Academic Librarian Status - An Attempt to Work through My Feelings
Recently, I ran into a professor colleague while picking my daughter up from her preschool ballet class. As we talked, she made a troubling comment that I have not been able to shake. She suggested that the lot of teaching staff, which includes academic librarians like me, was a sorry one because neither students nor “real” faculty tend to feel that we know what we’re talking about.
I became a librarian after several years as an instructor in the college classroom. The transition seemed natural: I have generally considered libraries as ideal learning spaces, places where individual curiosity meets abundant resources for satisfying it. A good librarian, I believe, immerses her/himself in the research process because she/he loves it, and attempts to communicate that passion to patrons. In an academic setting, where the majority of these patrons are students, this attempt to foster creative and effective research skills is the librarian’s primary educational role.
It is not my intention to recapitulate the long, inky history of the status of academic librarians vis a vis the traditional professoriate. My goal in this short essay is simple: I’d like to take a step toward organizing and understanding my own thoughts about my profession, and perhaps begin to understand why the status question matters to me.
I work at a very tiny liberal arts university in the south-central U.S. Our library and staff are correspondingly small: the library director and I are the only two professional librarians on campus. As a result, my duties are diverse. I manage the inter-library loan program; I oversee circulation; I process and manage our periodical subscriptions; I keep our account books. None of these responsibilities, however, figures as prominently in my thinking, efforts, or self-representation as my role as a teacher.
What is this role? Like many academic or school librarians, my typical schedule includes a fair amount of “information literacy” or research skills workshops and classroom visits. Most frequently, however, demand for this kind of instruction tends to be most intense at the beginning of the semester. I rather think the most important teaching I do goes on year-round, every day. In a 2010 article, Martha Fallahay Loesch argued for a re-imagining of the academic librarian’s role as educator. The “Research Model” of instruction as articulated by Wilkinson (2000) places students at the forefront of their own learning processes, prompting them to ask their own questions, conduct their own independent investigations, and frame their own responses to problems. As our higher education classrooms shift from the traditional lecture-based classroom (“Transmission” or “Passive Model”) to a more active, research-oriented approach, Loesch argues, librarians are the ideal educator-guides:
"The library as place in the 21st century may be facing an uncertain future due to increased electronic accessibility to information and the digital revolution, but for librarians, the time is ripe for expanding teaching opportunities…the Research Model stresses problem solving as a direct result of research, thereby making “inquiry and investigation” the “key activities” of graduate and undergraduate education. (2010: 35)"
I agree heartily with this sentiment, and see a real opportunity for increased involvement of academic librarians as educators as our learning models and access to information change. Famously, though, faculty and students do not always see librarians as teachers. I think we need to change this, and I think this is part of why the status question matters. If a university grants its librarians the same status as its teaching faculty, that school is saying, in effect, “our institution acknowledges and values the vital contributions made by librarians to the education of our students.” This is certainly part of what makes librarians’ faculty status satisfying; we must, however, also be aware that the status question goes beyond mere acknowledgement.
Librarians at my institution are classed as “professional staff,” which includes most non-teaching campus employees with college degrees. Librarians do get to participate in the university senate, albeit toothlessly: librarians are ineligible to vote on issues considered faculty domain, such as matters involving the curriculum. Over the past year, for example, librarians have been able to vote on just a few of the many issues to have come to the floor. As a result, my senate involvement often feels like nothing more than being required to watch a meeting several times a year, and can only be called “participation” in a very loose sense.
At Loesch’s school, Seton Hall University, faculty librarians were included in the broad restructuring of that university’s core curriculum over a decade ago. As she describes it,
"From its inception, librarians were involved in the creative process and they fought long and hard for the inclusion of information literacy as a required proficiency in the core design…Not only was information literacy infused in all the core courses, but the librarians also won the respect and admiration of several of the faculty members serving on the core curriculum committees. (ibid.: 34)"
This kind of inclusivity should be the norm, not because it would make librarians feel more involved in the major mission of higher education (though it certainly would do that), but because it would be beneficial to the students.
The ACRL has promoted full faculty status for academic librarians for half a century. In 1972, the American Association of University Professors, in collaboration with the Association of College and Research Libraries and the Association of American Colleges and Universities (then known as the Association of American Colleges), joined with this group in support of this position. Both the ACRL and the AAUP have maintained this as their official stances on academic librarian status ever since.
There is every reason, in short, for the status of librarians at my institution to be modified accordingly. If we are welcomed into important matters like curriculum development, if the teaching role of our librarians is not just acknowledged, but embraced, then maybe comments like the one I go the other day won’t knock the wind out of me so much.
And who knows? Maybe our students will leave college with a better sense of how to seek answers to their own questions, rather than simply parroting received doxa.
