If you haven’t done so yet, go read Comrades-in-Arms: The Professor and the Librarian by Rochelle at Random Access Mazar and then Joining the Club by Dorothea at Caveat Lector.

It is a healthy discussion of the highly variable relationship between the teaching/research faculty and the academic librarian.    I find it funny that Dorothea and I posted the first two comments to Rochelle’s post almost simultaneously the other day.  I thought I was posting the first comment but by the time I hit submit Dorothea had already done so.

It would be hard for there to be 2 completely different comments.  But knowing Dorothea I was looking forward to her response, which is now up.  I also knew I’d agree with her too.

I guess, for me, Rochelle’s view is a hope, a goal, a dream maybe.  But it is a positive outlook in my life.

And that’s the crux of it, always. We want the teaching faculty (and by this I mean anyone from the rank of associate professor on up) to see us as their equals, as comrades-in-arms in the daily battle to produce good scholarship, excellent graduates, and better the general welfare of our shared institution and Knowledge in general. We want a standing invitation to the faculty club. We don’t want to be seen as the help.

Rochelle brings out a lot of good points as to how we can possibly be seen as more than the help.  Read it.

Also for me, Dorothea’s view is extremely realistic and may be the best attainable on anything more than a small, local scale.  And for Dorothea, it is exactly the above quote that causes her most cynical reaction.  And she’s right.  It isn’t us, but is generally the faculty.

With all due respect, I don’t think the problem there is us. The problem there is faculty: to be specific, a large (though not, of course, all-encompassing) faction among faculty who simply cannot respect any path but theirs. They can’t imagine that librarians are highly educated, because in their rarefied world, all the highly-educated people are faculty. They can’t imagine that librarians are smart, ditto. Nor can they admit that anyone but they has a stake in the business of information.

And I have to agree, there is an alarmingly similar situation between (many) librarians and the "help."  I’ve walked that walk as both student worker and as paraprofessional.  While many librarians were more than aware of and valued the contributions of everyone involved, many, including a few whom I could name that are considered to be the consummate professional, disdained everyone and all work that wasn’t "Librarian."  Most of you can’t begin to imagine how many times I wanted to take all the non-professional staff out of the building and see how long it could operate.  Simple fact is, it wouldn’t.

Dorothea has a lot more of value to say, read it if you haven’t.

So how is it that I agree with both, you may ask?  Simple.  I tend to think that what Dorothea wrote is sad but generally true.  We are and always will be the "help" in the academy.  But that does not preclude what Rochelle is experiencing on a small and local scale from holding true also.

While not a professional librarian yet, I have and still do experience what Rochelle is describing in various small-scale undertakings and communities of practice.

When I was a paraprofessional in charge of electronic reserves much of the teaching faculty acted as if I was just the "help," as if my job was to satisfy them in the manner and timeframe they desired.  But there were also a handful or two who were always most appreciative of what we did, and treated me and even my student worker as an equal in the provision of education to their students.

I have also been involved in several reading/discussion groups as both an undergraduate, graduate student at-large, and as a grad student.  These people in these small groups, most of them full professors, have only ever treated me as an equal with something to contribute.  I have often found this to be the case in most of my classrooms as a student also.  That doesn’t mean that they had nothing to teach me, certainly not.  It only means that they were equally open to learning something from me.

Now these are small-scale operations, often extremely small.  I have lost the desire to pursue the fool’s errand of being seen as an equal by all faculty.  That is simply unattainable.  Matter-of-fact, truth be told, I’d have been happy to stay a paraprofessional if I had been allowed to continue contributing to the mission of education AND I had been able to make an acceptable living at it.

Poverty is no stranger to the library world.  Among the many millions of working poor are quite a few library workers.  Librarians justifiably complain of low salaries but the clerks and technicians around them are paid less for work that is just as hard and takes as many hours.  Some time, take a clerk out to lunch and ask her what it is like to live on a salary that will not permit her to own a house, a salary that puts anything beyond necessities out of reach.

Often, I feel like I’m being downright uppity by becoming a Librarian.  Who am I, a simple lower middle class, blue collar, enlisted soldier, to be a Librarian?  And after reminding myself of the economic argument, I also remind myself that I already have as much education as most dual master degreed or PhD holding librarians or faculty.  But then as Dorothea said much more eloquently, it isn’t about the degrees, it is about wanting and being able to contribute.

So thanks to both Rochelle and Dorothea for an interesting conversation.