The American Library Association: Neutrality, Civility, and What Comes Next

The American Library Association has not had a good run under the current presidential administration.

How We Got Here

First, in a since-rescinded press release from shortly after the 2016 election, the Association offered "its expertise and resources to the incoming administration," despite that administration containing racists, Islamophobes, and white nationalists like Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, and Michael Flynn. And despite a president-elect that, as a candidate, bragged about sexually assaulting women, called Mexicans "rapists," and mocked a reporter with a physical disability. Offering the expertise of information professionals to this group of people was understandably not well received, and the press release was updated.

Second, ALA's Washington Office presented an award to Representative Darrel Issa (R-CA) for his introduction and sponsorship of the Research Works Act, which mandates that federally-funded research be open access, a worthy goal. However, Issa was, and is, opposed to net neutrality, opposes some internet privacy measures, and has voted to cut funding to libraries on many occasions. In addition, there is some controversy over whether or not the Washington Office received adequate feedback from the ALA Committee on Legislation or an appropriate subcommittee prior to awarding Issa and a congressional colleague.

Third, the Association allowed librarians at the Central Intelligence Agency to post content from the ALA's Instagram account. The CIA then recruited from a booth in the expo hall of the ALA's annual meeting. No doubt the CIA offers good paying government jobs, with excellent benefits, but that organization is, ahem, problematic at best and there was some understandable push-back to their presence.

Fourth, and also at ALA's annual meeting, the Council amended and added an Interpretation of Article VI of the Library Bill of Rights, which pertains to meeting rooms. One such change was the explicit naming of "hate groups," left undefined, and that libraries may not discriminate based on hate speech, which, per multiple Council-members and ALA office-holders, was not presented to the deliberative body. "The statement I read and commented on, all the way up until ALA Annual in late June, had no specific mention of hate speech or hate groups," wrote one.

Taken individually, one could, maybe, forgive the first three offenses. Taken as a whole, they are a damning indictment of the ALA. In the fourth, the ALA discursively treats hate groups and hate speech as co-equals to civic clubs and groups: "If a library allows charities, non-profits, and sports organizations to discuss their activities in library meeting rooms, then the library cannot exclude religious, social, civic, partisan political, or hate groups from discussing their activities in the same facilities." The existing case law seems to support the ALA's cautious interpretations, but this was true prior to any revisions to Article VI. As a result, the amendment appears to, on some level, tacitly advertise library spaces to hate groups, potentially drawing attention to library meeting rooms as welcoming. One expects to see the sentence quoted above used in a courtroom in the near future. By counsel for hate groups, not libraries and information professionals.

As was the case with the Issa award, amending Article VI points to a disconnect between those who work for ALA and the people information professionals elect to various divisions and groups within the organization. The Washington Office chose Issa for an award, seemingly without much oversight from elected representatives. Article VI was altered and multiple Council-members expressed surprise.

More importantly, drawing attention to hate groups will do nothing for diversifying librarianship. It is hard to imagine a member of an underrepresented and historically marginalized group wanting to join the information professions given these revisions. James LaRue, head of ALA's Office of Intellectual Freedom, put the phrase "safe spaces" in quotes in response to criticism, but for some people this is literally a matter of safe space. Sure, libraries are afraid of being sued, but information professionals are afraid of being assaulted by white supremacists. No amount of wellness initiatives can make up for that, nor will pointing out, unhelpfully, as Carrie Wade notes, that free speech and free association are legally allowed.


The White, Neutral, Radical Centrism of ALA

https://i.redd.it/i69jnt27a8gz.png

It seems that few, if any, members of the ALA staff involved understand the paradox of tolerance. As a Jewish person in America, I understand my whiteness, and the privilege that comes with it, is very much contingent. White supremacists meeting in my neighborhood library make it much less likely for me to want to be there. I can stay, putting my physical and mental health at risk, or I can leave, ceding that space. There is no civil discourse to be had with such actors. That is not an option. I know many information professionals who have it much, much worse. Extremists can infiltrate library spaces, pushing out moderates. The both-sideism of the ALA here, under the guise of neutrality, is anything but. By tolerating the intolerable, they will put information professionals and patrons at risk with only potential legal liability as an excuse.

