Troy Swanson: Gail, Elizabeth, Hunter, welcome to Circulating Ideas.
Hunter Dunlap: Thanks, Troy, for having us.
Troy Swanson: You know, it is a unique time in Illinois and some challenging times for librarians and academics in Illinois. And I think that the things that we’re facing are reflective, unfortunately, of the wider issues across the country, so I appreciate you all being here for these conversations. But to start with, I’d like to get to know all of you a little bit more for our audience, kind of what you do, what area of academics you’re in and maybe your institutions too. So can you share kind of an overview of your role as a librarian at your institution and even what drew you into the professions?
Hunter Dunlap: Well, I’ll give it a try. This is Hunter Dunlap, Western Illinois University. I’ve been at Western for 28 years, serving in the university library there. I’m a professor and a systems librarian, and I’m the coordinator of resource management services, which means I do lots of different things like coordinate activities between cataloging, acquisitions, electronic resources, collections, our website, our library systems infrastructure, do a lot of the back end stuff in a library that makes it go. Not typically in a public setting usually behind the scenes, making sure that all systems are up, processes are working, and we’re solving problems along the way to make sure that things run smoothly.
I began my career as a reference librarian and with just a little bit of webmaster on the side, over time the web stuff grew. This is the late 1990s. And that’s when the web was exploding and things were going from CD to online formats. And so yeah, I’ve kind of seen a lot of different sizes of libraries, but that’s kind of where I am right now.
Troy Swanson: And major changes, major changes along the way. So yeah, Gail, do you want to go ahead?
Gail Porter: I’m the faculty librarian at Chicago State University, where I catalog and classify information in all formats. I also develop and maintain the catalog and coordinate digital dissertation and thesis submissions, which I proposed. I also serve as a liaison to professional graduate studies, which involves sharing information about library resources. As part of that role, I serve on the University Graduate Council, where I report on updates to instructions to the digital submission process.
I was drawn to librarianship, firstly, libraries as spaces where information is organized and everyone can access it and it’s free for all. And it’s satisfying for me because I have intellectual curiosity. And a passion for lifelong learning, and I enjoy the detailed work of cataloging. So, that means I have to follow established standards to make sure that things are consistent and reliable in the catalog.
I think the most rewarding part of my work is to see its tangible impact. For example, I find it satisfying to help students meet their thesis and dissertation requirements, and later see their names on the graduation list. I also enjoy seeing the usage statistics on our students’ dissertations through the ProQuest ETD dashboard (ETD’s electronic thesis or dissertation), and also to catalog their completed works in the library system.
So it makes a difference to look at the catalog and see names of students I’m familiar with and witness this full circle moment when their achievements become part of our library’s resources. It’s very gratifying,
Troy Swanson: And I can relate. That’s great. So Hunter and Gail, kind of behind the scenes, maybe not exclusively, but a little more behind the scenes, but Elizabeth, definitely out in front of the world, is that right?
Elizabeth Kamper: Yes, yes. Definitely never in my office, 50 percent wandering around campus, never in the library, really is what my role is. I’m an associate professor, recently tenured at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, and I’m also our information literacy librarian. So I work with all of our faculty librarians to coordinate our information literacy program and mainly work myself with the first year writing program and other foundation courses to get information literacy embedded into that curriculum.
On top of my work in libraries, being a faculty member has allowed me to also teach in the honors program. So I teach in our university honors program at the freshman level. I teach two classes each semester, and I’m also creating a class to teach a dual credit for high school students in the region. I’m chair of the university honors advisory council of faculty that discuss curriculum and set that for years to come, work with students, all of that. And I also am the faculty fellow, one of three faculty fellows, for exploratory majors on campus, because we recently switched to direct entry. So instead of having declared students, we have undeclared students, we have exploratory students.
And I am only afforded those opportunities because of my faculty status on campus and my ability to work with my peer faculty to get things done. So I think that that’s like a really important thing for me and my job and what I do.
