Librarians on many campuses have long been considered faculty, but some institutions are now reclassifying the position as a staff job as they reassess the role of their research libraries more broadly.
The move to take faculty and tenure status away from librarians has generated controversy and raised questions about whether their role should be narrowed and what the future of the job should be. Some administrators say the position must shift with the changing model for university libraries. But even though their role is changing, librarians say they belong on the faculty because they continue to support their campuses through research, scholarship, and teaching.
Last month the University of Virginia announced that all future librarians will be classified as university staff. The librarians are now considered non-tenure-track faculty, and current employees will retain that status.
And East Carolina University is weighing a plan that may strip its future librarians of faculty status, their ability to earn tenure, or both.
Debates on those campuses follow similar changes enacted elsewhere in recent years. The Alamo Community College District, in San Antonio, dropped faculty rank for its librarians in 2011. That same year, Mt. Hood Community College, in Gresham, Ore., laid off its full-time faculty librarians and replaced them with library staff. Two full-time, tenure-track positions were later reinstated following negotiations with the administration.
Steven J. Bell, president of the Association of College and Research Libraries and a librarian at Temple University, said universities reclassify library employees for a number of reasons. When they do, it stirs conversation about the perception of librarians.
“We see ourselves as being closely connected to educational mission,” Mr. Bell said, “yet librarians are often perceived as academic-support personnel.”
This is especially true when their roles are “devalued,” he said, as librarians often feel when their positions are removed from faculty ranks.
Difficult to Define
Lisa J. Hinchliffe, a former president of the library association and a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said there are many classifications for librarians on college campuses, and that they sometimes change. A survey she is conducting of libraries at four-year public universities asks about faculty status for their staff.
At nearly two-thirds of the roughly 1,600 institutions that responded, librarians have faculty status; 36 percent of those librarians have tenure or are on the tenure track; and 28 percent have faculty status but are off the tenure track, Ms. Hinchliffe said. The remaining third of the universities say their librarians do not have faculty status.
The University of Virginia said the difficulty of defining the role of academic librarians today was one reason behind the decision to reclassify their jobs, because it no longer made sense to call those employees faculty members. Any future librarians will be hired at one of the university’s three ranks of staff: operational and administrative, managerial and professional, or executive and senior administrative.
Karin Wittenborg, head librarian, sent an e-mail to library employees in late February announcing the change. The new policy, which is effective immediately, has been discussed since last fall through meetings and question-and-answer forums.
Ms. Wittenborg said she recognizes that change is difficult, but said the university and its libraries must evolve as different skills are required.
“Research libraries are in a time of dramatic and continuing change,” she wrote in an e-mail to The Chronicle. “Almost every aspect of the UVa Library, from collections to services to technology, has changed and will continue to change.”
But many faculty didn’t understand the necessity of the change in status or the timing of it, said Barbara S. Selby, a manager of the library’s research-and-information services.
Ms. Selby, who has worked at Virginia for nearly 30 years, said the university restructured its staff ranks about five years ago, when the issue of whether librarians would revert to staff status was raised but rejected by the administration.
“The fact that we had had this discussion in the not-too-distant past made a lot of people question why it was back again,” she said.
The university’s Library Faculty Assembly conducted a survey of the librarians to gauge their response to the change, said Charlotte Morford, the library’s director of communication, and two-thirds of them responded to the survey. Among the respondents, nearly all said they wanted to maintain faculty status for all librarians.
The Library Faculty Assembly sent a letter, signed by 43 librarians, urging Ms. Wittenborg to review a joint statement by the association of college research libraries and the American Association of University Professors on the faculty status of college librarians, which outlines why librarians should hold faculty rank.
Jean L. Cooper, an assistant professor in the library who signed the letter, said downgrading librarians’ status casts them in a “lesser light.”
“I’m proud to work at the University of Virginia,” Ms. Cooper said. “I feel I contribute to the mission, and I will continue to do that, but it does make you feel bad when your role is not supported.”
21st-Century Libraries
At East Carolina University, administrators are reviewing whether to revoke faculty titles for librarians and their ability to earn tenure.
The review, which began last year in an effort to find efficiencies in the library system, is not expected to be complete until the summer, said Marilyn A. Sheerer, provost and senior vice chancellor for academic affairs. Until then, the university will not hire for any tenure-track positions in the library. Any library employee hired during the “period of study” will be hired on contract, she said.
The university’s two libraries—the main library and a health-sciences library—hired consultants to find the best practices for East Carolina. The goal of the evaluation, Ms. Sheerer said, is to answer the question, “What does a library of the 21st century look like?” and to revamp the university’s libraries to meet that vision.
Maureen E. Sullivan, an organization-development consultant, said she began working with the university’s libraries last summer to build a human-resource management system that supports the librarians’ work. She has held meetings with the administration and said she is working closely with “the staff and librarians who will be affected by this change.”
Months into the process, however, the university’s librarians feel that their voice isn’t being heard, said one tenured librarian, who asked to remain anonymous. He said that the faculty had posed questions about what people mean by the “library of the future,” but that no one has been able to define it. The faculty has expressed opposition to a change in status or tenure, he said, as have both the library council and the faculty senate.
“Everybody here is of the same mind-set,” he said. “We don’t want this and feel like it’s being forced on us.”
Ms. Sullivan, who is also president of the American Library Association, said any change in title should not undermine the deep respect East Carolina has for its librarians. Universities operate on their own library models, she said, and those models regularly change to fit the institution’s needs.
“It’s important to remember there is a difference between the work and role of the teaching faculty,” she said, “and the work and role of librarians.”
Correction (3/19/2013, 6:09 p.m.): This article originally misstated the results of a survey of University of Virginia librarians. The survey drew responses from two-thirds of the librarians, and nearly all of the respondents, not two-thirds of respondents, said they wanted to maintain faculty status for librarians. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.