Further, the applications of "equal treatment" will be anything but. Power and social relations are asymmetric. Here is the head of OIF, prior to his accepting the position, siding with the powerful, for example.

https://twitter.com/jaslar/status/768918655308488705

That link leads to:

nextdraft.us2.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=ed102783e87fee61c1a534a9d&id=644f08388d&e=06ef6feea7 …

That a white man who heads OIF does not understand the power asymmetry at work here is sadly to be expected, but also gives me pause because of the office he holds. The University of Chicago's Dean of Students' words played well with donors, boards of trustees, and wealthy alumnae/i, but not with faculty or students. Whose speech, whose expression, was being suppressed here, and at whose expense? I am not convinced that he, or any of us, really, know how to accommodate hate speech while making people feel welcome and safe to speak, and one can also see this in the response from Martin Garnar, co-chair of ALA’s Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Implementation Working Group. That is the paradox of tolerance. There is a choice here. Neutrality is a myth, benign neglect and the status quo are choices. I was not convinced at the Midwinter meeting, and I'm not convinced now.

A Black Lives Matter group wanting to meet in peace in a library is not the same as a white supremacist group, given that this country is a white supremacist state. Power matters, intention much less so. "They fundamentally do not understand that the presence of white folks is inherently more dangerous to People of Color than the inverse due to the structures of oppression and discrimination built into our profession and society," per Wade.

Having white people in charge leads to organizations that take the concerns of people of color less seriously, because it, however defined, doesn't happen to white people. Dismissing critiques of ALA policies on social media is ignoring peoples' lived experiences (and LaRue should know, because he has been the target of trolls). Social media, a powerful organizing tool, is where people of color are more likely to be. They're not the ones writing and implementing these policies. There's a reason not as much criticism is taking place on ALA Connect.


What Do We Do? Exit, Voice, Loyalty

I don't know what's to be done with ALA. It's a truism that it's the American Library Association and not the American Library Staff Association. They are, by some accounts, a very effective lobbying organization. And yet they can't seem to get out of their own way lately.

If these four occurrences, plus more, I'm sure, make the ALA irredeemable in your eyes, I understand. I really do. And maybe so does ALA, having dipped below 60,000 members, and facing with declining conference attendance. These are not unrelated, just as these four incidents did not occur in a vacuum.

You're tired? I get that. Fight elsewhere if that's what you think is right. That's Exit.

I've seen both Council-members and ALA staff complain about social media push-back to ALA policies, resolutions, and press releases, especially since the most recent annual conference. Consider this Voice, and also consider using the ALA Position on Hate Groups in Libraries google doc as a way to express your opinions.

You could vote. Only twenty percent of ALA members bother to do this even though it's done online over the course of a few weeks, which is to say it's absurdly easy. Voting won't solve the disconnect between Council and ALA staff, but having conscientious people like Emily Drabinski, April Hathcock, and Jessica Schomberg represent you is a good thing. Given that we are information professionals, I find the low turnout in ALA elections to be especially dispiriting, and I encourage ALA members to vote for people of color in particular. People who look like me are far more likely to think as the OIF does, because we do not bear the brunt of "free speech" or library "neutrality." Consider voting for people who will not treat such policies as an intellectual exercise, but as tangible and corporeal, with real, material consequences for both library staff and patrons.


via GIPHY

Anyway, given that an employer pays my dues, Voice is where you can find me for the foreseeable future.

But however the organization responds, the damage is done. OIF's revisions have no doubt already been Internet Archive'd, pdf'd, and Wayback Machine'd. We'll see those words in a courtroom, used against us.

The Library Bill of Rights Interpretation as it is written with a special call out for hate groups will INCREASE the likelihood of lawsuits not decrease it.

— April (No one illegal, no one banned) (@AprilHathcock) July 11, 2018

As for loyalty, well... it hasn't gotten us much so far since November, 2016.

On Anger in LIS: Notes From a Feminized, White Profession

People are unaccustomed to anger in library, archive, and other information professions. The reactions to righteous anger in three recent events show how emotions are policed in the library and information science professions. I posit the responses take the shape they do in no small part because libraries and archives are white, feminized spaces.

it is important that librarians assess the basic meaning of feminization and give precise attention to their early history, for the dominance of women is surely the prevailing factor in library education, the image of librarianship, and the professionalization of the field. - Garrison, D. (1972). The Tender Technicians: The Feminization of Public Librarianship, 1876-1905. Journal of Social History, 6(2), 143.

