A second note from the founder
Why This Library Takes No Side
America's School Trust Library
Editor's note. Dave Sullivan wrote this note in June 2026, before the Library had a board; it is published here as written, with its original signature. The founding board it anticipates was not seated until August 3, 2026, and its membership has changed since. For the directors serving now, see About the Library.
There is already a note from me on this site that explains who I am and why I built this Library. This is a second note, about a harder question. The first one asks whether you can trust me. This one asks something I find more important: whether you can trust the Library after I am gone, when good intentions are no longer enough to hold it together.
Start with the trouble the Library is meant to answer. The lands at the center of this story were set aside, beginning in 1785, to support the education of children — held in trust, the way a guardian holds money for a minor. But look at who manages them today. In most states the agency is called a Department of State Lands, not a Department of School Lands. That is not a small slip of naming. Over decades, an institution comes to serve the people who actually show up — its own staff, its own budget, the constituents who walk through the door and complain. The schoolchildren do not walk through the door. The children not yet born cannot. A trust meant to last forever is hard to keep precisely because the future has no vote, and the present always does.
So the honest reader should turn that same suspicion on me. If I build a fact-keeping institution and ask the country to rely on it for two hundred years, what stops it from drifting the same way — from quietly keeping the facts that flatter its friends and misplacing the ones that don't? That is exactly the right question to ask of anything that calls itself neutral. I would rather answer it plainly than ask you to take my word.
My answer comes from my father. He flew thirty missions over Europe as a B-17 co-pilot in the war, which is reason enough for me to call him my hero, and by the arithmetic of that job reason enough that I might never have been born. He came home and went to work at the Oregon Statesman, first as a reporter and in time as the editor of the whole paper. From him I learned a distinction he treated as sacred. A reporter records what happened — who, what, when, where, why — and leaves the verdict to the reader. The editorial page, kept physically and institutionally separate, is where the paper says what it believes ought to happen. The newsroom looks at the past and describes it. The editorial page looks at the future and argues about it. My father knew the wall between them was hard to hold — even the choice of what to cover is a kind of judgment, and a reporter who skips the rally he dislikes has already failed at the job. But the difficulty was the reason for the discipline, not an excuse to abandon it.
That distinction is the whole design of what we are building. There are two kinds of organizations in this work, and they must not be the same thing. The advocacy groups — Oregon Advocates for School Trust Lands (OASTL), the Oregon group I lead, and Advocates for School Trust Lands (ASTL), the broader effort alongside it — are the editorial page. They take positions. They sue states they believe are breaking faith with the trust. They propose model laws. That is their job, and it is honorable work. The Library is the front page. It records what happened — the ruling a judge handed down in Alaska, the statute a legislature passed, the transaction an agency approved — and it takes no side on whether any of it was right or wrong. When someone proposes a model law, the Library does not endorse it. It holds the record and reports, evenhandedly, here is what these people are arguing for, and here is what those people argue back. Then it gets out of the way and lets you decide.
I want to be precise about what keeps that wall standing, because a wall made only of good intentions is the wall that has failed at more than one great newspaper. The Library's wall is built into how it works, not just into what it promises. It keeps the record whether or not the record helps its friends. It cites its sources so that any reader can go check the original for themselves. It keeps a public correction practice and openly invites you to catch its mistakes. The discipline underneath all of that is completeness: a library that tries to hold everything about its subject can be caught leaving something out, in a way that an opinion never can. That is the real safeguard — not that we promise to be fair, but that our work is laid open to be audited against the full record by anyone who doubts us. Neutrality you have to take on faith is worth nothing. Neutrality you can check is worth everything.
Now the disclosure I owe you, because my own situation is the sharpest test of every word above. I am the president of OASTL, an advocacy group. I am also a founding director of this Library. By my father's rule those are opposite jobs, and you are right to wonder whether one person can hold both without the advocate leaking into the librarian. For now my answer is partly practical and, I hope, honest: the only people ready to stand up a Library like this on its first day are the people who already cared enough to join the fight — so the founding board is drawn largely from OASTL and ASTL, and every one of us who serves the Library commits to act, in that room, as a reporter and not an advocate. Everyone is entitled to an opinion. No one is entitled to their own facts.
But a starting condition is not a resting place, and I will not pretend it is. Within about the first year, the Library's board separates from shared membership with the advocacy groups, so that no single person sits in control of both the side that argues and the side that records. For me, I expect that will mean a real choice: to help guide the advocacy, or to help keep the Library, but not to run both. I would rather set that plan down here, in public, while it is still a promise you can hold me to, than discover the conflict years from now when it has grown roots and is harder to pull out.
There is a reason this matters beyond one library and one set of lands. The country is about to build new forever-institutions — for the age of artificial intelligence now arriving — and every one of them will face this same question of how a thing meant to last keeps faith with people who cannot yet speak for themselves. A library that can prove it keeps the whole record, the inconvenient parts included, is one small working model of how that is done. And if you ever find this Library keeping only the convenient facts, you will have caught us failing at the one thing we exist for. Tell us where we went wrong, and don't pull any punches.
— Dave Sullivan
Founder and President, America's School Trust Library
President, Oregon Advocates for School Trust Lands
Oregon, June 2026
