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GenX, Higher Education, Libraries, Women

From Cost-Center to Profit-Center: Academic Libraries and the Corporatization of Higher Ed

In Canaries in the Coal Mine, Guest Blogger on 2010/02/17 at 09:00

Today, we have a guest post from Cathy Eisenhower, Humanities and Women’s Studies Librarian at George Washington University in Washington, DC. This is the first in our Canaries in the Coal Mine series – a series of monthly posts from academic librarians at higher ed institutions from across the globe.

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In library school, we librarians in training absorb the mantra that special libraries must prove their value every day because they do not ostensibly increase profits. (“Special libraries” reside in federal agencies, corporations, museums, nonprofits, and other organizations outside the categories academic, public, and school.) They are the first to go in a crisis, or, to forestall the shut-down, the librarian must transform her unit from a cost center to a profit center. As a library student I should have predicted the same fate would befall the academic library.

Observing a couple of trends in the corporatization of the university and of scholarship makes it easy to imagine where academic libraries may be headed in the years to come.

They will clamor, and are clamoring, for endowments and donors. Though libraries have been kowtowing to donors forever, the University’s declining generosity toward its libraries–ask most any librarian–has made raising funds for collections and other necessary purchases a requirement, and is compelling all librarians to become fundraisers of a sort on top of their regular duties. If libraries fail at this task, their collections, buildings, and programs will suffer–they are suffering right now–but it will be their own failure, not the University’s. We constantly argue that student and faculty scholarship and “success” depend upon a great research library, but this argument holds no water when many faculty do not foreground it in faculty senates and negotiations with the administration, perhaps because their situation mirrors our own. Raise your own money, don’t come asking for handouts, administrations insist, which creates academics and librarians forced to stake out territories and fiercely protect them.

And if libraries succeed at passing the hat? The more money libraries raise, the more university administrations will leave them out in the cold to fend for themselves, and they will turn projects like digitizing materials into for-profit schemes that have little or nothing to do with what students and faculty need, but rather will respond to the market, and probably poorly. After all, librarians are not professional fundraisers, but they are even less savvy entrepreneurs.

Academic libraries will cater to distance education programs and move to almost exclusively online content. The trend in higher education that perhaps disturbs me the most (though, as in all out-of-control market economies, there are so many disturbing trends from which to choose) is distance education. The arguments around it bear repeating (and I hope this blog will address the issue at some point), but not here. Let’s just say that libraries will be pushed more and more to support these cash-cow programs. Administrative types will encourage a focus on distance learning, which means that students on campus will get fewer resources–from in-person research help to print and digital collections for campus-based academic programs. With limited funding, academic libraries will be forced by administrations to push their resources toward lucrative, professional programs online for continuing vocational education rather than scholarly work in the disciplines. Is that bad? I guess it depends on your notion of higher education. It certainly won’t enrich scholarship on campus, and would fuel the trend toward the library as mall, a response to declining turnstile counts in physical libraries on college campuses.

These sketchy “predictions” are cynical, reductive, and hyperbolic. I hope. Partial renderings from a pessimistic bibliographer.

I do know this, though: Academic libraries and librarians are desperate to stay relevant and be valued, and fairly powerless to do so on their own terms–in fact, almost all librarians share this plight. We are marginal figures in the university landscape–mostly women in a feminized, poorly paid profession, mostly untenured so without the attendant (supposed) intellectual freedom, without a voice in campus governance, and mostly viewed as cultural caregivers rather than colleagues or mentors. And some of us are willing, even happy, to absorb the values of the larger corporate institution by serving the big money programs while serving scones to undergrads, and some of us are not. Maybe we just haven’t figured out how best to resist.

(Cathy Eisenhower is a poet-librarian and is author of clearing without reversal (Edge 2008) and would with and (Roof 2009). She translates the work of Argentine poet Diana Bellessi and has published essays in Writing against the Curriculum: Anti-Disciplinarity in the Writing and Cultural Studies Classroom and the forthcoming Critical Pedagogy and Library Instruction.)