If recent history is any guide, little has changed. In terms of demographics, both the American Library Association and Society of American Archivists [pdf, see table 3, on page 7] report membership that is over eighty percent female-identified and over eighty-five percent white. There is enough fodder for how librarians are viewed that a well-reviewed edited collection of essays exists (Pagowsky and Rigby).

McMaster University special collections houses the papers of Bertrand Russell. Too often the work of archivists goes unacknowledged, so much so that there is a meme about how materials are "discovered" in archives, as if no work went into making those materials discoverable. This lack of credit, acknowledgement, and citation itself is in part a reaction to an industry where women are (over)represented, per a special issue of The American Archivist from 1973.

The letter is here. It's online because of our work. We're glad you think it's suitably viral. Not acknowledging its source is unacceptable. https://t.co/NlOyjPVsBC

— McMaster Rare Books (@MacResColls) September 29, 2017

The response to this argument on social media was nothing if not illuminating. If an airline, restaurant, tech firm, or other "customer service" industry responded as McMaster Special Collections did I suspect we'd all be cheering them on; there'd be a gif-laden Buzzfeed- or Rawstory-style article about it: "Guess who got dragged!" Instead, there was circumspection, condescension, and more than a bit of discussion about tone and tenor.

The above image is a reminder that women are perfectly capable of participating in patriarchal modes of thought, and if the man takes offense, it is because he knows he has been feminized, viewed as insulting (Carmichael).

[UPDATE: I mischaracterized the person who wrote the tweet screencapped above as a "former higher-up at Folger. This is not the case. I have deleted that caption and offer my apologies. In addition, their reply to this post is worth examining.




As you were.]

A second example comes from school libraries. Melania Trump, First Lady of the United States, donated books to a library in Massachusetts. The librarian who received the books was deemed insufficiently grateful for the donation, writing an open letter to the First Lady. [A side note here: the books given are by Dr. Seuss, which--barely concealed hyperbole alert--close to every single library in an English-speaking country owns. I work in a federal facility and we own a copy of The Cat in the Hat. Really.] Again, I invite you to view the reactions to declining this book donation.

The third example is in some ways not like the others. It comes from a librarian's personal website, and the reaction does not involve information professionals. White supremacy "permits" black women to be angry and yet at the same time views them as ungrateful, as if centuries of slavery, Jim Crow, and structural racism and sexism never happened (Perry). This cultural act of cognitive dissonance lends itself to the kind of harassment and abusive behavior seen below in two willful misreadings.

America: where we care more about black women *sounding* angry than we do about what is making them "angry"

— 🍁Mortal Bus Boy🦇 (@PhysicistLisa) September 30, 2017

Anger is largely seen as the province of men, unladylike, thus alien to libraries and archives. Anger is to be repressed, one must not be overly emotional. Showing too much is unpuritan, not in keeping with White Anglo-Saxon Protestantism. Thus anger is by extension unwhite, alien to libraries and archives.

Librarians and archivists are not "allowed" to be angry. We can debate whether this anger is justifiable or not--it's a matter of opinion--but to do that is to miss the point. Similarly, we can debate whether anger "works," that is, does it achieve a desired outcome, and--spoiler alert--the efficacy of anger in terms of influence is often due to gender perceptions (Salerno and Peter-Hagene).

As a result, many information professionals are effectively silenced (Loon), unable to articulate concerns and advocate for themselves. With options limited the false promise of resilience becomes one coping mechanism (Galvan, et al.).

Whether it is decades of archival erasure, an ill-thought out photo op of a donation, or centuries of racial and gendered oppression: Let us, as information professionals, be angry. Many of us are going to continue to tone police, but let's at least acknowledge that we have a lot to be angry about.


References:

The American Archivist, 36(2).

Carmichael, J. V., Jr. (1992). The Male Librarian and the Feminine Image: A Survey of Stereotype, Status, and Gender Perceptions. Library and Information Science Research, 14(4) 411-46.

Galvan, A., Tewell, E., & Berg, J. (2017) Academic Libraries and the False Promises of Resiliency, Beerbrarian. https://beerbrarian.blogspot.com/2017/07/academic-libraries-and-false-promises_27.html.

Garrison, D. (1972). The Tender Technicians: The Feminization of Public Librarianship, 1876-1905. Journal of Social History, 6(2) 131-159.

Harris-Perry, M. (2011). Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America, New Haven: Yale University Press.

The Library Loon (2017) Silencing tag landing page, Gavia Libraria, https://gavialib.com/?s=silencing.

