Academic Librarian

ACRLog had a thought provoking post yesterday on creating library leaders for the future, asking what libraries are doing to create those leaders. A commenter wrote: “As a library administrator who tries to be intentional about nurturing the leadership skills of my staff, I have to admit that the thought of conflating “leadership” with “administration” gives me the willies.” I didn’t get the willies, but the post does tend to conflate administration with leadership. This conflation is evident in the following question: “Ask newer members of the profession if they plan to seek an administrative position and too often the answer is ‘no.’ Are there good models this profession could follow for developing its future leaders?”

I would have to agree with the commenter that leadership isn’t the same as administration. If it were, then all administrators would be leaders and all leaders administrators, which we know not to be the case. Library administrators might lead, but they can be just as effective in recognizing and supporting the talents of others and letting them lead change. According to my extensive research on leadership, one way to look at the difference between management and leadership is that “management involves power by position” while “leadership involves power by influence.” When position and influence coincide, one has a great manager, but there will always still be leaders who influence others regardless of their position, for both good and bad reasons. Scandalmongers and gossips might lead a library into decay. Creative innovators and collaborators might lead it into glory. But neither need to be administrators. I once had a terrible experience with an administrator who could neither administrate nor lead very well, and as I look around the profession these days, the people influencing how I think about libraries and where I think they should be going aren’t necessarily administrators, but frontline librarians trying to find new and creative ways to solve old problems.

Still, what struck me most about the post was the assertion that if we “ask newer members of the profession if they plan to seek an administrative position and too often the answer is ‘no.’” I don’t usually ask newer members of the profession this, but I can understand the “no.” I’m not sure if I’m a newer member of the profession anymore (I’ve been a librarian for 8 years, which seems long to me sometimes, but is considerably less than many of my colleagues), but I can speculate on some reasons why librarians wouldn’t want to be administrators.

First, job satisfaction. A lot of academic librarians like the academic part of academic librarianship. I like being involved, however tangentially, with the intellectual and scholarly life of the university. I like developing the collection as well as using it myself, and I like helping students use it as well. Last week I had a research consultation with a student I’ve worked with before, and at the end he said he thought I had a great job. I asked why, and he said because I got to learn so many different things especially during the research consultations, and he was right. In many ways I do have a great job, and one of the things I like most is the preparatory research before consultations, where I study whatever the students are working on so that I can give them the best help. I’m intellectually interested in philosophy and religion, and doing my job well means I read philosophy and religion books and articles, which I would be doing anyway.

Like a lot of people, I became a librarian after I’d done some other things. To give you an idea of the other things, I sold out to become a librarian. In library school, I talked to a lot of librarians and decided that initially at least the best library job for me would be a reference/bibliographer position working with philosophy and religion at a research university, preferably not at a state university because I wanted to avoid the tenure-track hoops I saw so many librarians going through (and have since seen so many old friends from library school go through). Two years out of library school, I had that job and liked it. If I moved into an administrative job, a lot of what I like doing would go away, and I’m not sure how I’d feel about that. Administrators should be there to support the work of others, not do that work, but I like doing the work. A professor who’d given up being a dean once told me he went back to being a professor because he wanted to be out doing the sorts of projects he was helping to support as a dean. There’s an administrative position open at a fine university nearby, a head of reference sort of position I’ve been tempted to apply for. I don’t know how competitive I would be, but I think I could be great at the job. But I hesitate because I like so much of what I do now, and I fear the loss of good things.

Another reason might be the expectations of libraries. I see a lot of job ads for department heads that expect the applicants to already have several years of supervisory experience before they consider the person qualified. I’ve talked to librarians frustrated by this old Catch-22. Many libraries seem unwilling to take a chance on someone who has the capacity for good management but not the experience. There seems to be the assumption that because someone has supervised before, that they must be good at it, and that unless they have supervised before they are a completely unknown quantity. I don’t know how accurate those assumptions are, but it seems to me that some libraries are better at rewarding degrees or experience than talent. Based on how many open administrative searches there seem to be right now in academic libraries, I think libraries are either going to have to change their expectations for some of these jobs. Notice I didn’t say “lower” their expectations. But for the reference librarian who wants to be a head of reference, how does that person break through the “supervisory experience required.” And at what point does one just give up seeking such jobs?

Some people might also want to avoid administrative positions because of the lack of financial incentive. Good managers aren’t compensated as well in libraries as they would be in the private sector. One might say that no academic librarians are compensated as well as they might be in the private sector, but that argument only goes so far. For example, I can’t do what I do with a large academic library. What I do isn’t just finding information, but has an integral relationship with information in specific fields communicated in specific ways that I also have an intellectual interest in. But management is a more universal trade. One can be a good administrator without knowing much about the specifics of much of the work. Good library directors don’t necessarily know how to catalog or answer reference questions or select materials any more. Management has some claim to being an art and science of its own. But out in the world good management is compensated, whereas in libraries one gets the burdens of administration without as many of the financial benefits. Some schools are worse than others, but not too long ago I talked to someone on a search committee for an AUL position at a university library in a major east coast city who said they planned to offer a salary in the mid-50s, which is the same or less than a lot of non-administrative academic librarians make already, especially on the east coast. That was an extreme, but I have noticed in those job ads that post salary ranges that the salaries for administrative positions aren’t significantly higher than the position just below it. For someone reluctant to apply for an administrative job, would the possibility of a few extra thousand a year (before taxes) be much of an incentive? Probably not. They’d have to want to be in charge.

