Administration/Leadership

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

Questions Middle Managers Ask: Ways of Seeing Everyday Work

This past semester, I participated in a professional development program at my institution targeting middle managers. My cohort included about a dozen such folks from across the university. While the size of our respective departments as well as the nature of our work varied, our shared experience as middle managers gave us a strong foundation of common responsibilities, opportunities, and challenges from which to work.

Each session seemed to highlight the balancing act that middle managers frequently have to strike. Like in our session about management and leadership skills, for instance. A typical framing presents the roles as distinct — are you a manager or a leader? the articles ask. Often, that framing elevates leadership as the more desirable role and positions management as inferior. Yet our discussion in this session positioned the skills as complementary. Instead of distinguishing management and leadership as separate roles, our facilitator acknowledged that department heads must lead and manage at the same time and that both are essential responsibilities.

We middle managers know this. Management is about planning, organizing, and coordinating. Management means attending to workflows, staffing, training, timeline, and resources. Leadership is about creating a sense of purpose and providing direction. Leadership means attending to vision and culture. Department heads use leadership skills to shape the environment for success and management skills to execute the work.

Yet managing the work can carry a particular sense of urgency. Without management, chaos can ensue. A staffing gap or a workflow problem requires attention now. Leadership is also essential, no doubt — developing culture, creating shared understanding, envisioning the future — but it’s quieter and slower. The busy-ness of management and its many demands can crowd out opportunities for leadership, continually pushing it to the back burner. The daily work of management can make it feel like there’s no time left for the big picture thinking of leadership. If you don’t create room for leadership, our facilitator said, you’re never going to get room for non-management work. So what’s a middle manager to do?

This next bit is where I really felt the light bulb turn on. What are the questions that management asks versus the questions that leadership asks?, our facilitator posed.

Framing management and leadership as questions to ask offered a simple yet significant shift for my thinking. It helped me see them as lenses to apply to any situation, habits of inquiry to bring to any opportunity or challenge. If my department is overwhelmed, a management lens could help me ask: What resources and support do we need? What processes or workflows might we improve? What timelines or expectations can we adjust? At the same time, a leadership lens could help me ask: What needs are most important? What work has the most impact on our mission? What assumptions are we making? What can we stop doing? How can we acclimate and support the team through changes we make?

Instead of being categories of work to carve out time for, this shift frames management and leadership as complementary ways of seeing my everyday work. This makes leadership feel less abstract and more actionable, positions them both as routine practice, and enhances their complementary nature, too. In fact, it’s helped me recognize the ways I already employ both regularly, and often in the same moments, with different lines of inquiry. This strikes me as an effective and sustainable way to carve out a bit more space for leadership practice, to strike a better balance between management and leadership.

What lenses do you apply to your everyday work? What questions do your lenses help you ask?

Coaching as Critical Leadership Praxis

Editor’s note: We welcome a guest blog post from Angela Pashia, who was an academic librarian for 12 years before becoming an ICF-Certified (ACC) leadership coach.

For the first half of my library career, I was adamant that I didn’t want to move into any formal leadership role. I was an instruction and liaison librarian, and I loved working directly with students and faculty to teach critical information literacy. I also got to teach a credit bearing information literacy course on a regular basis, which gave me a lot of opportunities to practice using critical pedagogy. I valued these opportunities to challenge rigid hierarchies and empower students to shift from seeing themselves as just consumers to producers of information.

My vision of what it means to be in management did not align with these values at all.

Fast forward several years, through becoming a reluctant leader, learning that I absolutely loved the opportunity to develop a team, and then becoming a leadership coach for librarians… Now I work with library leaders who are struggling with similar challenges rooted in similar narratives about what it means to be an effective leader.

In this narrative, the leader knows everything about how everything in the unit functions, and always has an answer for how to move forward in any situation. It’s very clear that this leader is directing everything – whether that’s through giving orders or just through always handing out solutions to every situation, for team members who’ve learned that it’s simplest to just go ask what the leader thinks. It’s clear that this leader is the one making all of the decisions that keep this library functioning and moving forward.

The best version of this leader comes across as a very knowledgeable parental figure, telling you how things should be done because they care about you. But they’re still telling you what to do, instead of helping you learn to work through the process on your own. This leader does provide development opportunities for their staff, but that tends to focus on molding you to follow in their footsteps, regardless of whether that’s the best fit for you.

Another version of this leader just gives you instructions and then grades how well you followed those instructions each year on your annual evaluation. They may or may not provide the scaffolded lessons that you need to complete the assignment well.