Pagowsky, N. & Rigby, M. (2014). The Librarian Stereotype: Deconstructing Perceptions and Presentations of Information Work, Chicago: ACRL Press.

Salerno, J. M., & Peter-Hagene, L. C. (2015). One Angry Woman: Anger Expression Increases Influence for Men, but Decreases Influence for Women, During Group Deliberation. Law And Human Behavior, doi:10.1037/lhb0000147.

Reconceptualizing "Fit": Theory, Practice, Praxis

As presently constructed, the practice of hiring based on "fit" is problematic. Fit too often means "people like me" to hiring managers, which perpetuates a vicious cycle of homogeneity.



In librarianship, that homogeneity is reflected in the demographics of our profession: white, cisgendered, middle-class, and predominantly female, with men both historically and presently overrepresented in positions of leadership (I am a data point here) and those pertaining to library technology.

Evidence shows the number of women in senior leadership roles has increased over the years. From the 1930s to the 1950s it was the natural order for men to be heads of academic libraries, particularly major research libraries. Research studies of the decades from the 1960s to the 1980s provide evidence of a shift from the assumption that various personal and professional characteristics could be identified to account for differences in the number of men and of women recruited into senior positions in academic libraries. Despite this, women remained vastly under-represented in director positions in academic libraries (Delong, 2013).  

This over-representation continued into the 1990s, and persists today.

Fit is an excuse for unconscious bias, as well as an excuse for the conscious kind. Norms of what a librarian "should look like" in terms of race, class, and gender identity, among other factors, are all enforced via fit. The homogeneity of librarianship is overdetermined, but I suspect that fit plays a role in why it looks nothing like the United States population. Librarianship is not even remotely representative.

It gets more depressing: American Library Association membership is getting less diverse in terms of race, and according to data (pdf) from American Community Survey Estimates Applied to Institute for Museum and Library Services and National Center for Education Statistics in 2009, there were over 118,000 librarians in the United States. Under 600 of them were black men.

This sameness has deleterious effects. It leads to groupthink, to monoculture. More diverse groups get better results in terms of:

• creativity and innovation
• decision-making
• problem-solving
• scientific research

In part, this is because social diversity is a form of informational diversity.

Simply interacting with individuals who are different forces group members to prepare better, to anticipate alternative viewpoints and to expect that reaching consensus will take effort. (Source is the above link.)

In the language of the market, diversity improves your bottom line.

And yet, I hire on fit. That's come at no small cost. I know I've been unable to hire people I think would make great librarians because of fit.

Applicant 1, you are brilliant. You will be an amazing librarian, probably a better one than any of the other applicants I've seen in this round of interviews. You understand our mission and you're already committed to it. You've lived it. You code switched three times in the interview in ways that felt organic and natural, not forced. But you won't become a great librarian here, and I'm disappointed in myself for writing that. I realize that oftentimes a discussion of "fit" is an excuse for all sorts of biases in hiring, especially in academia. However, fit applies here. As a manager, I have no idea, none, how I would harness the frenzied energy and passion you would bring to this job. I get the sense that you would kill for librarianship. These two things, the energy level and enthusiasm, terrify me. Our styles do not mesh. There is a mentor out there more suited to your needs. You'll find that person. But not here.

I work at a library with a staff of nine; we need to get along. There's an awful lot of cross-training that goes on, six of us can copy-catalog and four are interlibrary loan wizards, for example. Fit matters. And if we are to avoid the silos within libraries I've seen elsewhere, it matters even more.

What I want to do is to rescue fit, to reclaim it, because the fit described at the top of this post should not be the fit we think of. That fit leads to the decline of organizations. That fit, looking at the demographics of librarianship, above, perpetuates white supremacy.

If hiring based on fit is like a puzzle, then the homogeneous practice of fit is like choosing the same piece, over and over again.



The theory of fit, however, is different. Hire people that complement each other, that minimize each other's blind spots, and that come together to form a complete organization. That should be fit.



Do you have skills other people don't, do you think in ways that other people don't, do you have life experiences that other people don't? If so, then you fit, because those are plusses, and we'll try to get at that in the hiring process. Then we'll try to get at it in our workflows, creating safe spaces for voicing dissent and fostering experimentation.

The more organizations that do this, the more hiring managers and human resource departments that do this, the closer we'll come to having a praxis of fit instead of what we have now.