But what makes people want to be in charge? If they’re good leaders already and they have power through influence, they might already be getting things done they want to get done. Why take on the hassle of performance reviews and solving people’s problems when one can instead work collaboratively and yet still somewhat independently to get things done?

Unfortunately, I suspect that the best reason might be because of already existing bad administrators, administrators who aren’t interested in recognizing their talented employees and supporting their efforts. I know some librarians who want to be in charge because they believe the people in charge at their libraries are just doing a terrible job, and they want to take over and set things right. Setting things right is a powerful incentive.

Finally, though, I wonder whether this is even a problem. If the management vacuum that seems to be emerging continues as more librarians retire, libraries will have to either flatten their organizations and promote creativity and initiative in their frontline staff, or they will have to take chances on people who might not have had the traditional preparation, but who still might make great department heads and directors. Or they may just promote incompetents, but let’s hope that doesn’t happen often.

There’s at least one other possibility as well, a faint hope or a daring dream. Libraries will always have leaders, but there may come a time when they have very few administrators. Thoreau wrote that that government is best which governs least, and concludes that if this is true then that government is best which governs not at all, and that when people are prepared for it, that will be the sort of government they will have. As power disperses and communication changes and librarians are more empowered because their jobs demand creativity and flexibility and initiative, less library administration might be not just a necessity brought on by circumstance, but a good thing. A library of motivated, dedicated librarians with creativity and initiative who lead and exert power through influence might need no administration at all.

Steven Bell has a typically thought-provoking blog post at the ACRLog entitled Sorry But You Can’t Have it All. I don’t really know Steven, but since we did meet once years ago I’ll be informal and call him Steven. Before I begin discussing this post, I want to note two things for the record. First, I often disagree with either the substance or the tone of Steven’s blog posts, though not necessarily this time. Second, in terms of raising and framing issues of interest to academic librarians, discussing them intelligently, and provoking response, I think he is one of the best library writers around right now. He riles me up in a good way, and I’m thankful for it. Though I rarely do it, when I read one of his posts I often want to write one of my own in response, if only to argue the point. This time I am responding, but unfortunately to something within the post rather than the argument of the post itself.

In the post, he discusses a talk he gave to a group of library directors called “The Search for Tomorrow’s Library Leaders in A ‘Dissin’ the Director’ Landscape,” as well as some of their responses to his arguments. He points out that many Gen-X and Gen-Y librarians are critical of library directors and unwilling to sacrifice their personal lives to achieve a library directorship. These cohorts want a better work-life balance than library directors appear to have. He also argues that part of the problem is that they don’t see the potential rewards, and that the current generation of library directors should do a better job of communicating with the younger librarians, teaching them about leadership, setting good examples of leadership, and cultivating the next generation of library directors. And the goal isn’t to get just any library directors, but to attract the best and the brightest to the directorship.

And notice I’m saying “directors,” though he often uses the term “leaders.” I’ve written before about my disagreement with Steven’s conflation of the terms library leader, director, administrator, etc. The person in charge isn’t necessarily a leader, and to conflate the terms unnecessarily both aggrandizes the incompetent directors and leaves us without a way to praise those directors who are great leaders as well as acknowledge those librarians who are in fact leaders and not directors. For some reason, he doesn’t want these terms parsed, but that’s neither here nor there.

I don’t necessarily disagree with him in this post, and indeed think he makes a compelling argument, though I was struck by some of the comments to his speech, in particular this one: “One director said this was all well and good but that the current generation of directors needed to give their nextgen colleagues a dose of reality. Getting the job done, said the director, requires certain personal sacrifices, and that a work-life imbalance, staying late, working weekends, getting emergency calls in the middle of the night, is occasionally necessary. Bottom line: you can’t have it all.” This comment seems to have inspired the title of Steven’s post, but it inspired me with irritation. Thus, I’m responding more to this comment than to the general argument of the post. I am hardly a voice for my generation (that would be Gen-X), but at the same time I’m not necessarily responding with personal arguments. I’m just putting forth some plausible reasons why bright people might not want to be library directors based on librarians of all ages I know.

Since I dislike these generational and “class” wars, I want to state my opinion of library directors up front. I’m not in the camp of “dissin’ the director,” and in fact just cringed when writing the word “dissin’,” though perhaps that’s more because of my concern for the English language than any concern for directors. I’ve gotten along just fine with every library director I’ve worked for, even when I disagreed with them. If we extend this to library managers in general, the same applies. Early in my career I did have a horrendous experience with a library (mis)manager, but instead of developing a suspicion of management in general, I instead took my issues straight to the library director, whom I liked very much and with whom I got on quite well. And I suppose it’s just barely possible I’ll be a library director someday myself, and I wouldn’t want to be a hypocrite.

