All too often when these stories appear, be they informative or controversial, librarians engage in discussion among themselves on their discussion lists and twitter feeds, or they leave insightful comments to the stories, but rarely is there any organized follow up. In the end those who need to hear what we bring to the conversation most likely never have that opportunity. This new program changes that. Take for example two recent IHE articles, one a news item on “bookless libraries” and the other an essay on “Reviving the Academic Library“. Both generated considerable discussion in the library community, but who knows what message reached the academic administrators who decide on the library budget or whether or not to commit funds to a new library facility.

What do these essays look like? If you go to the detailed information page there is an example that provides a good picture of what’s expected. In addition to the essay authors should develop a set of questions that faculty could use to lead a discussion on the topic. Academic librarians should keep this new program in mind for the next time that Inside Higher Ed publishes an article or essay that could use a balanced and authoritative response from our profession. To not do so allows authors who may have an outdated interpretation or inaccurate understanding of the mission and operation of the contemporary academic library to unduly influence the thinking of academic administrators.

The authors describe the way Oregon State University has adopted Boyer’s definition of scholarship – which embraces not just discovery of new knowledge, but application, teaching, and integration. After examining what librarians have been doing, they concluded the problem isn’t being productive, it’s explaining the “breadth and impact” of librarians’ scholarly work. This includes not only traditionally-published research, but additional modes of communicating ideas.

Blogs are vehicles to teach and communicate to both broad and specific audiences. Their format precludes them being taken seriously as scholarship in current tenure review processes, but their content often demonstrates engagement and suggests impact in ways rarely seen in the print library journal. This raises questions about the concept of format and vehicle. Expanding acceptance of new forms of communication along with reconsidering what constitutes scholarship will benefit librarianship as a whole. A first step is accepting open-access, peer reviewed journals as outlets of high impact and validity. The next step will be integrating non-traditional peer reviewed work such as blogs that have an active readership and generate comments and commentary.

The outsourcing of faculty evaluation by peers – relying on university presses and journal rankings to determine whether a colleague is worthy or not – has contributed to the problem libraries find themselves in: having to somehow fund access to a bloated body of research, much of which is only produced to gain job security. (Two years ago an MLA survey found a third of institutions required progress toward publishing a second book. This, when libraries’ budgets can’t keep up with bare necessities.)

Maybe in a backhanded way the work we do, documented in a way that people in other disciplines can understand, could provide a model for sanity.

CC-licensed image courtesy of Kristina B.

Prof Hacker publishes at least one new post every weekday featuring news, advice, and how-tos. Posts are short and accessible, and cover a wide range of topics. Some of my favorites so far include:

• A couple of posts about using and managing course blogs, including a review of the pros and cons of group vs. individual blogs and thoughtful discussion on evaluating and grading blog posts. Great comments, too.
• A timely entry on managing stress over the course of semester (timely for me, at least, since it was published on the first day of classes at my college). Great advice that’s worth saving to reread on the first week of every semester.
• One professor’s report on using iPod Touches in a class he taught over the summer. This one seems especially relevant for librarians as we investigate ebooks and the various ways that they (and other library resources) can be accessed by students.
• And if you miss something and need to catch up, each week there’s a handy week in review post drawing together all of the previous week’s entries (the week I link to was particularly full of great posts).

Definitely a valuable addition to my feedreader. What blogs/sites are you reading this semester?

My point isn’t about the pros and cons of using technology in the classroom. I think that academic librarians are totally on board with the concept of using technology purposefully for teaching and learning. I certainly hope we have gotten away from subjecting our students to PowerPoint slide shows over which we drone on about the virtues of appropriate database search techniques. Now that many of us are teaching in hands-on classrooms we can get more creative with methods for activating the students and really engaging them in learning how to think critically about their research responsibilities, how to work effectively with their fellow students, and even how to efficiently capture, store, retrieve and cite their resources. Of course, like the Chronicle article states, there are students who don’t want to be activated. They would prefer to just sit there and have a librarian-instructor talk at them for 50 minutes, which they can tune out and then get on with what really interests them. So just like our faculty colleagues we are challenged to leverage technology that gets students thinking, working, and maybe even enjoying their time in the classroom with us.

