promotion

Tenure-lite: Proving Value to Systems That Don’t Value Us

This past week, I submitted my 3-year probationary review dossier. I am currently working towards a promotion with a multi-year probationary period, and without going into detail for this post, I have incredibly complicated and often contradictory feelings about academia.

The ability to hold contradictions—to critique systems while working within them, to name injustice while building alternatives, to acknowledge precarity while finding meaning in our work—has become essential to succeeding as an academic librarian. But let’s be clear: this constant negotiation is emotional labor. It’s exhausting to simultaneously perform competence for evaluation while questioning the validity of those very metrics. And it’s draining to build community and solidarity while competing for limited positions. It’s demanding to maintain hope while documenting the ways systems fail us.

This emotional labor is real work, and it matters. Working through these contradictions—rather than resolving them or pretending they don’t exist—is itself valuable labor. It’s also labor that is often overlooked in our promotion criteria.

It’s complicated

My job provides me with significant academic freedom. I have the opportunity to publish, present, and share my work. When I started this position, I had never written anything for publication or presented at a professional conference, not even during my undergraduate or graduate studies. I am learning as I go, leaning into making mistakes and learning quickly rather than striving for perfectionism.

Yet even this support reveals the contradictions we navigate. Colleagues offer generous mentorship, but their most common response is, “It depends”—a phrase that simultaneously acknowledges the flexibility of our roles and signals the very ambiguity that creates anxiety. The academic freedom I value exists alongside unclear expectations. The opportunity to grow professionally comes with the burden of figuring out how to document that growth for systems that don’t quite know how to evaluate it.

These aren’t complaints about individuals—my colleagues are doing their best within structures that don’t serve any of us perfectly. But the emotional labor here is real: I’m genuinely grateful for support while simultaneously aware that I’m navigating challenges endemic to our profession. We lack the established paths that teaching faculty enjoy, and our unique contributions don’t fit neatly into academic frameworks. When I explain to non-academics that many positions require an additional master’s degree, a PhD, or getting another master’s for tenure, they ask, “All that for a librarian?” That question stings not because it’s wrong, but because it reveals how little our work is understood—even by institutions that employ us.

Learning to hold these contradictions—gratitude and frustration, support and uncertainty, professional growth and systemic dysfunction—is part of the work itself.

Before diving deeper into these challenges, I want to make clear that I am not naïvely optimistic or cynical.

Instead, I believe that transformation is possible within unjust systems, paired with an unflinching analysis of those systems’ limitations. It means acknowledging structural inequities—invisible labor, inconsistent evaluation criteria, limited access to research time or mentorship—while still building practices that affirm agency, solidarity, and purpose.

For hybrid or mixed-status librarians navigating promotion and tenure, this means:

Naming structural contradictions openly, refusing to internalize them as individual failings
Building communities of practice that counter isolation through collective accountability
Reclaiming narrative agency in our dossiers and professional identities
Cultivating sustainable imagination about what academic librarianship could become

This approach guides what follows.

I made a meme! Thank you, Zohran Mamdani, NYC mayor incumbent.

The Statistics–And What We’re Building From Them

The statistics reveal a complex reality: only 30% of academic institutions hire tenure-eligible librarians (Bailey & Becher, 2022). Moreover, a 2017 ACRL survey found roughly half of academic libraries categorize librarians as faculty, while nearly one-fifth classify them as non-tenure-track faculty.

At private institutions, 77% don’t offer tenure-track positions for librarians (Bailey & Becher, 2022). As one analysis notes, academic librarian status has undergone a “seismic shift away from faculty status and tenure-track positions,” with many universities operating “a mixed model where some librarians are hired as tenure-track and others with fixed-term contracts” (Academic Librarian Status, n.d.). Many of us fit into hybrid categories—”academic professionals,” continuing appointment tracks, mixed-status systems where “professional librarians” blend faculty and staff roles. That’s my current status.

These statistics could be read as evidence of professional decline—and many do read them that way. But they also function as evidence that academic librarianship is actively creating new models of academic work. We’re not failed faculty; we’re navigating uncharted territory, and that navigation itself is generative. The question isn’t whether we fit existing academic structures, but whether we can leverage our liminal position to reimagine what academic work can be.

This requires naming the contradictions openly—not to accept them, but to refuse to internalize them as individual failings. By articulating these tensions in our dossiers, in peer conversations, and in collective statements to administration, we engage in transparency as a pathway to reform.

