Author: ACRLog Guest

The Allegory of the Meniscus or Accepting the Reality of Middle Management in Higher Education

Editor’s note: We welcome a guest blog post from Dustin Fife, College Librarian at Colorado College Library.

As with so many people who have recently completed a dissertation, I worry/assume that it will not find a broad audience, which is okay. However, there was one aspect of my study that felt so essential to the daily life of higher education that I translated it into this format and have focused on what I believe is a particularly important and illuminating illustration. I spent time with academic library administrators (deans and directors) exploring their experiences with DEIA work and had a key framework reinforced throughout the interviews for better understanding almost everything they do. It will not sound monumental at first, but the lived experiences of the people with whom I worked, along with my own experiences leading libraries and observing campuses, tells me that we have not accepted this reality within our many academic communities. In the shortest terms possible, department chairs, deans, directors, and academic library administrators are institutional middle managers. 

Throughout my research project, one quote more than any other captured this sentiment and the reality that the work of these positions is shaped and constrained by positionality. This quote was given by a library dean using the alias Justice, and I began colloquially referring to it as, The Allegory of the Meniscus. 

So, one of the vice presidents here…she used to have this great metaphor that she used. She said department chairs, deans in particular, are in what she called meniscus positions. So, you picture the meniscus in the knee, right? It is subject to constant pressure from above and constant pressure from below. And the meniscus’s job is to try to keep things aligned so that the knee doesn’t blow out. And one of the things that you have to ask yourself when you’re a dean is, do I see myself primarily as a representative of the people organizationally below me up to the university administration, or do I see myself primarily as a representative of the administration down to the people organizationally below me? And of course, the reality is you’re both. You’re always both. (p. 25-26)

So, if you do not always accept that the people in these roles are middle managers, or you do not believe that your chair or dean are constrained by their positionality, spend an afternoon thinking of them as a meniscus. Feel that knee grinding and twisting and balancing. Maybe even try to hop around on one leg. This reframing can change how we all conceptualize what is possible in colleges and universities from these positions and lead to more realistic conversations about DEIA work and a bevy of other topics.

Now, before the organizational scholars scoff, I want to say that I know this is not an earthshaking concept. I know that anyone who looks at an organizational chart should realize that these folks are institutional middle managers. But our daily expectations at colleges and universities do not seem to align with this reality and neither did the lived experiences of my interviewees. Interestingly, the library administrators with whom I worked reported having to convince people within their teams that they were middle managers, with all the obligations and constraints that come with that positionality. When one of the interviewees, Quinn, was discussing the frustrations of middle management and being stuck in the middle with her colleagues, she said, “and I’m like, I know, I feel that way too. And they’re like, no, you’re not, you’re the director. And I’m like, no, I have a boss. We’re all in the middle of something” (p. 27). 

I asked library administrators what their role is, or should be, in DEIA work and so much of our conversations revolved around the concepts of middle management that I concluded, 

Without this middle management framework in mind, it would be hard to truly understand the experiences of the interviewees. Their structural positionality created the opportunities and constraints by which they experience DEIA work…In short, to better understand the experiences of these library administrators with DEIA work and the choices that they make, we must understand that they are institutional middle managers. Accepting this reality, along with the constraints and opportunities provided by this positionality, should create more realistic conversations within libraries about what is and is not possible within DEIA work. (p. 77) 

And while this is not a naked attempt to garner sympathy for people who serve in positions like my own, I think it does provide a pathway to greater understanding within educational organizations.

This concept was further reified by the ways that these library leaders comprehended their roles within DEIA work. “The interviewees emphatically conceptualize their role as facilitators, modelers, prioritizers, strategic emphasizers, and allocators. Their narratives focused heavily on actions that enabled or empowered DEIA work through facilitation and modeling” (p. 77-78) and not on controlling DEIA work. This is emblematic of middle management. The most successful middle managers make things happen for other people by removing barriers and communicating vision. 

While this research study was not intended to focus entirely on middle management and DEIA work among library administrators, middle management was a key factor once the stories were collected and analyzed. However, this dissertation also relays so much more about the experiences of these library leaders. They believe that DEIA work is inherently library work and that it is their job to prioritize, enable, and fund it. They believe that hiring processes and policies are one of the best ways for them to influence the culture of DEIA work and the general culture of the institution. They also identified that DEIA work is culture work. Shay summed this up well when they said, “the [DEIA] work is culture work, and it’s always been culture work” and culture work just takes time (p. 45). These voices were paramount to the study and add so much to our understanding of how library leaders experience DEIA work, especially as a phenomenology during the upheaval of 2025 as the Trump Administration worked to nullify and undo diversity, equity, and inclusion work from generations of people.  

