Bulletin of the Office for Diversity American Library Association ISSN 1554-494X

MAY - JUNE 2005
SPECIAL ANNUAL 2005 ISSUE

FROM THE FIELD

Myths, Missionary Expeditions and Mobilizing the Profession
An Interview with Reinette Jones, Howard F. McGinn & Patricia A. Tarin

Versed enters the huddle with three of the profession’s most compelling voices for a no-hold-barred conversation on racism, recruitment, risk-taking, and the power of persistence.

Versed: The need for greater diversity in recruitment to the profession has become one of the field’s most pressing issues. At the same time we’re seeing many libraries wrangling with the threat of downsizing and closures. Can these issues be connected? Is the lack of diversity in the profession one of the reasons that the library is losing some of its relevance and resonance for contemporary society?
McGinn: I think the lack of diversity in libraries points to a much deeper issue. I co-chair the Black Caucus of the American Library Association’s Affirmative Action Committee.  I’ve received stories from across the country. I think that there is a deep-seated racism in the culture of American Librarianship.
Tarin: Generally speaking, I agree. I think there is a very high degree of institutional racism that isn’t acknowledged for the most part because it isn’t overt. That creates difficulties, particularly in the area of retention. A new eager, minority librarian joins the staff and is not mentored or welcomed so they don’t see librarianship as a long-term career for themselves. If they find another route they’ll take that, sad to say.  This doesn’t happen everywhere, but it happens enough of the time that it creates a problem.
Jones: I’d like to add to that. I think that sexism is as deep and detrimental as racism in coming into this profession. Now, I am basing this entirely on what I have observed in Kentucky, but for example, men coming into the library profession, especially those without additional degrees, come into a profession that is predominately female. When you add race to that it makes such a difference as to where that individual is going to be employed and you can almost predict where they are going to be hired. If they’re African American it’s going to be in the public library and probably in a larger city like Louisville. It’s not going to be in the academic or special library. It takes years for African-American men to become academic librarians.
McGinn: Yes!

Versed: All three of you have been active in the profession for long periods. What are some of the changes you’ve seen in this area and if you haven’t seen pronounced change why might that be?
Jones: In Kentucky we are at the beginning, but I can say that I have seen tremendous change in the last five years. When I first started talking about diversity in libraries, I was put in a corner and told I was talking about something that wasn’t important. It has only been this year that my position as a diversity librarian was created.  And I am creating a diversity plan that will be aligned with the University’s diversity plan. The University does not have one yet and you can see in the library that we are going along at the same speed as the University, which is unfortunate, because I feel we should be taking giant leaps. But I can say in the last five years that in the state library association we now have a diversity committee and the African American Librarians and Library Employees Round Table. It used to be a very frightening thing for librarians in the state to even say the word “diversity”, define it, and add action to the words.

Versed: Pat, can you talk about Knowledge River and its impact on the profession.
Tarin: Yes, and I think I need to start even before that. I am one of the people who have been working in this area for thirty years. When I started my career in 1974, I started in an outreach position in a Latino neighborhood in Chicago.  For the last thirty years people have been playing the “outreach game” and the “diversity game”, but it never seems to take. The commitment, the will to make it really happen doesn’t seem to sustain itself in libraries.

Versed: What are some of the barriers?
Tarin: I think it’s pretty basic. It’s fear of the unknown and difference, and asking people to go outside their comfort zone. I think that one thing that happened in the last ten years is that the demographics are different.  The numbers of minorities are now so high that people can no longer ignore it.  They have to do something about it.  In most major urban areas minorities are the majority of the population. That’s a statistical fact, and you can’t continue to ignore that leap in the population growth. So finally, some activity is being generated. I laugh because very recently in the 2000 Census they discovered that Latinos are going to be the largest minority group, are in fact the largest minority group. What’s funny is that on the day before they announced this, Latinos didn’t exist. The day after, there are all these marketing efforts to reach Latinos and find ways to serve these populations, not only in libraries but also generally in society. But these same people were always there. So I do think there is increased awareness, but not always in a positive way. There’s the professor at Harvard who recently wrote a paper stating that the problem with our society is that we have too many Mexicans. He literally said that they were ruining the culture.

