College and Research Libraries LOUIS SHORES The Junior College Impact on Academic Librarianship The author explains his enthusiasm for current trends in junior col- leges. In their present experimentation with curriculum reform and media utilization, they are moving toward the universal higher edu- cation which society will soon require. He reviews the long history of this movement and contemplates the influence it will have on higher education practices generally. He urges academic librarians in both junior and senior colleges to be innovative in their work. IF I WERE an academic librarian again -university, senior college, or junior college-innovation would be the theme of my effort. What I mean by this word is not what first comes into our professional minds these days. Automation has attracted me as much as the next librarian. I am captivated by the computer. The print- out catalog entered early into my li- brary school teaching. I effected one of the first modulations from traditional reference to Information Science, at Florida State, as the cover of an issue of American Documentation, some years back, will attest. My colleagues in Florida know the cross I bore in the forties and fifties convincing librarians there were no such things as "non-book" materials, and how finally, I effected what some called a "shotgun marriage" of librarians and Dr. Shores is Dean Emeritus of the Library School at Florida State University, and Editor-in-Chief, Collier's Encyclope- dia. This paper was read to the Illinois Li- brary Association, College and Resem·ch Libraries Section, on October 18, 1968. 214/ audiovisualists, with my book Instruc- tional Materials. Yes, I believe in computers, in tele- facsimile, in video-corders, in 16mm projectors, in the overhead with its transparency overlays, in the tape re- corder for oral history; in the whole repertoire of machines and electronics that will make us more efficient. I am not like the librarian who boasted, "It takes longer and costs more, but we are automated." I have passionately advo- cated taking advantage of every inven- tion technology has blessed us with. But all of this is not what I mean by inno- vation. What I mean by innovation welcomes improved hardware only as a means to a new dimensional education. But hard- ware is not the crux of my kind of inno- vation. The innovation I have in mind is on the drawing board in about one hundred experimental colleges. Mostly, these colleges are not the ones that head lists of outstanding institutions of higher education, that appear periodically, in such frequently cited media as the New York Times, or Newsweek, or even the education issue of the Saturday Re- Junior College Impact on Academic Librarianship I 215 view. They are not necessarily Harvard and Yale and the Ivy League colleges, almost always followed by Chicago and California; and perhaps, more recently, including near the bottom, with apology, a few institutions from the South. The innovating colleges I have in mind almost never make the academic counterparts of the Associated Press "Top Twenty" weekly football lists. For the innovation I have in mind, you would have to look at colleges like An- tioch in Ohio; Florida Presbyterian; Kendall in Illinois; Monteith of Wayne, in Michigan ; Oklahoma Christian; Ste- phens in Missouri; the University of California at Santa Cruz; Elmira of New York; and perhaps one hundred or more experimenting senior Golleges like them. But increasingly, I believe, we will watch the junior college, that higher education phenomenon, the public version of which was born in Joliet, Illinois, hard- ly a half century ago. Why the junior college? Because it is remaking higher education in America. In this phenomenon is emerging a pro- totype for the college to come. Call it community college if you prefer. It makes no difference now, since U .S.O.E. has established the two terms as synon- ymous.1 The community college has dared to break with some sacred tra- ditions of higher education. The first affront is to elitism. Chica is in hallowed country for the proposi- tion that only 10 per cent of the people are higher educable. Not so far from here, the president of one of our state "multiversities" with some 40,000 en- rollments was asked recently, "How many students do you now have?" He replied, "Oh, about 10 per cent." Clever as this may sound, it is nevertheless un- true. As far back at least as the 1948 Chicago Institute, I dissented with Dr. Faust's position that college is for the 1 U.S .O.E. Library Statistics, 1966-1967. G.P.O. , 1967 . p . 2 "chosen few. "2 In my naive philosophy of higher education, college is for every- one. The junior college has had the courage to open its doors to all high school graduates. It has, in effect, said to the Elitists: "Sissy; anybody can ed- ucate the top 10 per cent, in your kind of education. Let's see you higher edu- cate the dropout, and the rest of the 90 per cent who might never get the chance to go to college." I agree with the junior college posi- tion. There is some support for the con- clusion that violent revolution occurs in nations when the 10 per cent higher educated can no longer communicate with the 90 per cent not higher educat- ed. Spearheaded by the junior college, the United States is about to accomplish another first in world history. While many of the other countries do not even yet have universal elementary educa- tion, and most do not have 100 per cent secondary education we are about to provide college for everyone. By 1970, we are told, more freshmen will be entering junior college than any other type of higher educational insti- tution. This is true in Florida now. To this point, junior colleges have tried very hard, at least in their college paral- lel program, to comply with the Ivy League rul . o enable their graduates to s er to senior colleges and uni- versities, junior colleges have followed unquestioningly the prescriptions of tra- dition. But there are now some signs of dissent among the junior college lead- ers. The thinking ones are unwilling to concede that the traditional colleges have a monopoly on liberal education, or on academic standards. Among some educational statesmen, there are a few who contend that the elite colleges are the opposite of liberal. Among the Ivy League institutions, for instance, the authoritarian curriculum of predatory 2 Chicago University. Preprofessional Education of Librarians. 