What the literature doesn’t capture is how the metrics used often don’t match library work’s real demands. In reality, this constant evaluation—whether formal or informal—creates a hyperawareness of professional performance that can transform the joy of helping a student find precisely what they need into yet another moment of self-assessment.

The Structural Contradiction

The most absurd aspect is the fundamental contradiction at its heart: we’re asked to prove our value to systems that consistently undervalue us. We must justify our worth to provosts who regularly cut library budgets and positions, viewing us as expendable overhead rather than essential academic infrastructure. A profession that academic administration routinely underfunds is still expected to meet its standards and gain its approval.

This dynamic places the burden of success primarily on librarians themselves and on the mentorship networks within our profession. While other academic departments can count on institutional investment and colleagues who understand their field, academic librarians often find themselves advocating for resources while simultaneously having to prove we deserve them. We’re expected to demonstrate impact and innovation within systems designed to limit our influence.

The faculty liaison model exemplifies this dysfunction. We’re judged partly on how well we connect with faculty who have little institutional incentive to collaborate with us. Finding a faculty member who genuinely seeks meaningful partnership can be difficult. However, the institutional setup often shows that collaboration is more a matter of choice than necessity.

We’re held accountable for building bridges others have no motivation to cross—building relationships within systems that structurally discourage them, showing research impact with limited budgets, and showcasing educational innovation while frequently being excluded from curricular decisions. We’re asked to achieve academic excellence, yet administrators often view our work as secondary to the institution’s core mission.

Many librarians are already creating alternatives within this system:

Some libraries have formed peer review and writing groups across ranks, creating alternative mentorship structures when institutional support is inadequate.
Professional organizations like ACRL are developing new frameworks for evaluating library impact that don’t simply borrow from other disciplines.
Individual librarians are using local governance structures to advocate for clearer promotion pathways, submitting proposals for revised evaluation criteria that reflect our actual work.
Cross-institutional networks are sharing documentation strategies that make invisible labor legible—relational pedagogy, community partnerships, affective labor.

These aren’t solutions—they’re experiments in collective refusal. They represent librarians saying: “We will not compete in isolation; we will build alternative structures of support.” This is a complicated compromise, working within failing systems while actively building their replacements.

The Ambiguity Dilemma

Compounding these challenges is how RPT (review, promotion, tenure) documentation handles service expectations. Research on service satisfaction found that ambiguity in tenure documentation can cut both ways. It should be noted that some librarians appreciate the flexibility—vague standards allow them to explain their work creatively and encourage mentorship conversations with senior colleagues. For them, ambiguity equals freedom.

This isn’t naïve—it’s strategic. When we can’t change the rules, we can sometimes leverage their vagueness to make space for unconventional contributions: community-engaged scholarship that doesn’t fit traditional publication models, teaching innovations that happen outside classrooms, care work that sustains institutional equity. Some librarians use ambiguous criteria to craft dossier narratives that foreground process over product, showing how sustained community impact matters more than one-off publications.

But—and this is crucial—this strategy depends on power.

Senior librarians with established reputations can often interpret ambiguity creatively. Early-career librarians, librarians of color, disabled librarians, and those in precarious positions often cannot.

For many others, especially those on the tenure track, the lack of clarity creates constant anxiety. One librarian in the study explained, “I never know when enough is enough.” Another described it more bluntly: “we complain about this [RPT] document… we’ll be told by admin, ‘oh, well, it’s left short so it’s really open to your interpretation’ but then the problem is you walk into the room and you get told you interpreted it wrong… it’s a moving mark that nobody ever knows how to hit” (Rutledge et al., 2023, p. 7).

This isn’t just frustration—it’s a structural issue. To be clear, when administrators defend vague standards as “open to interpretation” but then penalize librarians for interpreting them “wrong,” the ambiguity stops being flexibility and becomes a trap. You can’t meet unclear expectations, which means you’re constantly second-guessing whether your service choices will count when review time comes.

Ambiguity can be leveraged strategically and it functions as a tool of control. The question then becomes: How do we collectively advocate for clarity where it protects vulnerable colleagues, while preserving flexibility where it enables innovation?

The Ableism Embedded in Academic Evaluation—and Disability Justice Alternatives

The probationary review process exists within what disability studies scholar Jay T. Dolmage identifies as an inherently ableist system, where disability has always been constructed as “the inverse, or opposite, of higher education” (3) The metrics we’re expected to meet—constant productivity, extensive conference travel, rigid timelines, intensive networking—reflect what researchers call “academic ableism.”

