Poaching jobs
A good friend of the Loon’s, at a small-college library with an extremely small library staff, tells a story of a certain department trying to shuffle off an overeager, no-longer-competent soon-to-be emeritus professor on the library. “Surely he can just run the archives? Or something?”
The Loon hardly knows where to begin with that. Apparently working in (never mind running) a library or archives takes no specialized knowledge or training; one needn’t even be fully compos mentis, it seems. Or a Ph.D in any discipline is an automatic ticket to competence in librarianship. Or the library exists as a sort of modern-day Works Progress Administration, to soak up the otherwise-unemployable Ph.D; clearly they don’t actually need all that staff or staff budget in order to run a mere library.
(Denizens of the UK among the Loon’s readership may recognize an echo of this way of thinking in the “volunteers can run our public libraries!” policy.)
Obviously foisting an agreed-upon incompetent off on the library is something of an extreme case. It’s not as extreme as all that, however, and the concept of library-as-WPA is alive and well, particularly in “alternative academic” circles. The variation on this theme the Loon constantly stumbles over is “one must have a Ph.D (or less aggressively, graduate training in my discipline) in order to curate My Precious Data!” Which the Loon’s experience, on her own and via her students, suggests is arrant nonsense. (Besides, if graduate disciplinary training were both necessary and sufficient, research data wouldn’t be in the unmitigated mess it’s currently in, would it?)
The difficulty working librarians and library-school instructors have with this isn’t about “virtue,” though the Loon concedes that some of the rhetoric is. Nor does the Loon think “changing the narrative” will make a difference until all sides confront fairly and honestly what the narrative actually is. The said narrative includes:
- The incessant debate over faculty status for librarians, most recently enacted at Virginia. Whichever side of it one falls on, the Loon can’t see how it isn’t in part a worth judgment about librarians. (Not about research. Never about that. The value of research is a given, which biases the argument no end.) Lest one think this question a bagatelle, one should ask oneself: would Edwin Mellen Press have dared to sue Dale Askey if he’d been faculty? Or even if he held a Ph.D? Why is that, do you think? And then one should ponder on how at times one’s livelihood is a larger question than one’s job.
- “New hires [are] unlikely to be librarians” coupled with “New hires [are] likely to be Ph.Ds.” (Yes, Trzeciak ultimately lost his job over this and other things. He has another, in a different library, and his style of boo-librarians rhetoric is pretty clearly evident in various Taiga Forum pronouncements.)
- When Harvard’s library staff hit the skids, the most faculty could apparently find to say amounted to “we have what we want, so why should we care?” Here is a thing librarians know: Ph.Ds defend no one but other Ph.Ds, and not even them always (ask any adjunct).
- Dan Cohen will have Ph.D company at the Digital Public Library of America; a project-manager position insists upon it. MLSes and actual project managers need not apply without it. (ACLS as the modern WPA. Discuss.)
The Loon can’t endorse the Feral Librarian’s happy notion that “libraries are such logical places for a broad range of services and resources that of course we need to hire folks with a broader range of education and skills and talents.” As Wayne Bivens-Tatum notes, the breadth of education, skills, and talents across all of librarianship is quite broad indeed, for one thing; the Loon believes the word “broader” needs significant unpacking, especially in the context of the usual absurdly narrow Ph.D. For another, library staff complements are not growing, but shrinking. Nearly every job reserved for a JD or Ph.D will come at the cost of a job reserved for an MLS. Ph.Ds, aided and abetted by library leaders, are poaching MLS jobs.
That reality may be all right, or it may not—it’s a discussion that needs having—but no one discussing academic librarianship should duck away from confronting it. In the specific case of the DPLA position, the Loon finds herself wondering why the ill-advised decision to spend most of a decade pursuing a Ph.D in hopes of catching a snark vanishing tenure-track position should be rewarded, and the (for now) considerably savvier decision to spend two years on an MLS punished. Surely common sense is a valuable quality in a project manager? (Says the Loon, who herself admits to a regrettable lack of it in her 20s that led to her wasting better than half a decade and much bodily and mental health on Ph.D studies.)
