College and Research Libraries


A Short Happy View 
of Our Emulation of Faculty 

Having served as a successful scholar and teacher of college English, and 
also as a librarian, I would like to make some comparisons between the two 
professions. College teaching has all the precision of a coven of witches. No 
one knows precisely how to teach anyone anything. The simple fact is that 
we still haven't the slightest inkling of what goes on in the mind during the 
learning process; consequently, results are impossible to define. Neverthe-
less, each teacher tries his own thing, and some of it works somehow for 
some students. Most of the effort is wasted, as any successful teacher real-
izes. 

This free-floating condition is the perfect refuge for opportunists who 
learn to play according to the rules of the guild that lead to rewards, and 

· they have come into college teaching in droves during the past twenty 
years, the only period in history when this profession has paid a living wage. 
In the past three years, standards of classroom performance and of grading 
in colleges and universities have slipped alarmingly. 

With the present shortage of jobs, the teaching profession has become 
obscenely competitive, with scholars grinding out articles like sausages from 
a casing machine, while their wives market them. The threat of nontenure, 
which means for the faculty termination of employroent, hangs over the 
young like a sword of Damocles, and because of the high percentage of 
faculty already on tenure, denial of tenure to those coming up has become 
commonplace. · 

Is this the profession with which we want to compare ourselves? If so, I 
wonder why. Is this the kind of life that librarians want to lead? Or are we 
after a cushy version of it-all the benefits and none of the stress? No grind-
ing demands for doctoral degrees? No pressures for publication? No termi-
nation if tenure is denied? It is possible to get the cushioned version in 
weak institutions, where no standards or pressures are applied to the teach-
ing faculty. But who in the world would want to work in one? In colleges 
and universities where full faculty equivalency means competition on an 
even basis with high-powered academicians, most librarians stand only to 
lose. The ]oint Statement on Faculty Status of College and University Li-
brarians now under consideration for endorsement by ACRL, AAC, and 
AAUP states quite clearly: "They [librarians] must go through the same 
process of evaluation and meet the same standards as other faculty mem-
bers." ( CRL Neuw, v. 33, no. 8 (Sept. 1972), p. 210. Emphasis added.) In 
any university of quality, this means no promotion above the rank of in-
structor without a Ph.D. degree. 

In any healthy academic library under adequate leadership, the only 
faculty benefit denied librarians is the longer vacation period. In turn, li-

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446 I College & Research Libraries • November 1972 

brarians are free from the publish-or-perish and the tenure-or-sink syn-
dromes. Within the past few years, the library-faculty of Cornell University, 
as well as at Hofstra University during my term there, . .voted down, by a 
margin of 2-1 in both cases, the option of moving to full faculty equiv-
alency, on the basis that they had far more to lose than to gain. Others 
throughout the country have expressed disdain at being compared to facul-
ty, rather than having their distinction as librarians fully recognized. 

Why do we ignore the fact that the rich and complex knowledge, the 
highly professionalized and varied skills demanded by librarianship-the 
very elements that make this an exciting profession constantly stretching 
out ahead of the best ,of us over a long professional career-are the strongest 
bases on which to demand our share of the university's benefits to the 
fullest extent? 

Two basic conditions are required. The library must be established at a 
high level in the eyes of its faculty, and it must recruit and hold a staff 
of librarians of academic worth. Both conditions depend on generating dy-
namics in the library that make it an exciting academic enterprise within 
the university structure. Both conditions can be attained without full facul-
ty equivalency. And then, who in the world needs it? 

ELLSWORTH MASON