Gormanghast
Well, yesterday’s Michael Gorman experience went about as I expected it would. He’s got zero use for me, I’m sure, and I very little for him.
My presentation all but put the man to sleep, gesticulate howsoever I would. Now, I’ve never been guest-of-honor at anything, and I don’t ever really expect to be… but my parents taught me when I was merely a sprat that one at least feigns interest. I grant that the self-reinvention travails of a tiny campus library are of somewhat less than universal interest, but really!
(I couldn’t get to Gorman’s talk owing to a conflict with networking class, but from what I hear of it, I may have lost him as soon as I pronounced the class title, “Systems Analysis and Design.” Nothing I could have done about that. The class is what it is.)
I’m still glad I did it, because the head honcho of campus branch libraries was there, and he very much liked what we (both my group and the class’s other project group) had to tell him. That’s a significant victory for both renovation projects, and I’m quite chuffed about it. I’m also glad for my classmate Bridget Zinn that her short movie “World’s Fastest Librarian” (which is an absolute hoot; loved it!) went over much better, and for our ALA-SC chapter that Gorman liked the school T-shirt they gave him. It is just the Best Shirt Ever, and I’ve ordered that second one in red.
In other words, I’m the only one who got a pie in the face from Gorman, and I can live with that. The honor of UW-SLIS has been upheld.
Gorman also went off into an anti-PowerPoint Tufte rant in my face just before lunch, which given that my presentation had (necessarily; this is SLIS, and it’s expected) used the tool seemed a wee bit less than wholly polite. I smiled and agreed; heaven knows I’m not PowerPoint’s biggest fan.
Lunch was a subdued affair. However aggressive Gorman’s writing may be, he is remarkably reserved in person. Another reason I grated on his nerves, I suspect; I’m not reserved in the least.
I did get a chance to bring up the job market and ALA’s recruitment efforts. Gorman clearly believes the received wisdom that a wave of retirements will mean a wave of new librarian jobs. When I brought up the situation in academia after the Bowen report, Gorman answered that a lot of professors at his school had indeed retired, and while “about a third” of the positions had gone adjunct, the rest were tenure-track. I forbore retort, but honestly—is a proportionate reduction of librarian positions really an acceptable outcome in ALA’s mind?
I did suggest, as mildly as I could, that a likely outcome of the retirements would be a great many position eliminations. Gorman found that he could agree with that, bringing up the sad situation in Philadelphia. But avenues of attack he had none.
We can expect no leadership from ALA on this, if yesterday’s lunch is any indication. None whatever. They will go on trying to solve what is and will continue to be a problem of severe disrespect for librarian labor by increasing the supply of librarians. That’s just peachy-damn-keen, that is.
Gorman did have a helpful suggestion for new librarians wanting to get involved with ALA, which I will pass on in hopes that someone will find it useful. To get a committee position, it turns out, one simply writes to the incoming chair of the division or interest group to express one’s interest. It’s actually quite hard, apparently, to recruit young librarians for committee work, so one is virtually guaranteed a position.
Glad that’s over. Will be gladder, I must say, when Gorman’s tenure as ALA president is.