Earlier this fall when the Oakland A’s said goodbye to the Coliseum, there was a collective sadness for what we were collectively losing. (Months later, I still have a hard time thinking about it without choking up a little, but baseball is always so much more than the game on the field.) In thinking about all of the good times I had at the Coliseum, it was fun to remember players of the Moneyball era that were improbable heroes with their own chants. (Naming random ball players is stupidly fun.) One of my favorite players from that time was Jack Cust. (OK, he might be a little post-Moneyball.) When he was at bat, the crew in the right field bleachers would chant his name repeating “Cust Cust Cust” with choreographed arm movements. Silly… but core to the cheer.
Anyhow, I’m reminded of Cust today because I saw this Chronicle of Higher Education article about Western Illinois University firing all of their librarians. (Check out https://savewiulibrarians.org/ for more information about the situation and how to support WIU librarians!) In the article WIU Interim Associate Provost Christopher Pynes was quoted, “We’re trying to Moneyball this thing and try to figure out how to get as much as we can, and as many offerings as we can, with the least amount of money.”
First – Pynes is giving strong “watched the movie without reading the book” energy. Second – even though the A’s were very frugal at that time, they actually won games. They might have been cheap, but they weren’t the mess John Fisher created through callous neglect. Third (and most importantly) – academic institutions aren’t businesses (like baseball teams), and shouldn’t be ran like soulless corporations.
WIU administrators thought firing librarians was a solution to financial woes without much regard for academic integrity of the university, and that reveals their motives and understanding of their university. It’s not about the teaching and research mission – it’s about the bottom line and bond rating. A real perversion.
But WIU is just part of a larger trend, where academic institutions focused on survival prioritize budgets and fundraising over teaching and knowledge creation. Where teaching and research is seen as a burden. Students are customers, and workers are annoyances.
And this dynamic is all too present in academic libraries. Our veneration of assessment regardless of the data are actually meaningful. The trend to spend resources and effort on sweeping policies and recommendations for other libraries, while cutting services for the campus. Turning libraries into transactional hubs to appease students and faculty, while cutting librarians out of the equation.
How do we stop this trend? The unionist in me says, “Organize!” But that will require hard conversations and reflection. For many librarians, our jobs are kind of bullshit by design, so how can we right the course?
I don’t know, but I’d like to work on it.
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