College and Research Libraries Faculty Status for Library Professionals: Its Effect on Job Turnover and Job Satisfaction among University Research Library Directors Michael Koenig, Ronald Morrison, and Linda Roberts The authors investigated the relationship between the job turnover and job satisfaction of ARL university library directors relative to faculty sta- tus. The findings were that there did, in fact, seem to be a positive rela- tionship between job satisfaction and faculty status. The provision of staff release time to pursue scholarly endeavors was correlated posi- tively with the directors' reported job satisfaction, whereas "hollow fac- ulty status," defined as nominal faculty status but without the provision of release time, was correlated negatively (both significant at the .05 level). Job turnover by itself was quite unrelated to the issue of faculty status. ~~~ n 1973, Arthur McAnally and Robert Downs published a landmark article pointing out the recent dramatic increase in turnover rate among directors of uni- versity libraries. They traced this in- crease to numerous factors ranging from the growth in size and complexity of the institutions, the information explo- sion, and budget cuts, to increased stress and declining status for direc- tors, all of which may have combined · effectively to force them out of their jobs before they were ready to retire. 1 To cope with these changes, the authors recommended better planning, creative budgeting, and improved services and or- ganization. However, as Dick Dougherty sug- gested in his 1989 introduction to a re- print of their article, things haven't changed much since then. 2 Not only have pressures increased and status declined, but there is also fre- quently no pathway open to further ad- vancement beyond the library director- ship. Edward D. Garten observed that few chief library officers eventually move into senior academic positions such as vice- president, provost, or president, perhaps because there is little opportunity in the course of their careers to build their resumes in relevant areas, such as curricu- lum design and development, faculty development, political coalition building, or external public relations. The director- Michael Koenig is a Professor at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Rosary College, River Forest, fllinois; Ronald Morrison is Manager of Network Services for Inflight Phone; and Linda Roberts is on the professional staff at Elmhurst College Library. 295 296 College & Research Libraries ship of university libraries, he suggested, is marked by a lack of influence and power and essentially constitutes a mar- ginal role within the larger university.3 Anne Woodsworth elaborated on this lack of career mobility, arguing that al- though library directors may appear to function at the pinnacle of their fields, within the college or university they are more accurately seen as middle manag- ers. They are not only subject to all the stresses that middle managers experi- ence, such as isolation and overwork, but they also lack any clear means for pro- fessional development.4 In a 1989 Library Journal article, Woodsworth pointed out another devel- opment since McAnally and Downs pub- lished their article. She suggested that li- brary directors don't necessarily want to stay in their jobs indefinitely. Instead, "the best and the brightest" leave because of burnout after some years of coping with increasing pressures and demands.5 In addition, Michael Koenig and Herbert Stafford discussed a related issue, namely, the unusually extreme vertical stratifica- tion of the field; that is, the difficulty of moving horizontally in or out of academic research library directorships, particu- larly the difficulty of moving from cor- porate research library directorships to academic research library directorships, and the recruiting problem this poses for academic library directorships. 6 Subse- quently, Michael Buckland, Evelyn Daniel, and Richard Dougherty all have echoed the same concern about recruit- ment of "the best and the brightest." 7-9 Recent literature focuses on the stress placed on library directors as a result of their middle-management status, but there is another factor that relates to stress: the presence or absence of faculty status for professional library staff mem- bers. ACRL's "Model Statement" recom- mending faculty status across the board has received a mixed reception, partly be- cause faculty status typically brings with it expectations to carry out and publish May 1996 research, even though the time and sup- port necessary to do so may not be pro- vided.10 Kee DeBoer and Wendy Culotta, for example, reviewed literature published in the 1980s and found that academic librar- ians most often have some type of faculty or academic status, although perhaps not full faculty status. However, because li- brarians have little release time for re- search, DeBoer and Culotta harbor "doubts that faculty status is the best al- ternative for librarians." 