ACRLog Guest

Advocating for Mental Health Together: Why Library Professionals Should Be At The Forefront of Advocacy

This post comes from a guest poster, Alejandro Marquez. Alejandro is a Collection Development Librarian at the Auraria Library which serves the University of Colorado Denver, Metropolitan State University of Denver, and the Community College of Denver.

The academic library is open the most staffed hours of any public building on campus. We open early for students to use the computers, print papers, or use the photocopier before class. The library provides a clean and climate-controlled space for individuals to study and learn even on the weekends when other departments are closed. Individuals visit the library to ask for directions or help navigating the physical campus. Because we see a wide swath of students, community patrons, and individuals experiencing issues such as housing insecurity, food insecurity, we should be able to recognize the signs of mental health distress. Healthier patrons equals healthier interactions which mean less trauma for employees.

As a community hub of campus, libraries have a mission to advocate for their communities and the workers themselves. I see advocating for emotional well being as being tied in with librarianships’s values of promoting social justice. The role of library professionals is to support belonging, build trust, and relationships within the library and in the academic community. All of these actions support student retention and employee retention. A healthy student body and healthy workforce support student retention and staff retention.

The profession needs to go beyond the traditional approaches to thinking about our work to meet the needs of our community. Libraries have always supported the traditional concept of literacy and mental health literacy is just another variation of our core mission. Many library professionals are woefully under trained nor equipped to handle mental health and there needs to be an active investment of resources to ensure success.

There are high levels of burnout and low morale in library professionals and it is compounded by similar experiences of university students, staff, and faculty who they also interact with and serve. Library professionals experience difficult situations and pass it on to the people we help and our loved ones at home. Later, our loved ones pass it back to us and we take it back to work where we begin the cycle anew. It becomes a never ending draining cycle. There is a recognition that even mildly difficult interactions can compound over time and create secondary trauma.

It can become overwhelming to think where to start addressing the issues when there is an interconnectedness and an action and reaction between the corresponding entities. The theory that I like comes from the field of safety science called the swiss cheese model. James Reason, a professor at Manchester University, introduced this model in his book, Human Error. A block of swiss cheese is full of holes and when cut into slices the number of holes and size vary from one slice to another. These holes could represent shortcomings, weaknesses, hazards, or potential for failure. Each layer has holes and no layer is perfect. Since all the slices have holes in different places, stacking them up reduces the risk. The openings are covered by other slices. The strengths in some parts can negate weaknesses in others. With any complex issue, there is no magic bullet and it is rare that there is any one single root cause. It requires all of those things, not just one of those things. Small changes enacted by individuals or organizations can broaden the safety net.

The following levels of care are meant to be fluid and can bleed into one another. They are built on trust, commitment, and accountability. Each of us has a duty to care for ourselves and others. Not everyone is a manager but they can be a leader. Leadership at all levels is needed to address the issue and improve well being. This collective and coordinated action involves library professionals, the organization, and the entities that fund and support our work. This is a community problem and will only be solved with the help of everyone.

On the individual level, the more immediate environment encompasses relationships between coworkers, library members, and staff. Self care is the most commonly heard phrase in the mass media. It calls for individuals to take care of themselves after a stressful day due to personal or professional obligations. Common remedies are getting enough sleep, exercise, or enjoying an indulgence. This level of care assumes that the responsibilities were difficult but manageable. Audre Lorde’s essay, A Burst of Light, illustrates this idea: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” It is like they tell you on the airplane, put your mask on first. You are unable to help another patron or coworker unless you are well yourself. People often feel guilty about taking time for themselves. Your health is just as important as others.

Individual Level Questions

Are staff receiving training and feedback?
Are there sufficient professional development opportunities?
Is the workload manageable?
Are individuals treated with civility and respect?
Are patron and staff interactions warm and inviting?
Can people afford to make a living at the job or do they have to work two jobs?

Collective care is the duty to advocate for coworkers and the work being done in departments. It requires building a culture of care so no one slips through the cracks. It is our duty to champion their health and wellness as we are interdependently connected. It increases work and life balance that create stronger and stable dynamics within a unit.

Organizational care is one in which institutions have a robust medical and mental health plan for their employees. A good benefits package shows that organizations care about their workers. It can help with recruitment and retention. Flexibility in the work schedule allows workers to spend more time with their families which allows individuals to balance child care and other life commitments.