We don’t see this leader admitting when they don’t know things or asking many questions or having doubts. We don’t see this leader actively sharing power with their team members in a way that would loosen up their control.

This narrative about effective leadership becomes problematic when a new leader steps into their position knowing that they don’t know everything yet. They need to ask questions, but fear that doing so will communicate that they’re not qualified for this role. And that leads to imposter syndrome.

And this narrative doesn’t fit those of us who value collaboration, empowerment, and shared governance. I resisted moving into a leadership position for years because I didn’t want to be the person telling people what to do. My clients need support in learning new ways to lead, because this narrative of leadership doesn’t fit their values, either.

And that’s why I fell in love with coaching.

For me, learning coaching skills, as defined and practiced by the International Coaching Federation (and described in my last post), provided a way to transfer the principles of critical pedagogy from the classroom to leading a team.

Banking Knowledge

I learned about the “banking method of education” long before I read Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Students aren’t bank vaults waiting for us to deposit bits of knowledge. Genuine learning is a dialogic process between student and teacher, building toward the development of a critical consciousness. Instead of being the “sage on the stage,” we can better support student learning by being a “guide on the side.”

And yet, we love depositing bits of knowledge! Many of the leaders I work with feel helpful when they come up with a great solution to every problem their team members bring to them. Leading a team is different from teaching a classroom, but these are often missed opportunities to develop that team member’s skills.

When a team member comes to you for help with a problem, using a coaching approach shifts you from depositing a solution to engaging in a dialogic process. When you start with a question like, “What ideas have you already thought of?”, and then ask genuinely curious follow-up questions to workshop one of those ideas, they learn more about how your organization works. Depending on the context, that may include learning to think critically about embedding equity and accessibility into library services, programs, and policies.

Holistic Approach

Building on Freire’s work, bell hooks proposed an “engaged pedagogy” that recognizes both student and teacher as whole people actively participating in the learning dialog. Students are not just passive consumers of information, and both sides bring a lifetime of rich experiences and emotional lives into the classroom.

The leaders I work with recognize that this is true with their team members, as well, but don’t always feel prepared to respond effectively when emotions are affecting how team members are showing up. When they do open a conversation, it can turn into two hours of the team member venting about everything they’re dealing with, which throws their schedule into disarray and leaves them emotionally drained. So now they’re afraid to even open that conversation again. And it’s one thing to know this intellectually, but when you feel pressured to keep things moving as quickly as possible because your library is doing too much with too little, it’s easy to overlook the bigger picture.

Learning to effectively use a coaching model to structure your conversation can help you navigate some of these tricky situations. This approach provides a roadmap to acknowledge those emotions, dig below the surface to identify the root of the issue, and figure out a path forward. It takes practice to find the right balance of listening to what’s going on now before jumping into problem-solving mode, but these models provide guard rails to keep you from just getting stuck in complaints.

And building a habit of using these ICF-style coaching skills can create openings to find out what’s really going on for people.

Self-actualization

As part of this engaged pedagogy, hooks wrote that “teachers must be actively committed to a process of self-actualization that promotes their own wellbeing if they are to teach in a manner that empowers students” (p. 15). This includes ongoing learning and ongoing reflection.

A coaching approach to leadership also prioritizes your own wellbeing and ongoing learning. Developing a curious, open, nonjudgmental mindset requires you to give yourself space to reflect, consider other perspectives, and make sure that your emotions aren’t skewing your view of a given situation. To support librarians in their ongoing learning and development, I regularly write a newsletter about applying a coaching approach in your library.

And, although it’s not exactly connected to critical pedagogy, I’ve found that this self-actualization process helps to combat imposter syndrome. Explicitly adopting a leadership style that encourages curiosity and questions gives new leaders permission to admit to not already knowing everything. And that helps to support their well-being.

What questions does this spark for you?

I’d love to continue this discussion in the comments section!

References

hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: education as the practice of freedom. Routledge.

Exploring Coaching As a Leadership Skill

Editor’s note: We welcome a guest blog post from Angela Pashia, who was an academic librarian for 12 years before becoming an ICF-Certified (ACC) leadership coach.

When you think of coaching, what comes to mind for you?

I’ve been talking about this a lot over the past couple of years, since becoming a professional coach. It’s becoming common for job ads for library leadership roles to mention coaching as a responsibility or coaching skills as a requirement^[i]. On the other hand, I’ve worked with library leaders whose team members completely shut down at the mention of being coached, because of past experiences with workplace coaching. That seems like a disconnect, but I attribute it to very different definitions of coaching.

