librarypunk - 016 - Wherefore MLS, or, Degrees for Exceptional Women

Episode Date: June 24, 2021

This week we’re talking about the history of the MLS degree, why do we do it, and how does it exacerbate all those pesky contradictions that keep dialecting off themselves?  Draft 6: Radical Empathy Report  Accomplices Not Allies: Abolishing the Ally Industrial Complex  Harris, R. M. (1992). Librarianship : the erosion of a woman’s profession. Ablex Pub. Corp.  https://www.worldcat.org/title/librarianship-the-erosion-of-a-womans-profession/oclc/25832854/editions?referer=di&editionsView=true http://mauraseale.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Seale-Mirza-Empty-Presence-final-manuscript.pdf

Just pretend your Bono's guitar. I'm Justin. I'm Skullcom librarian. My pronouns are he, him. I'm Sadie. I'm an IT administrator at a public library. My pronouns are she and they. I'm Jay. My pronouns are he, him, and I'm a metadata and discovery librarian at an academic library. I'm Carrie. I'm a health sciences librarian, and my pronouns are she her. Yeah. Exclusive Arthur content coming in the group chat.

Oh yeah. Nice. I'm fucking beefed for this. I'm so fucking beefed for some exclusive Arthur content. Oh, look at the bull at his window. So majestic. He was being so snugly this boarding. How am I supposed to go back to work when Arthur just sits like that with me in the morning?

I maybe like took a nap before I went to work today with mod on me. That's valid. You're still valid. Oh my God. Thank you for very. validating the shit out of me. You're like, of what? Will you be my gay BFF?

Yes. Yes, queen. I don't believe in monarchies, even though they exist. Yes, comad. Thank you. She may be a communist. So, we've got our regular segment. That's what I was looking for.

took a nap until like 10 minutes ago. I'm very sleepy today. Sleep science. This is really riding on Jay and Carrie today then. Sleep, sleep, science, science. I'm sorry, that was on me.

Just egging me on here. Hey. So, what's wrong in LA? Twitter. Uh, um, I was almost Twitter's person of the day in library Twitter anyway. Didn't get quote tweeted enough.

You're pretty far from being a main character, I think. It almost happened. I was worried there for a bit. You have to get, like, I think you have to be at least over 100 to be a main character. Okay. That's my metric, yeah. Okay. I don't know what people think, like, being popular means, but my metric is over 100.

One of my tweets got over, like, 800 the other day. Yeah, see, that's, that's popular. That's very popular. Oh, my God. ALA's intellectual freedom and social justice working group put out a draft of a report that suggested the adoption of radical empathy. And Jay said, no, not today. I said only cold callousness today. No, so what this is is, it's like, so they, we, you know, I'm not, no longer member of ALA because it has no use to me, and I see no use in spending over $300.

for something that is no good to me. Heard that. Yeah, it's like it used to be useful to me, weirdly, more when I was a graduate student, and only had to pay 50 bucks and, you know, anyway. But so there's been the problem of like the neutrality stance. And I know they tried to get rid of that and like do like an anti-fascist thing. And people said no. Well, they didn't, but like people did at midwinter or something.

And I got shot down. And so now I think that's where this radical empathy as a. opposed to neutrality comes from. And while the concept isn't bad, especially if you go back and like read the definition that the person they're citing is using, which I still think is a bunch of word salad, but it's coming from a good, it's like a tasty, healthy word salad and not like a bullshit grifter word salad. Yeah.

Well, and also like if you read, there's a someone pulled up a Michelle Caswell article about radical empathy and archives that was really good. I was like, oh, this would have made sense to. site. Wow. This is contextually, this is contextually appropriate. Whereas the document does like a sentence and doesn't really define it. And so what they're saying is it's like, you know, instead of neutrality, we should, I don't know, care about people. I'm like, great. God forbid. But a thing that I pointed out in my retweet, which Violet was right, I should make a comment, but I'm not an ALA member. So I don't know if I actually should make a comment on the actual

document. And I said that empathy itself is not liberatory. And I'm not the only person to point this out. The way they're using empathy and the way that radical empathy seems to be defined is more just being a good conscious human being or rather even like sympathy and not empathy. Empathy is like where you actually feel what the other person is feeling. Like you know what it feels like. You are walking in their shoes. They are hurting and you are also. hurting. That's where you get all these like empaths who are just like manipulative awful people because they assume they know how you feel. Right. And I know it's coming from a good place. Let me look at my notes so that I don't misrepresent things. So some of the other comments because

apparently I wasn't the only one who was displeased with this framework was that by using this, it's putting more focus on the individual practice in a document that's supposed to be for an organization. It is taking all responsibility away from the organization and the system itself and putting it on sole members. Now, individual people doing these things is not bad. But as like an organizational document, that shouldn't be the focus. Yeah, there needs to be like a structural framework. Because like it's a response to dealing with fascism, white supremacy. And what does the actions of an individual do to disrupt systemic oppression?