But here’s my point. I get what Dean Jose Bowen is telling us about being overly dependent on technology, especially when the focus is on the technology rather than the educator in the room. It’s all about adding value to the learning process. He is spot on when he says that students can now go anywhere to simply hear a lecture by a talking head that is attached to a series of slides. That describes a good deal of online learning and open education resource experience. You go to a web site or a course delivery system and just tune in to a lecture/presentation. But where’s the added value that comes from the dialogue between the teacher and the student? I believe what Bowen is really afraid of losing at his school is what makes the learning experience truly unique – the engagement between the instructor and the learner.

Academic librarians need to be mindful of the same challenge. We know that while we offer high quality information resources, our students and faculty can obtain information from a wide variety of resources. And there are times when they are accessing our subscription content through free search engines and are not aware that the content is delivered by the library. Those are well known issues. If the boundaries between information sources are becoming increasingly blurry to the end user, what is it that distinguishes what the academic library does for them? Finding the answer to that question is part of the challenge we face, just as our faculty colleagues will need to make clear to future students the value that they add to the learning process. Otherwise why bother with the huge investment in a traditional college education. I will continue to be writing about these challenges and possible solutions here and in other venues. I hope you’ll be a part of the conversation in helping us all to figure out how we add value for our students and faculty.

Michael Berube, a literature professor at Penn State, points out at Crooked Timber that it’s one thing to complain about the bureaucracy of departments, but the intellectual rigor of disciplines is a virtue, and Taylor is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Timothy Burke, a history professor at Swarthmore, blogs at Easily Distracted about the need for either some concrete, implementable plans, or a more tentative tone.

And a new group blog in queer studies, the Bully Bloggers, has a series of posts taking issue with the market-based measures Taylor adopts: Jack Halberstam, Eng-Beng Lim, Miranda Joseph, Brian Eugenio Herrera, and Lisa Duggan all participate in this critical dialog.

Jose Marichal, political scientist at California Lutheran, takes a more sympathetic stance towards Taylor, comparing his vision of conceptual problem-focused studies to Web 2.0.

Religion scholar Brad Johnson writes as a colleague of Taylor’s, reading beyond the text of the op-ed to argue (implicitly counter to Berube) that specializations would still thrive in the kind of complex system envisioned by Taylor.

Finally, Peter Levine, philosopher and director of Tufts’s Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, imagines a college curriculum set up along Taylorist lines with a focus on civic engagment.

Could we create a library for a university as Taylor envisions it?  What about mandatory retirement for librarians?  Are we prepared to catalog and preserve non-traditional dissertations?  How would you develop a collection for cluster of conceptually-based inquiries that shift every seven years?

A recently issued report titled Campus Commons: What Faculty, Financial Officers and Other Think About Controlling College Costs revealed the extent to which faculty are troubled and frustrated by students who get admitted yet are not ready for college-level work. What I found most unexpected was that the report, based on the description of its authors’ focus, at first appears to have little to do with the issue of how well prepared students are for college. The study was designed to capture information from college presidents, financial officers and faculty about ways in which higher education could improve its quality and achieve greater affordability. As I read the report in more detail I discovered that from the faculty perspective an important factor in improving quality is improving the students.

Here’s a summary of what the college presidents were most concerned about:

Instead of viewing higher education as a private good that benefits individuals, many presidents argue that the country must come to understand and act upon the idea that higher education is a public good that benefits the entire society. As a consequence, they believe it should receive a significant infusion of public reinvestment.

And the state financial officers had a somewhat different perspective:

They share the presidents’ concern that higher education is caught between declining state subsidies and rising internal costs, but many state financial officers interviewed for this report feel that colleges and universities can be more cost-effective. Many emphasize the need to graduate more students, and their first priority is often to increase the retention rates for those already enrolled.

The college financial officers did little to surprise with their mostly practical concerns:

Many of those interviewed were interested in increasing higher education productivity and were willing, at least in confidential interviews, to ask hard questions about higher education’s assumptions, especially about class size and teaching loads. Many were also interested in greater use of technology to save money.

The faculty brought a different perspective to the discussion about the challenges of higher education. For them the problem was mostly a lack of preparedness among students:

For the faculty members we interviewed, the major problem facing public higher education is declining quality. They often believed strongly that many incoming students are not ready for college, that they have weak academic skills and are not yet mature enough or self-disciplined enough to take advantage of what is offered. Although there is little indication
that faculty are unalterably wedded to the status quo, it is important to emphasize that most begin the conversation from a somewhat different mind-set. They may be eager to look at measures aimed at improving student preparation for college and open to those that focus on administrative
inefficiencies.