Regardless, the purpose of this discussion is not to minimize the role of these leaders or diminish their importance. Another thing that was made utterly clear by the interviewees was that for DEIA initiatives to be successful, they needed intentional support from people in these positions, which is true of many types of initiatives in my experience and should not come as a surprise. These constraints do not make leaders any less responsible; however, it is much easier to run an obstacle course with a map of the obstacles. Accepting that chairs, directors, deans, and library administrators are institutional middle managers and do sit in “meniscus positions” helps to chart a map of some of the most important obstacles.  

Fife, D. (2026). Diversity, equity, inclusion & access, middle management, and facilitating change in academic libraries during a time of disruption: A phenomenological study of the experience of academic library administrators (Order No. 32788361). Available from Publicly Available Content Database. (3366955209). Retrieved from https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/diversity-equity-inclusion-amp-access-middle/docview/3366955209/se-2

A Born-Digital Librarian’s Reflection on Digital Educational Tools

Editor’s note: We welcome a guest blog post from Senka Stankovic, Head of User Services at the Jean-Léon Allie Library, Saint-Paul University.

As an early-career librarian halfway through a year-long parental leave contract at Saint Paul University, I’ve noticed that digital tools are fundamental to how we ideate and deliver educational workshops. Born-digital, recently a student, and new to the workforce, I’ve come to believe that many digital tools that are meant to improve learning instead strip away the friction that the acquisition of knowledge requires.

In this post, I explore three common classroom technologies: the slide deck, the laptop, and the gadgets[1]. I present how these so-called “tools” often get in our way, and I offer opportunities for reintroducing friction to the classroom in the classroom in the form of minor inconveniences. This friction can lead to higher engagement from, and connection with, our learners.

I believe librarians are in a unique position to pioneer a more hopeful use of technology in the classroom and beyond.

The slide deck

The slide deck is ubiquitous in academia and in white-collar work. In the classroom, slide decks turn teaching into a presentation where we strive for perfection. This is in part because slide decks, meant for presentations, allow educators to over-prepare their courses. If you’re presenting something you know well, then your slide deck is there to make sure you don’t veer off course. But off course is where you get to show students your own fallibility, which helps build meaningful connections through vulnerability. It also gives your students a framework for managing the friction that things like research inevitably create. In other words, your slide deck prevents you from modeling educational resilience by giving you something to hide behind.

Adding friction to the slide deck includes taking the time to ask whether a slide deck is the right method of sharing the information at hand. I find that very often, it isn’t. At my university, I’m responsible for delivering one-on-one Academic Integrity Workshops to students who have committed plagiarism. I was unsatisfied with the presentation-style workshop I had inherited, as I felt myself lecturing at students who were either on the verge of tears or completely oblivious as to their wrongdoings. In neither scenario were they primed for learning. I adopted a new approach that includes a self-assessment on their behalf and a print workbook where they can take notes. I still use a monitor where needed, such as demonstrating tools they can use for research instead of ChatGPT. My new approach has so far been fruitful. I’ve not had any tears since adopting it.

When you remove the slide deck from the equation, you make room for more creative methods. I saw this in April, when I attended a session at the British Columbia Library Association Conference titled “Throwing Out the PowerPoint: An Experiential Learning Approach.” Adair Harper, Chloe Riley, and Julia Lane replaced their library orientation slide deck with a zine and an accompanying exercise to help students learn to navigate library resources. Their new approach seems more communal in nature, and I’m curious to see what can happen when we start questioning why things are done the way they are.

The laptop

The laptop and the expectation that students all have one are detrimental to everyone’s learning. Besides the obvious financial inequity factor, laptops are also hugely distracting. As a student, I was frequently sidelined by the person in front of me watching Euphoria or tweaking their resume. I’m sure that my compulsive opening and scrolling of Pinterest every time I open a browser also distracted many folks sitting behind me.

Recently, I read about Dylan Kane, a middle-school math teacher and early adopter of Chromebooks in classrooms who has decided to jump ship. In removing laptops from his classroom for a month, Kane learned that “screens […] made it possible for a student to look busy for an entire class period” without him realizing they were stuck on a problem. In other words, learning is hard, scrolling on Pinterest is easy. Think of your own life. How often do you come head-to-head with something you find difficult and pull out your phone to avoid it? If we can’t muster the self-control needed to not use screens as pacifiers, how can we expect students not to do so when faced with the friction of learning?

Expecting all students to be fluent in laptops is also a barrier to those with less technological experience. Catherine Carroll, a mature student at Saint Paul’s University, describes her return to academia as a huge learning curve by way of technology. “It gets in the way of learning the actual material,” she says.

