Here are some blind items from my interactions with academic libraries over the past few months. They don't paint a pretty picture of the hiring processes therein.
The university that schedules a phone interview, then, out of the blue, a second phone interview three weeks later with an entirely different search committee and no explanation.
That same university, when asked during the second phone interview, has no timeline to bring anyone in for an on-campus interview, a clear sign that they have no idea who or what they're looking for in the position.
The multiple instances in which the person you report to isn't part of the search committee.
On-campus interviews where the people you'd manage aren't part of the hiring process.
Places where you're told "the position is what you make it" even though there's a long, almost unicorn-like job description and a title that strongly suggests which area of academic librarianship the position falls into. Again, a clear sign that they have no idea what they're looking for in the position.
Places where more than a third of the students are non-white, but all the librarians are Nice White Ladies.
Place that check your references and then ghost. 0_o
Places that ask for a salary range and when supplied with one, with tons of wiggle room, might I add, feel the need to note that they're a non-profit. Passive aggressive much?
Places that have lost a significant percentage of their staff, but those that remain are clinging to their silos rather than trying to reorganize, reward versatility, and become more agile and open.
The counter: Places that awkwardly combine two or more positions into one to compensate for budget cuts. See that unicorn-like job description, above.
Places where it's clear you'll be punished for wanting to publish, to share knowledge, whether that's peer reviewed, presented, or blogged.
"So, I see you publish," I was told, with a tone and body language that made it clear I shouldn't aspire to such things.
"I've read your blog and twitter," remarked one hiring official, who did not and would not expand on that when I asked them what they thought of my online presence.
"Why can't you stick to beer?" is something that I was told by someone in human resources at one institution. If I weren't a cis het white male, I'd send that into the LIS Microaggressions zine.
Errata:
All directors, with no exceptions, think that if I, as an ex-director, interview for a librarian position, then I'm out to steal their job. Meanwhile, other library staff at these organizations can't fathom why I'd give up a directorship, not understanding how fraught middle management in academic libraries can be, often feeling trapped between library staff and academic administration, which can sometimes be at cross-purposes. Why is it not okay to be a librarian, a part of a team? We don't all have to aspire to management, even those of us in management.
A sign you're in a good place: when someone eats a fruit cup with both breakfast and lunch and not once touches the honeydew. Honeydew is a garbage melon.
The performance of whiteness is an important barrier to diversity in library and information science. I was aware of this before job hunting, but nowhere is this more true than when you're on the market. "Small talk" is crucial to determining whether or not one "fits" in an organization. I mentioned farmers markets, Cub Scouts, homebrewing, and many other topics, some consciously, some not, to show employers that I'm "like" them. No doubt it helps that I look like them, too. If you're looking for a job in libraries, I encourage you to read Angela Galvan's "Soliciting Performance, Hiding Bias: Whiteness and Librarianship," and April Hathcock's "White Librarianship in Blackface: Diversity Initiatives in LIS," both published in In the Library With the Lead Pipe.
Do you have horror stories you'd like to share? If you're able to, I'm here for that.
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.
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.
While I was burning vacation days, use it or lose it!, Andy Woodworth went and did it again.
His post was much more of an airing of grievances than a feat of strength, and then The Chronicle of Higher Education inexplicably sent out a tweet, since deleted, with the hashtag "librarianfestivus."
Thanks to The Stacks Cat for retweeting that before it was deleted,
enabling me to screen capture it.
The outpouring that followed nicely sums up the year in libraries, both for better and for worse.
infomercials for products repackaged and marketed as 'webinars.' my spam folder loves these. #librarianfestivus
— Dale Askey (@daskey) December 21, 2013
Only librarians could whine & bitch about a holiday that's about librarian whining & bitching. #librarianfestivus
— Matthew Ciszek (@mciszek) December 20, 2013
Confession: I can never remember what the G stands for anyway.
referring to even the most library-hostile vendors as 'partners,' when 'horrid codependent relationship' wld fit better #librarianfestivus
— Dale Askey (@daskey) December 21, 2013
I ranted about this earlier in the year and while I suspect the "Big Deal" is going to take some hits in the next year, I also think we librarians are going to be stuck with it.
