Retrofit 4: For the Love of Money

This is my fourth “thinking out loud” installment in preparation for the RBMS seminar “Retrofitting Expectations or Redefining Reality: What Does the Future of the Special Collections Professional Look Like?”

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By most accounts, state support for higher education is dwindling. In part, this has been a state response to the recession and weak economy. James Hilton noted in a talk to Minnesota library staff that “our institutions face profound and existential change. As a society, we are redefining our beliefs about the purposes of higher education and our conceptions of what it means to be ‘educated.’ Along the way, we are changing beliefs about who/how to pay for public education.”

According to the American Council on Education (ACE):

Despite steadily growing student demand for higher education since the mid-1970s, state fiscal investment in higher education has been in retreat in the states since about 1980. In fact, it is headed for zero. Based on the trends since 1980, average state fiscal support for higher education will reach zero by 2059, although it could happen much sooner in some states and later in others. Public higher education is gradually being privatized.

My state, Minnesota, is characterized by the ACE as one of the “biggest losers.”

Minnesota has reduced its higher education investment by 55.8 percent…. Extending the trend since 1980 into the future, state funding for higher education will reach zero in 2037. But another extrapolation hits zero in 2032.

The National Association of State Budget Officers (NASBO) paints a similar picture, while suggesting different solutions. “Tighter state resources, rising costs, high tuition rates and other factors make the current model of financing public higher education unsustainable.” In a recent report The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities indicated that Minnesota’s change in spending per student, adjusted for inflation, between fiscal years 2008 and 2013 was a negative 30.4%.

I’ll be retired by the time we reach the zero point. But my granddaughters will be in college. Will my state support their education in any way? Or will the entire burden fall to them and their parents? I’m not optimistic. The Atlantic recently published an article, “The Myth of Working Your Way Through College,” that opened with these words: “The economic cards are stacked such that today’s average college student, without support from financial aid and family resources, would need to complete 48 hours of minimum-wage work a week to pay for his (sic) courses—a feat that would require superhuman endurance, or maybe a time machine.”

The University of Minnesota Law School is currently engaged in a fundraising campaign “to ensure the future of the Law School's high-quality education and service to the profession and the larger community” regardless of how the state decides to fund higher education. Their goal is $70 million; they are 90% of the way there.

Throughout most of the Law School's history, the state of Minnesota heavily subsidized the cost of a legal education. But that funding has declined steadily over recent years. State support now represents only a very small fraction of the Law School's total budget, and that fraction is directed entirely to the Law Library, a resource we share with the University and broader community. In recent years, several other top public law schools that faced dwindling state funding made the move to financial self-sufficiency. Now the Law School is making that transition—to funding based almost entirely on tuition and philanthropy. A successful campaign will enable us to continue and expand on our agenda of excellence.

The University’s Carlson School of Management is in a similar situation. In a 2012 interview the school’s new dean, Sri Zaheer, made this observation:

As of last year, state funding for our school was 3.5 percent of our total budget. We’ve had, for all intents and purposes, to live, breathe, and think like a private school. We have a proposal to charge a tuition surcharge to our undergraduate [business] students, and that plan is close to being finalized. Our student body has grown 20 percent or more in the past four or five years, but we haven’t been able to [expand] our tenure-track faculty. Any tuition surcharge we collect from the undergraduate program will be dedicated to hiring new faculty.

In seeking approval for our current university budget, administrators and regents agreed to a two-year freeze on in-state tuition in exchange for increased funding from the state. It is a high-tuition, high-aid model that increases graduate, professional, and out-of-state tuition along with fees and room/board costs. First-year resident law students expected to see their tuition rise by nine percent. We no longer have a professional library school on campus; it was swept away in financial crises of the 1980s. Were it still in existence, I wonder how long it could survive under today’s constraints.

