ACRL College & Research Libraries News

Association of College & Research Libraries

Letters

Richard W. Meyer, director of the library, Trinity University

Tenure is important

To the Editor:

I read with interest the essay by Beth Shapiro (November 1993) in which she advocates dumping faculty status for librarians. A few years ago I would have agreed completely with her, but some empirical study modified my opinion. (See my article in Library Administration & Management (Fall 1990): 184-93.)

Faculty status without tenure is nothing. With tenure it is something of value, which I will here refer to simply as tenure. Note that tenure for general faculty is ubiquitous in four- year colleges and universities; it is not ubiquitous among librarians. Without questioning why this dichotomy exists, Shapiro misses the point of what faculty status for librarians represents. Answering questions about why tenure exists and [if] it should apply to librarians provides better rationale for a dump faculty status decision than our anecdotal experience.

Long justified as the way to secure academic freedom (the real myth), tenure exists primarily because it is the only quantitative mechanism that monitors quality in academics. The tenure process delegates the hiring decision to the faculty who use this mechanism as a means to assure themselves of quality among their peers. … At large research universities, the tenure process (i.e., faculty status for librarians) unfortunately imposes costs—in the form of diminished campuswide research productivity— which overwhelm its benefits. Shapiro is right in regard to those places. At teaching-oriented institutions (i.e., four-year liberal arts colleges) tenure helps to insure some level of scholarship, which makes it possible for faculty to teach better. . . . Therefore, it works to elevate quality. Fortunately librarians at teaching institutions often have more opportunity to help support the instructional program by working with faculty than they do at research institutions. And, tenure here helps elevate quality among librarians with positive return to the product of those schools. These differences in campus agendas taken together provide some explanation of why tenure is ubiquitous among teaching faculty and not among librarians.

Appropriate action: dump faculty status at Rice, keep it at Trinity.