Exactly. Yeah, it's like there are good things to do, but, you know, maybe we should also talk about other things. Someone also brought up that this is just making people do unpaid labor more than we already have to do. At a point I really liked was someone talking about performance surveillance, as in if this becomes like a statement of the organization, that is going to start to be a metric against which people are measured in the work. place. And because this is so vague about what does this look like, what is this, what does this look like in practice materially, the person who is responsible for evaluating you gets to decide what that looks like. And I know Jess Schaumburg came up with a point that a lot of neurodivergent people especially, but like people in general, what empathy looks like varies between people and especially people who might have trouble with the way that

neurotypical people use empathy especially people with autism or even like ADHD or like all sorts of things it's not going to look the way that neurotypical people like yes they saw I feel like I'm like lecturing yes you pretty much covered I was going to bring up Jess's comment on the on the document because like yeah that's the idea of being evaluated on my empathy at work just seems like a bad place to go. So, yeah, I was going to echo that, that, like, autistic or, you know, other neurodivergent people, like, it doesn't look the same. So if you start getting, you know, your neurotypical people judging the neurodiverse people, it's going to be a fucking mess. And if that's not what they mean by empathy, then why are they using the word empathy?

Exactly. to know. Exactly. And like I went, the woman whose work they cited for radical empathy, I kind of went and was reading the comments on Twitter and read a little bit of her website. And she really stresses the importance of this being for upper management and CEOs and stuff. Because she is one. Exactly. So it's all like a higher education perspective. Exactly. And so it's definitely like these are the people who should be practicing radical infancy. you know, empathy. So you have the entire, what, ALA base is supposed to do this. But I don't know. It just, it just seems like it was a misdirection. Yes, good intentions. Good intentions, misdirection. Like, this is something that's made for people who are higher up on the food chain to help out the people who are lower on the food chain. So people who are lower on the food chain, like, I don't need to, I don't need to radically empathize with a CEO, okay? Yeah, it's like one of the articles that sort of actually opened my eyes to this kind of thing is, and I'm not going to like do a book report.

I'm just going to mention a few points real quick and I'll be done. So there's this article that's in the New York Review of Books called The Manality of Empathy. You need a New York Review of Books account to access it unless your library has access, but it is a free account. Wow, sick paywall. Yeah, I know. It wasn't a paywall the first time I read it. Free account. I think I know what the price is.

It's you. It's your data. And it's about sort of like representation and fiction as tools for empathy, but it still makes some good points I wanted to highlight. To speak on Sadie's point about this being like, you know, for upper management CEO people, one of the things that points out is default humans, that is straight white men, good and evil, versus empathy vehicles. That is everybody else.

You only empathize with those lower. than you or worse off than you. So it's still like enforcing power and tokenizing. Another thing is the slippage between emotional empathy and the good in our public discourse also presumes that when we do feel the suffering of others, we are prompted to relieve it. But this is not always true. Sometimes we just want it to go away. So yes, well, and even in the Chronicles of Higher Ed, I think,

thing that Jess also posted, the person actually does stress practice and action with this. And that's this author's version of what makes this radical. That had like, I feel like empathy being the precursor of that is not reliable nor necessary. That seems to be like not drawing a difference between cognitive empathy and emotional empathy. This actually seems to be focusing on emotional empathy more than anything. and emotional empathy isn't actually that helpful. Cognitive empathy actually can be, though. There's a whole book about that called Against Empathy.

So I'm going more into that. And finally, another point that, like, this reminded me of is there's this, and I've linked in the note, so Justin, please put it in the thing. It's this article by Indigenous Action called Accomplices, not Allies, abolishing the ally industrial complex, which is, The ally industrial complex has been established by activists whose careers depend on the, quote, issues they work to address. They build organization or individual capacity and power, establishing themselves comfortably among the top ranks in their hierarchy of oppression as they strive to become the ally champions of the most oppressed. While the exploitation of solidarity and support is nothing new,

the commodification and exploitation of elizhip is a growing trend. in the activism industry. Another thing it mentions is where struggle is commodity, allyship is currency. Ally has become an identity disembodied from any real mutual understanding or support. And so this treatise encourages people to become accomplices, not allies. So to get over any sense of white guilt where we rely on uplifting voices because being an ally isn't correct parlance anymore,

but you have to uplift, right? That's still just removing accountability and just picking the people you agree with. No, actually, it's like, you know, your liberation is my liberation too. We're all in this together. I will help you. Yeah, that kind of thing. Yeah, all this stuff. It's very good.

Go read it. Yes, Carrie. And that's all I have to say. Yeah, I mean, like, what's to say that like the terminology accomplice doesn't get claimed in the same way for the same purpose in the future, though? Totally. I mean, you just, it's the fallacy of self-claiming. Yeah. Like, you don't get to claim that you're punk, you know.

Yeah. I mean, that's a point this makes in this is about people coming in and identifying as something. Oh, cool. Yeah. It actually lists different kinds of people. And one is the self-proclaiming slash confessional allies. Yeah. So, yeah.

Cool. It's very, it's very good. Yeah. And I think that's like something we see a lot of. No, it's it's very anarchism-heavy kind of theory. And so I don't know if I entirely buy the argument the way it was laid out, but it is a good article. Yeah. And like, again, it still sort of is directed towards individuals and not systems.

But the way that this article sort of framed social justice and radical empathy felt very like ally industrial complex. Oh, yeah. It's a good outline in analysis. Yeah. I just think there's, you can get in the weeds a little bit. then it starts becoming a problem like Carrie said, the buzzword latching. I was also thinking of like people, someone probably heard radical empathy and then just was like, let's give that a go because it sounds cool.