Adding friction to the laptop might look like encouraging writing by hand and taking the time to show students how to search the stacks. While these skills may not be frequently applied, I believe it would be beneficial. Born-digital students would be given an alternative, more tactile, framework for engaging with information. This may increase their attention to how information is created, accessed, and shared in the digital realm by giving them a point of comparison. On the other hand, mature students would be given permission to engage with knowledge in a way that works better for them.

The gadgets

Learning gadgets that advertise increased engagement reduce tactility and thereby advocate for the disembodiment of learning. Many of these tools are nothing more than a digitization of existing classroom activities. Miro is literally a virtual blackboard. With Quizlet, you can create digital flashcards, rendering the educational process of handwriting them obsolete. Kahoot replaces good, old-fashioned pen-to-paper trivia. They take away moments where students might otherwise be forced to write or move around in their learning environments.

Additionally, all these tools are privately owned by for-profit companies. This doesn’t sit well with me, as using them requires students to give out personal information in the form of email addresses or browsing data.

The friction of distributing papers to participate in an activity or having students physically get up to add ideas to a blackboard reintroduces a dynamism to learning that can pull us all out of the digital funk created by many learning technologies.

On the advantages of digital educational tools

The tools I mention have advantages. Laptops and slide decks both offer accessibility features, and removal of these technologies may lead to access friction – not the kind we’re going for – for learners with disabilities. The gadgets might encourage engagement, provide immediate feedback to learners, and provide educators with additional insights into their students’ knowledge.

The complete abandonment of digital technologies isn’t attractive to most of us, nor would it promote equitable access to information. Nonetheless, I believe that treating digital tools as a gold standard in education can be detrimental and limits our ability as educators to think creatively about the knowledge we share. By reflecting on ways to add helpful friction, while maintaining a balance for those that require assistive technology or prefer digital learning tools, we can create more positive learning environments.

A way forward

Adding friction to slide decks, laptops, and gadgets is a strong starting point to rebuild meaningful classrooms that center knowledge acquisition. It’s also a sign of hope that the world I want to live in is possible, one where learning is communal, present, and embodied. Librarians are in a unique position to advocate for the friction that learning requires, even when that means experiencing the friction of learning themselves.

In an interview, Kurt Vonnegut describes purchasing envelopes one at a time so that he has more opportunities to exist in the world. His wife believes it to be an inconvenience. He concludes, “And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals.” For me, the image of librarianship that elicits joy is one with room to dance. Or fumble, or add friction, or whatever you so choose to call it.

[1] I use gadgets to loosely refer to novelty items aimed at digitally increasing student engagement. Some examples include Miro, a virtual blackboard; Quizlet, for digital flashcards; Kahoot, for quizzes and trivia; and Mentimeter, for polling. These attempts to reintroduce tactility in the classroom are simulacral.

OER Legislation Update

Editor’s note: We welcome a guest blog post from Emma Wood, Scholarly Communication Librarian at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Library.

I contributed a guest post to ACRLog in 2023 about the expansion of state legislation related to Open Educational Resources (OER). With the importance of administrative support to expand OER, it seems useful to revisit this topic as budgetary concerns have rocked academia in the time since 2023. OER initiatives usually require some financial investment: have shaky budgets caused disruption to OER support and progress?

First, on the state level, OER legislation has stayed steady, at least in number, with new bills being introduced and progressing. SPARC has an OER State Policy tracker that updates weekly during the legislative session. In my prior post I noted that there were 11 states with OER-related bills in the current legislative session and 28 states with enacted OER policies in some form based on the SPARC map. At present, there are 13 relevant bills in the current legislative session and 32 states have enacted OER policies. This shows progress or at least stability in OER legislation for the past few years.

OER have caught the attention of state legislatures for a few reasons including their cost-savings to students, potential for higher performance indicators from students, and equity and fairness considerations. Here are some of the types of bills related to OER that are being considered or have been signed into law:

Course Marking/Flagging – Requires institutions of higher education to indicate the cost of course materials for students in course listings for the sake of transparency. One example is AB 607 which requires that institutions prominently display the estimated course materials costs for no less than 75 percent of the classes listed in their online course schedule.

Appropriation of Funding – These bills typically allot financial support to a state Open Educational Resource related initiatives or programs. California Senate Bill 101 appropriated $3M to the California Community Colleges to provide textbooks or digital course content to incarcerated students and encouraged the use OER when possible.

Establishes a committee, program, or study – These bills create and task a group of people with a goal or purpose relevant to OER. Washington HB 1946 (passed in 2009) was an early example of such a bill, and it directed a task force to investigate open licensing options for sharing digital content with the goal of using common online learning technologies for all institutions of higher education.

