ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

ACADEMIC STATUS

Dear Colleagues:

This is a call for help. Approximately 100 state college librarians in New Jersey find themselves in an unequal battle with the state bureaucracy. While more and more states are joining the trend towards recognition of librarians as fully integrated members of the faculty, New Jersey—a pacesetter in this trend—has now reversed itself and stripped its librarians of their academic status with all of the attendant rights and responsibilities.

November 20, 1970, will go down in library annals as a black day for college librarians. On that day New Jersey state college librarians were dispossessed. Contracts were abrogated, tenure rights were put in jeopardy, promotion ladders vanished, work years were lengthened, salary ranges were lowered, in fact, chaos reigned. As of June 1970 no job specifications existed for the new civil service titles bestowed on the librarians.

The librarians have explored all avenues of appeal and are now proceeding with legal action recommended by an experienced labor lawyer. This Takes Money and that’s where you come in.

This is not just our struggle. If this attempt to downgrade the profession is successful it will set a precedent for all state and college administrations.

PLEASE, send your contributions to:

Miss Ruth Beach

Harry A. Sprague Library

Montclair State College

Upper Montclair, New Jersey 07043

Checks should be made payable to New Jersey State College Librarians’ Advisory Committee. For more information write Mrs. Marian Siegeltuch, Chairman, New Jersey State College Librarians’ Advisory Committee, at the above address.

Sir:

As a contribution to the current quest for faculty status for academic librarians I offer an extract from the 1767 Laws of Harvard College. The following paragraph from Chapter 8 “Of the Governors and Officers of the College, Their Duty & Power” must be the earliest statement authorizing faculty status for librarians in this country.

V. The Librarian shall have the like Power & Authority in all Cases, as the Tutors have, & he shall act with the President & Tutors in all their meetings, & with the President, Professors & Tutors in all such cases as come under their Cognisance, & shall be intitled to the same Tokens of respect from the Undergraduates as the Tutors are & shall have a Chamber assigned him by the Corporation, suitable for the Inspection of some District in the College; & any Affront or Insult offered to him shall be punished as if offered to a Tutor.

Colonial Society of Massachusetts.

Publications,XXXI, 377.

Many of the earlier library keepers at Harvard became tutors after completing tours of duty in the library; a few held appointments as tutors and library keepers concurrently. The 1767 code was the third set of rules governing the conduct of the librarian. (The pleasantly anachronistic title of Library Keeper seems to have disappeared by 1767.) The rules of 1667 and 1736 gave specific directions for the care and use of the library but did not indicate the status of the librarian. The new status conferred in 1767 included an increase in salary in view of his “increased trust & work.” The discussions that preceded these decisions are not reported but the enormous task of renewing the library after the disastrous fire of 1764 may have been more important than a desire to emulate college teachers.

There may be no useful moral to be drawn from this vignette except that academic librarians of 1971 might reflect on the possibility that very few problems of librarianship are entirely new.

Joe W. Kraus

Illinois State University

Normal, Illinois

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