My first encounter with anything explicitly labeled “coaching” happened when I was a librarian exploring other possible career paths. I came across a video promoting a training program to become a book coach, and I thought that sounded like the coolest job ever! From this series of videos, it sounded like a book coach would mentor and guide authors through the publishing process, as well as do some teaching about the process when needed. As a librarian, the parts of my job that I loved the most were mentoring junior faculty and teaching critical information literacy in a credit-bearing course, so this seemed like a perfect fit! That idea of coaching as sort of the “guide-on-the-side” version of teaching and mentoring seems pretty common among the librarians I’ve talked with who haven’t had any specific training in coaching.

Being a librarian, I threw myself into researching more about professional coaching. Coaching is a completely unregulated field, but there are some professional organizations trying to establish shared standards and definitions. The International Coaching Federation (ICF) is the largest and most widely recognized member-led professional organization for coaches. So I completed an ICF-accredited program instead of the book coaching course that set me onto this path, and discovered that coaching is not at all what I had imagined.

The ICF version of coaching is a strengths-based approach, assuming that the person being coached is a fully capable adult with strengths and resources to draw on. Unlike a mentoring relationship, in which I would share my experience and knowledge with someone less experienced in that area, coaching centers inquiry – asking questions and listening a lot more than I talk. The ICF defines coaching as:

“partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential”

Partnering is about setting aside hierarchies as much as possible. For me, it feels like taking the next step from using critical pedagogy, shifting from the “guide on the side” to being an active collaborator. The process is a semi-structured inquiry model, with questions designed to help dig into the root of a challenge, so that we can find the best path forward. And this helps to maximize their potential by focusing on reaching goals that matter to them, in a way that works best for them.

In learning to coach, I shifted from sharing my expertise to helping others develop their own solutions.

Coaching as a leadership style

Coaching as a leadership style often comes up when I’m working with new leaders who are dealing with imposter syndrome. While it’s important to acknowledge the structural factors that contribute, I’ve found that our mental models of what it means to be “a leader” can also contribute to this sense of being an imposter. One common part of that is the idea that some people are “born leaders,” instead of recognizing that leadership is a skill that has to be developed. Another contributing factor is what your image of “a leader” looks like. If your idea of a good leader is based on watching experienced leaders who seem to know everything about everything and always have a solution for every problem, then how do you see yourself as an effective leader when you’re still learning?

Explicitly adopting coaching as a leadership style gives you permission to let go of the pressure to already know everything, and to embrace your curiosity. This approach encourages you to listen to your team members as the experts in their specialized areas – which means you should ask them questions to learn from their expertise! This invites more perspectives and ideas to the table, which leads to better solutions than any individual leader would be able to consistently come up with on their own.

The foundation for developing this coaching approach is to work on practicing staying in a curious, open, nonjudgmental mindset. That includes pausing to question what assumptions you’re making about a situation, continuing to learn, and viewing mistakes as lessons instead of as failures. That also includes paying attention the ways biases, context, and culture influence our interactions.

Practicing staying in this mindset is useful in all of your interactions, and helps you lead in a more inclusive, trauma-informed way. For example, staying curious while training a new employee can help you learn more about how they work best and how you can best support them.

The time to shift into actively coaching is when your team member is working through a challenge where there’s no one correct path forward – whether that’s planning a program, deciding the best way to do outreach to a liaison department, or thinking through which conference to submit a proposal to. Coaching is about helping your team member work through challenges and find the solution that’s right for them, so they need to be able to make the decisions about how to move forward.

There are some important skills to develop and several models that people use to shape their coaching conversations. Two fundamental skills are active listening and asking open-ended, non-judgmental questions.

What this looks like in practice

When someone comes to you for help solving a problem:

One simple way to start incorporating this mindset is to ask more questions before offering your solution.

“What ideas have you already thought of?”

And then get curious about workshopping those ideas before you add your own to the mix!

When you have information that they need:

The emphasis on partnering means doing your best to share information instead of giving advice that someone might feel pressured to take.

That can sound like the difference between:

“We tried that before, and it didn’t work. You should give up on that idea.”

And:

“We tried that before, and here are the things that went wrong… How does that affect the way you’re thinking about this idea?”

Depending on the details, they may decide to scrap that idea, or they may come up with some great improvements on the original plan. Either way, it becomes their choice.