So what exactly did the faculty have to say about the challenges of higher education? Here are a few examples:

* To some degree it’s amazing that some of these students are actually given a high school diploma. You wonder what it was that they studied and learned and what was the whole basis other than seat time.

* I don’t know if they’ve been over-parented, or if they’re the millennium students who have
had the helicopter parents who hover and are there to take care of any little problem, but they just don’t really seem to be ready for the college atmosphere.

* Yep. We’ll be forced to lower standards and graduate more numbers. That’s why you get paid. You know what? You’re going to find ways to get that done.

There are several pages of this and it leaves one feeling that faculty, at least those interviewed for this report, are genuinely cynical about students and the future of higher education. Not only do they see under-prepared students as the problem, but they are skeptical about almost any plan to correct the problem. It all surprises me because I’ve come to know many faculty who are eternally optimistic about the potential of their students or who acknowledge that many students are under-prepared but that it’s the responsibility of the faculty, working collaboratively with librarians, tutors and other teaching and learning professionals, to help the students rise above their lack of preparation.

Academic librarians see their share of under-prepared students as well. They ask you questions at the reference desk or attend your instruction session. Who hasn’t encountered a student in an instruction session that doesn’t understand the difference between an article title and a journal title or has difficulty understanding the concept of a synonymous term. Do you silently cringe in disgust at the student’s lack of preparation or do you commit yourself to achieve a teachable moment? At my institution I understand that many of our students come from school districts where there are no libraries or librarians, where cut-and-paste Google research was accepted and even encouraged and that the joy of reading, owning books and visiting the public library may not have been family values. I’d like to think that academic librarians can participate in this debate about how to improve the quality and productivity of higher education. But when we do let’s be mindful that the issue of the under-prepared student is our challenge and opportunity – not our burden.

In the New York Times, Columbia University’s Mark C. Taylor urges us to “end the university as we know it.” His suggestions include completely re-thinking our approach to the curriculum, the organization of the university into academic departments, and the place of tenure (spoiler alert: he is not a fan). Librarians may be especially interested in his comments on the doctoral dissertation, the traditional first step on a future faculty member’s road toward involvement in the scholarly communication cycle:

“Transform the traditional dissertation. In the arts and humanities, where looming cutbacks will be most devastating, there is no longer a market for books modeled on the medieval dissertation, with more footnotes than text. As financial pressures on university presses continue to mount, publication of dissertations, and with it scholarly certification, is almost impossible. (The average university press print run of a dissertation that has been converted into a book is less than 500, and sales are usually considerably lower.) For many years, I have taught undergraduate courses in which students do not write traditional papers but develop analytic treatments in formats from hypertext and Web sites to films and video games. Graduate students should likewise be encouraged to produce ‘theses’ in alternative formats.”

In one paragraph, Taylor enters into ongoing discussions of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs), the future of the university press, and the place of gaming and game collections in academic libraries! He is thinking outside the box!

Back inside the box (and with good reason) is “Laurie the Librarian,” who has come to conclusion that it is in her best interests as a young professional to “publish in the more established LIS journals out there.” Why? Because, unlike Taylor, who is already established as Chair of the Columbia University Religion Department, Laurie is still coming up:

“If we assume that the majority of the people on application review committees are long-standing faculty members, it could also be assumed that they are older members of the faculty and may prefer older journals that fit the traditional model of scholarly publishing. In other words, I’m not doing myself much good right now to publish in a web-only, new journal. I need to be more strategic in publishing, particularly because the peer review process is so lengthy and I need to start applying to programs in 6 months. I need to identify a set of criteria to determine those journals with the highest impact of what I assume an application review committee is looking for and work from that.”

Assuming she is correct (and perhaps she is not), Laurie tells us in one paragraph what’s wrong with academic library leadership of scholarly communications discussions. ACRL took a big step forward in 2005 when it provided open access to the archives of College & Research Libraries (which now also provides access to pre-prints), but Laurie suggests that we, as a field, are among those still tightly bound to traditional markers of scholarly communication. How many of us whose libraries provide tenure-track positions for librarians have taken the stand that Oregon State did in terms of open access? How many provide guidelines for tenure and promotion that reward non-traditional forms of publication (or other forms of scholarship beyond those reported in journals)? As my ACRLog colleague Barbara Fister asked just last month, “why can’t we walk the walk?”