Departmental And Organization Level Questions

Are there supportive policies such as remote and flexible work schedules, COVID policies, diversity, pay equity?
Are there clear expectations and NOT vague workplace fit and professionalism standards?
Are we only valuing work that is easily measurable? What about emotional labor and diversity work?
Are there systems in place for hiring, pay, promotion, and retention?
Are we making sure that there is pay equity?
Is there adequate staffing and resources?

Societal care is a public that funds quality medical and mental health services for all individuals regardless of their ability to pay for it. This creates a healthier workforce and prevents future social costs. We saw during the pandemic that the most vulnerable communities were affected because they didn’t have healthcare nor paid time off. Physical and mental health shouldn’t come with any financially or culturally imposed moral failings or blame.

Socio-Political Level Questions

How does the profession advocate for government investment of time, money, and resources?
How do library workers promote critical thinking to counter the wave of anti-intellectualism?
How do individuals fund libraries as a social good?
How do institutions lower the cost of the masters of library science degree?
How do organizations retain BIPOC librarians?
How should libraries contribute to the larger societal conversations on racism, discrimination, and marginalization?

Overall, libraries need to be able to give employees the tools and confidence to try to meet these modern problems. These challenges create opportunities for change. We should treat this situation not as something to run away from but as a signal that there is something to understand.

State OER Policies on the Rise

This post is from a guest poster, Emma Wood. Emma (she/her), is the Scholarly Communication Librarian at UMass Dartmouth.

As a Scholarly Communication Librarian, I have been thinking a lot about how best to expand Open Educational Resources (OER) awareness and use on campus. The key for OER success in higher education seems to be quite simple – administrative support. OER advocates, librarians, and faculty members encourage OER through committees, faculty stipend programs, workshops, panels, OA publisher agreements, and the list goes on, but the path forward is easier to traverse once these efforts grab the attention of provosts and administrators, those who can offer sustainability to these projects and address structural barriers such as policies or operational norms that hinder progress. The same is true when scaling up to the state level; universities’ OER success is bolstered by government support. Ultimately that recognition cycles back to librarians and other advocates working on the ground floor – each level powering the other.

Open Educational Resources (OER) have earned the attention of state legislatures because of their cost-savings to students, and because data has shown the positive impact of OER on student success indicators. Students achieve higher grades when they have consistent access to the required reading from day one of class. There are compelling equity considerations in favor of OER as well from the standpoint of access for all students regardless of socioeconomic background as well as increased diversity in OER authorship. According to SPARC, 11 states have OER-related bills in the current legislative session. 28 states have enacted OER policies in some form. Many are appropriations bills that deploy funds to incentivize and increase OER usage. Some states have committed money to OER directives that establish an OER committee or state-wide OER program which may include initiatives such as OER training and incentives for educators.

In Massachusetts we have an OER Advisory Council launched by the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education (DHE). The council is composed of one representative from each of the state’s public institutions of higher education, community colleges as well as 4-year universities. The committee seeks opportunities to fund OER in the state, provides trainings, discusses trends and strategy, and more. Further, MA public institutions of higher education report to the DHE annually on their OER cost-savings to students.

The most efficient way to collect OER cost-savings data is with a course marking system. Course marking, sometimes referred to as course flagging, is a system of transparency that indicates to students which courses require free or low-cost materials instead of traditional textbooks. In a nutshell, faculty members check a box to inform the registrar that their course uses free or low-cost resources, and the course is flagged as such in the course catalog where students choose their classes. This transparency helps students to make an informed decision about their course load when the cost of materials may be prohibitive to them.

Although MA does not currently have legislation that requires course marking, this data collection by the DHE may compel state schools to implement course marking systems. Some states have made course marking mandatory. Oregon’s course marking legislation passed in 2021 and went into effect January 01, 2022. The law “requires each public university and community college to prominently display, or establish link to website that displays, estimated costs of all required course materials and directly related course fees for no less than 75 percent of total for-credit courses offered by public university or community college.”

