Classic
A Review of:
Bundy, M. L., & Wasserman, P. (1968).
Professionalism reconsidered. College & Research Libraries, 29(1),
5-26. https://doi.org/10.5860/crl_29_01_5
Reviewed by:
Emily Drabinski
Interim Chief Librarian
The Graduate Center, City University of New York
New York, New York, United States of America
Email: edrabinski@gc.cuny.edu
Received: 1 May 2020 Accepted: 7 July 2020
2020 Drabinski. This
is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons‐Attribution‐Noncommercial‐Share Alike License 4.0
International (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/),
which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,
provided the original work is properly attributed, not used for commercial
purposes, and, if transformed, the resulting work is redistributed under the
same or similar license to this one.
DOI: 10.18438/eblip29772
Abstract
Objective – In their 1968 editorial for College & Research Libraries, Mary Lee Bundy and Paul Wasserman
interrogated the nature of librarianship as a profession. They describe what
they see as the limits of contemporary practice and offer ways forward for
those concerned with the status of librarians.
Design – The article offers an analysis of the question, making use of selected
contemporary literature on American librarianship, rather than empirical
research or a literature review.
Setting – Bundy and Wasserman locate their critique in the daily work of academic
librarians. Their descriptions are based on their own observations.
Subjects – The authors focus on “the real world in which librarians
practice” rather than “abstract academic terms” (p. 7). Their subjects are
library workers who, by virtue of the MLS, are identified as professionals in
the library workplace. Bundy and Wasserman note that these library workers
“often spend considerable time being concerned about whether or not they are
truly professional” and go on to take up these concerns themselves (p. 5).
Methods – Bundy and Wasserman compare librarianship to “what is customarily considered
to constitute professional behavior” (p. 7). Their comparison is structured
through an analysis of three categories of professional relationships:
librarian to client, librarian to institution, and librarian to professional
association. This taxonomy of relationships is their own; the authors do not
refer to analyses of professionalism in other disciplines such as nursing,
social work, or education, fields where similar questions have arisen. The
authors describe each of these professional relationships in turn through their
own observations as a professor and Dean of the library program at the
University of Maryland.
Main Results – Bundy and Wasserman argue that librarianship does not meet the threshold for
professional behaviour in any of these three
categories of practice. The relationship between the client and the
professional requires expertise: “the professional knows” (p. 8). According to the authors, most reference
transactions involve questions that “would not overtax the capacity of any
reasonably intelligent college graduate after a minimum period of on-the-job
training” while an “essential timidity” prevents them from clearly stating what
they do know (p. 8). Given this, the relationship with the client can never be
professional: the client knows as much as or more than the librarian. Bundy and
Wasserman make an exception for children’s librarians, arguing that their
clientele benefits from the “close control of the content of collections to
reflect excellence” (p. 9). Otherwise, librarians are “in awe” of both the
expanding bibliographic universe and the “growing sophistication of
middle-class readers” (p. 9). Unless librarians understand themselves to be
experts, and engage as experts with their clients, they cannot be
professionals.
Professionals also see themselves as superior to their
institution, struggling against “institutional authority which attempts to
influence [their] behavior and performance norms” (p. 14). The professional
resists disciplinary mechanisms that force workers to conform to institutional
norms, maintaining authority over their own work. In Bundy and Wasserman’s view, librarians
instead display “rigid adherence to bureaucratic ritual” where “the
intellectual and professional design is sacrificed upon the altar of economic
and efficient work procedures” (p. 15). Librarians focus on the efficient
completion of narrowly defined tasks that enable compliance with institutional
demands instead of placing their relationships with clients at the center of
their professional life. Library administrators encourage this restriction on
the status of their employees. The authors argue that the librarian who
attempts to maintain a professional relationship “is seen as a prima donna,
impatient with necessary work routines, unwilling to help out in emergencies, a
waster of time spent in idle conversation with his
clientele about their work--renegade and spoiled” (p. 16). Acting “like a
professional” is incompatible with the ways librarians normally relate within
the larger institution.