Restrictions or directives for publishers – These bills are currently less common than the aforementioned categories. They require publishers to make textbook pricing transparent or direct publishers to offer the components of textbook “bundles” for sale separately. HB 33 is an example from Texas. Among other things, it requires that publishers provide written information relating to textbook prices, copyright dates for the current and three preceding textbook editions, any substantial revisions made since the most recent preceding edition, and any alternative formats available to institutions.

With legislative effort to expand textbook affordability staying the course, is there an impact to OER programs at the institutional level based upon recent budget cuts? Many institutions of higher education are facing staff reduction and program cuts so it is reasonable to assume so. For example, Oregon’s academic library community is concerned that proposed changes to accreditation language could lead to a reduction in library staff and consequently OER efforts. “Reductions of library staff in Oregon colleges and universities is already an increasingly troubling trend as Oregon’s higher education institutions continue to grapple with budget cuts.” As another example, Dartmouth College will reportedly have over a million dollars in cuts to their libraries budget in the next two years. Textbook cost-savings efforts are often led by libraries, so these budget and staff cuts may hinder OER.

Readers may be asking the question of why do we need to invest money in OER when the goal of OER is cost-savings and the resulting materials are free? The answer is mostly time, infrastructure, and staff. OER requires humans for creation, editing, and upkeep. Digital products and services like publishing platforms are also needed in that process. Staff are needed to educate others about OER, administer course flagging systems, and develop outreach plans. Incentive programs with mini grants are an effective way to fill in some of the gaps for faculty who invest time and effort into OER adoption or creation.

Financial support for OER that comes from outside an institution’s primary funding is important because university budgets are currently shrinking. However, relying on one-off and finite grant opportunities to propel OER on the campus level is unsustainable. Thus, OER has to be considered and prioritized in administrative decisions, especially because it involves return on investment when states that conduct annual OER data collection are reporting millions of dollars in cost-savings to students.

The attention that OER advocates have earned from federal, state, and campus leadership is an undeniable victory.  Top-down support, whether it is monetary or other affirming actions, has been a goal and key to OER success. However, we are dealing with deficits in the support system in the field. Do we have enough staff and librarians to continue the efforts? Will administrators making tough decisions about limited funds prioritize OER? The shared understanding of the power and the importance of OER is stronger than ever, but the funding ping-pong ball is still in play.

Becoming an Audiobook Reader

Editor’s note: We welcome a guest blog post from Sarah Clinton-McCausland, Humanities, Social Sciences, and Open Education Librarian at the University of Maryland.

I never thought I’d lose my leisure reading habit. Leisure reading, pleasure reading, or “free voluntary reading” is “reading because you want to… [P]utting down a book you don’t like and choosing another one instead” (Krashen, 2004, p. x). Growing up, it was also my favorite activity in the world.

For people who like to read, reading is fun—more specifically, it is cognitively complex, immersive, energizing, embodied, and grounding. It’s a kind of play that takes place within a relatively safe container, balancing flow and emotional regulation, escape and connection, uncertainty and exploration. Allowed to read whatever I wanted throughout my childhood and adolescence, I checked out stacks of books from the public library and pulled intriguing, probably-age-inappropriate titles off my parents’ shelves. Each new book set me down in a world of unfamiliar people and occurrences, generating a hungry curiosity that propelled me forward. Reading allowed me to contextualize my own experiences and learn more about my likes and dislikes, deeply shaping my sense of self. I always preferred “visual reading”—print paper books, and later, the occasional eBook—but when it came to genre, I craved variety.

Then I started college—a time of personal growth and intellectual demand. I learned how to read and analyze theoretical texts purposively for a grade, but this process—combined with a newly expanded social life—gradually shifted me away from leisure reading. In the years after graduation, I would come home drained from my office jobs and crash in front of the Netflix subscription I could finally afford. I got through a handful of visual books per year, but the process had become a slog. No matter the book, my attention would drift, nagged by an endless to-do list of chores and obligations. Discouraged, I’d return books to the library half-finished. I had quietly lost my reading habit, but I didn’t fully understand why.

A few years later, midway through my MLIS, I sought answers through a class project. I conducted qualitative research with twelve Millennials who identified as lapsed avid leisure readers. Many of them had grown up in middle-class U.S. households and attended college, but all had developed more complicated relationships to their leisure time in adulthood, which impacted their media habits. Participants reported that “getting into” a book was the biggest barrier to regaining a habit, but it helped to choose reading material that was purely for fun. Others met their need for narrative story by listening to podcasts and audiobooks or reading more long-form articles on their phones, all of which slotted more easily into the shorter pockets of transitional, unstructured time available throughout the day.