Like the whole radical vulnerability thing, I know I'm unpopular for disliking that concept. But we just throw radical in front of anything that's, you know, then suddenly it becomes liberatory. But it's not. Like you have to actually change the paradigm. Yeah. For it to actually become liberatory. And I think that's the problem with this whole discourse

is because they're trying to find something to replace neutrality doctrine. And until you actually change the paradigm, you can't fix the neutrality doctrine. I also don't understand how this is fixing the neutrality doctrine when the neutrality doctrine is a lot about like access to information and stuff. It's still a lot of good doctrine, but it's about like collections and stuff like that.

It's about so many things. Yeah. It's just really wormed its way into. many aspects of library work and professional values, which segues into our topic today, Justin. Whoa. It's carry time, baby. It does. I was also going to say, we've got a theme already, which is the kind of structure of ALA makes it kind of hard to talk to different constituencies because ALA is made up of library trustees and employers and employees and organizations.

and vendors and vendors so open membership is kind of it's going to come back so we were talking about in the group chat the MLS and Sadie asked why is it a master's degree anyway and that was what got this episode going is the one question I still didn't figure out exactly why it got stuck as a master's degree yeah I still don't think we know why but I guess we're just going to keep asking that It's funny because that's like my number one beef. It's like why, why master's degree? There's no answer. It seems kind of arbitrary. So we all know that like Melville Dewey invented the internet and he invented libraries and started the school of library economy, which I really like that term better than library science. How do we bought it. Yeah, way to stuck Melville Dewey's dick right out of the gate.

Yeah. He still has that big dick You really got on that right quick And also there is just no way There is no way Melville Dillie had a There's no way Even Arthur's upset There's no way Melville Dui had a big dick

I'm sorry What? That drop gets a lot of mileage these days He had small dick energy And I'm just going to put that out there And no game No game. Arthur's here.

It's fucking Arthur time. Mother fucking Arthur time. I need to make one of those like Monster Truck rally sounds and just be like, it's fucking Arthur time. That was a little too. Arthur A-S-M-R.

Yes. Where he goes, look how he's resting his tail on me. This is how he shows affection. He puts his tail around me like a high school boy on a date at a movie theater. Oh, so you're living out that fantasy. Maybe.

I just tear in the movie theater, my robe. I'm not a robe. I'm in a jumpsuit. Thank you very much. Oh, I thought you were in a silk kimono. It was a jumpsuit season. Yeah, it's from like a Chinese company, and it took months to get here because, oops, the pandemic happened.

But they finally got here last summer. It's fucking comfy, and it makes me kind of like a samurai. It's very cool. This is why the ever given was stuck in the canal. It was just full of Jay's bass ropes. Jay's jumpsuit. Jump suits. We had one jumpsuit for Jay and one jumpsuit.

10% of global trade blocked. Comrade. It's a shame that that was a fluke and you couldn't actually do that intentionally. Two ships, one jumpsuit. I actually put that. I actually put that on all my delivery instructions. Please get this stuck in the Suez Canal and hold up global trade for three weeks. Yeah, that's a good week.

Library economy started as a small course, and you could have an undergraduate degree to start. It was preferred but not required, and it was a very short course. What we do know is just basically by the 40s, it was pretty universally a master's. And to get into why a master's sort of more conceptually is like, why do we need? to have a domain of knowledge and a educational degree to claim the title of librarian. And so that goes to the question of what is a profession? And I put the little bird meme that says, we just don't know. I fucking love that meme.

I quote that meme all the time. I don't know this meme at all. What are birds? We just don't know. I have no idea what this name is. Is this a Tumblr thing? Maybe. Maybe.

I don't know this bird at all. I feel like I've seen it on Twitter. It's not entirely Tumblr. I just don't know this bird. This bird is strange to me. I don't trust this bird. It's pretty sus. It is.

We don't know what he's up to. We just don't know. Yeah. The idea is like what makes a profession and how do you define what's a profession and what's a semi-profession and what's like half? And what's a trade? Yeah. What's a trade? what's what's bong scum i'm bong scum yeah

this whole discussion which i'm probably i'm sure we'll get into later is reminding me just like how vastly different a lot of the grad programs even are and like what they're like to go through whereas like mine very didn't feel like you know trade school from what i hear a lot of people's kind of did um so that sort of lack of what does it even need for this to be a grad program now. It's probably. Yeah, but I also think like it gets so like the, so, uh, part of our, uh, pre-show, uh, our pregame was, I pulled some chapters from, uh, Roma Harris's librarian ship.