DeLong, Kathleen. “Career Advancement and Writing About Women Librarians: A Literature Review.” Evidence Based Library and Information Practice 8, no. 1 (2013): 59–75. http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/EBLIP/article/view/17273.

Rockstars as Red Herrings: On Librarianship and Safe Spaces

Two librarians are being sued in a Canadian court for making statements in public that were already made in private, via informal "whisper networks."

The ‘whisper network’ – if you’ve worked in an office, you probably know it. There are two sides to that network. One is destructive and full of gossip, one is empathetic and fiercely protective. I’ll focus on the latter side and its importance in supporting those undermined in a working environment. The ‘whisper network’ creates a safe haven to discuss problems and prejudices experienced, warn others of harassers, and bolster camaraderie. (Source)

Across multiple media, Lisa Rabey and nina de jesus wrote that Joe Murphy has made women feel unsafe at library and information science conferences. Murphy's response was not to reflect and reevaluate his behavior, but to serve the two other librarians with a lawsuit, presumably in an attempt to silence them and receive compensation for reputational damages, never mind that informal networks were discussing his behavior as far back as 2010. The details on the lawsuit are here.

Murphy is a frequent presenter and sits on at least one conference selection committee. Within the last week, at least three librarians have written on the topic of "library rockstars" that, one assumes, are at least partially directed at him. These posts are well-written and thought-provoking. Please read them. Later. Much later. As the title of this blog post states, focusing on rockstars, American Library Association Emerging Leaders, Library Journal Movers & Shakers, trendspotting conference presenters, serial keynoters, and the like, is a red herring, a distraction, a derail, and a smoke screen.

The implicit argument made by these librarian authors is that upon becoming rockstars, librarians' sense of entitlement grows, which may lead to sexual harassment. One author notes that rockstars are made, a cultural construct that implicates library and information science professionals, and that we can and should unmake them. This thesis ignores the many of acts of sexual harassment, microaggressions, and other behaviors by librarians that take place every day that make our colleagues feel unsafe and unwelcome. Getting rid of rockstars will not end sexual harassment, and will not create safe spaces for our colleagues. But that argument, placing blame on rockstars, does make librarianship, writ large, feel better about itself, and make librarians feel better about themselves. It is not us, not our fellow LIS professionals that create, propagate, and reinforce these norms. No, it is rockstars that are the problem. 

It is hard to look in the mirror in general, and harder still for many librarians. We make things accessible. We serve the public. We want information to be free. And we do this among budget cuts, hiring freezes, and salaries that do not always reflect our work and our value to the communities we serve. As such, there is a tendency to think that libraries are not oppressive spaces, and that librarians are free of bias when compared to other professions. Focusing on rockstars allows us to continue to think this way.

The library is an institution, which has policies to define who is and is not a member, channels to resolve disputes, as well as feedback mechanisms. These structures intentionally legitimate some behaviors, and just as purposefully discriminate against others. 

Many libraries deliberately practice social exclusion. Exclusion may also be an unintentional consequence, along with the illusion of community expertise where there is none.* The library is not unique or alone in this. Every institution has ways to include and exclude. Whether these actions and practices are intentional or unintentional is in many ways besides the point. Libraries, and librarianship, are implicated and often strengthen them. (Source)

Joe Murphy has Lisa and nina on trial. But they're on trial every day as women, and as women in technology. One is often an outspoken advocate for mental health and overcoming the stigmas that publicly discussing mental illness brings. The other is a trans woman of color who cannot use the bathroom at her place of work without suffering some sort of aggression, micro- or otherwise. In this sense, they are not the "perfect" people to speak out against Joe Murphy's behavior because their marginalized statuses make them easier to discount and dismiss. Librarians and librarianship have created and reinforced an environment, couched in cis white heteronormativity and suppression of dialogue on mental health, that enables people like Lisa and nina to be sued for speaking up. And writing about rockstars, blaming them, rather than interrogating ourselves and supporting Lisa and nina furthers these discourses.

There are worthy and important conversations to be had about how we as librarians place people on pedestals, how we create LIS rockstars, their demographics, and how they behave. Reflect on that, yes, after we reflect on the transphobic and ableist reactions to the defendants and what we as librarians and information professionals have done to bring us to this point.


Lisa and nina are looking for people who have witnessed or experienced the behavior they write about. If you fall into either of these categories, please consider coming forward. I understand that doing so may be triggering. Please take care of yourselves if this is the case.