The increase in OER policies and legislation is reflective of the momentum that the OER movement has built over the years. OER is no longer a new concept, and worries about quality of content have fallen away as three little letters (OER) have proven themselves to be a mighty force capable of breaking barriers. All of the kudos to the wonderful people who pushed for open course materials when the topic was less mainstream, maybe even controversial on some campuses, and paved the way for OER to reach the administrative and state level. We are at a zenith point for OER now that Open Educational Resources are included in policy-making conversations and educational infrastructure. With that upsurge in OER on college campuses, comes a bonus opportunity for librarians – heightened demand for OER professionals. OER is in a peak position right now (or at least more visible than it has ever been previously), but to continue gaining administrative support, advocates can’t drop the ball on the work that we do. We have to be “so good they can’t ignore” us.

How Many Books? In What Formats?

This post comes from a guest poster, Scarlet Galvan. Scarlet is the Collection Strategist Librarian at Grand Valley State University.

A blogger for Inside Higher Ed recently published a plea for a more nuanced understanding of IPEDS data on academic libraries. Like that blogger, I also wish data about academic libraries offered more detail about their work and position as necessary infrastructure. I remember the failure to meet each other as colleagues has collective outcomes.

IPEDS is not designed to capture data about academic libraries accurately. This is a problem because of how familiar IPEDS data is to the rest of higher education, how our colleagues across the university will reach for this data with trust and certainty. Tools like IPEDS flatten complexity, offering a rather facile view into deeply complicated systems. There are many qualifiers. ACRL’s 2015 alignment with a portion of IPEDS questions to streamline reporting means how we conceptualize the work of other institutions faces similar constraints.

After skimming IPEDS data, the blogger’s suggestion, “…maybe academic libraries can avoid layoffs in lean budget times by cutting down on the roughly 40 percent of spending that goes to materials and services” comes down to individual approaches. I can only reflect on my experiences and note the marked difference in organizational capacity when leaders view challenges as opportunities as opposed to choosing what is comfortable.

Even when reducing a collections budget like this is an option, it’s not a decision that comes from a place of strength and would destabilize our teaching, learning, and research missions. That said, subscription-based resources make up the majority of collections expenditures in academic libraries. These carry a yearly inflation rate of 5-7% or more, though a growing number of library workers are working to recalibrate these contract terms. It’s cheaper to keep people. Most university employees do not receive similar increases to their salary and benefits each year. Still, an actionable response is to better understand how our university budgets work in order to clearly see them for what they are: articulated values.

Statistics describing the collection shift continuously as the way we define those things evolves along with scholarly communications ecosystems. IPEDS could offer a snapshot at best. Meanwhile, content providers engage in decades-long campaigns to consolidate and monopolize research infrastructure, impact metrics, search algorithms, mining user data, and even hiring processes.

What metrics might be used instead? What questions could we ask for a richer understanding of the impact of libraries and library workers in higher education? These things are much harder to get at than numerical totals in broad categories like budget allocations and collection totals. For example, we might consider what percentage of research output is Open Access, measure institutional investments toward open infrastructures, acknowledge and document the expertise to make archival collections findable, build research data management plans, measure student outcomes based on faculty authored and adopted open publications, or capture the incentives we offer for such work for accreditation, tenure, and promotion. Until different metrics can be included, we’re left to specific definitions of value and indigent questions. “How many books? In what format?”

Additional Reading:

Lamdan, S. (2022). Data Cartels: The Companies that Control and Monopolize Our Information. Stanford University Press. https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=33205

Wilson, M., & Cronk, L. (2022). The NERL Playbook. Commonplace. https://doi.org/10.21428/6ffd8432.2b8579b0

Scholarly Publishing and Academic Research Coalition: Elsevier’s Acquisition of Interfolio: Risks and Responses. https://infrastructure.sparcopen.org/interfolio-acquisition

Let’s Talk About Quiet Quitting: Why Work Drains Us and How to Build Better Lives

I recently attended a diversity committee where we talked about the state of the university. We talked about our workload, compensation, lack of mental health services for students, and diversity trainings. After the meeting was over, I received an email from one of the new members of the group. It read, “does this meeting always hurt the soul so much? Like I’ve heard nothing but facts and everyone here seems so amazing and talented and brilliant, but everyone sounds so beat down.” This response could easily describe the comments that I hear from library workers when I read the listservs or attend conferences. Library workers are known for going above and beyond expectations by staying late to help a student find a resource, answering emails at 11PM, or doing the job of coworkers who have left the building. They not only give of their time but also a piece of themselves. They work on library activities, complete campus service, serve on professional organizations, and assist students and faculty. A lot of a person’s library identity is emotionally and psychologically intertwined with their work.