Um, the, I always forget the subtitle, the erosion of a women's profession, or woman's profession, woman singular. Uh, and so what she does is she really opens up this question of like what is a profession especially in the feminized labor, the world of feminized labor. So she looks specifically at librarianship, but then kind of contrasted against nursing, social work and teaching. And even this idea of like home economics as a field, which I'm still not quite sure what that actually is. Although like my aunt was like actually like a home economist for like part of her life. Although like she was very good at making cakes. Apparently. Anyway. But anyway, what she does is she

kind of frames everything around this idea of like, but all these things are, have these kind of differing views of what they are as professions. And librarianship really struggles to identify itself as a professional body because it really struggles to identify what it is even and what its area of purview is. And so that that creates some struggle in kind of figuring out why we have an MLAS or why we have the MLAS.

or why we have the MLS essentially. So yeah, so she kind of digs into some things like there's different theories around like the, the sociology of work and the sociology of professionalism. And so there's like different ways of viewing what makes a profession. So there's kind of like a theory of traits. Sorry, my microphone is being a little, I'm not quite at the right angle for my microphone. So there's like this theory of traits, like a trait defined. a profession. And so this is like what makes men's work or what makes women's work. And this is kind of an outdated like, you know, sexist idea of. Or like, does education make a profession or

things like that? Yeah. So there's like a list of traits, which is like licensing, education, a distinct body of theoretical and applied knowledge. And basically the more you look like law, medicine, the ministry or university teaching, which I think the ministry was kind of a word one to throw in there. But it's a good one actually because the ministry has a very codified licensure and set of education and set of purview. It's like OG Oxbridge. Yeah, but it's like, but like I mean there are churches that are more lay led, but at least in the areas that like I'm familiar with with ministerial training and stuff like that. It has a very prescribed kind of course that you follow. And even within like lay led, they have their own kind of path that,

get you there. Yeah. You do have to take, because I mean, most higher education comes out of ministry teaching. Exactly. That was university and the ministry. And then, yeah, seminaries. And then law was basically your three options. And then medicine was kind of a late comer to this list.

So really, medicine is the odd one out. Yeah. Exactly. Medicine would be the odd one out because it didn't come until the 20th century, essentially. Yeah. The earliest ones were in like France, but American documents. doctors never felt the need to go specifically to go to medical school. Exactly.

I just, you know, ether and saws. So the problem with the trait theory is it doesn't really account for two things that are pretty important, which is a legal control over your profession. Yep. And an external control over power. And of course, just like a basic analysis of sexism so that women's value is, women's work is devalued in particular way. But like doctors have a complete control kind of over the field of nurses because doctors are put in a hierarchical position legally where they make the medical decisions and direct the labor of nurses. Right. Yeah.

So there's like the hierarchy is also like a consideration in this is like what control does anyone else have over the labor that you're doing? Hang on. I'm trying to get my notes to like one side. so I can like see if someone like puts their hand up while I'm reading and then also have the soundboard open. So I need three monitors. Soundboard's important. You got to get dual monitors. Just cave.

I have two. I need three. I have two computers. I want like six monitors. My boss has six monitors. We get like two and then two where you have like the two vertical ones. It looks, I mean, that's got to look like you're just straight up NASA at that point. I want to get one of those those hobbyists who are really into like Microsoft flight simulator.

Oh yeah. Old men love that shit. Around them. Those fucking. Like every fucking retired boomer, man. Just become a retired boomer. Just say you identify as a retired boomer and make it so. It's just that easy.

It really is. Just say, hey, I identify as a retired boomer. Get your social security card changed. to say I identify as a 65-year-old man, I would like to start collecting my pension now. Changing my social security card is the easiest part of my transition, by the way. Yeah, no. My mom, well, yeah, because my mom worked for social security for, like, her whole life.

Yeah, like I had to have the right documentation. One of those was a passport. That was the hardest part. Oh, I'm sure, yeah. It took like 16 years. Damn. But yeah, if you have the money, that stuff's easy. So the legal control over professional designation is a big one because that's where you get into licensure and that's really where you control a lot of who is in your profession and who isn't, which I thought would be very funny to lose your license to practice librarianship.

Right. Because like you lied or something. Honestly, that should be a thing. But like if we did have, but like imagine if we did like if we had a profession that was set up. that way that wouldn't feel like such a big deal. Like if we had a professional code that we were held to. Yeah, we could get rid of like Nazis and stuff. Exactly.

Like, oh man, Jay, you weren't being empathetic enough. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I'm a dick. Yeah, I'm a dick. And then we discussed the possibility of all library discourse turning into Tumblr. So that way we could cancel each other and just be kicking everyone out and starting new science. blogs about Sonic Adventures.

I'm sure they would make it that easy to kick each other out of librarianship. Does this mean we get a dash gun? Does this mean that's just ALA? Yeah, like three extra minutes in the ball pit. Who's in the ball pit at L.A? L.A. is happening like next week, right? Yeah. Fuck radical.

Like today. Someone get a ball pit in their house while they're in a session. I want to see pictures of it. Oh my gosh A guest on the podcast if you do it I'm kidding Unless Jessica's okay with it I don't care

So the feminization Hypothesis which is kind of more What I was familiar with Because I tried to write a couple papers on this In grad school because I was just like I kind of would just pick up Why am I here? Yeah well just every time I had to do a term paper

I would just do it on the same topics And it's just like Can I squeeze this? Oh no I just spent my whole grad school like Why am I here? Yeah I'm just spending a lot of money right now. I like the job more.

I don't remember much about classes. I don't either. But I do remember trying to write about this a few times. And I remember just so much of the feminization hypothesis problem is it's not really a sexist analysis. Like an anti-sexist analysis. It says women are inherently sort of like too nice. And you've made the field. for too helpful.

