As a student there were many times when I was bothered by other students’ disdain for LIS theory. Yes, some of it is hard to read. True, some of it isn’t immediately applicable. But the purpose of theory, it seems to me, is as much to cause us to reflect on our practice as it is to inform our practice. And for those students who were going into academic librarianship, the lack of understanding of the ways in which theory might be applied seemed particularly egregious.
Theory is a large part of what the academy does. Librarians have to understand how it works, what its place is, and why it’s important — even if they aren’t interested in perusing Cixcous while eating an orange.
Anne-Marie today has a marvelous post, in which her concern is some librarian’s disdain for peer reviewed literature:
[W]hen I hear people talking about how useless or stultifying or hard to understand or badly written they find the peer-reviewed literature, they sound just like year after year of students I’ve heard complaining about their classroom reading. Classroom reading not found by a keyword search in Library Literature, but carefully selected and assigned by experts in the field who are saying “this, this is an important thing you need to understand to understand what knowledge is in our discipline.” Yes, a lot of what is in the peer-reviewed literature, in all fields, is not well written. A lot of it is not well researched. A lot of it is published only because it needed to be for the author’s tenure hit. This isn’t just true for us – it’s true across the board. It might be more true for some fields and less true for others but it’s true on some level for all of them. And not recognizing that it is not ALL like that, that sometimes the language is hard because the concepts are hard, sometimes you have to read it three, four or five times not because it’s badly written but because it’s talking about really complex things that take three, four or five readings to understand means closing yourself off from a type of knowledge and a way of understanding that can absolutely inform practice — not understanding that will keep a student from being successful in college. More than that, I think not understand[ing] that hurts the practitioner as well.
She is so, so right. And I think that perhaps this dual distaste for theory and for peer review also leaches into a distaste for and lack of understanding of tenure as well.
I have actually heard academic library students say that they won’t apply to jobs at institutions where librarians are tenure-track. Now, some of them made this decision thoughtfully — they aren’t strong writers, or they’re only planning on being in the field for ten years anyway, or they want to simply be practitioners for a few years before going back to school for another degree.
However, most of the people who I’ve heard express an avoidance of tenure seem mostly interested in avoiding either: 1) theory, 2) research design, and/or 3) being rejected. And I empathize. My new job isn’t tenure-track, and I’m grateful. It seems enough to just get my feet under me professionally without worrying about getting published, too, at least for the moment.
Here’s the thing, though: when we decline to let theory into our professional experience; when we take a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do approach to peer review; when we avoid tenure out of laziness or fear — when we as academic librarians do these things, we are modeling behaviour that we would not consider acceptable in our students, and would certainly not be accepted by the academy in faculty.
If we are “just” practitioners, then we are not participating in the life of the academy, despite having charge of its artifacts. This seems to me to be contradictory at best.