Versed: That’s such an anti-intellectual view, really.  Howard, let’s address this to you. You’ve been particularly proactive in the area of recruitment and hiring. Did you have to swim upstream to manage this and what’s been the fallout to some of the recruitment work that you’ve done?
McGinn: Let me first go back to some of the ideas that Pat mentioned. I have come to be bothered by the term “outreach” because white library directors in cities usually pronounce it as if they have to undertake major missionary expeditions to neighborhoods to care for the poor Black, Asian, and Latino people. It’s backwards. This is our core constituency in most urban public libraries. Yes, I have had to swim upstream and to fight. But I’ve been fortunate to find some situations where I haven’t. The worst situation I ever had—I should mention that I received my library degree in 1970 and I started recruiting African American staff from Rev. Leon Sullivan’s Opportunities Industrialization Center in Philadelphia that year-- was when I was state librarian in North Carolina and began promoting Black professional and paraprofessional staff. I was very naïve.  I ran into an enormous amount of backlash. It became so bad that I finally resigned and left the State Library of North Carolina.  I later found out that there was a lot of disenchantment with what people thought were my very aggressive policies in assuring equity when hiring and promoting Black employees. But in New Haven and now at Seton Hall University, it’s been the exact opposite. The New Haven mayor who I reported to, John DeStefano, had a very diverse staff of administrators so if people had a problem with my trying to hire staff that matched the community, that didn’t go very far. When I got to New Haven there had been only one Black librarian in twenty years. In a space of eighteen months I hired nine Black librarians, not counting support staff. I think I was able to do this because I had the support of city officials.  And I received a lot of help with recruiting Black applicants from E.J. Josey [Professor Emeritus of U. Pittsburgh’s LIS Program and founder of BCALA] and Martha Hale [Dean of Catholic University of America’s LIS Program] and from the Department of Information and Library Science at Southern Connecticut State University.  Now at Seton Hall, I just hired two African American male librarians to tenure track faculty positions in the past three weeks. This is a general trend here in New Jersey. Betty Turock at Rutgers has been a champion for diversity in recruitment so there is a lot of support in this state for being proactive.  I’ve been fortunate to find those connections to good people.
Tarin: Yet, we should add here that there is a big myth that people aren’t there for you to hire.

Versed: Yes, what we hear is that people of color just aren’t there to recruit. Pat, talk about why you believe this is a “myth”.
Tarin: Well, for instance, on the recruitment side of getting people into library school, I work in a program where I recruit Native Americans and Latinos into the profession. And Native Americans are supposed to be “impossible” to recruit because of being such a tiny percentage of the population – the pipeline being so very small, the minute numbers, relatively speaking, of Native Americans that even graduate from college, that are even eligible to become librarians is a very small number, but we’ve found that we are able to recruit six or seven Native American librarians every year.

Versed: How? That’s going to be the question that readers have, how are you able to do this?
Tarin: I must admit that I am in Arizona, but location isn’t everything. We send out information all over the country and we find the students. We find them. It’s a matter of using different messages. It isn’t one single way. We use our personal networks and AILA [the American Indian Librarian Association] and REFORMA [The National Association to Promote Library Services to the Spanish Speaking]; but in addition to that we’ve developed a large database of all kinds of Native American Centers, Mexican American Centers, universities, all the major academic and public libraries. We send out probably five hundred mailings a year in addition to the personal contacts we make. And now one of the biggest recruitment resources is our own graduates. I am not saying this kind of recruitment is an easy thing, but it is doable. That’s what’s missing in our field. There is lip service, but there isn’t action.
McGinn: Yes, something that was mentioned earlier is important - the personal initiative. There are far too many library and library school directors that don’t make that effort, perhaps because they’re frightened. There are some library directors, as least in public libraries, who won’t go into minority neighborhoods in their own cities.
Tarin: I think you have to be interested in people and be willing to take risks, and these are tiny risks.
McGinn: You do, you do. Here at Seton Hall we sit right on the Newark city line. We have about 9,000 students, 30% of our students are Black or Latino or both. It just wouldn’t make good business sense for us not to recruit Black and Latino faculty and staff, when at any given time 2,700 of our students are Black or Latino. These students are the present and future of our libraries.

Versed: Reinette, calling on your academic library experience, there are many studies projecting that minorities will become “majorities” on college campuses. There are other studies that point to the importance of diverse campus faculty to the academic success of students from diverse backgrounds. Do you want to jump in here?
Jones: I believe there is a connection between staff and academic performance, and I want to thank Pat and Howard for some of the things they’ve mentioned. One thing we’re doing in Kentucky is to join together librarians regardless of library type or organizational memberships. It’s a group called KLDivERs [Kentucky Librarians Diversity, Education, and Recruitment]. We come together and go to conferences, not just library conferences--the next conference is the Migrant Network Coalition Conference.  We have had some success. People are actually beginning to know this group, sometimes even more than the organizations that have been here quite some time because we are not just going to library related conferences.
Tarin: I am glad that you brought that up because that is something that we do as well. I regularly go to other types of conferences and meetings where I think I am going to find either potential students or the people that reach those students, like the Chicano Faculty Association meeting.
Jones: Something else happened at the last conference I attended, I had people come up to me and say, “How come the librarians didn’t do a program this time?  I saw librarians at the last conference.” It told me that we have made a mark, an entry point. They are looking for the librarians. So on our agenda for this month’s meeting will be our going back to those conferences: the Kentucky Association of Blacks in Higher Education (KABHE), the Migrant Network Coalition, the Strategies for Change Conference.  There is also a working group of librarians who are in the process of trying to get the SOLINET “National Diversity in Libraries Conference” in Kentucky for 2008. And I have been talking about this with various people at conferences, and they in turn are asking about the status of the proposal. But one thing that really threw me was when someone asked, “Why should African Americans go into librarianship?”