And it talks a little bit about, like, how this ties into personality theory. So, like, your personality traits, basically, it's kind of just the same thing as traits. It's like, but like your womanness is infecting the way that the structure and the labor is done. Yeah. Well, and this happens, like, there's been a lot of research about, like, how as soon as women start to enter a field, like, in computer science, when women's, well, like, or like, when women start to enter a field, the wages go down. because it's like that becomes more acceptable to like pay women less. Hasn't that happened to like biology too? Yes.

Like biology is no longer considered a hard science and like that attitude is directly inverse to how many women become biologists. Yeah. And I think it also has impacted publishing. Yeah. Because a lot of women are now in getting PhDs in medical biology. And that field therefore is. has had like pretty structural changes and like when COVID started and then there's just a ton of people not publishing in the field because they're doing gendered labor at home.

Yeah. So yeah, computer science I thought was kind of a weird one would be one to talk about because like that started out a very feminized profession and then just found a way to kick all women out, which is actually something information scientists tried to do. So information science. And keeps trying to do. Yeah. I got to quote, information science is simply library.

apprenticeship practiced by men, which I thought was a pretty good quote. That's what I've heard about metadata as well. Metadata is cataloging for men or like neoliberal cataloging. This is a metadata librarian. Yeah. It's not entirely wrong. It's not entirely wrong, no. Jay found his way there in a unique way, though.

That's how they're a metadata librarian. It shouldn't have it all along. This is the melacentric manocracy. He's just warming his way in. Sneaky. It's like how, you know, I know why, you know, like, you know, you become a man to get paid more. Just like you become a woman to enter the locker room, right? Yeah, exactly.

I get so much male privilege, y'all. I figured you out. All day, every day. But yeah, no, that's like a really good point, though, is that like, yeah, we create all these different terminology. We, we re-we've reinvented all of our terminology, right? make our field more appealing to men so that they can take our jobs. And their funders. Yeah.

Like external funders. Yeah. So that like they can take my lady job. Or like yeah, I would know like health informatics, for example, the fact that like health informatics like that's a thing for me. Like that's a thing I worry about. Like I don't. And all those words mean together.

Yeah. I still don't. I like, that's one of my areas. that's one of my purviews. I support it. I do too. It sounds good together, but I'm like, I don't know what that means. That's one of my subject outreach here.

I actually do understand it, but like. It's all about electronic health records. It really is. And it's like, I can only do so much to help you, you know, like. So. Yeah. Just data? Yeah, it's basically like data. It's just data.

It's just data sciences. Yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah. I helped. I was allied health liaison at my last job. And I worked with the data informatics courses a lot. So that was really cool because you get to see like how it's all set up.

And it's like, oh, this is just librarianship in medicine. This is just like linked data and interoperable data. It's very straightforward. So I always thought it was pretty cool. So but it was interesting when we see the rise of like information sciences and like business and nursing and IT. That's I guess when a lot of library schools. started having like starting getting closed and then started reshaping into eye schools. I don't know where I put it in the notes.

I was going to say on the whole librarianship practiced by men, I remember that was a big thing about not getting ALA accreditation was you would, you would attract more men into an information science program because you don't want the word library associated at all. And so you would do basically an MLS curriculum and then you would recruit more men into the program and because they were all men, the gender disparity meant that your graduate program had good starting wages. Okay. So that actually happened while I was in grad school and that the University of Illinois changed

the name of its graduates. Because at the time, it was like a school and a program. Like it was the degree and the school at the same time. You could get the Ph.D. Yeah. When I was there, it was gistless. Like the graduate school of library and information science. Science. Yeah.

It was gistless. when I started too. Yeah. But one thing they didn't, when I was there was they changed the name of the school, of the college. They didn't change the name of the degree, but they added another master's degree and just, I think it's just informatics or information something. They had information.

They had informatics. Yeah. They had informatics when I was there. Because everyone was like, what the fuck is informatics? And they were like, everyone was trying to explain informatics all the time. Like, it was where all the dudes. were hanging out? Like it was just like data curation, but instead of it being an individual track, it's a degree now. And yeah. And one of the, their cited reasons for doing this was because most

high schools that were just a school with one program ended up getting absorbed by other colleges at the universities because of funding. And Illinois didn't have a budget at the time. And so the university was just relying on like funders and donors and tuition money. So that was like a huge discourse while I was there was just like what do we call our school and our degree people are very mad about it it's very neoliberal yeah my friend had the choice of whether she wanted library and her degree name when she graduated that was at Florida State wild because yeah there were there were a lot of people who were like I signed up for this program you can't change the name until I've graduated yeah I know Indiana

State splits there is you can get an LX or an IS or like an LIS, I think. Yeah, that's like such a weird thing that like the thing in your degree is like a thing you want to be choosy about because it really doesn't fucking matter. Like what I've noticed, especially where they split it, it's just a lot of the same classes, but you don't do things like reference or public service stuff. Like you do a lot of more like data analysis stuff. So instead of having like a library science program that includes all of that where you can just pick. pick and choose what you want. They say near the twain shall meet. Hey, guess what?

I have a degree in special collections and I don't do any of that shit. So like, man, like, I don't know. Like, if you want to learn how to do that stuff, you can learn how to do this. Like, I'm, I guess like I have a saltier attitude about it. But I guess this is sidetracking from like.