Free voluntary reading can be a powerful expression of what bell hooks (1994) and Paulo Freire (1970) term “the practice of freedom.” Once we’ve learned how to read, we can engage in the serendipity that reading engenders for the rest of our lives, reminding ourselves over and over that we are malleable and can dream beyond our current contexts. But there are many dominant cultural forces in the U.S. which discourage exactly this kind of visionary play. We know the form this takes in 2026: literal book bans; the monetization of our attention; rising living costs; the demand that we continuously optimize our time and energy toward paid work and quantifiable self-improvement. And of course we also face the extraction of our labor and creativity via generative AI, while we’re simultaneously told that genAI will render that same labor and creativity obsolete. After college, my study participants and I were plunged more deeply into the demands of a semi-post-recession labor market, and things have only gotten weirder since then. Everyone I encounter is stressed and overscheduled at best. In times like these, reading can be an especially powerful balm—a ladder in our survival toolkits. But it can also be harder to read when so much is happening.

My study participants’ stories echoed my own, but while they made me feel less alone, they still weren’t enough to kickstart me back into reading. Paradoxically, because I’d started to consider reading something that was “good for me” and morally superior to other leisure activities, it had morphed into another means of optimization. I had a narrow vision of “ideal” leisure reading as a disciplined, meditative, phone-free hour with a print book each night before bed. So I felt ashamed when reality fell short of my expectations: Why can’t I read anymore?? How come all I do is watch TV? It’s so embarrassing that I’m a librarian who doesn’t read! It took me a long time to understand that my perfectionism around my reading practices erased both my hunger to read habitually and the potential benefits.

Unlike many of my study participants, though, I didn’t consider audiobooks a suitable alternative. The same white supremacist culture which prizes optimization tends to value written over oral language, and steeped in that culture, I’d come to believe that listening to audiobooks wasn’t quite “real” reading—and also that I just wasn’t an audiobook person. The deeper truth: I was scared I wasn’t actually capable of listening to audiobooks. My education and career have always rewarded my visual reading skills. Having both my sight and hearing (and a love for music and podcasts) made it easier to spend years ignoring how much I struggled to follow linear narratives in audio. My brain tends to slip around and chase other thoughts without printed text or images to ground it.

Still, it was obvious that audiobooks had the huge advantage of letting me do other things while reading. In theory, I could visually read much faster than I could listen to someone else reading, but I slowly came to acknowledge that it might be worth trying to read in my nonpreferred modality if the alternative was not really reading at all. Halfway through 2023, I checked out my first audiobook: a literary mystery-thriller by a favorite author I’d only read in print before. I raced through it in a few days and immediately borrowed another one.

I quickly confirmed that audiobooks’ affordances allowed them to fit into the interstitial, transitional times in my schedule, making chores more tolerable while letting me get into a book more easily. I started delving into books that had sat on my list for years, rediscovering the joy of reading only what I wanted to and abandoning anything that felt like just a “should.” I slowly became more comfortable with the affordances of audiobooks, and they’re now the first format I reach for when leisure reading. In other words, I think I’ve developed “audiobook literacy.”

I am still simply not as adept with aural media as visual, though, and probably never will be. In the past few years, I’ve gently observed my experiences, trying different strategies to accommodate and scaffold my audio reading needs. Now, for most books, I’ll try to obtain the print or eBook version at the same time so I can refer back to it periodically. (Sometimes a text-only book will convey additional layers of meaning through font and text formatting, making the book “sound” different when read visually. If I can’t get the print version of a given book, however, I have to just accept that it’s OK to get a different variation of the experience!) For literature with more characters or complex plots, I’ll also enhance my comprehension by taking notes and making family trees, timelines, or other diagrams by hand. (I love a sweeping multigenerational family saga—and a diagram!) I finally got through Wuthering Heights in audio this year by referring to the Project Gutenberg eBook and creating a chaotic but extremely helpful family tree based on the Wikipedia entry.

The more audiobooks I’ve read, the more I’ve finally embraced the reality that listening to audiobooks is reading. Recent research has started confirming what audiobookworms have known all along: a 2019 study, for instance, found that “the semantic representations evoked by listening versus reading are almost identical” (Deniz et al., p. 7722). Our brains paint similar pictures regardless of modality.

That said, I still find that print and audio produce different reading experiences, and releasing my reading perfectionism has been a whole accommodation strategy in itself! I have a better time when I approach an audiobook knowing the experience won’t be exactly the same, and not expecting myself to “succeed” in audio the same way I can in print. I’ve developed more patience for my need to replay the same passages multiple times after spacing out, more tolerance for the vocal dissonance between my own internal narrator and the audiobook’s. I’ve learned I actually prefer some books in audio, especially thrillers, memoirs, and author-read titles. I enjoy giving my eyes a break and practicing my close listening skills. Sometimes I even remember audiobooks better than their visual counterparts, maybe because I have to work harder for them.