When you need to address a performance issue:

This could apply to any time when you need to see a certain outcome within a certain time frame, because it can be hard to see what options they have. Either get this done by this deadline, or face consequences. But when you look for any opportunity to offer choices, you’ll be surprised at how many you can find!

One way this could show up is:

“I need to see this outcome by this time next month. How do you want me to check in with you between now and then to make sure you’re on track?”

A different version of coaching as a leadership style

I could go on all day about coaching as I understand it, but to understand why some employees reject it, we need to talk about other ways “coaching” has been taught. Within the well-established Situational Leadership Model, they include coaching in their “Style 2”:

“Selling, Coaching or Explaining: Leader still makes decisions but provides context and engages in dialogue to reinforce buy-in.”

This approach is grounded in work from the 1970s, while the ICF was founded in the 1990s, so that may explain the very different uses of this term. And I’ll admit that I haven’t completed this program, so I may be missing some nuance. But years ago, I had a supervisor who used this “selling” style frequently, focusing on getting members of our department to “buy-in” to their priorities instead of supporting us in setting goals that mattered to us. Let’s just say that this approach led to very different outcomes than I’ve experienced from ICF-aligned coaching.

Of course there will be times when a leader has to be the one to make the final decision. And in that case, being transparent about explaining the reasoning behind that decision is good practice. But that would not be considered coaching within the ICF framework.

So whenever you’re discussing coaching, it’s important to make sure you’re both using the same definition. And when I work with leaders whose team members have negative associations with the label “coaching”, we frame it as leading with curiosity, instead.

[i] I did a quick skim of ALA Joblist while drafting this post. On just the first page of unfiltered results, I found three job ads that mention coaching!

Belonging, Power, and the Big Heart Building Work Between

Belonging is often described as a feeling—something we either experience or lack, as if it is found by chance rather than actively created. In institutions, belonging is frequently seen as incidental rather than the outcome of ongoing relational effort. But belonging is built through care, attention, and the often-invisible work of those who make room for others. Moments of transition make that labor visible, inviting us to pause and give flowers thoughtfully while we can.

This piece is a reflection on what it means to build belonging through librarianship, and on the communities and colleagues who make that work possible. It also asks how belonging is defined and distributed within a profession that is predominantly white and female, and how individual narratives—like my own—fit within, benefit from, and must be accountable to that broader context.

With Intentionality

Within university settings, librarianship and archival work have devoted significant time, energy, and resources to fostering a sense of belonging among students, faculty, and community members—often positioning libraries as sites of welcome, care, and connection within complex institutional landscapes. This was certainly what drew me in to the profession as an undergraduate. At a time when I struggled to understand who I was or what I could offer, librarianship felt less like a calling and more like a possibility. It seemed like it could be a space where belonging seemed not only valued, but intentionally built.

That isolation is not accidental. I’ve always been intensely aware of how lonely a university campus can be, and how much heavier this experience weighs on people who are already marginalized. That awareness drew me to librarianship. I wanted to counter that isolation.

Universities are often described as communities, yet within contemporary higher education–shaped by market logics, austerity, and increasing precarity—that language can feel aspirational at best. Even while benefiting from significant racial privilege, I did not experience the university as a site of meaningful belonging beyond my relationships with library staff colleagues. And even within that space, class distinctions between staff and librarians created points of tension that shaped how belonging was felt, distributed, and sustained.

Measuring success

It was at Arizona State University Library that belonging began to feel less aspirational and more tangible. While libraries are embedded wIthin the same institutional structures that shape higher education more broadly, they can have the possibility of operating through relational rather than strictly heirarchical practices. Care, attentiveness, and responsiveness are not abstract values but daily requirements of this work. And, I genuinely believe, values that ASU Library both champions and accomplishes through direct action. In this environment, belonging has emerged as something built collectively through trust, shared responsibility, and sustained relational labor.

At ASU, I experienced that sense of belonging most clearly through my colleagues. I was trusted to bring my full self to the work, encouraged to take intellectual and professional risks, and supported in ways that made sustained engagement possible. That support mattered profoundly. In a field where emotional and relational labor are often undervalued—and where isolation and burnout are common—experiencing collegial belonging shaped not only how I worked, but how I move through the world. It made the work feel shared rather than solitary, and it affirmed that building belonging is not an individual effort, but a collective one.