Let’s bring this back to the concerns of special collections professionals. What does the future hold, given the bleak landscape of state funding for higher education? What do these numbers tell us, if anything? Are there different concerns for public versus private institutions? Here are a few more questions to consider:

• Will dwindling state support mean less public money for acquisitions or staffing?
• Are we in the process of privatizing library operations?
• If state-funded acquisitions money decreases, will we be more reliant on gift funds or endowments to make up the difference?
• If so, would this reliance necessitate more time spent in fundraising and donor cultivation?
• Or do we care about the difference and simply purchase less for the collections?
• Will there be any new money for new staff, or will we rely on capturing funds from vacant positions and re-craft or re-design job descriptions as needed?
• Will there be greater pressure to develop and gain acceptance of grant proposals to cover part-time or short-term staffing as part of an externally funded project?
• How will preservation/digitization programmatic efforts hold up as state contributions shrink? (Or were the majority of these projects/programs always funded by external grants?)
• Will older staff feel pressured to consider early or phased retirement? (And are we opening ourselves up to possible age discrimination lawsuits?)
• How might increases in undergraduate student aid packages translate, if at all, in the number or quality of student assistants we employ?
• Does the model of adjunct faculty, translated onto a library stage, mean the use of lower-paid, project- or function-specific personnel to sustain library operations? Or has the plight of adjuncts created such bad press that libraries don’t want to go there?

There are more questions. This is just a sample occasioned by the specter of diminished state support.

There are a number of other haphazard thoughts, issues, or ideas floating around my mind that have some bearing on our panel topic; all are connected to expectations or realities. State funding is one piece of that randomosity. Stand by for more.

30th Year Reflections/46: Spies

“Smiley is one of the truly great creations of post-war English literature: a nondescript man of late middle age who confounds every stereotype of the spy as man of action; a man, as le Carré has it, with ‘a past so complex that he himself could not remember all the enemies he might have made’, whose weapons are a beady eye and a profound understanding of human fallibility. As Sherlock Holmes is to the world of detection, so George Smiley is to the world of espionage.” — Mick Brown, The Telegraph

There are a few authors I cannot get enough of, whose works I come back to again and again, reading everything in streaks, long evenings, and entire weekends swallowed up by their writing. John le Carré (aka David Cornwell) is one such author and I am currently on a le Carré binge. Over the past few weeks I’ve read Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; watched the television version starring Sir Alec Guinness and the movie version starring Gary Oldman (multiple times). At the moment I’m reading The Honourable Schoolboy. Smiley’s People awaits. After that, who knows? Why the abiding interest? And what is the professional connection?

At a point in my career when I was looking for a change (and probably sometime shortly after the 9/11 attacks), I applied for a librarian position at the Central Intelligence Agency. I submitted an online application but never heard back from Langley. I have no knowledge of why this was so and let the matter rest. Having talked to a couple of colleagues who worked for, or had contact with, the agency I had no romanticized or movie-inspired thoughts of what the job might entail. I was realistic in my appraisal. I believed—and still do—that I had the necessary skill set to perform well at the position. But I will never know, not having the opportunity.

This brings me, then, to the pen of le Carré and the world of George Smiley, “whose weapons are a beady eye and a profound understanding of human fallibility.” Or has Holmes once said to Watson in a corrective tone of voice: “You see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear.” This sense of observation became apparent during a time previously mentioned in these posts: my study of the Iranian Revolution during 1979 as part of a collegiate senior seminar in history; a time in which we of the seminar knew the revolutionary players so well that we could predict with a high degree of accuracy what would happen next. It was this experience, and others, that drew me to the world of Smiley and “the Circus” (le Carré slang for MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service of the United Kingdom). This attraction had less to do with the act of spying, or the apparatus connected with those acts—lamplighters, scalphunters, or wranglers, to use Cornwellian jargon—and more with the hard grind of research; the analysis that made such acts of espionage possible. It was this sometimes grim, often demanding investigative work that drew me to the Smiley character, le Carré’s stories, and the world of academic libraries.

Here, then, is the professional connection: a delight in the difficult yet rewarding work of study, examination, and exploration. And an enjoyment in being of service to others engaged in similar work.