Finally, professional status requires professional
associations. These associations should ensure the quality of education in
professional programs while facilitating the growth of connections between
professional librarians. Again, librarianship fails: its professional
association is guilty of “accrediting and re-accrediting programs of doubtful
merit thereby giving its imprimatur to schools very distant from any ideal or
even advanced attainment” (p. 21). When
it gathers librarians together at annual meetings, those committees “consist of
members explaining why they have failed to complete assignments or committees
which deliberate weightily the means for perpetuating themselves instead of
considering the purpose or program, or still others which consume hour after
hour preoccupied with minutiae” in organizations that are reduced to “the
associational excesses of the ritual, the routine, and the social” (p. 23).
Conclusion – For Bundy and Wasserman, librarianship fails to qualify as a profession
because the field cannot lay claim to a particular area of expertise, slavishly
follows the rules of the institutions in which it is embedded, and is governed
by professional associations that fail to ensure the rigor of professional
education while reducing relationship-building to the reproduction of the
association itself. Unless the field works to become more thoroughly
professional, they argue, librarianship cannot advance or innovate, doomed to
“not only decline rapidly, but ultimately face obsolescence” (p. 25).
Commentary
Bundy and Wasserman, American professors of
librarianship writing in a distinctly American context, published their editorial
at the same time that the United States saw both an increase in the social wage
and the intensification of struggles over control of it. In colleges and
universities, Lyndon Johnson’s Higher Education Act of 1965 had authorized
increased federal funding for colleges and universities in the form of direct
aid to institutions and student financial aid programs like Federal Work-Study
and subsidized loans for students and their families (Hegji, 2018). This infusion of cash led to a boom in enrollment as
the number of students in higher education institutions rose over the course of
the following decades (Snyder, 1993).
Academic libraries were serving more students with larger budgets than ever
before.
At the same time, higher education proved fertile
ground for the growth and expansion of social movements. The Black Panther
Party was founded by Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton in 1966; the two met as
students at Merritt College in Oakland, California. The Weather Underground
emerged in the same decade at the University of Michigan while the University
of California, Berkeley was host to the Free Speech Movement that would spread
to campuses nationwide. Just as resources infused the system, struggles for the
more equitable distribution of political and social power intensified.
Librarianship was not exempt from these forces.
Librarianship was caught in a familiar tension: should
librarians focus on elevating the status of the field by professionalizing like
our colleagues in medicine and the law, or should the role we can play in
fights for social justice take precedence? During this same decade, the latter
impulse made significant headway in the field. The Office for Intellectual
Freedom was founded in 1967 and the Freedom to Read Foundation followed in
1969. Within the American Library Association, progressive movements took root
as organized entities, including the Social Responsibility Round Table (1969),
the Task Force on Gay Liberation (1971), and the Committee on the Status of
Women in Librarianship (1976). Ethnic affiliates began to be established at the
start of the 1970s and included the Black Caucus of the American Library
Association (1970), the National Association of Spanish Speaking Librarians in
the United States (1971, now REFORMA), the Chinese American Librarians
Association (1973), the American Indian Library Association (1979), and the
Asian/Pacific Librarians Association (1980). The late 1960s and 1970s were a
golden time for progressive political movements in librarianship.
Bundy and Wasserman staked their claim in this debate
squarely on the side of professionalism as a bid for primacy and position in
broader social contexts, including higher education. Rather than place efforts
into “a wide range of national, international, research, and societal
responsibilities for which it is less than ideally equipped” (p. 25), the field
ought instead to focus on the substance of librarianship itself. The work of
the field should not be about finding ways to participate in or find common
cause with broader social movements. Instead, the field should focus on
boosting professional status in order to be “in the vanguard of new or
imaginative directions for librarianship” (p. 25). Librarians needed to act
more like doctors and lawyers and less like activists or functionaries in order
to survive.