Troy Swanson: I think that’s a good transition. One of the things I wanted to talk about was this role of librarians as faculty members and the role that faculty librarians play within their institutions, supporting teaching, supporting research, and how that works. And for folks outside of academics, for non librarians to think of librarians as faculty members, like, you normally hear the word faculty member, you think of teacher, but I think we know it’s not quite that simple, so maybe we could talk a little bit about that before we get into the nitty gritty of what’s happening around the state.
Elizabeth Kamper: Being an academic librarian and collaborating with faculty outside of the library is what I do, and I work with them to build out sometimes units to put into their syllabi for various information literacy units, media literacy units. I worked with the head of the first year writing program to write a grant to develop a media literacy unit to embed 101 classes. We’re working closely with campus curriculum to develop that and support student research.
On top of that, information literacy is one of the foundational pillars of higher education. It is a skill one must achieve, or attempt to achieve, in order to participate in democracy and understand how to exist in society. So we support it. We work with it. We’re constantly working with students to do research. So we’re kind of foundational to higher education.
Hunter Dunlap: I think that’s well put, Elizabeth. I would also say being a faculty member means that I get a seat at the table when faculty discussions are being had and administrative discussions are being held as well. I serve on many faculty Senate committees. I have over the course of my career. Some of those are technology committees where faculty are experiencing challenges doing things in their classrooms or helping their students access information or integrating library resources into their classes. And those are forums where as a fellow faculty member, we can discuss and have really good interactions of how best to resolve issues and to solve problems.
Gail Porter: Well said, both of you. I think one of the most important things about having faculty status for me is having a seat at the table and being able to use your voice and have people listen to you and see you as a colleague. Here at CSU, it’s rather small, so everybody knows everyone. These folks amongst the teaching faculty rely on me to help their students, and I do that to the best of my ability. So it becomes a collaborative process to get these students through the pike and out the door.
Troy Swanson: Well, let’s turn a little bit toward some of the issues going on in Illinois. And I think maybe the most pertinent way is to shine a spotlight on Western Illinois University and what’s happened there. Then we can talk a little more broadly about the state, and Hunter, you’re in the midst of it, so you’re probably the best person, but I know that Western Illinois had laid off 89 faculty roles, including all of their faculty librarians. So could you tell us a little bit about what’s happened and sort of the impact that you’re seeing?
Hunter Dunlap: Sure. So right on August the 8th, all nine of the faculty librarians, everyone who was a librarian at Western received a layoff letter, pretty devastating, unimaginable. We just could not believe it. I mean, how are they going to function? This is a comprehensive master’s level university and to even conceive of not having a single librarian just was unimaginable, just can’t comprehend what they’re trying to achieve.
They claimed in the letter that it was due to enrollment decline and we have experienced enrollment declines at Western over the last decade. Commensurately we have also been declining in the number of librarians that we’ve had during that time. Through attrition, we’ve basically cut in half the number of librarians that we’ve had, so it’s not like the library has not been touched, but they wiped all of us out. They picked like professors across campus in many departments here and there and there, but they didn’t wipe out any other entire departments.
They wiped out the entire library faculty, which was devastating. We immediately organized and started mobilizing and found great support throughout Illinois, which was so just wonderful. And it just really boosted our spirits to no end that so many library faculties, Gail’s university library faculty sent us a letter of support, Elizabeth’s SIUE did as well, and many others across the state were so generous. Faculty Senates across the state have also supported us. CSU and Eastern Illinois just this week have come through for us. The big turn was when CARLI, the Consortium of Academic Research Libraries in Illinois, they came out with a statement in September, which was a huge coup for us, which was then signed on by many organizations, including the Illinois Library Association, the RAILS consortium did as well.
So we just had a lot of support and we have a signature petition going right now. We have almost 6, 000 signatures. People would sign a letter of support for it. So. Yeah, we’re doing a lot. We’re still kind of in limbo waiting for what’s going to happen. Our contracts allowed us to continue working through May 14, then we will learn what’s going to happen exactly to the library at that point. We hope the administration will reconsider, reverse course, bring as many of us back as they can. At this point, we’re just kind of in a waiting mode to see what exactly will transpire.