Back to the comment. I was particularly irritated by the notion that library directors need to give us mere librarians a “dose of reality.” The arrogance of that statement took me aback. We Gen-X and -Y librarians work in libraries. We know what reality is, thank you very much. Personal sacrifices, work-life imbalance, staying late, working weekends: many of us do that without either the title or salary of “director,” and to imply otherwise itself shows a disconnect from reality. The generational difference, if indeed there is one, is that perhaps the younger generation doesn’t see this sort of sacrifice as a badge of honor so much as a road to unhappiness and burnout.

This tough talk reminds me of people who brag about how hard they work and how little sleep they get, as if I’m supposed to be impressed by them ruining their health and running themselves into the ground for what is most likely an enterprise of dubious value. That these sacrifices are “sometimes” necessary is one thing. It seems that the larger issue is that lots of younger librarians see these sacrifices as always necessary for library management, and they’re not willing to make the sacrifices. Perhaps they have more fulfilling personal lives than this particular library director. Perhaps they have a young child, as I do. Perhaps they have hobbies or interests that transcend their jobs.

And then the inevitable platitude: you can’t have it all. But what if you don’t want it all? Isn’t that exactly what the younger librarians “dissin’ the director” have said? They don’t want it all, and now they’re being criticized for not being able to have something that they never wanted in the first place. Steven’s concern is to show the best and the brightest of these younger librarians the benefits of directorship, and not just the burdens. I don’t know if I would be included in his “best and brightest” category of librarians, though I’m no slouch, but I would like to posit some reasons why librarians might not want to become library directors that haven’t anything to do with “dissin’” anyone.

For example, a lot of academic librarians identify as much or more with the “academic” as with the “librarian.” For whatever reason, they’re more interested in being a librarian for a particular field than in just being a librarian or they identify more with the professors than the library administrators, and some of them have a horror of ever being identified as a “manager.” Management is what those commercial folk do. Being engaged in the teaching and learning of a university is enjoyable. Spending time reading widely and trying to understand a particular field or the entire world compels many librarians. A lot of librarians have wide-ranging intellectual interests that have little to do with librarianship, though they might need libraries to fulfill their intellectual needs. They might be interested in literature or history or politics or even books, but not in management, and they’re not interested in the hassles they see library managers burdened with. They’ve had a “dose of reality,” and they know they’d rather work with scholars and build collections and follow their interests than deal with these burdens.

Take, for example, the necessity to deal with people’s personal problems, which managers and directors sometimes have to do. They probably don’t like it, either, but it comes with the job. While making exceptions for emergencies of various kinds, some librarians think people should keep their personal problems and their work separate. Being professional means we do our jobs, and being decent human beings means we take into consideration external problems and opportunities that happen to us all but interfere with work and make allowances for them. But then there are the petty squabbles, the gossipy scandal-mongers, the perennial layabouts, the needy, the whiners and the pouters, the offensive and the offended that sometimes in some places take up inordinate amounts of time for some managers.

One might respond that directors usually have their middle managers to deal with this stuff. Well, that’s another issue. Even some librarians who might be interested in being library directors have no interest in spending ten to twenty years working through middle-management positions to get there. They might be brilliant visionaries, and don’t want to spend years making sure a service point gets staffed or the student workers show up or writing gobs of performance reviews. They don’t want years of being pressured from above and below. Having a vision and trying to make that vision a reality? That’s one thing. But decades of middle management might crush their vision and their spirit. One might respond that this trip through what some librarians consider the purgatory of middle management is necessary for seasoning a director. After all, people have to “pay their dues” (which goes along nicely with the banal cliché about a “dose of reality”). But the point is that a lot of librarians—smart, talented, capable, even passionate librarians—believe, rightly or wrongly, that these dues are just too high. The opportunity costs are disproportionate to the rewards.

There could be many other reasons why talented librarians aren’t very interested in being directors, and some of them might indeed have to do with a certain hostility to library administrators in general. The venom that some librarians have toward the powers that be can be potent stuff. These librarians seem to believe that stepping over the line into administration is like stepping over to the dark side, that the goal of all library administrators is to manipulate their underlings and destroy the library. It seems to me the people who think this way may have been the victims of especially incompetent directors, of managers who don’t know how to manage and may have been promoted by default, as was my horrendous (mis)manager. If this is the case, then Steven’s overall goal is even more compelling, because the way to prevent default administration by incompetents is to persuade the talented to step up and wrestle for control.

But for other librarians, the problem could just be they think being a library director carries too many burdens and not enough benefits, and that the dues paid along the way are just too high. Can those librarians be persuaded to become library directors? I’m not sure. However, I am sure that those librarians aren’t going to be persuaded by some library director’s version of tough love. They’re not impressed by the tough, and they don’t want the love.