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.

Blog, रेदुक्स.

Or, not.

Been awhile.

But it's not that I've been, necessarily, idle:

My current homepage

What? Drexel? Doing... Library Science?

Well, geez. I told you practically a newt's age ago that I was fixing to quit the other life. And, lo, I did. Mostly I am posting now just because I am healthy enough to connect my life now to my life then. Of course, some events have occured during the interstice.

If you've followed my companion site - primarily (d.h. exclusively) maintained by my longsuffering wife - you will know that we now have a 6 month-old girl in our family. Her name is Maeve. She is exactly like a crocus, even though she was born in autumn.

In case you haven't been following, check out this link:

Kent and Maeve's site

(Sometime in the future, we'll update the name.)

Other events can wait until we speak in person.

Other loose ends:

D: I still have at least one book of yours, as well as the movie Ronin.

L: Yeah - I served the King of England. I haven't spilled hot grease on it or anything.

J: Pick a metaphor for what you already know.

Mom: You should really stop checking this blog. I post here, like, every 14.25 months on average.

Ta.

anonymity?

whoops. but i got a message from someone else named patrick morgan, requesting my url...so maybe there's an army of patrick morgans who infrequently blog to display all the turmoil they create for themselves.

my advisor is now officially hampering my dissertation's completion. i can't even think about the project without the template of whatever it is he wants (it's a vague template) sneakily layering itself over terrain i used to find fun and interesting. now it's all filtered before i even let myself think about it...i'm so concerned with finishing eventually that i worry about his criticism while questioning its validity/relevance. i have written and discarded so much stuff that i actually don't remember what the thesis i started out with was. well, an exaggeration that was. but really. when i began this thing (guess how long ago) i loved my topic. i was learning with gusto - "this is fantastic," i thought, like a bonehead, merrily skipping about the stacks in search of books on potentially related topics to explore. i went through pens and pens and pens, sticky notes were all over the kitchen table. and then i turned in what i thought was my first chapter. and this began a looooong cycle of handing in work, never to hear anything about it until i asked, getting the same comments, and i resisted because i wanted this to be my project. i had no idea about how to write a book, and nowhere near enough about the topic to do that, and i just wanted to absorb, actually teach myself something about what it was i was doing and how it related to the rest of the world. and years later i am now afraid of my own ideas because they always seem to be wrong, and anyway who cares about ideas when there are font issues to address, and citation format...and don't forget the philology. how stupid i was to believe that i could write a dissertation that was not acutely philological in bent! how silly to think that it would be clear to everyone that the focus was not supposed to be linguistic! (you know, in some fields, this is usually the major section of any respectable work, and the point is buried somewheres in there...).

so slowly i've slouched into dissertation torpor, kind of. i fight it - i managed to turn in 2 chapter drafts in the first half of 07 - but this temporary enthusiasm is invariably quashed by the apparent worthlessness of my work, at least this is the impression i get from the Fount. because of this worthlessness, i have discarded five chapters outright. at one time i was excited about those chapters...i knew, certainly, that they were not final drafts. but i thought they might be provocative. maybe you should never really ask even academic friends to read your stuff...but maybe they would say something if it was utterly incomprehensible, yes? and if it was incomprehensible, why and how did we discuss it afterward? anyway. lost time.

i am pretty tired of this, now. the writing, i mean. this blog, that is. i feel a little better. and i have made a decision: for all intents and purposes, I QUIT. it is becoming more obvious every time the Fount and i communicate that he will never let the work follow a trajectory and mature. he will never let me finish. so i quit, although the image of firing the Fount is more empowering. ah, the same. i do want to make something clear, however. and it sounds odd, probably. i am quitting in order to complete the project i started. i am going to have to spend some time regaining control over the direction and composition of this book, to allow that excitement i felt initially to grow once more. i will do this for me. fuck the Fount.