11 Emily Werrell and Laura Sullivan, in a review of the literature from 1974 to 1985, found that release time for research is se- verely lacking among those libraries that encourage or require it for promotion and tenure. Further, given a choice, librarians prefer to provide library service and leave publishing to the teaching faculty. 12 In a review of thirty-six faculty status surveys .from 1971 to 1984, Janet Krom- part and Clara DiFelice found unclear requirements for tenure and promotion, and inconsistent provision of release time and funds for research and publication.13 Betsy Park and Robert Riggs surveyed 304 college and university libraries and discovered that 41 percent of the librar- ians had faculty rank and status, and that most of these institutions encouraged publication, but that anxiety over a "pub- lish or perish" scenario seemed to be a major factor in the ambivalence expressed over faculty status. 14 In contrast to the above studies, John Buschman, in a comparison with Krompart and DiFelice's data, found that nonfaculty status librarians were dissat- isfied equally, citing isolation and lack of a peer group within the university, un- clear systems for promotion, and lower salaries than facu1ty. In short, as one of Buschman's respondents reported, "The faculty rank/ status issue is an ambigu- ous one and seems to make little actual difference in how librarians are treated."15 In fact, Judith Hegg found that librar- ians with faculty status had lower levels Faculty Status for Library Professionals 297 of job satisfaction than those without fac- ulty status. 16 Furthermore, in concluding a major literature survey, Rachel Applegate reiterated how past research has failed to support the idea that faculty status benefits either academic librarians or their institutions and called for aban- doning the faculty status ideal in favor of other models. 17 Most recently, Elizabeth Henry, Dana Caudle, and Paula Sullenger investigated the relationship between the existence of tenure and tenure require- ments in academic libraries and the turn- over of professional staff, and found that no significant relationship exists. 18 Because the directors of academic li- braries are also academic librarians, it is reasonable to suppose that the issues sur- rounding faculty status might have an effect on their positions, in addition to the stress already incumbent on it. In addi- tion, a director's position as manager of other professionals who have faculty sta- tus may be different from a position in which they do not. A director may have less leverage over librarians with faculty status who may be tenured and therefore not vulnerable to termination and only marginally vulnerable to other sanctions. Therefore, it is possible that the presence or absence of faculty status at a given university might have an effect on the li- brary director's perceived stress level and overall job satisfaction. The Hypothesis Librarians all know the reputation and the stereotype-the university library that is known or at least reputed to have a high director turnover rate because of its frac- tious and ungovernable cadre of profes- sional library staff made and supported, if not confirmed in that fractiousness and ungovernability, by tenure. Is there some substance to that stereotype? The authors conceived this study with the hypothesis that there was likely to be some fire be- hind the smoke, that an academic re- search library director's tenure and sat- isfaction with the job would be adversely affected by having to manage a profes- sional library staff with faculty status. The thesis might be stated more for- mally as: Having to manage a library in which the library professional staff have tenure and faculty status increases the stress level of the director's position. More specifically, the thesis would be that the library director's position is functionally that of a classic line manager managing a service function in a complex, multifac- eted environment, and, generally, is seen as such by his or her management. By contrast, the notion of tenure and faculty status inevitably carries with it the over- tones of academic governance and colle- giality in which the department head or Having to manage a library in which the library professional staff have tenure and faculty status increases the stress level of the director's position. dean manages-or better, leads-as first among equals. This dichotomy, it could be argued, creates a tension for the man- ager between the role he or she is ex- pected to play by the institutional admin- istration and the role he or she is expected to play by the library staff. The authors did not expect there to be a strong rela- tionship, but they did anticipate a nega- tive