Thank you to the Diversity Committee and Dean Dewey for the opportunity to present this research.

Transcription

1 Thank you to the Diversity Committee and Dean Dewey for the opportunity to present this research. I m going to talk to you today about the changing diversity of academic library leadership. 1

2 Who am I as a science librarian to talk about this? There is nothing special about me, but I have heard and felt the importance of diversity in every academic position I have held. From my first position as a librarian at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford under President Livingston Alexander, then at the University of New Orleans, and finally here at Penn State. 2

3 I have had the advantage of a position as an Associate Librarian to conduct research as part of my job. Also my experience on a leadership development track (Penn State Library Leaders and ALA Emerging Leaders) exposed me to many of these issues. As co-chair of the Diversity Committee in 2012, we decided to repeat the 2007 Climate Survey. I presented the preliminary results of the survey at the 2014 Diversity Colloquium and lead a team to write a report based on the data ( Most recently I was awarded a sabbatical leave to study the future of academic libraries by interviewing deans and directors, where I discovered related information. 3

4 I may be pointing out the obvious, but it is still surprising that there is public skepticism about the benefits of diversity initiatives, recruitment in particular. Just this week I saw an article written by a tech company employee in California who referred to diversity hiring as lowering the bar. Science shows proof of greater effectiveness by diverse groups in problem solving activities. Mark Winston s 2001 study published in College and Research Libraries correlated the organizational success of colleges with their diversity efforts. In words better than I can express, Chris Bourg, Em Claire Knowles, and Myrna Morales argue for libraries to confront inequality and change our practice. 4

5 I am going to step back from libraries for a moment and look at Penn State as a whole. I believe that these are all the current (May 2016) Penn State academic Deans. I apologize if I left anyone out. I wasn t sure if I should include this slide, because it doesn t really make a point. But I wanted to get your reaction. Looking at this what do you feel about our academic leadership? I was impressed by the number of women. One of our part-time employees, a current student, said it was whitebread. 5

6 Now we can return to a focus on libraries. In particular academic libraries where the most studied group is ARL, the Association of Research Libraries. ARL are libraries in North America at major colleges and universities with a few notable outliers, such as the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library. What is most helpful to us, is that ARL has been collecting and publishing statistical reports for over 50 years. 6

7 ARL also is significant in its support of diversity in the academic library profession. They began in 1997 with the Leadership & Career Development Program (LCDP) to prepare mid-career librarians from underrepresented gropus for ARL leadership roles. The Initiative to Recruit a Diverse Workforce (IRDW) program along with the later partnerships with the Modern Language Association (MLA) and the Society of American Archivists (SAA) supported students from underrepresented group through a Masters program in Library and Information Science, to become processional librarians. It s worth noting here that the American Library Association (ALA) has given over 800 scholarships since 1998 in it s Spectrum Scholar program. Finally the Career Enhancement Program gave internship opportunities to Masters students. 7

8 So what kind of impact has ARL and other programs had since 1997? A good overview is this article by Dean Dewey that explains how ARL decided to act collectively rather than institutionally creating programs in the profession rather internally at each college or university. By 2009 ARL had increased the diversity of professional librarians by a few percent. I would also like to acknowledge Dean Dewey for her creation of two initiatives at Penn State, our Libraries Diversity Award and the Diversity Residency Program for recent graduates. 8

9 So what did I do related to this? During my 2015 sabbatical, I interviewed 44 deans and directors of AAU institutions, most of which are ARL libraries. My main goal was to figure out their future priorities and how they make decisions. You can read the full article in portal: Libraries and the Academy. 9

10 Like any good social scientist I also collected demographic information from my participants and the results are shown at the top here. Only 5% of those I interviewed (2 people of 44) were non-white. This is a much smaller proportion than ARL leaders, which is a smaller percentage than ARL librarians. As you can see both ARL and ALA are quite out of line with the population of the U.S. 10

11 Over time, you can actually see the positive change in the percentage of racially and ethnically diverse ARL librarians. This chart by Chang shows 4 different decades. 11

12 However in that same time frame, I calculated that the leadership of ARL libraries has only recently increased after a steady low percentage. This data is from the ARL salary survey, which has between libraries responding each year. That means a change between 4% and 5% could mean the same number of people, four, but a change in the number of responses. Let s focus on what has happened in the last few years. 12

13 This increase was rapid from 6% in 2013 to 9% in 2014 to 12% in 2015 (the latest year I have data). Where did this come from? Let s look at a potential explanation. If the programs to increase the number of diverse librarians began in 1997, this would be about 15 years later. Considering the amount of time to move up from an entry level position to management to a director position, 15 years even seems like a fast track. You have to also realize that ARL recently had an increase in retirements among directors. There has been a corresponding increase in the number of ARL deans and directors under 40 years old. The payoff has been a long time coming, but the investments are proving to be worth it. 13

14 Now what about gender? I also noted (the quote is from my article) that my participants reported gender similarly to ARL libraries. Even though women are a majority of ARL leaders (58%), that percentage is still less than ARL librarians (65%) and even less than ALA members (81%). 14

15 As you can see from this chart, credit to Exline, it took until 200 to gain equity among ARL Directors and even now we aren t reaching parity, where the leadership represents the population. 15

16 Since 2010 the percentage of female ARL directors has not increased significantly. Perhaps it has reached a steady state, rather than continuing to approach parity. It is worth noting that the average salary of female library directors is now higher than their male counterparts. There is increased turnover among ARL directors, so the future will see some kind of change. 16

17 So what does this mean for AAU libraries? Remember that these are the largest of the big ARL libraries. I heard from at least one participant in my study that it is harder to move from a small ARL library to a large ARL library than to move from assistant director to director. Sometimes there is a career progression from smaller libraries to larger, which means there are more career stages and more time that may work against librarians from traditionally underrepresented groups. 17

18 But there is good news. I also spoke with deans and directors about how they are preparing future leaders. The most mentioned way was through ARL s leadership programs. Just as important, and mentioned second most, was mentoring informally and formally. An important new approach was to give more training and mentoring to early career librarians. Finally a few, though only a few, specifically mention diversity related programs and working with HBCU s for recruitment. 18

19 What challenges still exist? My college Binh has a great article focused on Academic Library Leadership by Asian Americans. He does a great job getting into the details on what can be improved. One of my favorite suggested actions is developing higher level leadership capabilities in current managers. Sharon Epps also did some work in this area for African American women. She found that while hiring managers said that they did not expect more from African American female librarians, those librarians themselves reported higher expectations from them. 19

20 With respect to success, I want to paraphrase another one of my esteemed colleagues, Courtney Young. She is the Head Librarian at Penn State Greater Allegheny and recently completed her term as the president of the American Library Association. I asked her what helped her to get there, and she said They tapped me on the shoulder to tell me I was ready. It is not enough to provide training, the mentoring and career guidance is key to success. We need to acknowledge the lived experiences of librarians that face hurdles in their career and work to address those problems. It will take time, but we will improve ourselves by improving the diversity of our profession and institutions. 20

21 Here are the papers that I referenced in my presentation. 21

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