1949. p. 109-14. 216 I College & Research Libraries • May 1969 subjects and a rigid teaching method de- scribe a dogmatism that repudiates lib- eralism. Judging by the campus unrest, there is something less than satisfaction with what the leaders of elitism have defined as higher education. What we must recognize is that to- day's campus revolt is proletarian. It is a protest against academic elitism by the new student masses which our American trend to universal higher edu- cation has created. The larger-than-ever before college population rejects the predatory curriculum which the acade- mician flaunts as liberal. Students over- whelmingly are objecting to the lock- step of classroom-centered education. Young people everywhere resent the growing impersonality caused by num- bers, and the faculty-administration per- sistence in enforcing the higher educa- tion folklore of the past, by introduc- ing mob scene registrations in gymnasia, at the beginning of the term; and com- puterized evaluations at the end. This policing is far more brutal to them than any that has yet been used by munici- palities to preserve peace in our streets. No wonder our young people are looking increasingly to the community junior college. Like a breath of fresh air, these new institutions are reviving the true liberal education. Without abandoning the general education re- quirements that senior colleges and uni- versities have made foundational for a bachelor's degree, the junior college has liberalized the curriculum by introduc- ing new areas for study. Not deterred by the conventional hierarchy of disci- plines that places a Berlin wall between so-called liberal and so-called vocation- al studies, the junior college has con- tended that all knowledge has potential for living, as well as for making a living. And the history of education is on their side. Subjects high in today's curriculum were very low in the middle ages; and vice versa. So I return to my opening sentence: if I were to come out of retirement to become an .academic librarian again, I would experiment and innovate, not with library techniques and automation, but with library education. I would ac- cept the challenge Chancellor Emeritus Harvie Branscomb hurled at us in Teach- ing With Books, back in 1940: 3 To sum up, the fundamental need of the college library is to develop a distinctive program of its own ... it has been too imitative of other institutions. And I would seek my inspiration from the educational concept of the junior college, even if I happened to be li- brarian of a senior college or of a uni- versity. For the time has come to admit mutual reciprocity between the lower and upper undergraduate levels, with- out condescension, and with more than an outside chance that it has been the traditional institutions that have "wat- ered down," and not been truly liberal. And now let me explore library-cen- tered educational innovation. Universal higher education means not only num- bers, but the widest range of individual differences college has ever known. It is therefore hopeless to continue lock- step education in the classroom. More than ever before we must move to in- dependent study. Contrary to the previ- ous honors program assumption, inde- pendent study, properly conceived, pre- pared for, .and guided is especially suit- ed for the wider range of talents now found in our student population. Fur- thermore, individual independent study provides, as Winslow Hatch has indi- cated in his thoughtful little "New Di- mension" booklet a real measure of quality education. 4 The first concomi- tant of a distinctive library-centered higher education, therefore, is a learn- ing mode that is carrel-oriented, rather than classroom controlled. 3 Harvie Branscomb, T eaching Wit h Books. (Chi- cago: ALA , 1940.) p. 9. 4 Winslow Hatch, N ew Dimensions in Higher Edu- cation. U.S.O.E. Junior College Impact on Academic Librarianship, I 217 The second element is a teaching mode that is predominantly concerned with matching individual differences in students with individual differences in media. For the first time in the history of education there are now so many media, in a variety of formats, a range of levels, and an assortment of subjects that the individual differences Binet and Simon told us about a half century ago exist in humans can be found in the proliferation of media pouring out all over the world today. It is , therefore, hopeless to continue a type of class- room-centered, group teaching that was necessary when media were few and expensive, and when the range of in- dividual differences was far narrower than now. Indeed, the phenomenon our orators like to refer to as "explosions"- of population and of knowledge-dictate abandoning the horse and buggy meth- od of education we have known in the past, and to take up a new learning mode, an educational program that is in Dr. Branscomb's words, "the library's distinctive own." In 1934, at Chicago's World Fair ALA convention, I read a paper in which I predicted the coming of this new edu- cational dimension in the colleges and schools. 