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Faculty, GenX, GenY, Higher Education, Libraries, Research, Students, university

Aklatan/Library/Bibliothek/ライブラリ/Raiburari Re-invented

In Ponderings of a Peregrine Pinoy Professor on 2010/02/11 at 09:00

In my 20 odd years inside the academia, I have seen varying conceptions of the university library as a space. In the pre-electronic age of card catalogs and microfilms/microfiche, the main library of University of the Philippines Diliman (an American colonial, neoclassical treasure, with soaring ceilings befitting the pre-air conditioning period when it was built) was a refuge for freshmen in need of contemplation, solitude and occasionally, an afternoon nap. It was akin to a medieval church, where silence is golden and dutifully enforced by hawk-eyed librarians. Food and drinks are strictly forbidden in all rooms, and can never be smuggled in as your bags checked on the way in and out. In this strict construction of space, the library predictably empties out of patrons during lunchtime and awards carrells (dedicated rooms) only to students doing their masters thesis/PhD dissertations.

In many ways, Northeastern’s (Boston) Snell library ca. 1996 echoed the call to serious scholarship that UP Diliman’s grandiose building evokes, plus-plus. For me, mining the electronic databases was as thrilling as free journal article printouts and pdf versions electronically-mailed to yourself. Those comfy round padded chairs are such a premium at the 3rd floor for international grad students who spend half their NU lives (the other being at the apartment) cocooned in them. Meals and drinks were taboo; NOT a vending machine in sight within the premises. One goes to the library to find elusive grad friends (like Taka who literally lived there!) but NOT to “hang out.” I embraced my carrell for 6 months of dutiful reading and writing for my dissertation proposal. In its tomblike silence and aesthetic austerity (and the view of planes making their way into/out of Logan airport), I labored and toiled for my PhD.

In the years following my itinerant life as professor/researcher, I had been a patron of the Meiji University (Tokyo) Ochanamizu campus library and the University of Innsbruck (Austria) SoWi and GeiWi libraries. Apart from their understandably modest English language materials, their electronic database is lightyears behind their US counterparts (too expensive they argue). SoWi’s all-glass southern wall provides natural light to the spacious reading room and the jungle of potted plants alongside it. No food, drinks or smoking allowed. Meiji gave me my first encounter of closed stacks, towering movable shelves, and discreet, enclosed spaces where food/beverage vending machines reside (it is considered POLITE to consume your food and drink beside the vending machines). In the pre-wifi enabled libraries of Japan as in Austria, young habitues were buried deep in reading, calculating and writing. They spoke in low tones and were quiet in their movements.

My return to an American university library seven years after my PhD was no less than a culture shock. Loyola’s (Chicago) art deco library building was “married” to an all-glass, smart-shaded Information Commons occupying the campus’s premier real estate– the lake front. The layout this “marriage of two spaces” created not only re-invented the library as a concept, it also brought me to a rude awakening of the follies of modern-ist thinking. A cafe with a 24/7 flat screen tv is situated in the corridor between these two buildings; food and drinks are allowed EVERYWHERE; students talk and hang out with their buddies, EXCEPT in one room (the 3rd floor at the Information Commons) where silence is strictly enforced; and wifi enabled throughout. The university library is actualized to mimic the neighborhood coffee shop where caffeine-dependent, internet-addicted, company-hungry young can be attracted to spend their precious time in; where lounges and easy chairs (facing the gorgeous lake) are in great number and laptops can be borrowed. It is the library made perfect for a generation of relativists, of no-boundaries.

I belong to an old school where serious scholarship is synonymous with silence and mental fortitude in a near empty stomach. While I celebrate the many conveniences modern libraries have made accessible to students, faculty members and researchers alike, I lament the blurring of spaces between sacred/profound (learning) and gratuitous need. That millions of dollars are being spent to build these spanking new libraries-slash-Information Commons evoke a dying tradition where the centerpiece was the BOOKS. In US university libraries nowadays, the library is less about physically possessing the books or materials (why, you can get them remotely wherever you have internet connection) than a place to hang out, be comfortable and relaxed (as you stare at the zen-like blueness of Lake Michigan).

In the bowels of Third World university libraries like UP Visayas, books remain scarce; there is only ONE electronic database (OVID and with limited full text) and internet access intermittent with erratic signals from a remote cellular tower and power outages. But in this academia where patrons like myself make do, the library STILL evokes a romantic invitation to scholarship in its silent rooms, no-food-and-beverage policy, no mobile phone use (save texting, which we Filipinos are experts at) and hard wood seats. Without air conditioning in tropical weather, mental sinews are honed in this environment. It is, in my opinion, a better space to build character.

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