It's Wrong for Rutgers to Drop the "Library" Name
Mary K. Chelton -- Library Journal, 03/23/2009
As a Distinguished Alumna of the MLS program (1965) and also a graduate of the Ph.D program (1997), I would like to go on record to say how disappointed I am that the Rutgers School of Communication, Information and Library Studies is once again trying to remove the word “library” from its name.Failure to consult
It was bad enough when the attempt was made on the Ph.D program several years ago, ironically the same year the school celebrated the merger of its multiple departments and disciplines. Worse still is the pretense on the part of the SCILS Dean that any real consultation was done with the various stakeholder constituencies for the school. (Our school, for example [GSLIS, Queens College, CUNY], employs seven of your SCILS Ph.D graduates.)
The Dean is correct about one thing, though, namely that various attempts have been made to remove the word over the years ever since the very beginning of the merged school when Communication merged with Library Studies to gain access to a Ph.D program they could not otherwise get approved by the state.
The school has always seemed to be a “marriage of convenience” rather than the fluid, exciting interdisciplinary community it could yet become.
Denial of history
As a beneficiary of the merged school through my Ph.D in communication and through my colleagues who are also graduates of Rutgers, I find the need to suppress the word “library” in the school’s name to be both denial of a proud history obviously neither understood nor cared about by many current faculty, and capitulation to the very biased and gendered presumption that “library” is some sort of negative drag on attempts to gain external resources for the school, without any credible explanation why this is so.
In fact, the main criterion of success for a professional school—the effect of the name change on the employability of its graduates—is not even mentioned. I would be interested in the current employment rates for the various segments of the school, for example, rather than proportional student headcount numbers by major.
Just a cosmetic change?
It is even more dismaying to find that people who talk about words being social action are pretending they are not taking any, that this is just some sort of cosmetic change that will gain external resources (from whom is not stated) with nothing changing underneath this new “absent totality.” My experience with this action in other professional contexts says not to believe it.
It sounds as if the Dean really wants to say that librarians are female and poor and mostly wedded to a diminishing public sector, and SCILS wants private money and therefore has to appeal to private money biases, or to academic administrators who share these biases, all the while reaping the headcount of the MLIS students.
I find this contemptible and do not support it.
I wish there were a way without hurting those students to get them to leave the school if the name is changed, but they may do that anyway. I have to remind you that there are other options for this degree in the state and in the metropolitan NYC area, depending on what someone wants to do in the field.
I can’t deny my Rutgers degrees and have generally been proud to be an alumna. However, if there were some sort of formal divorce process available, I would request it if this name change goes through.
Mary K. Chelton is professor, Graduate School of Library and Information Studies, Queens College, City University of New York. She initially wrote this as a letter to Rutgers officials. Dean Schement responded.