Yes, history. This discussion. Anyway, yeah, just me being salty. But the reason the professionalism discussion comes into it so much in the history of it is because the most common way in feminized professions or women-dominated professions, whichever term you'd use. I think feminized probably is assigning a trait to the profession. Anyway, it's the most common approach to getting professionalism through the trait theory, because even though there's from issues with the trait theory, it still will, it's still sort of dominant. the American Nursing Association assumed the best route to achieving comparable status with physicians as to adopt a process of education similar to that.

So it's basically doing the same thing as law and medicine, which is to have a theoretical base of knowledge and then one that you can kind of control and then kind of requiring it as a way of controlling the entry into the field. The interesting thing is that this really wasn't the case of jobs being actually requiring an MLS for an entry-level librarian position because there's an interesting problem, which is it's both the entry-level degree and the terminal degree is the same degree. So there's really no like you get to be in after bachelor's and then the master's is the terminal degree. So the United States federal government in our reading at the time didn't require an MLS for entry-level library. positions. And so I went on to USA jobs. And they do say something like five years of undergraduate work or one year of graduate work in the MLS sort of program. So they've kind of have forced you to have that degree without really saying you have to have the degree because who has five years of undergrad. So but yeah, technically you don't have to have it. Try telling that to

pretty much any public library I've ever heard about. Yeah, and that's the thing, too, is only 80% of, 80% or 90% of jobs actually require an MLS, and that's kind of going down in academic libraries as we see a desire by administrators to try and bring in, what was the word? Hang on, I got it in here. Farrell librarians. Yeah, that was the John Unsworth quote. And he was at Illinois when I was there, oddly enough. Yeah, which is like, yeah, guys with like computer science backgrounds coming in. Yeah, it's basically it.

This is the dude bro version of punk-ass book jockey, isn't it? I think you're up. Oh, God. Carrie, when are you going to put that on your band camp? Because I'm not. Like some Diamonda Golas, like, wild women are sticking out of shit. And now we're going into Sweet Leaf, okay. I love you.

Won't you listen? It's one of my favorite songs. It's so good. I don't even smoke. And I'm like, fuck yeah, black Sabbath. it. So yeah, the thing about having education and the thing about like having the education controls is the ALA has a little bit of structural control by accreditation. But as we were just talking about the mixture of like Farrell librarians and non-accredited information science programs means that you could get an erosion of that pretty quickly, especially if you were combining it with like hiring practices and changing out what other degrees could be used. And so I thought it was pretty useful to keep library in the degree name as a good way of sorting who would work well in libraries would be people who are not afraid of the word library. I love this idea that you'd be willing to work in a library but not actually have a degree or a title that contains the word library.

How delusional are you, bro? I love you, man. No homo. No library. Like I do tech services, but no library. I'm doing metadata. I'm not doing cataloging. God, did you know anything?

They're six feet apart in a hot tub and it's not gay. Two forms of metadata sitting in a hot tub. Yeah. And part of, I really don't remember how I was going to tie this in, but there's a little bit I wanted to say about like private practice and third party work, which is like, making things more consulting, working for businesses, vendors, independent researchers, consulting generally. It was a parallel drawn to social services, which were government services that are increasingly moving into the private practice. And that's a little bit harder to do for libraries because there's... But what about bibliotheca?

Yeah, what about bibliotheca? What about automation, man? You've got built into librarianship sort of like the public good and the use of the public. And so it's a little bit different than trying to turn like social services into doctors, but also commodifying knowledge searching just in general. So just charging people for library cards or stuff like that. I don't know. Well, that happens if you try to get a library card out of your district.

Or if you try to get a library card out of university that you're not affiliated with. These are all sort of very liberal ideas. I think in terms of that's just my initial critique is a lot. lot of this is focused on like credentialism and there's a lot of elitism when you're talking about credentialism inherently which is gone into when we're when we're reading this but here was what I thought the solution was going to be because it's the right thing which is unions syndicalism baby yeah and jay is a union easy union boss he's uh he's the big hammer me better hafa yeah really like this jimmy he'll hafa really like this jimmy

Hoffa. I've only seen the first half of the Irishman, but I really like his, I really like where things are going for him. I've never seen the Irishman, but I love me some Marty Scorsese, so I approve already. I've never seen the Irishman, but I've seen an Irishman. Wink. But yeah, no, I'm a union rep now for the AAUP. Any time you see someone reference, like, is the rectum of grave and an AASA.A.A. UP newsletter, take a shot. Because academia is obsessed with that. Teachers and nurses have been more inclined to do unionizing.