But all of that information, I’ve been giving interviews to the Chronicle and Inside Higher Ed and all kinds of other places. I kind of became a spokesperson for it. And we have all of those articles and our petition, everything that’s been going on on our website. I will plug it here, saveWIUlibrarians.org. And so that’s where we’ve been trying to galvanize and build some momentum to make a change, hopefully make them reverse course.
Troy Swanson: Well, I think your organizing has been successful. I mean, obviously we’re still waiting to hear the outcomes on positions, but I know everyone has sat up and noticed and that’s why we’re here today, and I thought it was important that we should start with that conversation around Western because it has been so impacted. But before we move on to our next topics, Hunter, just how is everyone holding up? I know that there was a lot of work, and I’ve just been so concerned, I couldn’t even imagine how that would be with colleagues. Is everyone hanging in there okay?
Hunter Dunlap: We are. We are all kind of dealing with it in different ways, which is not unexpected, but we are all, we’ve really done a beautiful job, I think, of supporting one another in terms of encouraging them to do what they need to do. I mean, if they need to put all their energies into finding a new job somewhere, great, we support you.
If it’s holding the line here and hoping for the best, great. We support you. We’re really trying to do that. We’ve held together. We’ve been really collegial through the whole thing, and we’re really united in stating the importance of librarians to our students. I mean, this isn’t just about us. This is about our university and we’re committed to our university. We’ve worked there for many years, many of us, and we care about it. We care about our students, and we hate to see this trend start with us, and just really sincerely hope it does not spread.
Gail Porter: The other day at our faculty Senate, one of my colleagues presented the action item for the Senate to support this action item, and it passed 95%. One of the things that my colleague said about it, that it was just draconian for an entire unit to be wiped out, and the importance of the libraries providing the intellectual foundation, just unbelievable.
Elizabeth Kamper: Yeah, about a couple of days after, I think it was the Chronicle article came out, our provost came to our library faculty meeting, as she does at the start of the fall semester for every academic unit, and one of our librarians just looked at her and was like, “So what do you think about that? What are you going to do about that?” She threw her arms up in the air and was like, “Listen, I do not support that. I have no plans. Campus faculty would come after me. Faculty status is not a thing that has ever been discussed taking away.” Like, we are pretty vocal on our campus. about faculty status for librarians, and we do a shit ton of work, if I can swear on the podcast. And so, it would be an interesting choice for that to happen. But now that there is precedent, everyone is kind of looking behind their back and saying, “Am I safe? Am I supported by campus administration? Do I need to look out for my job? Am I valued?” So it’s really put this fear undertone to librarianship in academia that was possibly there before, but it wasn’t as strong.
Troy Swanson: Well, let’s, let’s talk a little bit about what’s going on at that kind of next level up. And I think Western is this illustration of the larger problem of underfunding higher ed in Illinois. And in some ways, I think Illinois has its own unique challenges, but also we represent a lot of what’s happening around the country as well. And Hunter mentioned the enrollment drops. We wouldn’t be so reliant on tuition if there was adequate funding to undergird our budgets, right? And so can we talk a little bit about what’s happening in Illinois, and what’s the impact you’re seeing with underfunding more generally?
Gail Porter: Sure, I can talk about that. Last year our campus went on strike, the Unit A faculty. It lasted for 10 days. I’d never been on strike before. That was interesting. I’m proud to be part of the union. It was great to see people come together. Not all the faculty were participating in the strike, but many, many people were and people were just very upset at the conditions that drove the strike, and that’s all I’m going to say.
Hunter Dunlap: Funding issues have plagued Western Illinois University for a long time. One of the things that happened within the last 15, 20 years is that WIU kind of, there had been a lot of efforts to provide educational services, master’s level services in the Quad Cities, Moline, Illinois area. Western took the lead and created a campus there in Moline along the Mississippi River and invested millions of dollars there to develop both a graduate and undergraduate level program in that community. There is no public university in the Quad Cities, although it’s a large urban area. There was no major institution serving that urban area.
One of the things that happened, however, is that Western never received any additional funding to start a campus at the Quad Cities. All of the money that we used to have at our main campus, part of that was siphoned off to pay for a brand new campus in the Quad Cities, but no funding ever materialized from the state legislature to support that.