The pandemic changed the face of libraries and heightened the already present difficulties of many institutions that never fully financially recovered from the housing recession. Some of the issues that people might be facing include increasing workload, inadequate staffing, time pressures, flat budgets, burnout, wages haven’t kept up with inflation, and lack of professional growth opportunities. Anecdotally, one library has a designated decompression room and they encourage workers to utilize it with no questions asked. There is a recognition that even mildly difficult interactions can compound over time and create secondary trauma.

Quiet quitting is the latest workplace buzzword. It describes individuals who go against a culture of going above and beyond what a job requires. They are still doing the work but they don’t work outside of their job descriptions. The quitting part is a misnomer. Individuals aren’t quitting their jobs, rather they are setting clear boundaries. Quiet quitting is a way of dealing with burnout. They try to balance these pressures by looking towards meaning and purpose in their work, organizational culture, and professional relationships. The term presents a view of an American workplace culture that celebrates toxic workaholism and grind culture. The popularity of the term is a positive sign that there is a shift in workplace expectations.

The pandemic has led to what some are calling the “great resignation”. On many college campuses, salaries have stagnated and the cost of living has increased while productivity has remained the same. It makes it hard for many people to afford a home. For contingent workers, there is no national legislative support for required paid sick days. As a result, people are rethinking the role that work should take in their lives.

Many individuals like to think of libraries as the bastion of democracy. A place of liberal ideas and intellectualism. However, it is conservative and resistant to change. It is just a workplace at the end of the day where individuals jockey for prestige, hierarchy, and resources. A non-profit that has a need to generate income. Although some might think of it as a higher calling, it doesn’t mean that it is beyond reproach. The university library is built on relying on workers to pick up the slack due to the slow pace of hiring and the freezing of positions as budgets become lean. Library workers have had to do more with less. It raises the question: would the library collapse if people worked the stated number of hours and/or stayed within their job description?

Asking workers or groups to change feels “personal.” It seems like an individual moral failing if a person burns out as though it were an accurate reflection of their ability and character. There are some individuals who will claim that work is supposed to be hard and difficult and people have to just suck it up. They use the stereotypical phrase, “It is called work for a reason.” It presumes that burnout is a personal factor rather than an organizational failure.

Organizations have weaponized the idea of passion or calling when it refers to working. The work that library professionals do such as helping patrons or serving the common good feels like it is “inherently good and sacred, and therefore beyond critique.”The previous quote and concept of vocational awe was coined by Fobazi Ettarh talks about the ways that librarianship at both an institutional and individual level are feeding into the narrative that dysfunctional systems and actions are beyond critique because of the mission, vision, and values of a highly regarded institution like the library.

Let’s stop blaming individuals for imposter syndrome, burnout, and low morale. Organizations send library professionals to conferences or bring in consultants to address these workplace issues. It often feels like the message is for individuals to fix their attitude because organizations can’t be successful unless people are productive. After these employees come back to their libraries, they often find that the policies and budget don’t support the necessary changes that need to be made. Libraries need to look at the systems and structures. When we ask people to make do with less, or don’t give them all training or resources to do a project, people will say that they aren’t good enough. They think that there is something wrong with themselves. Instead, let’s look at the system that underpays them and doesn’t give money for projects.

When we focus on a process, policy, or system, leaders can make workers feel that they are less targeted or spotlighted. There will be less resistance, rejection, and backlash. Additionally, these problems are complex and multifaceted. To create bigger and long lasting change, it is better to focus on the system rather than the individual.

These issues surrounding quiet quitting create an opportunity for the university library to recognize the challenges and assume responsibility for resolving them. This is a message of hope because it means that members of the community can take action. Hope without action is just toxic positivity. The challenge might be tough but the pain even more so. The pain that we are collectively feeling can act as an impetus for change. It can keep us focused and working towards something positive.

I want to end this post with a list of ideas. I acknowledge that every library environment is different and we each have a unique set of circumstances. It is my hope that each of us at no matter what level of the organization that we find ourselves will enact change where we can. As a result of this change, library workers and administration are able to build on positive patterns of trust, commitment, accountability, and results. We are part of an interconnected ecosystem. Just like the natural world, if we neglect one area, other areas suffer.

