OK, so one of the mailing lists I’m on is a discussion space intended for persons new to librarianship. One of the ongoing points of discussion-generating irritation is the surprising difficulty of actually finding a job once one has graduated from library school.
Reading this ongoing, multifaceted, free-form discussion over time, I’ve identified what seem to be some unchanging themes and positions. It will come as no surprise to many of you that the cases I find most interesting are those in which people come to violent disagreement despite using words and premises that should mark them as allies. That is, all factions in the controversies I find most interesting use the same signifiers to represent their positions, but it becomes clear under analysis that the meanings they assign to those signifiers, and the related notions arising from those meanings, are in severe opposition.
As this list is supposed to be a nurturing, helpful environment, various issues are often addressed in advice-giving terms. Controversy arises, naturally, as people on one side of the rhetorical divide find the advice given to be (when judged from their own understanding of the signifiers in play) either irrelevant or outright false.
The specific case I am going to talk about here is the tendency for discussion of non-traditional opportunities available for MLS-holders, of the availability of jobs outside actual (public, academic, special, or corporate) libraries. This is a frequent locus from which optimistic advice proceeds, and the controversy surrounding such advice has erupted spectacularly this weekend.
It had been obvious before this eruption that the discourse on-list is controlled, or at least very heavily shaped, by persons promoting two notions: that the MLS has some inherent worth, and that hiring committees outside of libraries are likely to recognize that worth. The exact meaning of the former notion had never been addressed with any specificity, and the latter notion was simply presented as a received truth.
When a demand for specifics supporting the worth of the degree arose, the elitist biases held by the primary shapers of discourse were revealed. It weren’t pretty.
The specific crisis arose when posters began insisting that the skills learned and developed during the pursuit of a degree would be desirable by companies in the knowledge/information industry. Pressed for specifics, the cheerleaders waved their hands toward the development of information management and database architecture skills.
Two paths resulted from that claim. Both were cut pretty short as the dominant biases were laid bare.
The first, more robust path resulted as some dissenting posters argued that hiring committees at information-industry firms (Google was used as shorthand, which unfortunately allowed the dominant parties to use a nasty rhetorical trick). There was a bit of chasing around the bush, and finally the pro-MLS parties admitted that of course the MLS alone wouldn’t qualify anyone for the jobs they were talking about, but that people who had already been professionals working in that sector before pursuing their MLS would have a definite leg-up when looking for a new job in the field. In other words, the optimistic advice they had been long promoting, their justification for the value of degree, carried the implicit acknowledgment that the MLS was actually neither necessary nor sufficient for attainment of the possibilities they were holding out.
This is where the really tasty elitist stuff gets revealed. Some of the people who had been grousing about the lack of available positions, who had been chafing under the advice offered by the cheerleaders, and who had sparked the current eruption called foul. The cheerleaders responded with a fairly haughty declaration that of course it should have been understood all along that the advice they were given was intended only for people with appropriate backgrounds.
It is important to note here that there was a divergent sub-discussion in which cheerleaders began actively berating–even outright insulting–people who had the nerve to speak up and claim they didn’t have the backgrounds necessary, who had entered librarianship without having first spent years in the corporate or technology world. Yes, there was actual name-calling.
I mentioned above that there were two paths emerging from the claim that MLS programs provided people with desirable job skills. I was personally responsible for that one. I spoke up and said, plainly, that my program is ranked exactly in the middle of the pack of accredited programs. There was no such instruction in or opportunities for development of such skills available in my program, and it seems likely that any program ranked equally to or lower than mine would provide such. Graduates of at least half the programs in the country, then, and so would not find the advice being given at all useful.
The cheerleaders responded that, yes, that’s true. And moved on, and kept repeating their claims and advice.
And so here’s the analysis: The giving of job-seeking advice is not an act of beneficence, it is instead a means of establishing and maintaining an unrealistic normative notion of what the profession should be. While purporting to be an outreach effort to draw people into librarianship, it instead serves as a means of actively excluding and pushing away those persons who do not fit into the idealized notion. I must note here that I have no reason to believe that this is conscious or intentional behavior on the cheerleaders’ part; it is likely instead a result of the special sort of blindness inherent among members of an institutional elite.
Those persons who have thus far successfully maintained control of the discourse are also those persons who do not seem to realize that the advice they offer is inapplicable to every single person who has been seeking advice. They work, as humans do, from the assumption that other people are pretty much like them; the fact that the great majority of persons struggling to enter the profession are very much unlike them may register, but it is not internalized. Advice useful only to a very small number of persons is offered to the entire group, and then is defended and justified as if it should be applicable to all.
That last clause is where the charges of elitism emerge, and are justified, and are destructive to the well-being of the majority. It is excusable to offer advice from a position of blindness regarding its universal applicability; it is sheer cussedness to defend that position, and to insist on its universality, once it is demonstrated as being of narrow applicability.
Wow, I’ve used a lot of words already, and I’m dying from lack of organization. I feel I’m not really approaching my point, just dancing around it. Grr. Maybe I’ll approach this again, later, from another standpoint. There’s something very important here, I feel, but I can’t quite express it. Of course I’d appreciate any advice.
Another cheerleading post has come in while I’ve been typing, and it really does seem to be a good exemplar of both the problem and its crushing effect on those who need career advice. The post reproduces a recent job-advice column from the author’s local newspaper, and the advice given is several bullet points that boil down to “if you want to break into a new field, you need to get to know people already in that field socially and professionally.”
See the assumption there? It’s not expressed at all in the article, and may not even be realized by the article’s author. But it is there, and it wholly informs what is written. The column, like the cheerleaders, assumes that anyone seeking career advice is interested in a horizontal move, that they have the time and money and kinds of resources available to someone already established in that field. It assumes the seeker possesses the social standing (or the resources to fake it) of somebody already there. It assumes the seeker possesses the material resources to join professional societies associated with the destination field, and it also assumes (this is critical) that the seeker knows how to successfully navigate and exploit the opportunities afforded by membership in a professional society.
While I am sure many people are interested in moving horizontally across fields, it is my experience (and it seems a fair assumption) that the great, vast, huge majority of persons seeking career advice are interested in vertical moves. These seekers are invisible to those providing advice, which might be understandable. In the case of the mailing list under discussion, though, these persons are actively berated when they dare make themselves known and try to establish a voice. And then they’re fed more advice useful only to horizontal movers, and they’re expected to be grateful for it.