We know that it will take academic leadership from people like Taylor and from scholarly associations to provide the structures that will allow future faculty to take full advantage of the positive changes now possible in the scholarly communication process. The same might be said of academic librarians; what more can ACRL do to provide support for our colleagues making decisions about appointment, promotion, and tenure for academic librarians wishing to make different choices about how and where they publish? “Right now,” Laurie writes, “I have to work within the system.”

It’s our system, and it’s high time we change it.

Both IHE and the Chronicle point to a new report by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity on “Trends in the Higher Education Workforce” that notes that the number of “support staff” positions have increased far more rapidly over the past 20 years than has the number of instructional positions. This, it is suggested, “reflects unproductive spending by academe.”

The Chronicle does a good job making clear the (very) gray areas around any conclusion that increased spending on “other professional staff” reflects “unproductive spending,” but the lumping together of librarians with other professional staff presumed not to be directly contributing to instruction is worth noting. I have seen several surveys over the years that have followed the “other professional staff” model, including those of first-year-experience programs and public engagement initiatives – librarians are administrators, managers, and, perhaps, research support staff, but they are not instructors.

And, perhaps we are not (although I have argued the opposite on many occasions), but I see echoes in this report of the 2006 debate in school library circles over the “65% solution”, i.e., the question of whether school librarians should be “counted” as instructional staff in budget allocations and reporting required by educational reform programs. Should the argument advanced by the CCAP report gain traction, and should there be any question of whether professional academic librarians contribute directly to student learning in ways that all might recognize as being “productive,” we might be wise to consider these questions advanced as part of the school library debate (Harada, 2006):

• How does your library media center support student learning?
• What compelling evidence do you have that students have achieved the learning targets?

How ready are you to provide the answers?

On campuses, we rarely have book challenges to cope with, but there are more intangible challenges that compel me to think that information literacy is more important than ever, and that it needs to go beyond “how this library works” and “how to be a good student” but embrace “how to understand and evaluate evidence” but even more importantly “why evidence matters.” (I hasten to add, before you hit the comment button, that I believe information literacy is not the sole responsibility of librarians; it’s something the entire academy must embrace, and when it’s defined as more than “how to use this library” I believe they generally do embrace it, even if they aren’t always sure how to do it. And while I’m editing this, I realize this whole train of thought owes much to the Infofetishist who wrote a thought-provoking post about evidence recently. You should read it.)

One problem we have is the multiple meanings of the word “argument.” The popular meaning of the word is that it’s a form of discourse that results in a winner. Evidence is something you might selectively use, along with ethos, logos, and pathos. But as you prepare for an argument, you already know what side you’re on. You just need some “facts” to prove it.

Another definition of argument – the one used in the parts of composition textbooks that students don’t usually read – is about how you develop and frame a position based on evidence as well as effective use of it. The piece that’s especially important in terms of information literacy is not that you find evidence that will work effectively for your argument, but that you find and evaluate evidence so that you can make your mind up about the issue you’re investigating.

A student recently introduced me to the concept of agnotology – a newly-minted word to capture efforts to generate “the cultural production of ignorance” or, put differently, an effort to cast doubt on widely-recognized scientific principles by any means necessary. We had just been discussing Joel Best’s description of how “mutant statistics” are used by claims-makers to shape public attitudes about social issues. And one thing that seems to be frequently missing in our discussions of how to frame an argument is not just that it must be based on evidence but that we must be willing to let the evidence persuade us before we deploy it to persuade others. In other words, it’s not a tool, it’s not an ingredient we select to spice up a claim, it’s where we go to get our understanding. For that reason, it’s not something we can reject because it doesn’t fit our beliefs. It should shape our beliefs.

The ACRL is a member of Free Exchange on Campus, a “coalition of faculty, student, and civil rights organizations working together to preserve the free exchange of ideas on college campuses.” This group has recently published Facts Still Count, a rebuttal of David Horowitz’s most recent book, which contends with cherry-picked anecdotes that higher education is full of leftist professors seducing innocents. He also has suggested that the best way to counteract this seduction is to require professors to teach “both sides” of issues – which again uses the notion that argument is a contest between two sides (only two, apparently, as simple as right and left or red and blue) and we place our bets based on which one we want to win.

In reality, knowledge isn’t a contest, it’s more of a team sport. We do what we can to arrive at the truth collectively and sure, we have our scuffles along the way and many disagreements aren’t easily resolved. But winning isn’t the point; losing is fine so long as it gets us somewhere.