The pressure to perform well during probation can be especially challenging for individuals with chronic illnesses, neurodivergent conditions, or mental health issues. This situation is made even more complicated by the way ableism intersects with the precarious circumstances many of us face. Early-career academics often worry that disclosing their health challenges may negatively affect their careers, especially in environments where temporary contracts are more common than permanent positions.

The dilemma of disclosure—needing to request accommodations while fearing professional repercussions—forces many librarians to make difficult choices during their evaluations. As someone with chronic physical and mental health challenges, I have learned to advocate for myself but still struggle with the shame from internalized ableism.

But what if we reimagine what “productivity” and “excellence” can look like? This might mean:

Documenting process over product: showing how sustained community relationships matter more than publication counts.
Proposing alternative timelines that account for chronic illness, caregiving responsibilities, or neurodivergent work patterns.
Using disability justice frameworks to argue that diverse ways of working aren’t deficits to accommodate but strengths that enrich our profession.
Crafting dossiers that highlight integrative knowledge work—demonstrating how teaching, service, and scholarship mutually inform one another rather than treating them as separate categories.

Our precarious positions—frustrating as they are—may actually give us unique leverage here. Because we’re already outside traditional faculty structures, we have less to lose by proposing radical alternatives. We can be the ones who say: “What if we evaluated contribution over four years instead of three? What if we valued depth of community impact alongside breadth of conference presentations? What if we made sustainability explicit professional values?”

The Innovation Trap and its Alternatives

The pressure to innovate during probationary reviews creates what Julia Glassman (2017) describes as the “innovation fetish”—a fixation on newness for its own sake instead of genuine improvement. This pressure particularly affects those of us in precarious positions, where we are compelled to chase “flashy projects that take more time, resources, and money to do what we could have done with something much simpler.”

During my own review process, I’ve caught myself questioning whether refining and deepening existing successful programs counts as professional growth, or whether I need to reinvent my work to maintain a perception of innovation. This anxiety reflects what Glassman calls the corporatization of academic culture, which increasingly pressures us to see our work as startup pitches instead of lasting, relationship-based service.

But sustaining meaningful relationships isn’t just a “maintenance phase”. It means librarians collectively saying:

“I’m deepening this existing instruction program rather than creating a new one, and that’s scholarly growth.”
“We are maintaining relationships with community partners over years to build trust”
“Our team is refining a reference service that already works, and that’s innovation—just not the kind that gets conference buzz.”

Some of us are already practicing this resistance. We’re writing dossier narratives that foreground sustained care over flashy projects; supporting colleagues who choose depth over novelty; using promotion materials as sites of narrative sovereignty, and, crafting documents that insist: the moral and relational dimensions of librarianship are scholarly contributions.

This transforms the dossier from a compliance document into an act of professional re-visioning. It’s not just about getting promoted—it’s about changing what promotion values.

Looking Forward: What We Need

The landscape of academic librarianship is changing. We need better ways to understand and evaluate our work. The changes in librarian status at many institutions mean we are creating new models for academic life, often without past guidance or established best practices.

We need:

Assessment frameworks tailored specifically for library work instead of borrowing from other disciplines
Slow librarianship principles that focus on meaningful, sustainable work over constant innovation
Disability-inclusive evaluation processes that accommodate different ways of working and contributing
Documentation of the experiences of librarians in non-tenure-track academic professional roles
Advocacy for compensation and benefits that reflect our educational credentials and professional responsibilities
Solidarity practices that move us away from individual competition toward collective support for all library workers

Ideas for Supporting This Work
Connect with or form local peer review groups that practice collective documentation and mutual support.
Use ACRL forums and special interest groups to share alternative promotion narratives and evaluation models.
Propose institutional pilots at your library: portfolios instead of CVs, reflective practice documentation, community impact assessments.
Document what you’re trying to change and why.

What Still Needs Building
Disability-inclusive evaluation processes that accommodate diverse ways of working and normalize flexibility.
Compensation and benefit structures that reflect our educational credentials and professional responsibilities.
Solidarity practices that move us from individual competition toward collective care for all library workers—not just those on promotion tracks.
Documentation and research on the experiences of librarians in non-tenure-track roles, building the archive future librarians will need.
Feminist, Indigenous, and community-engaged epistemologies integrated into promotion criteria, recognizing diverse forms of knowledge work.