Early in The Honourable Schoolboy, as Smiley and his small circle of confidants attempt to reconstruct a lost portion of Circus history destroyed or misplaced by a Russian double-agent working within the hierarchy, they attack the archives with a vengeance, looking for missing pieces. Two excerpts from the book describe their work:

By minutely charting Haydon’s path of destruction (his pug marks, as Smiley called them); by exhaustively recording his selection of files; by reassembling—after aching weeks of research, if necessary—the intelligence culled in good faith by Circus outstations, and balancing it, in every detail, against the intelligence distributed by Haydon to the Circus’s customers in the Whitehall market-place, it would be possible to take back-bearings (as Connie so rightly called them) and establish Haydon’s, and therefore Karla’s point of departure….To Peter Guillam the night was taking on surreal dimensions. Smiley had become all but wordless. His plump faced turned to rock. Connie in her excitement had forgotten her arthritic aches and pains and was hopping around the shelves like a teenager at the ball.

The grit and joy of research and analysis are here for all to see. In Smiley’s world the stakes were much higher than in my world of archival special collections and rare books. But there is a camaraderie between spheres and a necessary gravitas in each endeavor. Smiley’s people and the world created by le Carré inform my work and my perspective on the world. Is there an author who provides you with the a similar professional esprit de corps?

30th Year Reflections/42: History

“To remain ignorant of things that happened before you were born is to remain a child.” — Cicero

A sinking feeling grows daily in my mind: my profession is becoming historically illiterate about itself. I am not speaking of general historical illiteracy (although that, too, is a problem), but of a lack of historically informed discourse that helps guide our profession into new arenas of theory and practice. One of the most recent and stronger manifestations of this sensibility came as I reviewed the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) preliminary program included with my January issue of College & Research Libraries News. The conference theme was “Imagine, Innovate, Inspire.” Alas, I was not inspired to attend the gathering in Indianapolis, so what follows is based on an examination of the preliminary printed program and the post-conference online version.

I’ll acknowledge up front that my critique is biased and may be unfair. I would be happy to hear from conference attendees to the contrary. But here is my initial “take” on what I saw proposed for a conference of “more than 300 carefully curated, thought-provoking sessions” (to quote from the program) that would help me “explore innovative methods for driving the transformation of libraries, learning, and research.” Of greatest interest to me are the keynote addresses (3), invited papers (4), and contributed papers (80). Unfortunately, ACRL does not provide a full-text version of the program that could be text-mined for keywords in session descriptions such as “history” or “historical.” (They do provide a pull-down menu for “Primary Program Tag,” but the tags are not useful to me for this kind of analysis.) Individual papers are now available on the conference proceedings web site. The complete proceedings are available from Amazon (for a not insignificant price). The three keynote addresses are not provided as part of the proceedings, nor are they available in any form on the ACRL site. The descriptions provided for the four invited papers give at least a small hint of historical awareness. Alison Head’s presentation on Project Information Literacy indicates that the project dates back to 2008 and is ongoing. Here my questions would be how this five-year-old study was informed, if at all, by earlier studies on college students’ information seeking behaviors. David Green’s presentation on the ERIAL Project (Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries), a two-year effort by librarians and anthropologists, raises similar historical/contextual questions. Jamie Merisotis’s presentation, “The Attainment Goal and the Changing Higher Education Landscape” give a sense of some historical analysis (if one is looking at a changing landscape). No text is available from the ACRL site, but speculating that at least a few of these folks are good self-promoters, I found Jamie’s talk on the Lumina Foundation web site. I discovered Brian Mathews talk by following a few clicks from his blog to a depository at Virginia Tech.

I still need to wade through the eighty or so contributed papers. There may be a gem or two (or three) there. A quick scan through the online program gives me little hope for historical perspective. One session on copyright provided at least a ten-year perspective: “Over the past decade, the American library community has been confronted by a copyright axis of evil….” Another session on information as a weapon even used the word “historical” in its description: “This session will look at current and historical examples of information as weapon, and examine the role of libraries in developing good consumers of information.” A session on ethnic and racial diversity analyzed “diversity statistics from Association of Research Libraries (ARL) in order to provide a longitudinal view of demographic patterns in ARL academic libraries.” But I also found “beer cans in the stacks” and "mutant superheroes" among the contributed paper titles. Maybe I’ll spend my lunch hours sorting the wheat from the chaff. Kudos, at least, to ACRL for making materials available, especially to those of us who could not attend in person.