I’ve contemplated whether to write this post given that it will no doubt tamper with my anonymity. But this issue has been on my mind for a couple of weeks so here goes… For two weeks now my university has been an eerie ghost town. Contract faculty, teacher assistants and graduate assistants have been on strike for almost two weeks. The university administration, having learned from a previous 11-week strike, decided to cancel all academic activities (including most classes with some exceptions).
This is my first strike. I narrowly escaped a strike at this university as a student almost a decade ago (I graduated the summer before the previous strike). I have to admit that I’m still on the fence about supporting the union on strike. I feel the demands of the graduate assistants and teaching assistants are unrealistic given the current financial climate at the university. However, I sympathize with the contract faculty who do not have job security. Having been a contract employee for three years, I understand the anguish of uncertainty that hangs around you. What is unconscionable is that contract faculty who have worked for many years at the university must re-apply for their jobs each academic year. The university does rely heavily on precarious employees to teach a largely undergraduate population.
For two weeks now, the library has been eerily quiet with a few students (mostly those living in residence) dotting the library. The university is still open as is the library. Full-time librarians and professors are part of the faculty association that is separate from the union on strike. During the strike everything is expected to be status quo. The library is open. Librarians are expected to come into work. Librarians are still providing reference service in person, on the phone, via email and virtually. Cataloguing librarians are in their offices cataloguing away. Committees are still meeting. Librarians must cross the picket line to get to work. Everything is status quo (with the exception of teaching information literacy classes) for the librarians. Professors are not teaching classes. Are professors expected to cross the picket line? Nope.
That is the difference between librarians as faculty members and professors as faculty members. We, the librarians, must cross the picket line, to serve our users (the handful that are in the library and virtually). The truth is that librarians will never truely be like professors because we are not. A strike makes that very clear. We are service providers as well as teachers (for those who do teach information literacy classes or subject-specific classes). Professors are not tied to their offices on campus. With classes cancelled their focus might now turn to their research or service committments. They are more flexible to work elsewhere. There are some tasks that librarians can accomplish from home (such as collection work and writing reports), but officially librarians are expected to be in the library during the strike. Arguably, librarians can take this opportunity to use some of their research days and not cross the picket line, but prior arrangements must be made to take a research day and work from home.
Librarians will never truely be faculty members. But that is alright. I’m personally taking the strike time to catch up on some collection work and readings. I’m not sure how long this strike will last, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed. As the days get colder for the picketers outside the ivory tower, I find myself growing more and more sympathetic to their cause….
I don’t have an understanding of what your position regarding unions is, but because I have a strong pro-union orientation, I have to say that I would never willingly cross a picket line. Long ago, I quit a temp job at a corporate retail because there was a picket line at the front gate. While doing graduate work in Canada, the local teacher’s union went on strike and I, though a lowly grad student with a TA position, stayed off campus because it would mean crossing a picket line. I know that there are people with different perspectives on this, and in tough economic times people have to do what they think will keep them above water, but I feel strongly that unions provide the only counterweight available to the tendency of management to lower wages and decrease benefits.
I also think that it is a mistake to say that librarians will never be faculty because they cannot work from home. The real work of a professor takes place in a classroom and in the context of the department on campus. A professor is not a private scholar, pursuing subject on a whim, but rather a professional who works with other researchers in and out of the classroom — sometimes in the library, sometimes at seminars, but almost always with a strong identification with the physical campus. It is not the portability of their trade (their trade not being portable at all really) that makes them faculty — it is the idea that they are working with a “faculty” toward a common goal. And for that reason I have to say, tenured academic librarians are faculty, especially insofar as there are often teaching opportunities for academic librarians within their field of specialization.
Rereading this post, I sound hopelessly snotty and condescending, but rather than rewrite it, I’ll leave it as written. I just wanted to throw in my two bits and to say that the idea of who is and who isn’t faculty could be theorized a little more.