I’ve also learned that print and audio are fundamentally complementary. When I engage with a book in one format, I’m more likely to engage with the other—maybe even switching off depending on my mood. Learning to be curious and flexible about format—not just genre—has allowed me to take advantage of the affordances of audio, making reading a joyful and rewarding experience again.

Developing audiobook literacy has unexpectedly impacted my work as a subject liaison librarian in various ways, too. I’ve come to see leisure reading practices as a powerful way to develop transferable information literacy skills. They can teach us more about information contexts and affordances; show us new ways to navigate our own and others’ access needs; and help us reenvision inequitable systems. In reference and instruction interactions, I’ve started demonstrating how to access sources in different formats by default (e.g., “this database also lets you listen to journal articles in audio”), and I highlight library accessibility services in resource lists. My own experiences remind me that media format preferences are deeply individual, and disability status and access needs are complex and constantly shifting. I can’t ever assume where someone else locates themselves along those spectrums, especially because they may have very good reasons for not telling me or the institution.

I’ve also deepened my commitment to promoting play and leisure for their own sake. I suggest students pursue the projects that most spark their curiosity and interest, but I also encourage them to carve out leisure time outside of school and work whenever possible. As an icebreaker, I sometimes ask students to share any piece of leisure media they’ve enjoyed recently, emphasizing the validity of all formats. I’ll also disclose my own preferences and access challenges when appropriate. This can segue into conversations about accessibility, platformization, and the pros and cons of different formats in context—all applicable to scholarship, too.

My own information literacy skills (and institutional affiliation) also make it easier to access leisure reading materials. I usually get audiobooks and eBooks from my public library via Libby, but I occasionally buy them from Libro.fm or check LibriVox for public domain titles. I borrow print books from my workplace (including via interlibrary loan) or the public library, access public domain titles via Project Gutenberg, and sometimes purchase from Thriftbooks.com or Bookshop.org. I want to support students in developing a similar sense of information abundance and more pathways for meeting their leisure needs even after graduation, so in orientations, I talk about how public and academic libraries complement each other, and I explicitly promote our local public libraries as major sources for leisure reading and learning. Students aren’t always aware that they can get a public library card for free and access more “fun” books in print, audio, and eBook forms. In this current moment, it also feels good to help spawn more lifelong public library and local bookstore patrons!

Few things feel more essential right now than leisure and play, and activities like leisure reading can bring a deeper sense of meaningfulness to our lives in a way that job skills on their own don’t necessarily. By becoming an audiobook reader and developing a new literacy, I’ve been able to tap into this feeling more than I have in years, and I’m endlessly grateful that I was able to release my format perfectionism and regain one of my favorite things to do. I’m excited to keep exploring how to center play, leisure, and reading in my life and librarianship.

References

Deniz, F., Nunez-Elizalde, A. O., Huth, A. G., & Gallant, J. L. (2019). The representation of semantic information across human cerebral cortex during listening versus reading is invariant to stimulus modality. Journal of Neuroscience, 39(39), 7722-7736. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0675-19.2019

Freire, Paulo. 1970. Pedagogy of the oppressed. Continuum.

hooks, bell. 1994. Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. Routledge.

Krashen, Stephen. 2004. The power of reading: Insights from the research. Libraries Unlimited.

The MLS Is Not the Problem: A Response

Editor’s note: We welcome a guest blog post from Ben Rawlins, Associate Dean for Outreach, Engagement and Collections at the University of Kentucky Libraries.

Bryn Geffert’s recent Inside Higher Ed essay argues that the MLS degree is an obstacle to hiring, a barrier to diversity, and an increasingly optional credential in academic libraries. His survey data from R1 and R2 institutions is real, and the hiring challenges he documents are real. His diagnosis, however, misses the mark, and his argument carries implications that deserve more scrutiny than the piece provides.

I write as an Associate Dean at an R1 research institution where librarians hold faculty status, where I have been involved in hiring, mentoring, and evaluating MLS-holding colleagues for years. My concern is not with the idea that library education needs to improve. It most certainly does. My concern is with the slide from that legitimate observation to the conclusion that the credential itself is the problem.

The MLS Is a Formation Credential

Geffert treats the degree primarily as a skills-delivery mechanism, then faults it for not delivering every skill administrators want. The MLS is not principally a skills credential. It is a professional formation credential. The ALA’s Core Competencies of Librarianship place the foundations of the profession first among all competency areas, requiring graduates to “employ the ethics, values, and foundational principles of the library profession” and to “promote democratic principles and intellectual freedom” (ALA, 2022). The ALA’s Core Values, updated in 2024, explicitly ground the entire accreditation framework for library and information science programs in commitments to access, equity, intellectual freedom, privacy, and the public good (ALA, 2024). Practitioners and scholars have long argued that the MLS provides the foundational knowledge and values necessary for socialization into the field and that degree completion unifies librarians with a common professional identity (Holley, 2016). Research on librarian professional identity supports this framing, finding that professional formation is understood as a process over time, defined in part by benchmark events and the internalization of professional norms and values, rather than a one-time credential transaction (Pierson et al., 2019). A subject PhD does not initiate that process. On-the-job experience may eventually transmit some of it. But that is a longer and less reliable path, and it places the burden of professional socialization entirely on individual institutions rather than on the shared educational infrastructure the profession has built.

