“We’re getting a Ph.D program in linguistics,” a colleague said to me at lunch the other day.
“Oh, are we?” I said mildly. “That’s nice.”
“Yeah, I thought you’d be interested.”
“Me? Uh, I’m not, not so much, no. If I’d wanted a Ph.D, I’d have stayed in Madison and gotten one in LIS.”
“Oh.” He sounded vaguely disappointed. “Well, you can’t go and get another master’s. Three looks suspicious.”
Bwah? What is it with people telling me I need to pile stuff higher and deeper? I like my job. I like my profession. I like my life. Why would I go ruin all that in a Ph.D program? Why?
I’d sooner take up bungee jumping, and I don’t like heights.
For the record, I should say that I was wrong that in the library world, a Ph.D fits one only for teaching in library schools. The other thing it fits one for, it seems, is running large academic libraries. If you’re going to run with the big boys, you need their union card.
Yes, all right, so perhaps some of my colleagues have a notion of grooming me for management. Go me; since I took this job, I have been working hard on my project-management and people skills, knowing those to be weaknesses of mine, and apparently I’m getting somewhere.
But with all due respect to the Big Boss at MPOW, he doesn’t make his job look like a whole lot of fun; the layer underneath him doesn’t seem so bad, but it also doesn’t require a Ph.D. So if I have to give in to the sirens in order to rise to a job I don’t fancy, then the glass ceiling (and librarianship does have one) is going to have to be broken by some other broad. Include me out.
