LSU librarians can thrive outside of the tenure framework, dean says

The LSU Library sits in the middle of campus on Monday, March 20, 2023, in Baton Rouge. (Matthew Perschall for Louisiana Illuminator)

Editor’s note: The following commentary was submitted in response to an Aug. 20, 2024 report from the Illuminator: “LSU changes tenure rules for librarians to improve its research rankings,” by Piper Hutchinson

In August, LSU announced that it would no longer hire librarians to tenure-track positions. 

The University offered two justifications for the move: LSU’s aspiration for American Association of Universities status, and the chronic difficulty involved in evaluating the promotion and tenure portfolios of faculty who teach no classes and have just 15% of their time allocated to research.

For some of LSU’s library faculty, the elimination of future tenure track appointments felt like a devaluing of their work, and one that could lead to further diminishment and disinvestment.  

While I empathize with the concerns of our disappointed librarians, I believe that this move will  improve the work lives of librarians generally. Speaking as a research library director with career long research interests, I am fully committed to a model of academic librarianship which involves significant engagement with the literature of our profession, the publication of new knowledge, and service contributions such as leadership in professional associations. My experience, however, leads me to believe that these behaviors can exist, even thrive outside the framework of  tenure. They certainly do at the 79% of AAU institutions that do not offer librarians tenure.  

The controversy over librarian tenure has shown us all how deeply enmeshed the issue is in  foundational values and beliefs that might otherwise go unchallenged. I am as guilty of ignoring  my own assumptions as anyone, and it’s taken this abrupt change to make me take stock of what I  currently believe. I’ve ended up with the following five principles: 

Respect for the role

However research librarian positions are configured, in practice they need to operate as full  partners in the academic process. Teaching and curricular support, the provision of student  success services, and collection building all require deep professional expertise, and all require  full engagement with teaching faculty, Faculty Senate, and campus-wide committees. It is further  appropriate for research librarian positions to offer the protections offered teaching faculty. NC  State University provides “academic tenure” to their non tenure track faculty, which differs from  “permanent tenure” only in that it is bounded within the contract period of employment.  

Respect for tenure

Tenure at most of America’s best universities is reserved for those who do significant teaching and  research, and who do those jobs extremely well. Teaching is entirely absent from many librarian  positions, and for nearly all, conducting original research is peripheral to their primary  responsibilities.  

Scaffolding and rewards for research and service

The appointment and promotion of research librarians needs to encourage and reward innovation  and substantive contributions to the profession. Engagement of this sort will not suit every  librarian, but for those who actively seek out this kind of professional life, libraries should provide  mentorship programs, internal peer coaching, travel budgets, and allowance for continuing  education of all kinds. 

Scaffolding and rewards for excellence in librarianship

A common trope in higher education bemoans faculty reward structures that discount excellence  in teaching. The analog in research libraries are librarians who are extraordinarily good at the job  they’re hired for, only to lose their jobs as a result of inadequate publication activity. Librarian  ranks need to recognize excellent work, and provide consequential promotion and compensation  rewards. The mentor programs and peer coaching mentioned above can easily be adapted so as  to support those oriented towards workplace excellence. 

Producing value

There is an additional cost that flows from shoehorning librarian contributions into evaluation and  promotion documents built for teaching faculty. That awkward effort also impairs our ability to  highlight and reward the dazzling breadth of work our librarians do in serving faculty and students.  Now more than ever, we need those contributions to be visible, inescapable really, all across  campus. Doing so will come naturally to a profession that has transformed itself so completely  over the past 25 years. Excellent research libraries are a university’s competitive edge, and it is  their librarians that make them so.