Many other associations operate in a manner similar to that of unions. So they can actually do collective bargaining on behalf of their membership because of the way their membership is structured. Unions have been kind of avoided in some other paraprofessionals or feminized professions as unprofessional because there aren't doctors unions and lawyers unions, but they do have like guilds and credentialing and also university professors do have unions or did have unions. It depends on who can collectively bargain because of the way that U.S. law works. So I put a thing like state law issues for public employee unions, like what kind of union could you be in? So like I'm in the

Texas State Employees Union, which is not a business union. It's an industrial union. So it's basically anyone who works for the state can kind of be in it. But it just kind of does basic organizing and legislative work because our legislature only meets for a few months every two years. So that's the only time anything actually happens. And then they just don't do anything. We just don't about government most of the time. It's pretty sweet. Sort of the discussion was, could the ALA act as a union? And the problem is it's a library association instead of a library and library worker association. So you also have this structure in other places where the people who are providing the

education are sort of the elite in the field as the people who are the practitioners. So you have an elite versus a non-elite. You also would have librarians who don't have an MLS could fall into that non-elite. And then you have managers, supervisors in the association. They keep it being a union because then how could it enter into collective bargaining agreement against its own members on behalf of its members. And also there was an argument in the book that basically it just missed its opportunity to restructure in the 70s to be an employee's organization.

And it's just- It's continually shat the bed essentially. Like ALA has continually shat the bed on organizing around workers. Yeah. It would basically have to completely change out its member organization structure to be able to do any collective bargaining. But yeah, the problem is that you could have like a sweetheart union. problem where the people who are in the professional organization are going to collude with

the management of the organizations that are in your association, and that violates U.S. labor law for pretty good reasons. So it's very unlikely that you would have a solution that way. But what about, like, how do librarians actually unionize? So you have, like, library-specific unions. Those would be unions of just library workers. And the problem with that is if your library goes on strike, you're not really shutting down like the municipality because everything else will just kind of, they'll just close the library for however long and be like, yeah, you only got eight hours a week open anyway. You can still use the catalog. You can go use the printer. Bibliotheca will open the doors. So you can use the printer. So the question was our library

workers kind of better off in unions that embrace a variety of employees from different occupations, but then sometimes don't get what they want, or should they be in ones that are only librarians and other library employees? And then there's also the third option, which is librarians going after tenure in academic institutions, so being faculty members with faculty status and tenure. And I'm two of those three, yeah, because the faculty at UNH can join AAEP, and the library faculty are tenure track. Definitely for like K. 12 library workers are way more likely to go into a union with public teachers. And then I think in a lot of universities, academic librarians are in the faculty unions. So that's sort of what I've

seen during strike actions. But it's usually librarians just kind of tacked on to the general teacher's strike. But you can actually shut down the operations of the entire organization that way. So I'm always in favor of industrial scale unionizing. I think the concern about having library-specific unions is kind of business union, trade-y, kind of a little in that line of thinking. But I do like the idea of doing big industrial unions of, you can have like focused groups, like within the IWW, you have the freelance journalist union. So you still have your industrial union that you're in,

but you also have all of the sort of side projects that come with the, the freelance journalist union which they have some sort of like educator one too that covers librarians if i remember correct because i wasn't unionized at utah um so i looked into that go join the iw if you're not in a union they're good yeah basically uh if i do i do a card at least you'll learn a bit about how unions work especially if you're in an area where you don't think you're ever going to get to union unionize your shop floor you should join industrial union and learn about union organizing um at minimum At least it's a start. And I know we have people who are listening who are thinking about library school or are going back to school and thinking about libraries.

I don't have any advice except to think about all the ways that your profession interacts with the position and sort of the labor chain. Because that's really the big thing is librarians don't have control over their own labor. when you're in any kind of state employment. So if you work for the municipality, you really don't. And if you work even in like a private university, you're still beholden to the bureaucracy of the whole institution. So that was kind of a big theme was, can you internally and externally control your labor?

And doctors and lawyers have been able to do it. And I think university professors are losing their ability to do it over time. But it's going to be a very difficult thing for, librarians to do. And I think the best thing to do is focus on industrial union organizing within your field so that you are working with so-called library staffers, paraprofessionals, library assistants, associates, assistant librarians, because that's the most effective way to organize and trying to organize it based on being a separate class profession is kind of a problem. But it's not one unique to libraries. But I think that's like one of the big traps of the the master's level education, is it kind of trapped librarianship into this kind of class-based profession. It attempted to create a class-based profession out of library work, right? And I think there's also some interesting kind of direction that's happened around with the profession discussion around the way that, and I think like, so Roma Harris's book was written in 19, or was published

in 1992, right? So like the nature of library work has changed since, you know, the master's degree was kind of codified in the 40s anyway, right? So this concept of professionalization and the way we codified it and the kind of differentiation between, oh, it's prayer professional and what's professional, like is such bullshit anyway, because there's been such blurring between what's professional and what's not professional anyway that like, we need a. complete reevaluation and I keep saying paradigm shift like I feel like we just need to like scrap everything in the universe and start over again like just fucking blow it all up because you know we've failed as a species so um anyway climate catastrophe 2023 see you there so I have a question at my old job

the librarians were the only ones who were unionized everybody everybody else was not unionized. How common is that? Like, do you guys have a feeling for that? I don't know. You're academic, so faculty unions and stuff. But I caught myself thinking about it the other day and was just pissed at that whole labor situation. So, uh, oh, I feel like Jay knows something about this. So the staff in the UNH library and in general at the university are not unionized. New Hampshire was a right to work state until I think a few weeks ago. I don't know, because it's a bunch of libertarians, right? They're wishy-washy on whether or not they actually do good things. But so, like, the faculty are unionized across the board. And you can join that union if you want, but you don't have to. The staff are not unionized. And it definitely creates a lot of tension, especially where pay and benefits are concerned.