So it’s sort of like we’re a system like University of Illinois or Southern Illinois University, and yet we’re still just one university, but we’re treated as one university by the legislature as well, which has some really big problems, including the fact that they shut down totally the library when they laid us all off. They shut down the Quad Cities library, so there’s not a library presence on a university campus in the Quad Cities now. So what we’ve learned is that students are actually going to a community college in the Quad Cities to gather, to have a place to be, to study, to work with students in their classes, and doing proctor tests and that kind of thing.
So, I mean, that’s all happening at a community college library, and we’ve spoken to the librarians at the community college, and of course, they’re welcoming us. They’re glad to have our students, but that’s not appropriate. I mean, we really should be providing, our students are paying for these services. It should be provided. It’s wrong that they’re not being provided, they’re being poorly served. And that’s another example of how funding is poorly serving our students. We can’t even keep the doors open in our own library. They’ve created a makeshift services desk on the other side of the campus there, literally shut down and locked the doors of the library, so you can request a book and they’ll send someone. They’ll run over to across the campus, open the door, get the book, return it back to the desk. Here’s your book. “Oh, that’s not the one I wanted!” So, you know, they repeat the step around, going around and running around.
So it’s just very sad. It’s really a disaster at Western and we’re just hoping that times improve and that reasonable minds and their good senses prevail.
Gail Porter: Talking about the two main questions that were raised recently when the library is shut down or limited services, can people check out books? What if the system breaks down? We have an automated storage retrieval system. It needs an upgrade, has needed one for years. It has 80 percent of our collection nearly. So if that thing breaks down, you can’t just take it to a shop. The library building was built around it. Those materials are inaccessible.
And the other question was, can people use the databases? Well, who’s going to make sure that the appropriate databases are purchased? Who understands how to negotiate those contracts with the vendors? It’s back and forth, back and forth. It’s quite an involved process. I’m glad I’m not part of that, but it can be a lot of work and really expecting a staff member to do that? We don’t want vendors to be making the choices of which databases we need or which educational packages we need. I mean, our students need a lot of help. And I can see them giving up, just not having the support that they need, that the librarians provide them the bridges for. It’s just, it’s a no win situation.
Hunter Dunlap: That’s an important thought. Librarians bring so much to the table. I know administrators, sometimes think we are large warehouses full of books, but we are really the glue that connects our students and the public who come into our public university libraries. We provide enthusiasm and encouragement and care and support as they’re trying to navigate. I mean, we have a million books in our collection. How do you access that? It’s intimidating to students. It’s intimidating to people who walk in off the street, the general public, who don’t know how to access things, don’t know how to search for things. Not to mention our databases, the interfaces change every year seemingly, one or another always does.
And so we’re constantly learning, and just because of our professional duty and responsibility, we are learning these things on the fly all the time to make sure that we’re meeting the needs of our students and the people who are seeking information. And that enthusiasm and that eagerness to help and that sense of encouragement that we give students and the public is something that is just gone. It’s missing when you don’t have trained professional librarians there helping to guide and lead.
Troy Swanson: And I think the point it’s not just the physical items that aren’t accessible, but also online resources become inaccessible because there is a level of knowledge that you need about the curriculum. It’s not just as an I. T. job. It’s not just a managing a building job. It is a unique kind of role that historically we have played as librarians that you can’t just plug and play with somebody else. So Elizabeth, go ahead, jump in.
Elizabeth Kamper: I just was going to echo exactly what you were going to say. Yes, it’s about support. Yes, it’s about understanding our collection and all that, but like, it is the expertise. It is the expertise that we provide to campus especially in terms of research support. And I’m not just talking about students. How many times have we worked with campus faculty because they can’t find what they’re looking for because they’re asking the wrong questions?
People don’t understand how much librarians support ideas around inquiry, criticality, investigation. Like, these things are hard to do. You are asking questions, you are looking for things that you don’t know that you don’t know, and it’s hard to do that alone. And so we bring the expertise to work with campus faculty, to work with students to find not only the materials that they need, but to ask the right questions and seek the answers that are going to best support not only their curriculum, but their own research. And then we are also supporting scholarly discourse and the perpetuation of information across multiple disciplines. I think that that sort of expertise is often overlooked because it’s hard to articulate, it’s hard to understand, and it’s hard to ask for help for, right? So our job is to identify and understand what people need, and that takes a specific set of skills.