One Size Does Not Fit All Institutions

Geffert’s argument treats R1 and R2 institutions as if they share a uniform personnel structure, but the reality is considerably more complex. Academic librarians are classified differently across institution types, some hold faculty status with full ranks, tenure, and governance rights equivalent to teaching faculty; others hold academic or professional staff status; still others occupy hybrid classifications unique to their institutions. This variation is not incidental. It is structural, and it has direct implications for how the MLS functions as a credential.

At institutions where librarians hold faculty status, the MLS is not simply a hiring preference. It is the terminal professional degree that anchors the faculty appointment itself. The ACRL Standards for Faculty Status for Academic Librarians state explicitly that “the MLS/MLIS degree is considered the terminal degree for this appointment.” The ACRL Standard for Appointment, Promotion, and Tenure is equally direct: “any librarian appointed to a college or university library faculty shall have the appropriate terminal professional degree.” Notably, even the ACRL Standards for Academic Librarians Without Faculty Status, written specifically for institutions where librarians do not hold faculty rank, still identifies the MLS from an ALA-accredited institution as the terminal degree for the profession. In other words, the professional standards framework treats the MLS as foundational across classification types, not just in faculty contexts.

The ramifications of devaluing or treating the MLS as optional are therefore not uniform across the profession, they are most acute precisely at the research-intensive institutions Geffert surveyed. At institutions where librarians hold faculty status, moving away from the MLS as the terminal degree credential does not simply expand a hiring pool. It raises fundamental questions about the basis for faculty appointment, the legitimacy of promotion and tenure review, parity with other faculty in governance and compensation, and the standing of librarians as full academic partners. These are not administrative details. They are the foundation of the professional standing that faculty librarians have built over decades. An argument for credential flexibility that does not account for these downstream consequences is not a complete argument, it is an administrator’s convenience framed as a professional reform.

Two Different Arguments

The claim that library schools are not producing graduates with sufficient skills in data science, GIS, digital scholarship, and other areas may well be true. This supports the conclusion that library schools need reform, not that the credential should be treated as optional. These are different arguments, and Geffert slides between them without acknowledging the distinction. The appropriate response to a medical school producing graduates with clinical gaps is to reform the curriculum, not to suggest that hospitals hire biology PhDs instead of MDs. Treating the MLS as optional undermines the case for investing in library education at exactly the moment that investment is most needed, and sends a signal to the market that the programs producing that credential are dispensable, even as we ask them to do better.

Economics and Politics

Geffert frames difficulty hiring candidates with skills in data science, GIS, and digital scholarship as evidence that the MLS pipeline is failing. There is a more direct explanation he does not consider: the compensation structures of academic libraries make these positions economically uncompetitive for the candidates he is hoping to attract, and the political environment in many states makes certain institutions genuinely difficult places to recruit to regardless of credential requirements.

On compensation, the numbers are telling. The median annual wage for academic librarians was $64,320 in May 2024, with early-career positions frequently starting between $50,000 and $65,000 (BLS, 2024). By contrast, the median annual wage for data scientists, one of the specific skill areas Geffert identifies as a gap, was $112,590 in May 2024, with projected job growth of 34 percent through 2034 (BLS, 2024). A candidate with a PhD in data science or geography who is weighing a position in an academic library against industry or government alternatives is not being deterred by credential requirements. They are being deterred by a salary structure that academic libraries largely cannot compete with. Opening the credential to subject PhD holders does not change that math at all.

The broader political environment compounds these economic pressures. Across a significant number of states, legislatures have targeted DEI offices, restricted curricula, and weakened faculty governance structures, creating conditions in which recruiting becomes genuinely difficult, independent of credential requirements (AAUP 2024a; AAUP 2024b). Professionals with the specialized skills Geffert identifies have substantial labor market mobility. A data scientist or digital scholar with options is unlikely to accept a below-market salary at an institution operating under political constraints that threaten academic freedom, regardless of whether the position requires an MLS or a subject PhD. The credential is not the barrier. The conditions of the work are.

This matters because Geffert’s argument implicitly assumes that relaxing the credential requirement creates a larger and more capable pool of willing applicants. If the economic and political conditions of academic library positions are what is actually limiting the pool, widening the credential gate does not address the underlying problem. It simply shifts who is excluded by those conditions from MLS graduates to subject PhD holders.