relationship between professional staff faculty status and the director's ten- ure and job satisfaction. Interestingly enough, the results of their study contra- dicted this thesis. Methodology The authors designed the following study, therefore, to evaluate the relation- ships between length of time on the job and job satisfaction among directors of academic and research libraries, and the presence or absence of faculty status for professional staff. In order to evaluate this issue, the authors mailed survey questionnaires to all academic ARL li- 298 College & Research Libraries brary directors requesting the follow- ing information: • Please give the number of years you have been director. • What was the length of tenure of your two most recent predecessors? • Please rank your overall satisfac- tion with your job. (Here appeared a seven-point rating scale ranging from "Terribly frustrating, not what I ex- pected when I entered this field [1]" to "Great job. Love it!" [7].) To obtain data on the policy of a given institution regarding faculty sta- tus and rank for professional library staff, the authors also mailed the fol- lowing questions to the personnel of- ficer at each ARL library surveyed: • Do the professional librarians have faculty status? If so, roughly what percentage of them do? • Is release time provided for re- search and publication? Is research and publication activity a significant com- ponent of tenure and promotion deci- sions? • Is there any union or functional equivalent that represents professional staff (for example, a staff association that takes part in salary or contract ne- gotiations)? If so, roughly what per- centage of professional staff are in- cluded? • Is there any other social or pro- fessional mechanism that serves some of the functions of faculty status, par- ticularly professional recognition? (For example, at Yale University, a profes- sional library staff member can be, and often is, elected a Fellow of one of the colleges.) If so, roughly what percent- age of professional staff are included? The library director and personnel officers at each library were surveyed separately to minimize the possibility of the directors' detecting the study's interest in the relationship between turnover I job satisfaction and tenure and faculty status. This correlation could have caused bias in their responses. May 1996 Results The response rate to the questionnaires was gratifyingly high, particularly be- cause usable results required that both the library director and the personnel direc- tor reply to separate questionnaires. There are 120 ARL libraries, of which twelve either are not academic libraries or are otherwise not relevant to a study of the effect of faculty status. Of the remaining sample of 108 libraries, the authors re- ceived complete data (both respondents) from seventy-eight libraries for a (joint) response rate of 72 percent. The authors believe that the comparative simplicity of the data-gathering instruments contrib- uted ·greatly to the high response rate. The two dependent variables were job satisfaction as reported by the current li- brary directors and the average job ten- ure of the current directors and their two predecessors. Indeed, job satisfaction did relate to the issue of faculty status, and although the relationships were not par- ticularly strong statistically, they were highly significant and rather stronger than would have been anticipated given the plethora of other potentially influen- tial variables. The three most salient cor- relations were the correlations, or in one case the lack thereof, between the direc- tor's job satisfaction and (1) whether the professional staff enjoyed faculty status, (2) the provision of release time for pro- fessional staff to pursue scholarly activi- ties, and (3) faculty status but without the provision of release time (see table 1). The correlations among any of the in- dependent variables above and the mea- sures of job turnover (the incumbent's tenure on the job, that of the predecessor, the predecessor once removed, or the av- erage of all three) were essentially insig- nificant (all were low, and none was sta- tistically significant, even at the .1 level). This is entirely consistent with the find- ings of Henry, Caudle, and Sullenger, who examined the relationship between over- all staff turnover and tenure in academic libraries. 