On why unpaid internships suck (tl:dr, they perpetuate inequality, are exploitative):
Don't complain about the lack of diversity in LIS if you support unpaid internships in LIS. #librarianfestivus
— Rebecca Giftman (@DerangeDescribe) December 20, 2013
No I'm not going to buy your textbook for the library. You took the class. Buy the book. #librarianfestivus
— Kimberly Feher (@KSF1975) December 20, 2013
No more hand-wringing over every asshole who writes an anti-libraries/librarian article. #librarianfestivus
— Michelle (@winelibrarian) December 20, 2013
And of course the Think Tank was mentioned as well. Quote Andy:
Honestly, if you can’t control your resident lunatics, please at least keep them within the confines of your posting area. When people in the position of hiring within the library start talking about membership in the group as being a liability on the resume, you might want to work on your image within the library world.
Here's what I said to Hiring Librarians about ALA Think Tank, to be published by that site shortly (UPDATE on 1/3, here it is):
Membership in the ALA Think Tank Facebook group won't hurt a candidate in my eyes, but participation is another story. Ninety-five percent of what goes on in that group is fine by me, so if you use the group to "make it happen" and get ideas/feedback/discuss the issues of the day, that's great. But the remaining five percent gives me a great deal of pause. If your participation in ALA Think Tank includes making fun of South Asians, being sexist and using the group to create gendered spaces, subtweeting and bickering with your peers as if librarianship is junior high school, and generally acting like a "drunken embarrassment," then yes, participation in the group is going to hurt a candidate's chances with me.
I'm heartened that in 2013 I saw much more discussion (and please do read the links therein) of diversity, gender, race, class, and I aim to further this dialogue in 2014. However, this needs to progress beyond discussion. While I grew up in one majority minority city and now work and live in another (thus as a hiring manager I have a slate of candidates available that other hiring librarians do not), if there's anything I can do to move this topic from one of position to one of maneuvers, I will do it.
I've done an interview with the good folks over at Hiring Librarians on, you guessed it, hiring library staff. Here's a taste:
Too many applicants come in unprepared. They haven’t done, or haven’t articulated that they’ve done, background research on the library, on the institution. Please please please go to our website and poke around. Tell us what you liked, what works, as well as what doesn’t. Look at the mission of the institution; it’s something we take very seriously, and there are hard days when that mission, those goals, seems like all we have. Let us know how you can help us with that mission, and achieve those goals.
Over on DCBeer.com I have a post up that's an interview with Brian Strumke, the brewer/owner/sole employee of Stillwater, a "gypsy" brewing outfit loosely based out of Baltimore. Every beer brewed by Stillwater is made with a farmhouse-style strain of yeast, commonly associated with saisons and biers de garde. Strumke, however, blurs and blends styles, to great effect. The end result is often a series of yeast-dominant beers, an interesting contrast with more common hop-forward styles, like Pale Ales, India and otherwise, and malt-forward ones like brown ales and bocks.
His most recent creation is Stillwater Premium, a beer that doubles as an inside joke since it's based on ingredients used in macro lagers like flaked rice and corn, and hops like Cluster, Northern Brewer, and Saaz. Instead of a lager, however, he's made an ale, and he's used two wild yeast strains in addition to a farmhouse strain to ferment the beer. The result is something like "dirty Bud," or Stella Artois if it was good and not skunked, as has been the case the last few times I've had that beer. Also, at 4.5% alcohol by volume, you can drink a lot of it, if, you know, you're into that sort of thing.
Also also, he used to be a DJ, and so of course I ask him about Skrillex. He's an interesting guy, and his thoughts on beer are worth a read.
I paired the beer with a semi-reasonable approximation of congee, a Chinese rice porridge. The flaked rice in the beer compliments the rice in the dish, and the dryness of the beer on the back end, due to two strains of wild yeast, or Brettanomycnes, kept me coming back for more broth. I also dropped an egg into that bowl, so the slight acidity of the beer plays against that richness.