The Diversity Argument Collapses Under Scrutiny

Geffert argues that because the MLS pipeline is 87 percent white, opening hiring to subject PhD holders would help diversify the profession. The fields he identifies as sources of the skills libraries need are themselves deeply homogeneous. The NSF’s Diversity and STEM: Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities 2023 report documents that underrepresented minorities (Hispanic, Black, and American Indian or Alaska Native) collectively account for 37 percent of the U.S. college-age population but earned only 16 percent of science & engineering doctoral degrees in 2020, a gap that widens at every step up the degree ladder (NCSES, 2023). Women remain underrepresented at all degree levels in physical and earth sciences, mathematics and computer sciences, and engineering (NCSES, 2023). Black students earned only 5 percent of engineering bachelor’s degrees in 2020 despite constituting 14 percent of the college-age population (NCSES, 2023). Geography, the home discipline for GIS, and one of the specific skill areas Geffert names as a gap, “is behind virtually all other fields of study examined across all degree types in terms of racial and ethnic representation,” with doctoral geography programs consistently trailing even other social sciences in diversity (AAG, 2023). Research on doctoral training across science and technology fields finds that Black men and women experience the greatest and most consistent loss of representation across the transition from bachelor’s to doctoral to postdoctoral stages (Hofstra et al., 2023). Swapping MLS pipelines for PhD pipelines in STEM, GIS, and related fields does not solve a diversity problem. It trades one homogeneous pipeline for another while abandoning the professional formation infrastructure the field has built.

The Unasked Question

There is a dimension this piece does not address at all, and it may be the most important one. Librarianship is approximately 82 percent female as of 2023 (BLS, 2024). Calls to bypass or devalue the credential of a female-dominated profession have a well-documented history that should give us pause. Sociological research by Levanon, England, and Allison found that as the proportion of women in an occupation grows, relative wages in that occupation decline — evidence of what researchers call occupational devaluation, the systematic undervaluing of work done by women (Levanon, England, and Allison, 2009). Seale and Mirza have argued directly in the library literature that academic librarianship’s turn toward non-MLS credentials is “inextricable from its search for markers of professionalization outside of librarianship, in the form of non-MLS degrees, more appealing domains of knowledge, and nonfeminized types of labor,” and that removing the MLS requirement “will not address these broader issues” (Seale and Mirza, 2020). Research published in College & Research Libraries has further shown that “the feminization of library work, and in particular the undervaluing of emotional labor required of public-facing roles like reference and instruction, serves as a way to continually devalue feminized work to uphold patriarchal norms” (Bryant, Bussell, and Halpern 2019).

We are watching the same dynamic play out in real time across other female-dominated professions. In 2025, the Department of Education reclassified nursing, social work, teaching, physical therapy, and audiology as non-professional degrees for student loan purposes — fields that are between 70 and 88 percent female (National Nurses United, 2026). As one university dean observed in response, “it is concerning that many of the professions in this category are women-dominated professions. This appears to be part of a larger attempt to undermine and minimize professional roles of women in our society” (University of Pittsburgh, 2025). The pattern of credential devaluation in female-dominated professions is not abstract. It is structural, it is historical, and it is happening now. An argument for treating the MLS as optional that does not engage with this pattern is an incomplete argument.

What the Profession Needs

None of this means the status quo is acceptable. Library schools must do more to develop graduates with the technical and interdisciplinary competencies the field needs. Institutions should invest in professional development that builds skills not fully addressed in graduate programs. The profession should have an honest and sustained conversation about where library education is falling short and demand better from its accredited programs, and work with them to make those changes. What the profession should not do is treat the credential as the source of its problems. The claim that library schools need to do better and the claim that the MLS itself is an obstacle are not the same claim. Conflating them, as Geffert does, redirects the profession away from the more important conversation about how to strengthen library education rather than abandon it.

To be clear, this is not an argument that subject PhD holders cannot succeed as academic librarians or that institutions should never consider candidates without an MLS. There are contexts where such hires make sense, and many non-MLS professionals have made genuine contributions to the field. The argument here is narrower and more specific: that Geffert has not made a sound case for systematically devaluing the MLS as a professional credential. His survey documents real hiring frustrations, but frustration is not analysis. The problems he identifies (skills gaps, diversity deficits, unfilled positions) have causes that his proposed solution does not address, and consequences for institutional classification, professional formation, and the gendered history of credential devaluation that his piece does not engage. A better argument for credential flexibility is possible, thoughGeffert has not made it. The MLS is not a barrier to a better profession. It is one of the foundations on which a better profession can be built, if we are willing to invest in it rather than look for a way around it.