The Librarians Are Not OK
A decades-long attack on their status is bad for us all
Just before the winter holiday in December, 2021, the administrative team at Texas A&M University announced that all librarians with faculty status would be removed from the tenure track at the end of the spring term; if they were tenured, they would be stripped of it. Despite opposition by the Faculty Senate, university leaders gave tenured librarians two choices: They could relinquish faculty status and stay on as staff, or they could retain tenure by vacating their library position and securing an appointment in a different academic department.
Alyson Vaaler, formerly an assistant professor in the business library, wrote in a blog post that the process caused a “collective trauma.” Should she renounce her faculty status, with its autonomy, prestige, and research expectations, to remain true to her identity as a librarian? Or was academic freedom, membership in faculty governance, and job security so valuable that it was worth giving up the professional identity that felt most natural to her? In the end, Vaaler chose to remain as a staff librarian and still received the small raise that she would have earned with tenure, though she worried that the tangible demotion in status would leave her feeling as if she were “not enough.”
The choice that Vaaler and other Texas A&M librarians faced represents a cultural problem with deeper roots. Throughout the past two years I have reported on flagging morale among tenure-track faculty members, which has caused some to leave academe altogether and others to either withdraw from their work or set pragmatic boundaries for themselves. Those problems have long plagued academic librarians. Many institutions hire librarians strictly in a staff capacity, but even universities that offer tenure-track appointments reveal an abiding prejudice among faculty members and administrators toward librarians. The Texas A&M University library system, which has included many first-rate scholars, was reduced in the president’s own words to a “service unit.”
Denigrating language of this kind clashes with a statement on faculty status for college and university librarians that the Association of College and Research Libraries, the American Association of Colleges and Universities, and the American Association of University Professors issued jointly in 1973 and reaffirmed in 2018. While many institutions continue to reduce faculty lines, the ACRL, AACU, and AAUP agree that “where the role of college and university librarians … requires them to function essentially as part of the faculty, this functional identity should be recognized by granting of faculty status. … The function of the librarian as participant in the processes of teaching, research, and service is the essential criterion of faculty status.”
I have come to think of academic librarians as akin to the engineers who maintain the electrical grid. Without them, many university systems would go dark. But colleges increasingly treat librarians like convenience-store clerks waiting to help faculty members and students at their points of need or impulse. Why is it that academic librarians are rarely viewed by their faculty colleagues as experts and collaborators — as equals?
A version of this essay first appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Upgrade your subscription to read the full piece and for access to other features in this series, including “Younger Faculty Are Leaning Out,” “Why Faculty of Color Are Leaving Academe,” and “The Big Quit: Even Tenure-line Professors Are Leaving Academe.”
A history of misogyny
When new faculty members approached librarian Jamie Byerly at Shorter University, in Georgia, it was often because they needed help finding a building on campus. Sometimes, instead of giving directions, she would accompany them to their destination while giving her elevator pitch for the library. And she would ask her new colleagues to consider inviting her to class. Despite her efforts, Byerly struggled to book even a few visits to classes every semester. Eventually she left. “I couldn’t keep working where I felt no value or support,” she told me.
Byerly is now a reference and instruction librarian at Clarke University, in northeast Iowa, where she has built collaborative relationships across the campus. But she was warned about faculty members in graduate school: the potential for misunderstanding, the default assumptions about status inequities. Consequently, she still runs through multiple drafts of an email before approaching a colleague she has never worked with before. “I want the first impression to be good,” she said. “If I’ve never worked with you before, then I’m careful. I always err on the side of not trying to start an argument.”
There is a term for Byerly’s caution: deference behavior. As mixed-methods researchers Lyda Fontes McCartin and Raquel Wright-Mair explain in a recent study, academic librarians frequently prioritize the goals and preferences of teaching faculty over their own, even in cases where better library resources or approaches to research could improve student learning. Even when librarians have faculty status, their disciplinary counterparts can be demanding and presumptuous. It is common for faculty members to request that a librarian visit their class on short notice, for brief periods that do not allow for meaningful instruction, and sometimes even as a substitute when they are absent due to illness or conference presentations.