Like, a lot of the stuff that staff are forced to do, even with just, like, timekeeping and reporting, the union like will recommend we not do it and so we don't have to even though it's like a university-wide policy like we the faculty don't have to track our time at all on chronos because they say it's like some sort of infringement on the way we're salaried or something yeah because you're you'd be exempt you're your fair LSA exempt so you wouldn't have to time keep so like we get a lot of like you know, on principle, we shouldn't do this thing. Or, like, a lot of stuff that we should be fighting against.

And the staff have none of that. And they've tried before. And the university discouraged it. And so there's, like, the fear of losing jobs if they try to unionize. And it's bullshit. So I was surprised they got offered the same. Like, if you retire now because COVID, you'll get some sweet perks out of it. I'm surprised staff got offered that too.

And it wasn't just faculty. I was shocked. Yeah, that was pretty much the situation at one of my previous jobs was the paraprofessionals tried to unionize and got smacked down so hard. It was like astonishing. And then, of course, admin came out like, oh, well, we'll give you the same benefits as the unionized people. We'll take care of you that way. And it was just like the stupidest thing. They did finally unionize like after I left.

So that's good at least. But yeah, I was just like, who the fuck thinks that this is a good idea? I try to bring up the concept of like professional managerial class. But again, like if you want to be a professional, I'm going to leave that aside. But if you want to be like a professional, it kind of means like you're controlling other people's labor. Like lawyers control clerks and doctors control nurses. So like my job used to be a union job prior to my. arrival but because I live in Wisconsin that's no longer and it like they didn't have much power they

were mostly for bar like they had collective bargaining on like basically benefits and stuff but they lost that I think under Walker so it's a staff job and so I work in what you might call a a mixed union workplace but I think faculty are union but no one else is anyway and very few people are faculty except for like tenure track teaching faculty. And there are people who are not tenure track teaching faculty who are still staff, who are teaching staff. We have some really odd structures at my workplace. Anyway, but speaking about that professional managerial class and the forcing into that

the way my promotion is structured in my workplace, if I want to promote any level higher than my current position, which is an academic librarian, if I wanted to become a senior academic librarian, I would have to take on management duties. So I would have to be forced into a management position to earn any higher pay grade beyond my like, what we what we call indefinite status promotion, which is like a tenure light sort of thing. But yeah, it's kind of an interesting kind of promotional model where like for my class of job, which is academic staff, the senior level of whatever job you're in has to be determined by managerial duties. And I don't know if that's just library specific or across the university, but I think it might

just be library specific. Might be. But it's also kind of the thing people were talking about what's the lowest job that's like secure from layoffs and it's like department head. Yeah. So it's like the only way you can move up is to move into supervisory roles. And that creates all kinds of problems. Like I supervise people who I'm in the same like union with.

And it's like, okay. We actually have a big problem with that in my library where it's like. Supervisory bloat. Yeah, because it's like there's like faculty can supervise, but also staff can be, I forget where the term of it is, but it's basically like kind of supervisory. But it's like ultimately at the end of day. It's like the faculty that like the reporting line goes through.

And because they're having to supervise, but also do all their other work, as well as all of the weird work that faculty members have to do because we're doing all this like other stuff, it means that while the faculty are working on all these things that aren't their actual primary duty and they're also having to supervise and also doing this stuff, they let like we, we aren't always the most reliable. and we don't always follow through on things. Like, I'm including myself in this and I don't even supervise, but because we're, you know, drawn in so many directions, that causes a lot of resentment between, like, the faculty and the staff they supervise, because the staff are often the people who end up taking that slack because it's not often the faculty doing a lot of the like, especially in tech services.

We aren't really the faculty aren't really the ones doing a lot of the, like, day-to-day labor. Not that we don't do any, but it's the staff that do it, and we're more in, like, strategy positions. And so it caused a lot of resentment

because we're being forced to supervise. I'm not, but, you know, we use a body and then can't do our other work, and then so staff and have to, the very people we supervise have to end up. And it's just not the best model in the entire world, if that makes sense at all.

Yep. Well, I mean, our structure is really flat, which is good and bad, but there's like tons of things that, like, I think pretty much every librarian could potentially be made into a supervisor because of the amount of like supervisory congestion we have, like too many, like some people are supervising way too many people. And so it creates like a really weird situation. But like, you know, we have student workers and graduate assistants and stuff, people who need someone to supervise them so that could go to like any library ranked person.

It wouldn't have to be like a senior librarian rank to be forced to take it on. You could probably be forced to take it on any time. But yeah, I've thought about it a lot. I take having to do supervising very seriously. So I think very deeply about it. But it's, I mean, ultimately you have to think in terms of the whole structure of your work holistically. Because there's just all these little contradictions. I tried not to bring up dialectics.

but I was thinking about it. We've got all these weird little contradictions in our work, especially when you start talking about education, credentialism, professionalism. They're all pinging off of each other and making these weird new situations that puts ourselves in. So that's what I want people to take away. We wanted to go over the history of the MLS and then tease a possible future episode where we'll talk about the future of the MLS and what we might make it look like. So instead of a what do we do we do?

after the revolution question for this episode. I'm just going to leave on a cliffhanger. And I don't have any cliffhanger music. Clip, clip.