Writing in 1968, Bundy and Wasserman’s push for a more
robustly professional librarianship can be seen as a gambit for a larger slice
of the expanding institutional pie. As budgets and student bodies grew, more
resources were up for grabs, and librarians competed with other campus entities
for their share. Indeed, Bundy and Wasserman saw professionalization as
essential if librarians were to continue to dominate their field: “In order to
fulfill their original mandate of serving as guardian of society’s information
needs and in order to influence positively the forward motion of progressive
information development in a time of competition with other emergent
information-oriented disciplines” (p. 6). Unless librarians made a strong case
for themselves as the true guardians of human knowledge, they were at risk of
being replaced by other academic entities on campus. We hear echoes of this in
today’s anxieties around the replacement of our reference desks by Google, a
tool that has essentially replaced the ready reference collections of Bundy and
Wasserman’s day.
Bundy and Wasserman point to library training programs
as a root cause of a library field they saw as essentially clerical.
Transforming the degree program could also be a solution. Instead of focusing
library training on “memorizing names of famous modern librarians, committing
to memory large sections of classification schedules, cluttering their minds
with details of whether certain books have an index and table of contents or
not,” library education should engage
broader questions, “studying the reasons for contemporary trends in societal
information developments, the logic of comparative systems of classification,
the structure of bibliography and information agencies as resources for problem
solving, or the personal, organizational, and social group determinants of
information need” (p. 20). Their argument anticipates the contemporary focus in
LIS programs on information behavior and social information practices, as well
as pointing to critical librarianship as an emerging discourse. Debates about
what constitutes the best curriculum in LIS programs continue along lines
similar to those outlined by the authors in 1968 as librarians demand a more
rigorous intellectual engagement with information and society, considered
essential if librarians are to be more than simply enforcers of narrowly
defined bureaucratic norms.
In a short but provocative paragraph, the authors ask
whether collective bargaining might offer a straighter route to professional
status for American librarians, a group for whom unionization and
professionalization might be seen as in conflict. Such a suggestion runs
counter to many contemporary libraries where union/non-union traces precisely
the border of the paraprofessional/professional divide. Collective bargaining,
Bundy and Wasserman suggest, is a superior method of producing the “militant
group solidarity” they see as necessary for professionalization (p. 23).
Indeed, as they say in the union movement, management is the best organizer:
pulling together as workers around shared grievances and enemies in order to
struggle for better wages and working conditions can cohere a group of
individuals like little else. The authors stop short of advocating for unions
for librarians. Like other institutions, they claim, union bureaucracy can be
stultifying, “a reinforcement of the very rigid authority structure of
libraries which serves now as an impediment to innovation and furtherance of service
commitments” (p. 24). In many cases, professional librarians still see unions
this way: mechanisms for the production of staff and the rules that govern them
that hobble the innovations a more “entrepreneurial” workforce would otherwise
produce.
Concerns about whether or not librarianship is a
profession continue to animate the field, discussed “endlessly” (p. 5) just as
Bundy and Wasserman complained fifty years ago. Worry that librarians are too
servile, too docile, and too narrow to survive a changing technological and
economic landscape continue in the guise of “future-proofing” and appeals to
entrepreneurial and other business values. The authors’ complaint that
“innovation remains on trial when it should be encouraged” reads as fresh as if
it were written today (p. 25). As investment in higher education shrinks,
librarians turn to learning analytics and efforts to quantify library value as
strategies to ensure their continued existence. Associations and institutions
steer clear of political conflict by hewing closely to what are described as
professional values around free speech and academic freedom.
Read in the
context of the present, Bundy and Wasserman’s editorial serves as a warning
against too narrow a focus on professional status as the means to the end of a
robust and well-resourced academic librarianship. In 1968, just as today, the
call to professionalize or face replacement or obsolescence puts the emphasis
on the wrong analytic frame. Attacks on librarianship must be met on a different
terrain. We might instead conceive of disinvestment in higher education and the
demands of capital that all units on campus generate profit as the problem. In
this case, the solution to our always already impending demise lies not in
transforming ourselves, but in transforming the social and economic formations
that directly attack librarianship and so many other necessary social goods.
References
Hegji, Alexandra. (2018). The Higher Education Act:
a primer. Retrieved from https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R43351.pdf
Snyder, Thomas D., ed. (1993). 120 years of
American education: a statistical portrait. Retrieved from https://nces.ed.gov/pubs93/93442.pdf