TITLE:
Owning Faculty Status: A Manifesto
AUTHORS:
Wyoma vanDuinkerken, Catherine Coker, Todd Samuelson
KEYWORDS:
Academic Library; Tenure; Promotion; Faculty Status; Academic Freedom
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Service Science and Management,
Vol.6 No.3,
August
6,
2013
ABSTRACT: Since the first moment
librarians were granted tenured faculty status in the academic arena, questions
have been raised by university and library administration, faculty members in
other departments, and non-academics as to why they were given the opportunity
to achieve such a prestigious rank. Not only did the majority of tenured/tenure track faculty librarians not
have the standard doctorate degree possessed by most other tenured/tenure track
faculty, but there were
also questions surrounding the librarians’ purported lack of teaching and their ability to
perform original research as required for those tenure and promotion standards set by the academic
institution. Sadly, this perception is due not only to incorrect external opinions about what
academic librarians do and how they serve their profession but also to various
internal library misunderstandings of what it means to be a tenured/tenure
track faculty member. As a result of this misunderstanding, some librarians are unable to
communicate what it means to be a librarian with tenured faculty status and
thus the importance of academic freedom for their profession as a whole. This
paper describes some key challenges tenured/tenure track faculty librarians face within their academic
institutions as they attempt to grapple with what it means to be a librarian with
tenured/tenure track status.