This did not mean the absence of tension or inequity. Librarianship remains shaped by the same racialized, gendered, and classed dynamics that structure the academy, including disparities in status, pay, and authority. And yet, within those constraints, I encountered colleagues who modeled what institutional belonging can look like in practice: collaboration, partnerships, and growth rather than competition.

The Potential for Repair

But my ASU story was also about complexity. Even when you believe in the work, it is exhausting to make a change. I discovered how draining it is to care deeply in spaces where change outpaces relationships. And I recognized how tenuous belonging can become when university politics shift around you.

That sense of belonging grew stronger and became real through the work itself, especially by caring for the Theatre for Youth and Community Collection. Working with this collection showed me that archives are not neutral, but shaped by who is included, who is invited, and whose stories are kept, and offers a chance to repair.

This potential for repair became most evident to me in moments when students encountered materials that reflected their own identities, communities, or creative lineages—sometimes for the first time. Watching a student recognize themselves in the historical record underscored how deeply representation matters. Importantly, these encounters were not incidental; rather, they resulted from intentional stewardship, collaborative description, and sustained relationship-building with artists, donors, and communities. As a result, belonging here was not symbolic. It was experienced.

At the same time, while these moments were powerful, they also revealed the significant labor required to build that sense of connection. Activating a collection in ways that feel inclusive, ethical, and responsive demands time, trust, and profound emotional investment. This experience is often in contexts where such labor is undervalued or under-resourced within an institution.

It is important to name the irony here: the sense of welcome and even belonging I found was largely cultivated by colleagues who themselves occupied marginal or precarious positions within the academy—arts faculty, staff members, colleagues with disabilities, and BIPOC, LGBTQIA+ librarians and archivists whose labor has historically been feminized, undervalued, and structurally constrained.

The Cost

Building belonging through librarianship is deeply meaningful work, but it is not without cost. The same relational labor that makes libraries feel humane can also be exhausting, especially when it is unevenly recognized or structurally unsupported. Care, when treated as an individual disposition rather than a shared, structurally resourced, institutional investment, becomes difficult to sustain.

At ASU, I became increasingly aware of the emotional weight that accompanies this kind of work. Advocating for community-centered collections, ethical archival practices, and inclusive engagement often meant navigating institutional constraints that moved faster than relationships could be built. The work required patience, persistence, and a willingness to sit with ambiguity. While I was fortunate to experience strong collegial support, the broader systems in which the work unfolded did not always make time and care for relational practice.

This tension—between the values that draw many of us to librarianship and the structures that shape how that work is resourced—was one of the most difficult lessons of my time at ASU. It sharpened my understanding of how fragile belonging can be in transition, and how quickly care-centered work can slip into burnout. And yet, naming that cost also clarified what I believe the work requires: not less care, but more collective accountability for sustaining it.

Going Grief

Leaving ASU for a new role in early 2026 has stirred a grief I was not entirely prepared for. Stepping away from students whose growth I have witnessed, from collections I have stewarded with care, and from especially colleagues who offered trust, generosity, and challenge in equal measure. This is not the grief of regret, but of genuine gratitude and connection that form when work is shared and deeply invested in.

There is a particular ache in leaving a place where you have poured vision and labor into something ongoing. Much of the work I was engaged in at ASU was iterative and future-facing: collections in the process of being reimagined, relationships still unfolding, students still finding their footing. To leave knowing that some of those seeds will continue to grow without you is both a testament to collective work and a reminder that belonging is never owned by a single person.

That grief is also evidence. It shows that something real was built. The ability to grieve a workplace and miss colleagues is rare and meaningful. It reflects a model of librarianship based on being changed by the work.

Carrying the Work Forward

As I move into my new role at the University of Chicago Library, I carry this work with me not as a completed chapter, but as an ongoing practice. The context will change. The questions will deepen. The communities and institutional cultures will be different. But the commitments that shaped my time at ASU remain the same: to build relationships grounded in care, to approach librarianship as an ethical practice, and to treat belonging not as an abstract value but as something made through daily, collective effort.

To my ASU Library community: Thank you for giving this early-career librarian a shot, and for showing me the way. Special thanks to Shari Laster, Nancy Godoy, Renee James, Harold Housley, Jessica Salow, Seonaid Valiant, Jasmine Torrez, Vina Begay, Elizabeth Dunham, Suzy Morgan, Rachel Leket-Mor, William Yates, Josh Maki, Zoie Ypsilanti, Allinston Saulsberry; and, of course, my Humanities Lab chapter writing crew, especially Matt Harp, Rachel Fernandez, and Joyce Martin.