Some ideas for change include:

Individuals and organizations need to undertake an honest assessment of the financial situation, staffing patterns, and employee workload. Using this information, they need to make deliberate decisions and create sustainable environments. It doesn’t mean giving up but rather a chance at a new beginning. An opportunity to get rid of preconceived ideas of what it means to be successful. It can be exhausting to live up to unrealistic ideals. Quiet quitting isn’t a symptom rather it is a direct cause of overwork, neglect, and low compensation. When people don’t feel cared about, eventually they stop caring.
Individuals must prioritize the health and safety of individuals at all levels of the organization. There is a thought that it would be easy to just get rid of things that are bad or harmful and everything would be solved. It is only one piece. We also need to create systems that heal too. Activities could include job flexibility, access to mental health services, and diversity policies.

Leaders need to readdress relationships with historically marginalized employee groups by focusing on pay equity, promotion and tenure, and workload distribution. They need to have difficult conversations and enact change.
Administrators need to take a long term view of the future instead of focusing on the current budget year. Planning for the future instills in library workers at all levels a sense of purpose and motivation to go the distance. It also allows us to plan for the well-being of future generations.
The system needs to be designed to learn and improve over time. It can’t just be a yearly training and there is no single solution. It needs to be a continuous improvement feedback loop. Leaders need to look at personal structures and relationships that enhance psychological safety, empathy, vulnerability, and peer support. This will create a culture of support at all levels that aligns structures and processes with our institutional values and purpose.
Diversity work needs to be baked into the job duties of individuals and they should have adequate time during their work day to accomplish it.
Building managers need to design workspaces to fit a variety of different people including individuals who are neurodivergent and who have differing physical abilities.

Informational Holism: Humanities librarianship, liberal arts, and the limitations of quantitative metrics

Benjamin Dueck is a General Librarian in the Arts & Humanities Division at The University of Manitoba Libraries. They are the liaison librarian for Religion, English, Catholic Studies, Theatre & Drama, and Peace & Conflict Studies. Their role includes collection development, teaching information literacy, and providing reference services for faculty, students, and staff.

I am writing this article in the midst of a major life transition. Earlier this month, I began working as a full-time Humanities Liaison Librarian at the University of Manitoba. This is both my first academic job and the only time in recent memory that I haven’t been a student. I am feeling proud and excited to be embarking on this new journey! Still, despite the stability that this position provides, I remain plagued with feelings of uncertainty. As someone who falls somewhere in between the proverbial “millennial” and “zoomer” generations, I’ve become accustomed to a certain sense of precariousness. As a child who grew up on the internet, I struggle to remember a time where there wasn’t a global crisis happening around me—be it the 2008 economic crash, the COVID-19 pandemic, or the omnipresent threat of climate change. Be that as it may, I remain resolutely optimistic about the role that academic librarians have to play in the future of teaching and learning. More specifically, I believe that the qualitative research methods supported by humanities librarians like myself will become vitally important in decades to come.

Historically, the capacities I am referring to have been transmitted to learners through the artes liberales (or liberal arts), a Greco-Roman ideal based on the assumption that a flourishing and cooperative society requires a population that is systematically trained in critical, interdisciplinary thinking. In this blog post, I want to reflect on my experiences as a humanities librarian and explore how the philosophies that inform my work contradict many of the demands being placed on universities by neoliberal governments. I hope that those working in similar positions will be able to relate to the ideas explored here and come away from this article feeling empowered and reinvigorated.

Informational holism

As a subject librarian serving the English and Religion programs on my campus, my day-to-day work involves thinking about domains of experience that elude empirical measurement: ethics, theology, and the great wisdom traditions of the world. In order to support the information needs in my subject areas, I take an integral approach to my reference work and in-class instruction. I strive to teach my community to master a form of inquiry that I call informational holism, the ability to intuit across disciplinary boundaries, think in gestalts, and cognize around clusters of datapoints (figure 1). Informational holism can be contrasted with linear-procedural thinking which emphasizes step-by-step instruction and a hierarchical connection between concepts (figure 2). It is also different from decentralized or “non-hierarchical” network thinking which maps the connections between concepts but lacks the dimensionality needed to render relationships of transcendence (figure 3). While the latter two styles do a good job of modeling workflows and making them more efficient, they tend to flatten out the qualitative depth of the objects they represent. If this all seems overtly abstract, worry not! In the sections that follow, I will ground these concepts with some more concrete examples.

