, it’s how we’ve always done it.” It’s much easier for someone from the outside like me to say, “Yeah, well, that’s not an answer. That’s a description.” I want to know why we’re doing it this way and ask if maybe we could do it in a different way that might be more useful or more successful.

I also think my background in leading advocacy in difficult times, politically and socially, is going to be helpful here.

What will be your longer-term goals?

I feel privileged to be in this position of helping set the course for the next 150 years. Here is this venerable, incredible organization that we all feel an affinity toward. We have to get it right and position it well so it’s really strong and has a long, healthy future ahead.

That’s happening in the context of a federal government that wants to defund IMLS [the Institute of Museum and Library Services]. It doesn’t seem inclined to increase funding for things like education, libraries, or museum services. Book bans have been on the rise. There’s a roiling social atmosphere that pokes into people’s freedom to read.

For me, ALA is the premier organization that should be out front, leading on issues of protecting Americans’ right to read, to access information freely, and, for that matter, for every community in this country to have resources that enable you to be a full participant in our civic society.

That’s essentially what libraries do, and they do it now in more ways than ever before—for help in doing your taxes, participating in social programs for seniors, or getting something as simple as internet access. Libraries are community hubs, especially in rural communities. The position of the library in American life is more important than ever, and yet it’s at the vector of a lot of attacks happening in our culture, in our polity.

So it’s a very challenging time. But for me, it’s like, where else would you rather be right now, protecting this essential part of America?

Both the country and ALA have big anniversaries coming up next year, and they’re both facing economic and organizational uncertainty. The recent US jobs report was dismal. ALA faced workforce reductions in July and is expected to experience more. How will you manage this period of upheaval and change?

You may have heard this term VUCA—meaning volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. How do you lead in these times when there’s so much VUCA going on? One of the things I find you have to rely on is “What are your core principles?” How do you band together, find strength in numbers, and get to some clarity? You don’t always exactly know the answers, but you know what you’re going to rely on to figure out those answers. I find that a very helpful framework.

The financial concerns you talk about—those are huge. You can’t really do anything if you’re broke, if you’re in the red. You can’t sustain that. Fortunately for me, a lot of people have thought long and hard about ALA’s finances and how we sustain the organization going forward. It’s painful to hear about staff reductions. It makes me sad, but it’s being done in the interest of the sustainability of ALA as a thriving organization.

I’m confident we’re going to get to a place where we’re financially sound and secure. We’ve got to. We will. It’s just going to take some time to get there. But from what I’ve seen, early on, we’re on that path. Hopefully, we’ll begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel fairly quickly, and both staff and membership will feel better about that.

What’s the first step toward that goal?

First, we celebrate who we are, who we’ve been, and the great successes we’ve had as an organization over time. Then we really look at who we want to be in the future.

We have to engage people. I firmly believe in the hivemind and that we’re all smarter together. There’s this incredible, brilliant membership that’s very engaged in ALA, which is a tremendous strength.

There’s still a lot of opportunity for membership growth, given the number of librarians and library workers in the country. I think every one of them should be a member of ALA. I’m optimistic we’re going to grow. But we have amazing strength already. That’s incredible activism. I think that speaks to people’s devotion to the organization and the cause.

What lessons have you learned from your union work that might apply in your role at ALA?

When times are tough, lean on first principles. Think about, “Okay, what is it we really believe in? What’s our core here?” Because in times like these, you can be pulled in many directions, right? But in big organizations, you can’t do everything or be everything to everybody. If you try too much to do that, you just attenuate your strength. You can’t get much done.

Focusing on the real tasks we have—strengthening the finances and making sure it’s a strong organization, strengthening our connection to members, so members really see themselves in what ALA is doing—leads to membership growth. When people feel secure that their interests and their professionalism are represented in the organization, they want to be part of it, and they want their colleagues to be part of it.

ALA is a sprawling organization with many divisions and round tables and committees and subgroups and affiliates. I get that, but to some degree, we can do a better job of being more coherent and having a unifying vision about who we are and who we want to be and how we get there. I’m very confident that—because it’s been proven to me in my teaching and in my union work—if you align people a bit more, you’ll get there.

ALA has been working for a long time on critical issues like intellectual freedom, library funding, advocacy, and technology access. Are there any new strategies that you hope to implement in the fight for these values? Anything that was particularly successful when facing similar issues in your role as president of the IFT?