5 My colleagues have been good enough to credit the beginning of the current Library-College movement to that paper. But I acknowledge the ori- gin of the idea in Thomas Carlyle's es- say "The Hero as Intellectual," in his book Heroes and Hero Worship. From this essay comes the frequently quoted commencement line: The tru e university is a collection of books. But what is not so frequently quoted is the context. Carlyle's contention, as far back as the middle of the last century when books were not as plentiful as 5 Louis Shor es, " The Library Arts Coll ege," S choo l and Society, XLI (Janu a ry 1935). now, was that there is little the profes- sor can do for the students beyond teaching them to read. The rest the students must do for themselves, largely independently. This is the heart of the Library-College concept. 6 When a college is a library and a li- brary is a college it is a Library-Col- lege. Fundamentally, the Library-Col- lege reverses the present relation be- tween classroom .and library. Instead of meeting classes at regular hours and working in the library irregularly when time permits, the Library-College stu- dent is more likely to set for himself a regular schedule at his exclusive work- bench, his very own library carrel, a carrel which thanks to the technology I applaud, is becoming "wet" with dial access to .a variety of media. In this learning design the student speaks less of attending classes and more about reading. There is a precedent for this in Eng- land, where there are a few colleges that might even make our top twenty with the Ivy League. During my Fulbright year in the United Kingdom I heard students and tutors constantly using such expressions as he is reading in physics; he is reading in economics; he is reading in philosophy; rather than that he was attending classes in those subjects. Now, by reading, the Library-College means more than just reading in a hard cover book; or even a paperback, serial, or other form of print. The Library-Col- lege means reading in what I call "The Generic Book" in my editorial for the Saturday Review during the observance of the first National Library Week. Any medium of communication between man and his environment, between man and man, and between man and God is part of the Generic Book. Under this definition, a 16mm film is a book; so is a magnetic tape, or a transparency 6 Louis Shores, et al. Th e L ibrary-College. Phila- d elphia: Drexel Press, 1966. 218 I College & Research Libraries • May 1969 overlay. Discs and dioramas; maps and microtexts, community resources, and ·computer assisted instruction are vary- ing formats of the Generic Book. You can understand, perhaps, as my students have all of these years , why the term <'non-book materials" causes a hayfever- like intellectual allergy in me. Philo- sophically, I have described the Generic Book as the sum total of man's com- munication possibilities. If I may push theory a little more in this pragmatic profession and world of ours, I specu- lated in the Saturday Review, as I have elsewhere in my writings, that com- municability is the only real evidence of life, just as the French General in World War I had insisted that death is incommunicability. I am not alone in this position that reading is related to all the means of communication. In a thoughtful little book published by Columbia University and titled What Is Reading?7 Frank G. Jennings wrote: reading . . . is not restricted to the printed page. Actually, it never was ... through- out his history man has "read" many things: the flight of birds, the guts of sheep, sun spots, liver spots, and the life lines on the hand. H e has read the lore of the jungle, the spoor of the beast, and the portents in a dish of tea. . . . In all the furor and exhibitionism over Marshall McLuhan there is really only one fundamental truth: the format of a medium may affect communicability. Our individual differences are such that some of us may understand a subject better by viewing it on television, or hearing it on tape, or taking a field trip, or concentrating on .a printed page. Learning is enhanced by the choice not only of the right subject and the right level of maturity, but also by the choice of the physical makeup of the medium. Forgive this philosophical transgres- sion. It is a preface to an understanding 7 Frank Jennings, What Is R eading? (New York: Teachers College, Columbi a University. 1965) , p . 11. of the library's own, distinctive, educa- tional program. I believe we are on the verge of realizing it in some one hun- dred experimental colleges. I believe that any campus where independent study is the learning mode not only for a select few, the so-called honors group, but for all of the students, an element of the Library-College is emerging. There are evidences that the liberalizing in- fluence of the junior college through its extension of higher educational oppor- tunities to all is spurring individual, in- dependent study to universal acceptance as the new learning mode. As a concomitant to this learning mode innovation, I see ahead some startling revolutions in academic librar- ianship. Considering the standard ele- ments of stock, staff, facility, and ser- vices, the impact of the junior college mass higher education phenomenon can cause major