18 Faculty Status for Library Professionals 299 TABLEt Key Relationships with Director's Job Satisfaction Variable Correlation P. Value Comments Coefficient Faculty Status (whether the -.0925 .421 Essentially no professional staff were described relationship as having faculty status) Release Time (whether the .4452 .002 A nontrivial professional staff enjoyed release relationship, highly time to pursue scholarly activities) significant statistically "Hollow Faculty Status" (nominal -.2441 .031 A modest correlation, faculty status but without release time) The data were also subjected to a fac- tor analysis, and although two factors did emerge, they were not crisp and the au- thors were not successful in tagging them with meaningful conceptual labels. Conclusion It appears, with one caveat, that faculty status for library professionals, rather than adversely affecting the job satisfac- , tion of academic library directors, is cor- related positively with job satisfaction. That caveat is quite intriguing. It implies strongly that mere nominal faculty sta- tus-faculty status that does not include release time to pursue scholarly or re- search activities, that is, simply declaring that professional library staff have faculty but still statistically significant status but not actually providing the time and wherewithal to pursue research- does not make a positive contribution. It further implies that what does correlate with the director's job satisfaction is an environment in which the library profes- sional staff are treated as functional fac- ulty equivalents and given release time to pursue scholarly activities. "Hollow faculty status," nominal faculty status but without release time, is negatively corre- lated with the directors' reported job sat- isfaction. Although these results are in- deed interesting, it is important not to im- ply causality to correlation. Nevertheless, the results certainly hint at a more posi- tive role for faculty status than generally is accorded in the current literature. Notes 1. Arthur M. McAnally and Robert B. Downs, "The Changing Role of Directors of University Libraries", College & Research Libraries 50 (May 1989): 307-27 (reprinted from 1973). 2. Richard M. Dougherty, "The Changing Role of Directors of University Libraries: Introduc- tion to a Reprint of a C&RL Classic," College & Research Libraries 50 (May 1989): 305-06. 3. Edward D. Garten, "Observations on Why So Few Chief Library Officers Move into Senior Academic Administration," Library Administration and Management 2 (Mar. 1988): 95-98. 4. Anne Woodsworth, "Library Directors As Middle Managers: A Neglected Resource," Li- brary Administration and Management 3 (winter 1989): 24-27. 5. --, "Getting off the Library Merry-Go-Round: McAnally and Downs Revisited; the Best and the Brightest Directors Are Burned Out," Library Journal114 (May 1989): 35-38. 6. Michael E. D. Koenig and Herbert Stafford, "Myths, Misconceptions & Management," Library Journal109 (Oct. 1984): 1897-1902. 7. Michael Buckland, "Theme V: The School, Its Faculty and Students," in Changing Technology and Education for Librarianship and Information Science (Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Pr., 1985), 127. 300 College & Research Libraries May 1996 8. Evelyn Daniel, "Commentary" on "Current Developments in Education for Librarianship and Information Science" by Edward G. Holley, in Changing Technology and Education for Librari- anship and Information Science (Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1985), 78. 9. Richard M. Dougherty, "Commentary" on "Changing Technology and the Personnel Re- quirements of Research Libraries" by Carlton Rochell, in Changing Technology and Education for Librarianship and Information Science (Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1985), 45. 10. ACRL/ Academic Status Committee, "Model Statement of Criteria and Procedures for Appointment, Promotion in Academic Rank, and Tenure for College and University Librarians (Revision of the 1973 Model Statement)," College & Research Libraries News 48 (May 1987): 247- 54. 11. Kee DeBoer and Wendy Culotta, "The Academic Librarian and Faculty Status in the 1980s: A Survey of the Literature," College & Research Libraries 48 (May 1987): 215-23. 12. Emily Werrell and Laura Sullivan, "Faculty Status for Academic Librarians: A Review of the Literature," College & Research Libraries 48 (Mar. 1987): 95-103. 13. Janet Krompart and Clara L. DiFelice, "A Review of Faculty Status Surveys, 1971-1984," Journal of Academic Librarianship 13 (Mar. 1987): 14-18. 14. Betsy Park and Robert Riggs, "Status of the Profession: A 1989 National Survey of Tenure and Promotion Policies for Academic Librarians," College & Research Libraries 52 (May 1991): 275-89. 15. John Buschman, "The Flip Side of Faculty Status," College and Research Libraries News 50 (Dec. 1989): 972-76. 16. Judith L. Hegg, "Faculty Status: Some Expected and Some Not-So Expected Findings," Journal of Library Administration 6 (winter 1985/86): 67-79. 17. Rachel Applegate, "Deconstructing Faculty Status: Research and Assumptions," Journal of Academic Librarianship 19 (July 1993): 158-64. 18. Elizabeth C. Henry, Dana M. Caudle, and Paula Sullenger, "Tenure and Turnover in Aca- demic Libraries," College & Research Libraries 55 (Sept. 1994): 419-35. 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