Another recently-published book that I just added to my incredibly long “to be read” list is For the Common Good: Principles of American Academic Freedom. An excerpt at the Yale UP site introduces the issue by recounting a response to a Common Reading book choice at a college campus. A committee of citizens denounced the choice of Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed as “an all-out assault on Christians, conservatives and capitalism.” The assumption seems to be that if you read something, you are being forced to agree with it, though the purpose of such common reading programs is to stimulate discussion, not to inculcate beliefs or establish a body of facts that will be on the test.

Academic libraries have a relatively easy time of it. We don’t tell anybody what to read, we just offer lots of choices and occasionally have to defend the existence of those choices. But when reading a book in common comes under threat because reading is characterized as a form of indoctrination, or when a teacher’s freedom to teach is threatened by an effort to establish a student’s right to force the teacher to teach “the other side,” it becomes a matter that should concern us as a profession that believes in intellectual freedom.

And when it comes to information literacy, we should be having more conversations about how to get across the idea that “evidence matters” in terms that are more complex than “because you’ll write a better paper.”

I submitted some ideas the first day the box was available. I had just come back from my morning workout at the campus gym and I was brimming with observations on how to cut waste at the fitness center. One towel to a person. That would cut laundry costs. Eliminate the piped in music. Everyone’s got earphones attached to their skulls. Shut down the television monitors in the weight room. Guys and gals pumping iron aren’t interested in what Oprah has to say. Do we really need liquid soap dispensers in the showers? Even college kids can afford bars of soap, and most of the ones I observe opt for a total body spray of AXE rather than a shower (if that sounds disgusting it smells much worse). A good start I thought, but wondered if I could come up with something a bit more profound.

It never occurred to me that I was missing something totally obvious for a librarian until I read a post written by WIRED magazine’s creative guru, Kevin Kelley at his “The Technium” blog. Kelley wrote an intriguing post about ownership vs. access – and he concludes that ownership is a concept that has run its course. Then it came to me. Why should anyone on our campus have the institution pay for a personal subscription to any print newspaper, magazine or journal if the library subscribes to an e-version of that publication? Here’s how Kelley sees it:

Suddenly ownership is not so important. Why own, when you can get the same utility from renting, leasing, licensing and sharing? But more importantly why even possess it? Why take charge of it at all if you have instant, constant, durable, full access to it?…Access is so superior to ownership, or possession, that it will drive the emerging intangible economy. The trend is clear: access trumps possession. Access is better than ownership.

It struck me that all libraries are built on the premise of giving everyone equal access to a commons of information, and that in turn can collectively save the community money. People have depended on libraries for access rather than ownership for generations. Kelley even points out that libraries share the qualities of the web and public roads in that they offer a social common good.

Here was my simple suggestion for saving institutional dollars. The university should no longer pay for a subscription for any publication to which the library already provides an electronic version. I gave two examples of how this can benefit the university. First, the obvious one – cost cutting. Consider the Chronicle of Higher Education. The Library has a site license that makes it accessible to anyone with a university network account. I imagine our various administrative and academic departments hold dozens of subscriptions to the Chronicle. If we dropped them all that would contribute to hundreds or thousands of dollars in savings. Add in the cost of any scholarly journals and you could be talking real money. And over time it would really start to add up. But could people live without their print publications? We may not have a choice.

I admit that I like to read the paper version of the Chronicle, but in the year since we added the site license I increasingly find myself saying “read that one already this week” since I’m reading more online. And I’ve never had a paper copy of Inside Higher Ed and I can’t even imagine needing it in that format. The second benefit is that eliminating all this paper makes us a greener campus. My institution has committed to achieving sustainability via green campus initiatives. I imagine any number of these paper copies end up in trash bins. Eliminating paper subscriptions eliminates paper waste. A less obvious benefit is that it capitalizes on the significant institutional investment in electronic publications…and an even less obvious benefit is that it drives more campus community members to our academic library resources. Better for us.

I finished my suggestion with the bold statement that our university president should publicly commit to sacrificing her paper subscription to the Chronicle, and indicate that others should follow her lead by using the Library’s site license to access all the electronic content. While good ideas can emerge from anywhere in the organization, bold initiatives that save dollars and help make us greener need the very obvious support of the institution’s top leaders. We the employees need to know that our leaders are making the same sacrifices they ask us to endure.