professional innovations in college and university libraries. To meet the wider range in the individual dif- ferences of our student population, we will have to reorient book selection to media selection. That this has not yet been done is illustrated by the two new, fine junior college book lists that have appeared this -year. Dr. Frank Bertalan has compiled a Junior College Library Collection8 of over 17,500 titles that is clearly curric- ulum related. He has maintained the high standard of selection that made his previous list the guide for so many be- ginning junior colleges. I daresay the new list will be just as helpful. But as it stands now, it is a list of print books. There is a promise of other media format lists to come. Similarly, Dr. Helen Wheeler has re- stricted her Basic Book Collection for the Community College Library9 to "the first five thousand book-titles," that is, 8 F. J. Bertalan, The Junior College Library Col- lection, Newark: Bro-Dart Foundation, 1968. 9 Helen Wheeler, A Basic Book Collection for the Community Junior College. (Hamden, Conn. , The Shoe String Press, 1968). Junior College Impact on Academic Librarianship I 219 print books. Although Dr. Wheeler ad- vocates the concept of the Materials Center, which we originated and pio- neered in Florida right after World War II, she accepts the boundary line we have drawn, professionally, between print and so-called audiovisual aids. Her appreciation of these latter formats, how- ever, underestimates them educational- ly less than Marshall McLuhan under- estimates print. But selection aids of the future , I dare to predict, in the light of educa- tional innovation, will erase the arti- ficial boundary between so-called print and audiovisual formats. To illustrate the unity of media, and therefore of library materials, I cite the fact that both audiovisual and library profession- al literature claim at least these com- mon formats: maps and globes; pictures (although the audiovisualist likes to use the term flat picture); museum objects, which the audiovisualist sometimes calls Realia; exhibits, bulletin boards and dis- plays. Recall that the Carnegie Corpora- tion donated a million dollars to librar- ies as early as 1928, to develop phono- record collections. This was some time before the audiovisual movement re- named these formats discs. Librarians have been in the vanguard of oral his- tory production and preservation, which rely heavily on the magnetic tape. And what will you say to the librarian-en- cyclopedia editor who crossed an audio- visual transparency overlay with a printed book. If the cross-media ap- proach of which we have made so much of late, means anything at all, it means unity among all of the media of com- munication, and therefore a library ob- ligation to balance selection not only by subject and level, but by format, as well. I predict the next selection aids will be media aids, rather than print-only lists. STAFF More carefully defined levels of li- brary practice, in the future , will at long last release the professional from semi- professional and clerical tasks for truly professional performance. Automation and even newer technological develop- ments are helping. But even more prom- ising is the growing recognition of the middle level paraprofessional, now offi- cially renamed by the ALA committee the Library Technical Assistant. The im- pact of the junior college on this innova- tion in personnel is evidenced by the fact that almost all of the education for this new career has occurred in the two- year institutions. This month Tex-Tec will be published, 10 which represents the first state-wide syllabus for the training of library technical assistants. As libraries add paraprofessionals as well as clericals and take advantage of li- brary technology, professional librarians will have released time to devote them- selves to participation in the new learn- ing mode of independent study, and as- sume full partnership in faculty re- search. Since ·the new type of Library- College education is dependent upon knowledge of media as well as of stu- dents, there is no faculty segment bet- ter prepared than the knowledgeable li- brarian. Just as the artificial line be- tween print and audiovisual formats is being erased, so also is the separation of faculty who center their instructional effort in the classroom from faculty who teach with media in the library. Indeed, if the independent study trend contin- ues, the time may soon come when the classroom instructor will have to fight for faculty status. FACILITY Library facility planning has already begun some spectacular innovation. As a countermeasure to the growing. im- personalism on our multiversity cam- puses, which student revolters place at 10 Louis Shores, et al. T ex-Tec. Syllabi for the Ed- ucation of Library Technical Assistants in the Junior Colleges of T exa s. Washington ( Communication Ser- vice Corporation , 1967). 