Libraries and Learning
Retrenched
September 18, 2019
I’ve been hearing for years that we should expect increasing competition for students in the upper Midwest and New England because the population of traditionally college-age students has been declining. That decline is predicted to become precipitous in a few years, since after the 2008 crash the birth rate dropped and hasn’t rebounded. For institutions that aren’t bribe-worthy and elite enough to have both big endowments and heavy competition for admission, the belt-tightening that has been going on for a long time will get worse.
So I’m not entirely surprised that a public university in my neighborhood is making cuts after years of declining enrollments. St. Cloud State has sent letters to eight tenured faculty announcing they will be let go at the end of the academic year. Their union disputes the decision-making process and challenges the administration’s legal right to move forward with this retrenchment.
One of the layoffs is in the Theater department, which is also losing a position to retirement – and its major will be discontinued. Three of the layoffs are in philosophy. That’s about half the department. Replacements have not been approved in recent years, and four retirements are pending, so that department is also on the near-extinction list.
Four of the layoffs – half of the total – are in the library. (For non-librarian readers, it’s not uncommon for librarians to hold faculty status, including meeting requirements for tenure.) There will be eight remaining librarians to serve over 14,000 students, 200 majors, 60 graduate programs, and two doctoral programs.
Libraries are easy pickings because librarians’ labor is almost by design fairly invisible. When you click on a database link and download an article, it may take only a second, but people did a lot of work to make that happen: they selected and negotiated a license annually for that database, put links to it in all the right places on the library website, changed them when the vendor randomly decided to rebrand (please don’t), and did a ton of fiddly work to make sure the links to hundreds of thousands of individual articles actually work. When all goes well, it appears seamless. In the classic words of S. R. Ranganathan, we want to save the time of the reader. But it’s a ton of labor that nobody sees.
Then there’s the considerable work of helping students one-on-one and in courses figure out not just where to click but why scholarship matters and how to think through questions with the help of good sources. We also work with other libraries so we can share what resources are sharable. If you got an article or book by interlibrary loan, a lot of people had to do a lot of work to make that happen. You’re welcome.
There’s no question universities will have to adapt to changing enrollment patterns. The best way to do that is openly and with shared information and with a process that allows data to be examined and challenged if n