The Personal Stakes

Writing this from within the probationary process, I recognize that this isn’t an intellectual exercise. These questions of status, evaluation, and professional recognition have real implications for our livelihoods, career trajectories, and sense of professional identity. They influence our ability to take intellectual risks, pursue innovative projects, or speak truth to power in our institutions.

The research shows that tenured librarians assign greater value to the benefits of tenure compared to those without it (Silva et al., 2017)—a reminder that job security and academic freedom are not abstract concepts but tangible realities that influence our ability to serve our communities.

By documenting our professional achievements and our journeys through these challenges, and by sharing our stories—our emotions, our obstacles, and our creative solutions—we help build the roadmaps that future academic librarians will need.

Every time we support a colleague through their review, we practice the solidarity that could transform these systems.

Every time we document care work and relational labor as scholarly contributions, we chip away at the frameworks that undervalue us. The very act of articulating these problems is part of building solutions. Writing through my own review process, I hold onto this: transformation doesn’t require us to wait for institutions to value us differently. It requires us to value our work differently, collectively, and to build the structures that reflect that valuation.

It can also mean leaving. I mean this for career change librarians as well as those who refuse to stay in institutions that will never recognize their value. Refusal to compromise is entirely valid and just as important to this dialogue.

The roadmaps future academic librarians need aren’t waiting to be discovered—they’re being created right now, by us, in our imperfect and ongoing experiments in solidarity.

What has your experience been with probationary review or professional evaluation as an academic librarian? I’d love to hear your thoughts, stories and supportive screams in the comments.

References

Academic Librarian Status. (n.d.). A list of academic institutions in the United States and elsewhere, sorted by the professional status of their librarians. https://academiclibrarianstatus.wordpress.com/

Bailey, E., & Becher, M. (2022). Academic librarian faculty status. Chicago, IL. Association of College and Research Libraries.

Cary, S. (2001). Faculty rank, status, and tenure for librarians: Current trends. College & Research Libraries News, 62(5), 510-520. doi:https://doi.org/10.5860/crln.62.5.510

https://crln.acrl.org/index.php/crlnews/article/view/19384/22679

Dolmage, J. T. (2017). Academic ableism: Disability and higher education. University of Michigan Press.

Glassman, J. (2017). The innovation fetish and slow librarianship: What librarians can learn from the Juicero. In the Library with the Lead Pipe. http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2017/innovation-fetish/

Investigation of tenured and tenure-track academic librarians’ service satisfaction at public Association of Research Libraries’ (ARL) institutions. (2022). The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 48(6). https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0099133322001677

Silva, E., Galbraith, Q., & Groesbeck, M. (2017). Academic librarians’ changing perceptions of faculty status and tenure. College & Research Libraries, 78(4), 428-441. https://crl.acrl.org/index.php/crl/article/view/16639

No Goals

It’s that time of the year again: a new year and new goals. Several years ago, my friend wrote a mini-comic entitled No Goals, about minor hockey culture. The title refers to scoring goals throughout a hockey season, but also puns on not having a clear direction in life, influenced by overarching life goals.

I was thinking about my friend’s comic as I’m writing professional goals for the new year. I’ve never been someone without any goals, but goals are something I have been wrapping my head around, especially as an early-career academic librarian.

At my institution, goals set in our annual performance reviews weigh heavily for future promotion applications. You want to have a record of accomplishing your yearly goals to show consistent, professional growth to a future promotion committee. It’s important to think about what is achievable throughout the year, to show growth and progress, but also to challenge yourself. It’s like walking a tight-rope, having a goal that’s achievable on the one side, but challenging yourself on the other. Setting a goal that is challenging and achievable is why I have been wrapping my head around goal-setting, especially to have goals that are meaningful for me.

I, like the majority of my peers, like accomplishments; I like looking back and knowing I challenged myself, stuck with a task, and finished it. However, sometimes what I’m working towards doesn’t work out – a conference proposal is rejected, I’m not offered that research grant, a faculty member doesn’t invite me to teach to their class that semester, I don’t land that University Librarian job, I’m not elected ALA President, and so on. Some goals you have more control over and some, not as much. That’s why I’m still wrapping my head around writing achievable, yet challenging, goals.

To set my goals, I think about my year and where I want to be in a year’s time: what are my priorities for the year, where do I need more growth, and what opportunities do I foresee coming up. I then think about where my goals fit into the different sections of my performance review: professional performance, research, service, professional development, and teaching. I have at least one goal for each section, with more in the professional performance section as this area makes up the bulk of my job.