I always felt in my IFT role and in union work that our best advocates are our members, because they’re in the trenches every day, and they have the subject matter expertise. So when we were meeting with, say, legislators or public policy folks, I always wanted our rank-and-file members—who are in a classroom every day or in a university—front and center.

That has many advantages—one of them is legislative. It’s easy for legislators to take an out and say, “Oh, well, you’re just the union, or the association,” like you’re a separate entity from the people you are representing, which is, of course, wrong. But it’s very hard for them to say that to a public school librarian. They can try to say it to me as a staffer or any other ALA staffer, but it’s much harder to say it to a member.

Many librarians are struggling with issues like low pay, lack of job opportunities, constrained library budgets, and culture war issues. How can ALA appeal to professionals who are overextended?

In our society, teachers, school workers, librarians, and library workers pay an economic penalty for doing their work. It’s really awful. There’s a term economists use, the “public employment penalty,” which is seen to be about 20%–30% of salary. In other words, if you take two people with similar amounts of training, the one who has an MBA is going to make 20%–30% more than the MLS holder. That’s a societal problem.

We have to keep working to change. My professional work as a teacher demanded that I be a unionist, too, because it was the best way to advance the cause of my profession. And I feel this way about the Association. If you’re a librarian or library worker, you should be part of ALA. You should advocate on behalf of ALA and our collective interests, because that’s the best way forward. We’re going to get further together.

Given the recent shifts in the diversity, equity, and inclusion environment, how do you plan to reaffirm ALA’s commitment and increase diversity among ALA’s staff and membership?

Despite the current political environment from the federal government, most Americans still believe in diversity and in strengthening communities that are diverse. And if you really want to diversify staff, you’ve got to think about everything, top to bottom. With hiring practices, not just “Where do we post our job openings?” but also “What kind of mentoring do we have available for our staff?” Long term, what are the deeper things we need to address once we bring on a more diverse staff to make sure they stay and that it’s a comfortable place for them, a fulfilling place for them to work?

A huge part of diversity in hiring is retention, and it’s a lesson I really learned in schools. We did a survey in the IFT a few years ago and found that about a third of our members were planning on leaving the profession in the next couple of years, which is really disturbing. And almost half of our Black members said they were planning on leaving! I think that speaks to the issue of what the job conditions are. Often, our minority candidates go into much more difficult work situations in under-resourced communities. Once we hire candidates who are from more underrepresented groups, what kinds of things are in place to help them succeed?

The diversity of the ranks is out there. We have members from every kind of demography you can imagine. We need their best thinking about how to do this, too.

What skills from your time as a high school teacher do you think will be useful in the executive director position?

Teaching in high school, you’ve got 20–30 kids in a class five times a day, and that’s a crash course in understanding people and managing them. It teaches you to really listen and attend to where people are. I used to say, as a teacher, it’s not really what you do that matters; it’s what the students do as a result of what you do that matters.

In any organization, we’re often in places where there are things beyond our control. But you can control your own leadership, right? You have to attend to where people are—getting to know them, building relationships. People develop trust that way. And when people trust you, they feel like we’re all in this together. We trust that there’s a vision going forward, that there’s sound leadership, and that makes a tremendous difference.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?

I had great mentors in both teaching and unionism. I don’t really remember anything like an old saw that has stood me in good stead. But what I do remember is the way people behaved and approached their work.

One of the great mentors was Jim Dougherty, a biology teacher at the high school where I taught. He was an early union leader, a very courageous guy. He was a biologist, and he saw the school, the district, and the union through a biological lens, as organisms. He had this perceptive way of realizing, like, if you adjust something over here, there’s a result over there. I learned a lot about managing people in big organizations from him and his thought process.

What are you reading right now?

I just finished Alan Hollinghurst’s latest book, Our Evenings. He’s an English novelist and a really elegant writer. I listened to the audiobook, and thankfully, it had a great reader. So I enjoyed that.

I’m not quite done with Timothy Snyder’s book On Freedom, which is a very thoughtful, philosophical analysis of freedom. It reminds me that when it comes to libraries and the freedom to read and the freedom to access knowledge, we have to reconnect to Americans and help them understand that freedom in a positive way. It’s not just, “We have to kill this bad bill that takes funding away,” but also “What does a library mean to us in our lives?” And why do we care that every citizen should be able to come in and get information or a book or something, some piece of knowledge from the library, freely, without hindrance? It’s a very compelling book.