And I’m thinking about the idea of underfunding and its impact on libraries. And, I mean, it ranges so far. It is a lack of expertise. We’ve had to make cuts to our databases, which then means that faculty aren’t accessing what they need for their curriculum or for their research. Could it set their research back? You know, we were looking at these large package deals and saying, maybe we can’t support this anymore, which means entire disciplines would be cut off from particular types of scholarship, and no one wants to do that. Whenever I see my Dean, we have an incredible Dean, but whenever anyone says the word “budget” in front of her, a little twitch under like her left eye just goes off because it’s such a hard thing to navigate. And we know that we’re dealing with increased prices with no budget increase, and it’s hard to manage all of it.
Troy Swanson: Yeah. And I’ve spoken to legislators about our budgets and we have had some minor increases, but they don’t even keep up with inflation. So if you don’t even match inflation, then you’re actually having cuts. And then that is pressure on tuition. And then pressure on positions and we see where we are today. So it’s definitely difficult.
Let’s talk a little bit about some of the mobilization that has happened. Hunter, you had mentioned this a little bit, and that’s how we all kind of came together, but there’s been some really excellent work done in speaking up and advocacy. And maybe talk a little bit about how that mobilization looks right now.
Hunter Dunlap: One of the things that happened over the last several weeks, ever since the WIU situation unfolded, was that John Miller of the University Professionals of Illinois, he’s the president of that state university union, convened a group of faculty librarians to gather and brainstorm about ways that we could mobilize and make a difference in our state, try to reverse this Western story and turn it around so that it does not spread or evolve beyond what it is. And so we’ve been meeting weekly for several weeks and have representatives from universities across the state and are growing in size. But we’re looking at legislation potentially to get the legislators involved and interested in the issues that we’re concerned about in terms of making sure that university libraries are actually employing librarians with MLS degree, that there’s a baseline of sorts. Now, we’re never going to get at a numeric ratio kind of thing, but we are looking to make sure that there are librarians there. And that’s the kind of thing that our committee so far has been actively involved with.
Elizabeth Kamper: I mean, I’ve only joined this legislative group, what, a month or two ago, so I’m interested in advocacy and in mobilizing. I’m really just here to support in any way that I can, especially representing the downstate libraries, us in the cornfields down here.
Hunter Dunlap: It has been wonderful to see different university communities come together. We do represent different constituencies and different areas of our state. We’re a very diverse state and you move from Downtown Chicago out to the cornfields of Western Illinois and Southern Illinois, as Elizabeth was saying. Yeah, that’s totally different realms, and we have different issues, and that’s one of the reasons why you need librarians at each institution, because we have unique challenges, and we offer different programming, so we have to, as libraries, respond to the curriculum that each of our university campuses put forward.
There are lots of decisions that can’t be made. A vendor can’t create a profile of all the sources that you need, that everybody’s gonna need. We all need something different, and in different quantities and different qualities, depending on what the program is. So, we’ve got lots of challenges, but it’s really important and great that we are collaborating and working together to try to move these issues forward, and hopefully get the legislature interested and concerned about some of these issues because they are having a really large impact on higher education in Illinois.
Troy Swanson: Yeah. And I wonder, when I talk to legislators and they’ve increased the budget, even if that budget hasn’t kept up with inflation, I don’t know that they see the perspective over decades of underfunding. And what happens from administrators, is that the people that generate credit hours, of course, stay in place, but it’s all the other services, it’s neglecting facilities, it’s reducing mental health services, it’s reducing librarians. The other places where they can cut, they do cut. And I know in my own libraries to share a little bit, we’ve done some benchmarking against peers, and we haven’t added positions. I feel like we’re under supported. We should have more librarians for my community college, but just because we’ve maintained and everyone else has cut, we look like we’re overstaffed when you benchmark us against peers because they haven’t replaced positions, and I feel like we need three or four more librarians, to be honest, just to be where we should be, but instead we look like we have two extra positions compared to where our peers are.