I try to make my goals SMART — because what librarian doesn’t like a witty acronym? But also, it helps me develop specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound goals. This gives me a framework and allows me to hone my focus on several goals for my performance review.

After I have a draft of my annual goals, I usually put my feet up on my desk, with my arms behind my head, and think about the riches and fame that will be showered upon me after I complete my goals for the year. Joking aside, I will spend time to think about my draft of goals for a few days or weeks and revise, then discuss my goals with the head of my library to get their thoughts and input.

While thankfully I can’t say I have no goals, as I’m putting the finishing touches on my performance review and it’s chalk full of new goals for myself, I hope the new year brings with it many accomplishments and completed goals for myself and for you.

What do you hope the new year brings? What are your goals for 2023? Pop them into the comments, if you’d like. We would love to hear from you.

Handling It: Under New Management

I’ve recently moved into a new role at the college library where I work. Our former Chief Librarian retired, and I applied for the job and was appointed as the new Chief at the beginning of the semester. My new job is exciting and challenging — I’m fortunate to continue to work with my terrific colleagues in the library and at a college in which the faculty and administration view the library as a valued partner. While I miss the teaching I did as Instruction Coordinator, I hope to be able to add some instruction back into my days once I get more settled. As Steven has blogged here, it can be hard to move into an administrative position that affords fewer opportunities to work directly with students. I do have one reference shift this semester, and I’m also looking forward to more opportunities in my new role to make good use of what I’ve learned in my research on how students do their academic work.

Any new job comes with a learning curve, even one in the same institution you’ve worked at for a while. Some days I feel a little bit like Atta in this scene from the movie A Bug’s Life:

And other days I like to channel Manfried from Adventure Time:

Luckily there haven’t been any literal (or even metaphorical) grasshopper infestations or fires to extinguish (…yet?). But I’ve been a bit surprised by how busy I am. In other new jobs I’ve always had some breathing room as I learned the ropes, some down time in those first couple of weeks in which there wasn’t anything immediately pressing to do. But moving into a new job in the same place has kept me nearly constantly busy with meetings, planning, and other duties.

I’ve got my eye on a couple of books to read about academic leadership and library management, but with my time so short I haven’t been able to carve out a space for reading them yet. Instead, I’ve been collecting shorter reads — blog posts and articles — about library management and leadership in general. Here are some that I’ve found really helpful so far:

Jennifer Vinopal’s blog post My job? Make it easier for employees to do their jobs well was published at the perfect time for me, right before I was interviewed for my new job, and I’ve kept it in mind ever since. It pairs well with an article published in the May issue of C&RL News: Start by interviewing every librarian and staff member: A first step for the new director, by Scott Garrison and Jennifer Nutefall. Even though I’ve worked with most of my colleagues for 6+ years, I’ve adapted these questions and am meeting with everyone one on one to learn more about their jobs and goals.

I’m also learning from several folks who’ve been doing this for longer than I have. At the end of last summer Karen Schneider posted her reflections on five years of being a library director, a post chock full of characteristically level-headed and wise advice. I’ve been reading Jenica Rogers’ blog Attempting Elegance for a while now too, even before the thought that maybe I would be interested in being a Chief Librarian entered my mind, and I’ve always appreciated her transparency about the large and small tasks that come with being a library director, and the highs and lows.

One of the things that’s been occupying my time this semester is working on hiring in two faculty and two staff positions. While I’ve been on search committees at my library in the past, this is the first time I’m acting as chair of these committees. I thoroughly enjoyed this well-written post about orienting new staff by Megan Brooks — Hospitality and Your New Staff Member — on Jessica Olin’s Letters to a Young Librarian blog last week. This post provides a great reminder about what to do (and the reverse, what not to do) when bringing new folks on board.

Do you have a favorite or recommended reading of the shorter-than-a-book variety for busy new library managers? Let me know in the comments!

Shared Governance and Library Faculty: Jazzing Academic Community

ACRLog welcomes a guest post from Sue Wiegand, Periodicals Librarian at St. Mary’s College in Notre Dame, IN.

