Caveat Lector

The best blogging on library-as-workplace these days is happening over at Rochelle’s. If she keeps it up, I’ll just have to hang up my keyboard—on this topic, at any rate.

The latest installment discusses the often-fraught relationship between academic librarians and the teaching and research faculty who represent one of their constituencies as well as—possibly, anyway—their colleagues.

I won’t bother summarizing her argument, because I want everybody to go read her post. (The article she links to is good stuff also.) All I want to do is point out that while she and I come from remarkably similar backgrounds vis-à-vis academia, we’ve definitely come to dissimilar conclusions about how we care to relate to faculty.

Which isn’t to say either of us is right, wrong, brilliant, delusional, or anything of that nature. A lot of this is situational, for one thing. I’m not in a tenure-track librarian job, so in a very real sense, I don’t have to show I’m somehow the equal of a faculty member. If I’d been offered the job in Ruritania, things would be different.

I could not repress, however, an entirely cynical response to this:

We want the teaching faculty (and by this I mean anyone from the rank of associate professor on up) to see us as their equals, as comrades-in-arms in the daily battle to produce good scholarship, excellent graduates, and better the general welfare of our shared institution and Knowledge in general. We want a standing invitation to the faculty club. We don’t want to be seen as the help.

With all due respect, I don’t think the problem there is us. The problem there is faculty: to be specific, a large (though not, of course, all-encompassing) faction among faculty who simply cannot respect any path but theirs. They can’t imagine that librarians are highly educated, because in their rarefied world, all the highly-educated people are faculty. They can’t imagine that librarians are smart, ditto. Nor can they admit that anyone but they has a stake in the business of information.

We’re not going to change that by going through we’re-faculty-too rituals, because of this same stubborn snob cadre. It doesn’t matter what we know, what we publish, or what we teach. We are not faculty, therefore we count for nothing. (Anybody noticing a similar dynamic in the librarian-parapro wars gets a gold star. We librarians have our own snob cadre, undoubtedly.)

One of the worst systemic problems in academia, in my highly biased and unreliable opinion, is that it selects for the snob cadre. If you’re not darn near monomaniacal, you don’t make it through grad school. If you’re not darn near tunnel-visioned, you don’t want to make it through grad school. If you’re not darn near totally convinced that academia is a holy calling to which only the select ascend, you don’t darn near kill yourself getting tenure.

(In passing—and I am very carefully not naming names here—I notice that several blog-academicians who objected vociferously to my anti-academia stance back in the day are now contemplating leaving academia themselves, or are already gone. The plural of anecdote is not data, admittedly. I do think, though, that blog-academicians tend not to be part of the snob cadre; the snob cadre is full of Ivan Tribble and his ilk. And the non-snob-cadre is more likely to have professional crises, and far more likely to see the wider world as potentially attractive, which boils down to “more likely to leave.”)

Frankly, I don’t want to be equal to the snob cadre. I don’t want to be in their club. So much so that, yes, in my eyes the snob cadre has poisoned the rest of the well. I’ve got absolutely zero interest in being “one of the pack with these people,” as Rochelle puts it. I’ve nothing invested in their opinion of my scholarly pursuits or intellectual capacity. If I’m merely “the help” to the snob cadre, I’m in company whose excellence far surpasses anything the snob cadre can muster. (Who wants to be pals with Ivan Tribble? Seriously. Even on a workplace level of palliness.)

What do I want? To do my job. Like Rochelle, I believe I can do my job best when faculty are receptive to what I have to offer. Unlike Rochelle, I don’t think the I’m-just-like-you-really card is the only, or the best, card in my hand.

I’ll play that card, if it’s expedient. Sure, why not? My ΦΒΚ certificate is hanging in my cube (mostly because that frees up the closet space in our apartment!). I’ve also got my tassel and a couple of library-school graduation pictures in my cube, though those are mostly for my own morale. Eventually I’ll get my other academic detritus framed and hung in the cube too. It can all live there along with Don Quixote, Sancho Panza, Mighty Plush Cthulhu, and the shoggoth.

But if it’s more effective to baffle ’em with tech-talk, that’s what I’ll do. If an allied-expert stance gets a better response than playing faculty-manqué (and in my specific situation, I incline to think it will), then I’ll act all consultant-like. If they’ll give work to “the help” that they wouldn’t give to a perceived equal, I’ll happily reinforce whatever expectations they have of “the help.” I don’t care, as long as the job gets done.

What I won’t do is hide my history, despite my strong sense thus far that academic librarianship would like me to—when I talk about my first grad-school experience with my work colleagues, the fidgety nervousness and edgy laughter are all but palpable. Of course I don’t make a point of mentioning that I’m a dropout, but if it comes up in conversation, it comes up. If snob-cadre faculty want to think worse of me because I washed out, fine. I truly don’t care; I have a job to be getting on with, and any faculty who won’t deal with me because of my chequered academic history would probably have found some other excuse not to anyway.

I’m also concerned about creating a spurious separation between librarians who can play with the faculty on the faculty’s terms and librarians who can’t. Not all academic librarians have extra sheepskins lying around. The last thing we want to do is train faculty to respect only those who do. That’s professional mass suicide, is what that is.

That’s really the only serious objection I have to other librarians employing I’m-just-like-you-really tactics, though. If it works, it works. I just recommend some clarity about it (let’s not ever do it just to massage our egos; Rochelle’s clearly too big for that, thank goodness), and some thought toward developing additional alternatives. We’re librarians. We are to be worshipped. We don’t have to see the inside of the Faculty Club door just to kick informational butt.