If you would like to ask Joe Murphy to drop his lawsuit and reflect on his behavior, and I hope you do, please sign this petition.

The ALA Annual Post #alaac14

At the American Library Association Annual Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada I'm presenting a poster on Sunday, June 29th, from 2:30-4pm in the Exhibit Hall. The topic is how discovery searching alters library websites and search boxes, and is based on this giffy blog post.

On Monday, June 30th, from 4-4:45pm, I'm on a panel moderated by Daniel Ransom on the experiences of first-time library directors. Kristi Chadwick, Jessica Olin, and John Pappas are also on the panel, so it will be a good mix of public and academic librarians.

If any of this sounds interesting, or you just want to say hi, add me to your schedule.

Speaking of which, here's where I'll be. And yes, I'm overbooked for many of these. I'll wake up and see where the day takes me. If I missed something you think I might be interested in, please let me know.

My ALA Schedule

Useful Sites

Main conference website

Transportation

Vegas on a Budget

American Library Association Party Map

Unofficial Guide to Socializing via I Need A Library Job

Eater Las Vegas is your friend

Survival Tips and Vegas Eats from Library Journal

American Libraries Cognotes (pdf)

Arts Guide to Las Vegas from the Association of College and Research Libraries Arts Section (pdf)

Diversity Takes Work: On "Rigor" in MLIS Programs

Librarianship, as a profession, is not a very diverse place. As of 2010, there were 118,666 credentialed librarians, those with Masters degrees from American Library Association-accredited programs.

Of those:

6,160 were African-American,
3,260 were Asian-Pacific Islander,
185 were Native American,
1,008 identified as two or more races, and
3,661 as Latin@.*

The above data is from the ALA's Office of Diversity (pdf), and if you like pie charts, Chris Bourg at Stanford has you covered.

There is no reason to think that four years later, things look any better.

The pipeline isn't broken, it was never built. It was intentionally not built.

Ta-Nehisi Coates shows all the "work" that went into, and still goes into, oppression. It takes work to undo that.

And instead of doing that work, we get this (diversity and rigor are at odds). And this (derailed by Common Core, but good comments on both). Instead, what we should get is this (paywalled).

Let's leave "rigor" undefined for now. After all, it's a means to an end, and that end is employment. And rigor, however defined, is neither sufficient nor necessary for that, because of the political and economic contexts in which libraries and library staff are situated. Rigor, however defined, might lead to librarians and information professionals who are better able to navigate this environment, but it won't get anyone a job by itself.

Aside from the "soft bigotry of low expectations" that comes with the false dichotomy between rigor and diversity, we're also treated to Masters of Library and Information Science programs as places for remediation, even though there's evidence that remediation doesn't work.

The default strategy at U.T. for dealing with failing students was to funnel them into remedial programs — precalculus instead of calculus; chemistry for English majors instead of chemistry for science majors. “This, to me, was just the worst thing you could possibly imagine doing,” Laude said. “It was saying, ‘Hey, you don’t even belong.’ And when you looked at the data to see what happened to the kids who were put into precalculus or into nonmajors chemistry, they never stayed in the college. And no wonder. They were outsiders from the beginning.” 

That New York Times article quoted above, "Who Gets to Graduate," shows what does work. Let's do it, library schools.

Students in TIP [Texas Interdisciplinary Plan] were placed in their own, smaller section of Chemistry 301, taught by [then-Chemistry professor David] Laude. But rather than dumb down the curriculum for them, Laude insisted that they master exactly the same challenging material as the students in his larger section.

... [Laude] supplemented his lectures with a variety of strategies: He offered TIP students two hours each week of extra instruction; he assigned them advisers who kept in close contact with them and intervened if the students ran into trouble or fell behind; he found upperclassmen to work with the TIP students one on one, as peer mentors. And he did everything he could, both in his lectures and outside the classroom, to convey to the TIP students a new sense of identity: They weren't subpar students who needed help; they were part of a community of high-achieving scholars.

Library and Information Science programs can continue to admit as they see fit, but what the University of Texas at Austin is doing is also a form of rigor. There's no reason why LIS programs can't do something like this, except that it takes work, and LIS programs seem unwilling to put that work in. It's much easier to play rigor and diversity off each other.