A research librarian at a graduate school on the West Coast told me that academic librarians are accustomed to disciplinary faculty members assuming that the library will assist with grant projects, such as providing data repository work or collection support for a new curriculum. Some faculty members only notify the library of their inclusion in a grant proposal the day after the application is submitted or shortly after funds are awarded, rather than consulting with the library much earlier in the process. “There is an inherent power imbalance between teaching faculty and librarians,” he told me. “Teaching faculty need to recognize librarians as collaborators and partners, rather than an afterthought.”
Some of these markers of disrespect are subtle, more microaggressions than frontal attacks. But the blowback that librarians receive from disciplinary faculty members for requesting more class time or suggesting other changes to instructional requests is often overt. I once overheard a faculty colleague shouting at a librarian over the phone, “I just want you to be a consultant!”
That 83 percent of librarians are women suggests that a strong current of misogyny runs beneath these interactions. This has long been known to librarians, at least since Dee Garrison published “The Tender Technicians: The Feminization of Public Librarianship, 1876-1905” in 1977. Garrison explains that the growth of under-compensated but highly credentialed positions in academic libraries near the end of the 19th century led universities to overwhelmingly recruit women. This demographic imbalance promoted the sexist perception of the librarian as a warm and accommodating hostess.
In their journal article McCartin and Wright-Mair explain that even though academic librarians are aware that undue deference harms their professional and personal identities, they are often denied representation in the very governance structures that might level the playing field. As a staff librarian, Byerly cannot vote on curriculum or policy proposals that might affect her role. As she told me, “You’re focused on trying to get in with faculty and hope that the faculty then advocate for the library.”
For a glimpse of implicit bias about librarians, see these two sets of images generated by Canva’s “Magic Media” AI tool. The first was generated simply using the term “librarians.” The second was generated using the term “academic librarians.”
Should librarians earn tenure?
Laura Krier believes that all librarians who work in academe should be hired as faculty members. Krier is a collection development librarian at Sonoma State University, in California, where librarians have enjoyed faculty status since the early 1970s. For much of that time the Sonoma State model was the norm. One 1993 study found that 67 percent of librarians held some form of faculty status, and a 2008 survey reported that roughly half of academic librarians with Ph.D.s or other terminal degrees were recognized as either tenure-track or non-tenure-track faculty members. A 2016 study also showed that “52 percent of U.S. research universities grant nominal faculty status to librarians.” However, the same study demonstrated that faculty status for librarians at research universities had declined since 2008.
There are between 26,000 and 30,000 academic librarians nationwide. The U.S. Department of Education reported 34,423 library positions at colleges and universities in 2012, but this category included both librarians and professional staff. The American Library Association listed 26,606 academic librarians in a 2018 fact sheet, but this report did not distinguish between those in faculty and staff roles. The lack of clear data on how many academic librarians there are in the United States reflects the opacity of the profession, even to its insiders.
Krier said that she has never felt unwelcome in faculty governance. “Nobody has ever been like, ‘Oh, what are the librarians doing here?’” she told me. “But I also think they don’t really understand what we do.” Ignorance about library expertise among disciplinary faculty members can complicate the tenure process for librarians. Without a nuanced understanding of how a library faculty member’s workload differs from that of teaching faculty, governance systems can create new inequities. For instance, Krier and her colleagues enjoy participating in campus-wide committees, but maintaining membership on more than a dozen committees, the Faculty Senate, subcommittees, and working groups sometimes overwhelms her department of four.
A library administrator whom I’ll call Schneider said that participation in governance is a way for librarians to feel seen as colleagues and accorded the same respect as their disciplinary faculty counterparts. Schneider is dean of libraries at a public university in the West, where she has been trying to rebuild morale among her staff despite resource stagnation under a Republican state legislature. “The more I try to uncover and expose and resolve some of these long-time challenges, the more challenges I’m discovering,” she told me.
When we spoke, Schneider was freshly piqued by “How Do Academic Libraries Spend Their Money?” an Inside Higher Ed blog post that raised questions about how academic libraries spend their budgets, especially around “people costs” — salaries and benefits. The author, Joshua Kim, claimed that he was merely trying to interpret data from the U.S. Department of Education, but many librarians took him to task on Twitter for failing to consult an academic librarian before publishing his “guesses” about what the data meant.