220 I College & Research Libraries • May 1969 the top of their disaffections with Amer- ican higher education, cluster college patterns are developing. Again, as a Fulbright Fellow to the United King- dom, I have been taken with the British organizational plan. For example, Cam- bridge University has over thirty col- leges, none of which has an enrollment of over five hundred, thus insuring facul- ty-student personal relations. The Uni- versity of California at Santa Cruz, which will have an ultimate student population of 27,500, is organizing its campus into small colleges, each under one thousand. So also is the new Florida Technical University in Orlando. Mich- igan State has begun to organize col- leges around individual dormitories. Here is a trend that will modify the classic site ·specification for the center of the campus into several sites each cen- tral to a cluster college campus. The carrel-centered, independent study, learning mode suggests that we can no longer accept a standard that seats 25 per cent of the student body at one time. Already we have colleges that seat half of their student body at one time. Oklahoma Christian has 110 per cent seating, to insure an individual car- rel for each student and provision for enrollment increase. Steadily, these car- rels are becoming "wet" with dial access to a widening range of visual and audio media. STOCK When it comes to stock accommoda- tion, it is no longer adequate to plan for so many volumes of print, hard and soft cover, with a general allotment for something called an audiovisual area. Now, definite provision for housing oth- er media formats of the Generic Book, along with necessary equipment, is an integral part of total stock accommoda- tion planning. Furthermore, something called a core, must be designed to han- dle dial access, possibly computer con- trolled. But planning for staff accommodation will b e most sensitive. The usual 100 square feet per full-time staff member to accommodate workers in technical processes, reader services, and other conventional library functions, will have to be augmented by office, seminar, and classroom space for instruction. For in the Library-College type of institu- tion the library becomes the main in- structional building. And the faculty to be accommodated teach more in the li- brary than they do in the classroom. An example of library architecture in- novating in this direction is Dallas Bap- tist College. In an approximately square building, a central core accommodates the Generic Book stock. Around that core are student carrels to accommo- date at least half the student body. And utilizing the outside wall space are ser- vice areas and technical processes ; in- structional areas housing faculty offices, seminars, classrooms. SERVICES Which brings us to the critical ser- vices. With th~ professional librarian re- lieved of most of the organizational tasks of the past, he can for the first time as- sume the major responsibility for de- veloping a distinctive library education program such as Chancellor Branscomb challenged us to do. Curriculum-wise, we have two fundamental areas in which to contribute, areas we can hold our heads high about, because they are truly liberal and substantive. The first of these is what the prolific author "anon." heralds on many of our campus build- ings as the "half of knowledge"; that is , knowing where to find it. And who bet- ter than we can teach the use of media. In the past we have admittedly accom- plished less in teaching the use of the library than we had hoped for. But now, with independent study as the dominant learning mode, the student is impelled by academic survival to understand me- Junior College Impact on Academic Librarianship I 221 dia, to master the skills of information retrieval. The other area I call simply Knowl- edge, a capstone synthesis of the sepa- rate predatory disciplines. Although we have now integrated at the general ed- ucation level separate chemistry, phy- sics, and geology courses into something called phy sci; botany, zoology, physi- ology into Bi Sci; sociology, political science, economics, and even history in- to social sciences; philosophy, art, litera- ture, religion into humanities; a further integration of these three areas is called for; a bringing together of what C. P. Snow has called the "two cultures." The librarian, as a natural generalist, is best equipped, of all faculty, to ac- complish this. Through his professional concern with epistemology, with the classification of knowledge, with the provision for a generalia class; with his traditional impartiality toward all of the disciplines, he can be trusted, more than his colleague specialists, to represent the universes in perspective. In addition, through his own learning device of browsing, he can encourage a cross-sub- ject approach to an understanding of the riddles of the universe. He can, in- deed, introduce into the bloodstream of the learning life that phenomenon which science has but recently discovered, namely, serendipity. Yes, if I were to return to academic librarianship today, I would devote my- self to educational innovation. Because I believe that is part of the high role I see in our profession of destiny. To those of us who celebrate the «grass roots" and always being practical, what I have said will sound like a dream. But to quote the South Pacific song, how can our dreams come true if we never dream. I know that our campus tradition will interfere with realizing much of what I have suggested. That is why I look to the experimental rather than to the Ivy League colleges for a breakthrough. Even more, I look to the junior colleges, who seem to have the courage to ques- tion all the folklore academicians have taken for granted. At any rate, whether we want to or not, campus revolts will force us to other less creative measures. Why not then experiment in newer di- rections? Why not experiment and in- novate on our own. I believe in this profession of ours. I have faith that what we know and are will point the way to a higher educa- tion more liberal and substantive than anything the world has known before. My faith in our next professional gener- ation of librarians convinces me we will yet develop a prototype for the higher education to come. ••