And while I’m not an instructional technologist I’d certainly like to think that I have learned and integrated many of those same skills into my approach to academic librarianship. From my perspective, having the ability to help faculty improve their pedagogy through better uses of learning technology is far more likely to help integrate the library into the teaching and learning process than being a member of the undergraduate curriculum committee (which I was at my previous institution – so I think I speak from experience).

One of my main problems with the what it means to be a faculty member post last year, though, persists here and that is the focus I’m seeing on *teaching* In my experience, and I think that the phrase you quote above illustrates this – faculty do not consider librarians something different from faculty because we don’t teach enough. When I talk to faculty they are rarely surprised to find out that I teach. The perceived gap is in research not teaching. They don’t see library or information science as a discipline in the traditional sense, nor do they see librarians engaging in knowledge creation and discipline-building. The time spent interacting with students is really not the issue.

There is movement, though not much, on many campuses to take the scholarship of teaching and learning, the scholarship of application, seriously in the promotion and tenure process and this is where librarians have an opportunity to find allies among other teaching-focused, student-focused faculty. But it’s essential, I think, to understand that in some cases those teaching-focused, student-focused faculty aren’t considered “real” faculty either. That in some disciplines and some departments doing research on how to *teach* math well, or geography well, or history well won’t get you anywhere in the P & T process.

So when I argue that there is a benefit to faculty librarians there is a context there – and it *does* require a broader understanding of faculty than can be understood by traditional, disciplinary appointments. And my question about the prior post was – did it give traditional, disciplinary teaching too much weight? I think it did, and where I think that’s problematic is in this – if undergraduate teaching and learning is going to be a central goal for our campuses, those campuses need to consider more than disciplinary knowledge-building in their reward systems. And as librarians, I think we want to work to find allies, to open the conversations on our campuses up in those ways.

As for Stanley Fish, I actually believe that being allowed to do our jobs requires some latitude for defending ideas that are unpopular rather than responding to customer service, given customers and the electorate may demand otherwise. Curiously, that latitude is more frequently needed by public librarians than academic ones, because our customers are more likely to defend having different ideas on the shelves. But I don’t see this as an argument against faculty status.