Ah, but the Loon has been dancing about that question, hasn’t she? What, exactly, is the value of an MLS? What, exactly, is the Loon’s own value as a library-school instructor? Where does that value overlap with that of other degrees, other instructors? The Loon has been pondering these questions, and has a tentative answer which she hopes to write about here, but until then: acknowledge and own it, please, Ph.Ds, your presence in academic libraries does come at the expense of MLSes.
Don’t feel too bad about it. Ask most paraprofessionals what they think of the MLS and those who hold it…
I completely agree with the need to “confront fairly and honestly what the narrative actually is”. I have to say, though, that is hard to do so in the face of some pretty harsh generalizations about the pursuit of a PhD being an absurdly narrow and ill-advised decision.
And sure, every job taken by a PhD comes at the expense of a non-PhD. And every job reserved for catalogers comes at the expense of reference librarians. Shouldn’t the conversation be about the skills and experiences needed for the work? Otherwise, we really are conceding of the library as a modern-day WPA.
I can’t speak broadly to this question, and I don’t know that there is a generalizable answer to it anyway. But I can tell you that I have a Ph.D. That’s why I’m fluent in Russian and Polish and why I can read and understand (and transliterate, when necessary) those languages, plus Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Czech. (College courses in Modern Greek and French allow me to work with materials in those languages when called upon). That’s also why I have extensive training in career counseling, instructional development and peer observation and consultation. I use all of those skills in my job as a Slavic bibliographer, all the time, and, to the best of my knowledge, none of them are taught in library schools?
When I was on the faculty of a Slavic Department I always taught (by choice) writing-intensive interdisciplinary courses with required research papers, I had worked with hundreds of students one-on-one to find appropriate sources, using library catalogs and databases from a wide range of fields, crafting key word and subject searches (replete with truncation and boolean logic). And, as a Slavist, I kept up with new research in my field and was familiar with publishers and scholarly journals. I also taught classes, delivered presentations, led workshops, in a wide variety of settings and circumstances. Now I’m a librarian, and I’m still doing all that, and I’m doing it well.
I’m extremely lucky to work in a department that is a collegial mix of degreed professionals. Most have the MLIS, some have a PhD, and some have both. One of the great joys and satisfactions of working there is that, when I don’t know something, there’s guaranteed to be someone in my department who does, and that person will unfailingly (and usually gladly) take the time to steer me in the right direction. And when someone in my department needs help tracking down an obscure Greek citation, or wants some new ideas for refreshing an instruction session, or is working with a student who wants to use Russian newspaper articles in a paper, I am there to help them in return. It works. I have enormous respect for my colleagues’ expertise, regardless of how they acquired it. And we are all doing our best to help students and faculty keep learning and share what they learn with others.
I’m not denying that there is terrible snobbery in academia (not only vis-a-vis adjuncts, but untenured assistant professors, and women, and faculty from underrepresented minority groups, and…). Nor do I deny that faculty could and should have a much better understanding of what it is that librarians do (and vice-versa for that matter). And all of that distresses the hell out of me.
But libraries serve such a diverse range of needs and populations, and they require professionals with an equally diverse range of expertise to meet them. Some of those professionals might have acquired the necessary skill set through a Ph.D. But speaking out against Ph.D.’s as a class as job poachers (and implying, albeit with caveats, that they are very possibly also doddering snobs and/or departmental rejects) doesn’t do anything to help libraries move forward in difficult times or to help people learn. Regardless of degrees, and as we all well know, pretty much every librarian is facing the prospect of having to develop some new skills, taking on more than one job, and doing it all with fewer resources. And that’s kind of scary. (Talk to me about having to take on the Linguistics portfolio or about figuring out how to talk to my liaison department faculty about data curation.) I suppose feeling some antagonism toward new people coming in who have some (but not all – nobody has all) of those skills is understandable. But drawing the battle lines between Ph.D.’s and MLIS’es not only seems kind of pointless, but it also seems kind of mean.