As Commencement season draws near, I thought again of lines from Dana Goia’s poem: “Praise to the rituals that celebrate change…Because it is not the rituals we honor/but our trust in what they signify…” It’s been two years now since I served as Chair of our Faculty Assembly, the first librarian here to be elected to this role. Commencement is a ritual celebrating academic community — when we come together to celebrate the culmination of the academic year and our successful graduates. I think the ideal of academic community — all of our voices blending to make plans and create respectful discourse for mission-based decision-making — is what “shared governance” is all about. It’s a kind of jazz — a participatory blend of traditions, always changing — as well as a shared trust.

How many librarians participate in jazzing shared governance at their institutions, given the disparity of appointment categories at academic libraries? My “historic” 2009 election to be Chair-Elect of our shared governance body, Faculty Assembly, made me think more about this. I may be incredibly idealistic to be thinking in terms of academic community and shared governance at all, let alone as a librarian, a profession still subject to debate on its status, still sometimes considered a woman’s profession (well-behaved librarians don’t make history, right?). Higher education itself is on the very precipice of change in many of its hallowed traditions, and can ill afford more confusion. Could shared governance survive a librarian leading Faculty Assembly? Well, I had a lot to learn, but yes, we survived, with a lot of support from my faculty friends. Jazz is improvisational, after all. It absorbs and transforms tradition, and gives a participatory voice to all.

Are librarians faculty? Yes — in some academic institutions. Are we tenure-track? Yes — again, in some places. Can we earn promotion? You guessed it — maybe, maybe not, depends on where you are.

According to the Joint Committee on College Library Problems (including ACRL, AACU: American Association of American Colleges and Universities, and AAUP: American Association of University Professors), in a report issued in 2012: “Faculty status entails for librarians the same rights and responsibilities as for other members of the faculty. They should have corresponding entitlement to rank, promotion, tenure, compensation, leaves, and research funds.” I like the dual reference to rights and responsibilities. ALA and ACRL have also weighed in with their guidelines, the Standard for the Appointment, Promotion, and Tenure of Academic Librarians. The Chronicle of Higher Education has covered the question periodically; two examples are from 2008 and 2013. The comments sections often show a nice variety of perspectives on the subject, and incidentally on the academic tenure system in general.

Obviously, mileage varies a great deal on this one, and each tradition has its adherents. For me, having faculty status and earning tenure was a valuable experience that led to increased collaboration with classroom faculty, in both collection development of library resources and library research instruction. These include my favorite topic of conversation, scholarly communication — how it informs collection development as well as guiding research instruction for library resources — leading to informative discussions. The bittersweet part for me is that librarians here earn tenure, but are not eligible for promotion. It seems as though every place has its own ethos — its own distinctive style — about what seems to work best for them. Tradition rules.

Should librarians participate in shared governance? In my experience, the answer to that is an unequivocal yes — the experience is so rich, and the opportunities for interaction with classroom faculty so rewarding, I think librarians should let their voices be heard in their academic communities whenever possible. Shared governance and faculty status lets the librarian voice be heard, lest students enter the library to do research and find “there’s nothing there to support it,” says Deanna Wood, quoted on Inside Higher Ed. Yet, opportunities to contribute to shared governance and partnering with faculty vary as much as the opinions about librarian status. Should librarians stay in their place, the library? Which committees should they be eligible for? Does faculty status matter? How might the faculty status of librarians and their contributions to scholarship and shared governance enhance the educational mission and improve student learning in the academy? More research is definitely needed.

Still, for me, sharing the anxiety of figuring out what to do to be a full academic citizen involved getting to know my fellow faculty travelers on that uneasy road in a way that would not have been possible otherwise. After a fair amount of committee service over the years, when the question arose of putting my name on the slate for Chair-Elect, the first of my many protests was that I didn’t want to be Chair of Faculty Assembly — I was told that that was the first criteria! A Philosophy professor answered another protest of mine — that no one would vote for me — making me see that it wasn’t about me, but about being willing to make the commitment that underlies the “academic community/citizenship” rhetoric (I’m not a philosopher, so I’m paraphrasing here — what he actually said started with “So what?”). So I put my ego on the line, and was surprised and pleased to find that even a librarian could be elected to lead the Faculty Assembly at my academic institution.

Transformation — can the rituals that celebrate change and tradition encompass jazz harmony in shared governance and even librarian participation? Does our trust in the significance of academic citizenship invite us to think more deeply about the role and opportunities of librarians in the academy? I’m thinking about this as we prepare for Commencement here. Do we, to quote Goia again, “…dream of a future so fitting and so just/that our desire will bring it into being?” How do librarian status, service, and shared governance play out at in your academic community?