At present, it's not as if library science programs are rejecting people en masse; a wide net has already been cast.  Schools and programs could easily cast a wider net, or continue to do so, but instead of admitting so many cis white females from History and English undergraduate programs, maybe look a bit harder. Hiring managers could and should do the same.

The Loon writes that rigor in admissions would "slam the door to librarianship in the faces of some of those who wish to open it." But look at the above data. That door is already shut. It was never open. Because of the lack of diversity in LIS professions, it probably better to discuss rigor within programs, as Becky Katz writes, which the Loon divides into technological ("librarians should know how to code!") and humanistic ("Foucault! Interrogate! Problematize!"), rather than in admissions. And UT-Austin's program gets at that kind of rigor.

Do MLIS programs want to put that kind of work in? Are there monetary or other structural factors that prevent them from doing so? We'll see.

* And yes, librarians and library staff overwhelmingly identify as female, over 80 percent of the profession. Speaking of race and gender, the twitter streams for "rigor" and either "MLIS" or "LIS" are hardly representative, but they are also not a parade of white men, (/waves to self), calling for rigor, as the Loon paints it.

Elsewhere on this site:

Dear Aspiring Librarians (On MLIS Program Placement and Salaries)
The "Digital Natives" Myth and Library Science Education
Choose Wisely
The Adjunctification of Academic Librarianship
On Diversity in Library and Information Science Education
Guilty as Charged, Yet Another MLIS Post 
Making Masters of Library and Information Science Programs More Rigorous 
Not Another MLIS Post 
Explore the MLIS tag.

On Diversity in Library & Information Science Education

On Thursday, November 8th, and Friday the 9th the iSchool at the University of Maryland, College Park held its first Symposium on Diversity in Library and Information Science Education. It's an excellent idea that's well overdue, given that the profession appears to be somewhat demographically stagnant. To wit, in 2006 American Library Association members self-reported a composition that is approximately 89% white and 80% female (data in pdf form). In 2012, those numbers hadn't budged (pdf), which begs the question of what library and information science educators, librarians and paraprofessional staff, the ALA, academic advisers and faculty are doing or can do to correct this imbalance. I'm not naive enough to think that librarianship should reflect society, writ large, but for many librarians patron demographics are changing while ours are not.

Library and information science educators operate somewhat at the mercy of the other persons mentioned here. Graduate students are a self-selecting sample, and if not many students from diverse backgrounds attend MLIS programs, there is not much for this group to do beyond creating a welcoming environment for all students. Since that is easier said than done, more on that in a minute. [UPDATE: More on this in the comments.]

Librarians themselves, ourselves, have a role to play here as well. While academic librarianship may be a fallback career for failed academics, and I am guilty as charged, for a great many prospective librarians interactions with library and information science professionals can guide people towards the field. How we communicate with prospective students, both librarians and paraprofessional staff can go a long way towards recruitment.

For its part, the American Library Association has an Office for Diversity that I assume, like the rest of the ALA, is underutilized. Outside of the very effective Spectrum Scholarship Program I don't hear much about this resource. Divisions of the ALA, such as the Association of College & Research Libraries, have their own standards that are also worth examining.

Graduate programs in library and information science are dependent on undergraduate institutions for the "raw materials" of librarianship, the students, which is why there was an emphasis on academic advisers and faculty at the symposium. These professions can guide students towards librarianship, but without knowing the resources that exist to support graduate students their persuasive abilities may be circumscribed. Or worse, they may throw unprepared students to the wolf that is graduate school. That's where this conference comes in.

I was unable to attend the Thursday session, view the program here, but was present for Friday. Prior to lunch the main takeaway seemed to be the need to embed diversity and cultural competencies into all aspects of curriculum, to make it the new normal. This is important because hegemony really does exist. Lip service to diversity is not enough; rather, it needs to be as banal, unconscious, and as taken-for-granted as white privilege is. In practice, this means a focus on mentoring, hands on experience in a variety of roles, and celebrating and promoting diversity at every possible opportunity rather than devoting a mere week to it. Repetition makes routine. At one public library in Baltimore, diversity means thirteen different languages during story time.

Following lunch there was a focus on funding for diversity initiatives. The Storify below, put together by Rebecca Oxley, a conference organizer, has a wealth of links to funding sources, among others.

I am unsure if the symposium will be repeated next year, but it strikes me that if this is something we're doing every year, then we're not doing a good job of making LIS programs diverse and welcoming.