Versed: How did you answer?
Jones: I mentioned income, because when you look at the income based on race in this state, no one race outdistances the median income of librarians in this state. I know that we talk about pay equity, but if you are a librarian in the state of Kentucky, you’re making a pretty good salary--62% of the people employed full-time in Kentucky earn less than the librarians employed in Kentucky

Versed: We’re going to wrap up, but Reinette’s last observation is intriguing. It echoes a comment that librarian, currently a doctoral student in Florida, Sterling Coleman made a year ago when we interviewed him for Versed. One of the things he said is that we as librarians of color have not done a good job of letting youth know that with a career in librarianship you can purchase a house or buy a car. Yes, it’s true that librarians are very underpaid, terribly underpaid in most situations compared to occupations requiring advanced degrees, but is the profession letting itself off the hook too easily in the recruitment arena by saying the problem is just about salaries?
McGinn: Two years ago, I finally completed my doctorate at Emporia State University. I wrote my dissertation on job satisfaction of Black librarians in some urban systems of the Midwest, New England, and the Mid-Atlantic states. I did a lot of interviewing. Salary was not a factor in why people were happy or unhappy. It wasn’t even mentioned. What gave people the greatest job satisfaction was being able to help people and doing the work of a librarian. A third major reason was one I was totally unprepared for -- a feeling by Black librarians that they were doing the work of God. They felt a calling. It was really striking. The major reason for workplace dissatisfaction was working in a hostile workplace and being subjected to discrimination by library directors, staff, and patrons.
Tarin: To move beyond the salary issue and show a different angle, look at it from the perspective of some of our potential recruits to library school. They are minority students that have just graduated with undergraduate degrees. They are often from areas where early education was not particularly good. They’re often not going to be prepared to go into the sciences or into law or medicine. It’s really a sad statement but it’s often true. And fortunately there are some who can and do go into these fields, but I know that not many are prepared to do that. What are their career options? And then we have to ask ourselves, why do so many go into teaching and not think about librarianship?

Versed: You’re right. Fifty percent of all doctoral degrees earned by people of color are earned in one field…
Tarin: Education. People need to have models. That’s why we don’t have many minority engineers or architects or have representation in a lot of other fields. Librarians need to have more contact with students in ways that display to them what the career really is about. That’s a missing element.

Versed: I want to ask you all to do a little prescription for the profession. We have Knowledge River, the Spectrum Initiative, ARL’s recruitment program and many other diversity initiatives, but in some ways the idea of diversity seems to still float on top of the profession like oil on water. As we approach future work what can we do to ensure that we achieve this seemingly elusive diversity once and for all?
Jones: One of the things we need to do is get out of the library.  We need to market ourselves. When is the last time you heard a librarian say, “I love what I do”? When I go out and talk to young people I make sure that I am telling them that I love being a librarian. I am not a traditional librarian and I am never going to be. I don’t get excited about my job because of the computers; I get a high from the people I interact with every day.
McGinn: I think that if you forecast fifteen years into the future there could be two problems. The first is the continued deterioration of the urban library due to neglect by local government. The second is often the cause of the first -- the detachment of librarians from their communities, a detachment which occurs because librarians don’t understand their communities, don’t even live in their communities. This detachment adds to a greater sense of the public’s feeling of disconnection from the library, especially in Black and Latino neighborhoods. I think the library schools are going to have to move away from notions of political correctness and take more risks. We need more champions like Betty Turock and E.J. Josey. Until the American library community puts as much energy into diversity issues as it puts into intellectual freedom issues we’re not going to get anywhere. Our commitment to first amendment rights is essential but we must get equally involved in diversity and equity issues. It is much more difficult to eradicate racism than it is to defend the First Amendment.
Tarin: I agree that we’re on a collision course with what’s happening in larger society. If the resources aren’t there for libraries and libraries continue to de-skill librarianship by sending more and more professional work to support staff and leaving librarians with less contact with the public, our prospects will not be favorable.  Right now, with IMLS’s emphasis on diversity and recruitment and the bump in the numbers of people recruited to the field, this is our opportunity to develop a new leadership that will influence the next 30 years. We need to be at every table, in every kind of library. Our future is based on our ability to mobilize the next generation of leaders.
Jones: I think we’re still in a portion of the learning curve where the numbers are not yet way up.  We are still figuring things out.  But I hope we don’t stop trying just because the numbers are not what we want them to be at present.
Tarin: I totally agree. You just get up everyday and do it all over again.

Reinette Jones is Interdisciplinary Information Literacy & Diversity Activities Librarian, University of Kentucky.  Dr. Howard F. McGinn is Dean of University Libraries, Seton Hall University. Patricia A. Tarin is Director, Knowledge River Program, a Center for the Study of Hispanic and American Indian Library and Information Issues, University of Arizona School of Information Resources and Library Science.

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