So that’s the challenge that you get. You get this ongoing erosion of what counts as normal over decades. And legislators, removed in Springfield from our campuses, don’t recognize the ripples that happen from their budgets to our campuses and ultimately to the quality of services that we give to students and that’s really of course the bottom line. So let me ask for our audience members who want to be supportive and who want to get involved, what are steps that could be taken to help raise up voices to fight for these kind of essential roles within Illinois’s universities?
Gail Porter: Well, I would suggest that, people call their legislators and ask about how to support legislation requiring faculty librarians to be present in all state academic institutions of higher learning.
Elizabeth Kamper: I would also advocate for unionizing, gather together, make sure that you are part of some sort of Either union, or… I went to an incredible ALA a couple of years ago. I went to an incredible presentation about unionizing or getting organized at your library. And that’s the first step of being able to advocate for others is making sure that you yourself are protected and supported so that then you can use your organization to write letters, to call legislators, to stand out and say, I have safety in this and I will put my neck out so that I can support you and make sure that you too are safe.
Gail Porter: That’s important. I remember what it was like to be a librarian without faculty status, and I really didn’t have an official voice. I mean, I was a cataloger and one staffer didn’t know I even had a library degree. I was not visible. I did not have that voice, but here I have faculty status and with that, I had the opportunity to collaborate with teaching faculty on these forms for submitting your thesis or dissertation digitally and having faculty status makes a huge difference. You have a seat at that table. Yeah, you can use your voice, like I’ve said before.
Elizabeth Kamper: I don’t think that students understand how much power they have. Their voices are the loudest at the university. If you want campus administration to listen to something, make a student say it loud in the quad, can’t use megaphones anymore, but like I tell my students all the time, if you want something done, you write an email, you address it to the chancellor and send it to him. We have so many students at our university that are advocates of the library in terms of space, but also in terms of librarians, and sometimes they are our biggest allies when it comes to cutting things or moving furniture, having to get rid of it, building spaces.
Hunter Dunlap: I would also say that there’s a big job to do, and that’s just in educating the public, educating administrators, educating everyone, many times on the university campus itself about what we do, why we’re there. We do such a wonderful job, I think, as librarians of actually performing the work, in actually providing reference services of indexing and organizing and selecting and doing the work of the librarian, but we don’t always do a really good job of promoting ourselves. It’s kind of like, it’s not in the librarian gene. It’s something that we don’t excel at.
I think we’ve got to really start being proactive, and yes, we need to organize and we need to gather our supporters and be more upfront about what it is we do, why we’re here, and why we’re important. I know I’ve come out of my shell a great bit since I received a termination letter. That focuses one’s attention to the problem and to how much you are or are not appreciated in a given situation. So that has certainly focused my attention and my activity, and I am really seeing the need for us to go out and educate legislators, everyone who is a potential supporter, we need to let them know what it is we bring so that they can help us, and that they can articulate that as well.
Troy Swanson: Well, as we wrap up, maybe, Hunter, could you share that website one more time?
Hunter Dunlap: Sure. SaveWIULibrarians. org.
Troy Swanson: Fantastic. And we encourage our audience to go, and is there an email list there? Like they can sign up to get updates or there’s updates?
Hunter Dunlap: Yeah, you can, we have a GoFundMe. You can send a letter to our president and board of trustees. You can join our mailing list. You can be updated on all things going on. We have ads running in newspapers. We’ve got t-shirts. We’ve got stickers. We’ve got business cards. We’ve got all kinds of things that we’ve created to try to get the word out and try to spread the importance of librarianship at Western.
Troy Swanson: Well, I hope everyone listening will go and sign up. Clearly, I need to make sure I sign up. Well, Elizabeth, Hunter, Gail, I want to thank you all for your time, and thanks for being on Circulating Ideas.
Hunter Dunlap: Thank you, Troy.
Elizabeth Kamper: Thank you.
Hunter Dunlap: It’s been a pleasure.
Circulating Ideas 