A recent article published at the
Chronicle of Higher Education website (sorry, the full article is subscriber only content) caught my eye. It is a report about a few schools that are
considering or have begun changing librarians from faculty status to
professional staff. This may be an indication of a trend among higher
education generally. Nationally, the article notes, about two-thirds
of all academic librarians are faculty, whether tenure-track or not.
At my institution the librarians are
non-tenured faculty. The library gets a delegation to the faculty
Senate, and librarians serve on faculty committees. We've just
recently been asked to update our faculty portfolios, for some kind
of accreditation requirement. Or maybe it's bragging rights. For
several years now I've been part of the faculty team in the annual
showdown between us and the student Quiz bowl team. We hold our own.
Over the years working in higher
education, I've heard, as many have, the stories about professors who
put themselves on permanent vacation or indulge in selfish &
unprofessional behavior as soon as they get themselves tenured. So
I'm not convinced that tenure should be expanded or even continued.
I'd be fine seeing it phased out of higher education all together.
But that's another topic. Do I think that it is important for
librarians to have or keep or be given faculty status? Yes, I do.
Very much so.
Librarians are part of the research
and learning process. We're a big part, to be plain about it.
Professors tell the students what information they should learn, the
librarians tell them, and more importantly, show them where to
find that information. We impose order on the world of information
resources which is big, getting bigger all the time, sloppy &
disorganized, littered across the Internet and polluted with all
manner of misinformation, distortion, falsehood and irrelevant junk.
Librarians pick out good stuff, organize it and put it within the
student's grasp. Go see my old post about Why
Librarians Rule. Humorous, yes, but it speaks truth. To state my
point simply, we teach students. What do you call a group of
university employees who teach students? Faculty.
Several
of the commenters to this article asked the same question that I
asked upon reading this article. To wit: how does being removed from
the ranks of faculty make librarians do their job better? The
University of Virginia cites “the difficulty of defining the role
of academic librarians today” as a reason for making the job
classification change. The article does not elaborate on how the
“role of academic librarians” is different in 2013 than it was in
say 2009 when their librarians were faculty. Librarians are not
surprised by change, our profession has been adapting and many think
adapting well to all the changes in technology, fields of research
and communication. We get the necessity of learning new skills and
applying new capabilities. But we haven't forgotten how to 'kick it
old school' and just know our collections so
we can be that responsive search interface no computer can match.
At
East Carolina University, they're looking for greater “efficiencies”
and deciding what “a library of the 21st
century” looks like. Great. What they're not seeing, I think, is
that the library is more than the stacks, and tables, and databases
and print stations. To quote an old French guy, “Sans
Maitrise, la Puissance n'est Rien”
- (Without Mastery, Power is Nothing)
and guess who provides the Mastery? The Librarians do.
So
I'll ask the question again – how will changing librarians' status
from faculty to staff make us do what we do any better? Neither UVA
nor ECU have an answer for that, at least not given in the article.
One of the changes that I expect would happen as the result of such a
move would be the withdrawal of librarians from much of their
interaction with the professors. No more attending faculty meetings
to learn what's going on, and the professors get no more input from
other professionals with an “in-it-but-not-of-it” perspective. At
least at our institution, the librarians do a lot of the book and
resource selection, as many of the professors are too busy with
classroom work to search catalogs and review sites to determine what
resources to add to the collection. Would staff be given the
authority to make those decisions? I don't know.
If
librarians are not considered faculty, what is the point in requiring
the advanced degrees in Information & Library Science? Why hire
professionals if it is considered more of a clerical/administrative
job? Well, there is the likelihood that the University could pay them
less without the Masters' Degrees. Don't imagine that this thought
has not crossed the mind of some Finance Officer somewhere.
Well,
to wrap up, it is not my responsibility to prove that making this
change would be worse, it is the responsibility of the University
administrations to prove that it will make things better. At least as
far as this article explains the situation, UVA and ECU have not made
this case. It is not wisdom to make changes without understanding why
things are the way they are, and without a solid case for why the
change is needed.