Quantification & the neoliberal university

One of the things I love most about working as an academic librarian is the open-ended nature of my job. Aside from daily duties of reference service, teaching, collection development, and committee work, I have the privilege to choose the kinds of projects that I work on. While I remain grateful to have this liberty, the freedom to choose arrives bundled with the gift and the curse of unstructured time. Lindsay O’Neil gives some much needed strategies for managing this freedom in her articles on time management and academic culture shock. Still, I frequently feel torn between two competing inner voices—a wise and encouraging voice that advises me to slow down and reflect and the voice of a factory foreman chastising me for not using this time to the best of my ability.

I’ve come to realize that this pressure to maximize my work output is only one ripple in a broader current. I am employed after all in the Canadian province of Manitoba, a place where a neoliberal conservative government is making moves to restructure public education as part of a larger effort to stimulate private sector growth. In this landscape, publicly funded universities like mine are being pressured to align themselves with the economic goals of the state by demonstrating their value and accountability. One of the ways that this manifests in the lives of academic workers like myself is through the use of quantitative metrics designed to save time and money. Generally speaking, these metrics leverage networked technology as a means of meeting the goals delineated by linear-procedural strategic plans. In my own institution, I have seen them implemented in various ways: key performance indicators (KPIs) that track the form and frequency of library reference appointments, usage statistics used to determine the value of library subscriptions, and alumni employment surveys that inform how funding is to be allocated to specific academic programs. Quantitative metrics have their place and are undoubtedly useful from an organizational perspective. In my library, the teams that are implementing these metrics are doing so in good faith, working as best they can within a strategic plan that has been set by the university. Nevertheless, if these measures are used at the institutional level to support a program of economic austerity, they can become harmful to the academic community as a whole.

The limitations of scholarly metrics

To understand how the biases of linear-procedural logic become materialized through networked technology, I want to talk about scholarly metrics. As an academic librarian, this topic comes up quite often in my reference appointments, particularly with graduate students who are preparing to enter the academic job market. Broadly speaking, scholarly metrics refer to technologies and programs that are used to measure the “impact” of digital objects (journals, papers, researcher profiles etc.). The most common are the citation tracking features available through platforms like Google Scholar, PLoS, BioMed Central and ResearchGate. Within these systems, impact is measured quantitatively. The greater the total citation count of a digital object, the greater the impact and influence it can be said to have. The problem is not that these tools are inaccurate, it is that they do not tell the whole story.

To understand why this is, I pose to you a hypothetical question. Which is more impactful, a research paper that is cited 100 times or a book chapter that while only being cited once, plays a central role in an emerging scholar’s PhD dissertation? If this were my own work being referenced, I’d tend towards the latter. I’d much rather my work be engaged with in a thoughtful and rigorous way than referenced many times in passing. You may have a different opinion and I respect that. Your answer will depend on your own definition of what is valuable and your own tendencies as a thinker. Nevertheless, the question sheds light on the way scholarly metrics are biased towards a particular definition of what constitutes valuable knowledge. More perniciously, when quantitative metrics become central to the budgetary decisions made by universities, academics feel the need to choose research topics that yield the highest possible impact. If left to continue, I can see this trend posing a threat to academic freedom, particularly if research tied to industry is prioritized over work that contributes to human knowledge in the long term.

The future of humanities librarianship

In their book The Evolution of Liberal Arts in the Global Age (2017), editors Peter Marber and Daniel Araya show how the liberal arts model has survived centuries of economic and technological upheaval. This is because it teaches timeless skills that help learners to navigate periods of social and economic change. In order for subject librarians working in the humanities to best serve our communities, we need to become vocal advocates for the artes liberales as both a guide to action and as a philosophical ideal. On a practical level, this means fighting back against metrics that impose a reductive quantitative logic onto our work and proposing sustainable alternatives that leave room for informational holism.

Valuable guidance on this front can be found in Kevin Adams writing about integrating Critical Information Literacy (CIL) into library instructional design. Pedagogies of this kind will be crucial in the coming decades. Still if these initiatives are to have an ongoing structural impact, they must be paired with a commitment to the liberal arts at the institutional level and a broader societal shift away from neoliberal economics. I am aware that I have only diagnosed the most general contours of this phenomenon here. To use a scholarly cliché, a richer engagement with this subject goes beyond the scope of a single blog post! Nevertheless, this is a topic that I plan to expand on in future research projects. I encourage anyone who shares similar interests to get in touch with me or to leave a comment below.