As someone who spent 19 years getting her PhD, all the while pursuing a motley series of jobs when she couldn’t secure teaching positions, I don’t feel that I’ve been “rewarded” with the fulfilling career I currently have as a librarian. It no doubt is “rewarding.” But to portray the PhD getting a library job as rewarded, while the MLS is “punished,” is too black and white. There’s more grey in these situations – it’s not *just* a matter of, “I can’t find a teaching job. Oh, look: X Library is looking for a librarian, and they’re not requiring the MLS.” Every situation is different. To reduce, dichotomize, and generalize as you have – it’s unjust.
When I think about the librarians I’ve met whom I admire and whose example I try to follow, it’s a mixed degree bag. I work for someone who doesn’t have an MLS, but who is one of the best bosses I’ve ever had and one of the most forward-thinking librarians I know. My closest colleagues in the field have either an MLS, or MLS and second master’s, or a PhD, or both an MLS and a PhD. But is it their degree that’s imbued their librarianship more, or their experience? Am I modeling myself after them because of a certain degree they have, or because of the librarianship values, experience, and sense of service they exude? I’m betting you know how I’d answer these.
Full disclosure: I have a library degree. Why, during my two years as a postdoc working in a large research library, did I go after an MLS? Certainly, most of my cohort didn’t, and a number of them still work in libraries today. At base, I did it for two reasons: 1) I was at an institution that has a consistently top-ranked LIS degree program (it has often vied for, or shared, the top spot with an LIS program in the Southeast), and I thought I’d be crazy not to try to get into it, as I found myself more intrigued by LIS as a discipline; and 2) as a full-time employee of the university where I was doing my postdoc, I could attend this program FREE OF CHARGE – which I did for the first year. (When one has a husband who is an attorney with a six-figure debt to repay for law school, a reason like the second one is necessary.)
But there’s also a third reason – one more intellectually important: I was drawn to a program that was headed, at that time, by someone with a PhD in English (who was John Unsworth), who had extensive experience in something called the “digital humanities” (which I knew little about at the time, but I knew I wanted to learn more), and I’d been auditing a course taught by someone with a PhD in Philosophy, who also had a reputation of long-standing and high regard in the digital humanities – this was Allen Renear. So, the key reasons why I wanted to attend the library school at my postdoc institution had little, if anything, to do with concerns about getting a job later. I was in it purely for learning, for being challenged in new ways, and for getting a chance to be taught by some of the best in the LIS field (who include Dave Dubin, Bryan Heidorn, Kathryn La Barre, Jerome McDonough, Carole Palmer, Boyd Rayward, and Mike Twidale). My program, in which I followed a digital library concentration, was not the “union card” granting program that I’ve heard many librarians – especially established ones – say that theirs was. It was rigorous, and it was brain-frying at times, but I loved just about every minute of it. A huge reason why was the diverse range of expertise represented by the faculty teaching and advising me, not least of all Unsworth and Renear, two non-LIS-degreed faculty.
Everybody has a different story about how they meandered into librarianship – whether with a PhD, or without, whether with an MLS, or without. What strikes me as more important, and thus less a waste of time, is the question of whether we’re all committed to being at the service of our institution’s faculty, students, and staff, regardless of our educational upbringing. Are we in this because it’s a job, or are we in it because it’s the job for us? I’d rather work with colleagues who are in it for the latter and who bring experience to show for it, degreed or not degreed.
Ha, look at all the offended privilege being trotted out. A lowly non-PhD has dared to question the Cabal and must be Quashed Forthwith.
Not quite an exact parallel, but I did once manage a reverse migration along these lines! Worked for us, receiving department not so happy, did I care?