BY HANK REICHMAN
This afternoon I had the pleasure of joining a demonstration of University of California librarians and their supporters outside the Berkeley campus’s Doe Library where the latest bargaining session between the UC-AFT Librarians and the UC administration was taking place. As I previously reported, academic freedom is a central topic of negotiation. The union is seeking contract language that could protect the academic freedom of librarians, who in the UC are inappropriately classified as academic employees and not faculty. Since 1972, the AAUP and the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) have argued in the Joint Statement on the Faculty Status of College and University Librarians that librarians are faculty members for whom “academic freedom is indispensable.” In August, the Council of University of California Faculty Associations (CUCFA) and the California Conference of the AAUP (CA-AAUP) wrote to UC President Janet Napolitano, urging her “to instruct UC negotiators to grant academic freedom to university librarians as they rightly deserve and have requested.”
At today’s rally members of the union bargaining team stood on the library steps with their mouths symbolically taped shut while a stream of supporters read from comments submitted by signatories of UC-AFT’s petition in support of the librarians’ demands. Here is what I read:
The erosion of academic freedom is a danger to our educational system. The AAUP position on librarians as having the same academic freedom rights as tenure-track faculty has been the standard one for decades. As a professor and patron of our University Library I find it unconscionable that officers of the University of California would suggest/consider that librarians and other non-titled academic personnel are not covered by the academic freedom provided to the academic faculty.
Here are two other quotes that were read out:
If academic freedom isn’t a good fit for librarians, then it isn’t a good fit for anyone. They’re the ones who make academic, intellectual, informational freedom a reality for everyone else. Good luck defending your own academic freedom without them.
Academic freedom is a central tenet of information literacy, and as such is an essential component of librarianship.
While academic freedom has emerged as central to the negotiations, UC librarians also seek pay equity and expanded professional development support. In negotiations UC-AFT has proposed changes to 20 out of 34 of the contract’s articles and proposed the addition of two articles. The UC has dismissed all of these proposals. On October 9, the union informed UC that it would reject the administration’s request to extend the contract, which expired on October 1. The UC-AFT represents about 350 librarians from all ten UC campuses. Currently, librarians employed by the California State University (CSU) system and California community colleges are paid higher salaries than UC librarians. CSU librarians enjoy full faculty status.
UC negotiators have proposed a wage structure whereby salaries would go up by 3 percent, 2 percent, 2 percent and 2 percent over the next 4 years. UC-AFT, however, said these percent increases are below the annual inflation rate and do not address the disparity experienced by early-career librarians. The union proposed during bargaining that there be a $3,500 lump sum raise across the board for a three-year contract.
With respect to academic freedom, UCLA history professor and AAUP Committee A member Michael Meranze wrote:
If you think about it there are many reasons why librarians should hold academic freedom. For one thing, university librarians are research professionals often engaged in their own research. This research can take many forms–from more conventional academic work, to understanding both the trends in library science, onto the latest issues in digital technology. Beyond that, librarians are constantly engaged in precisely the sort of academic and intellectual judgment about which materials to purchase for libraries, how they should be organized and presented, developing and organizing exhibits and conferences that pull them into precisely the sort of controversial decisions that academic freedom is designed to make possible. Moreover, between digitalization and efforts by faculty to increase opportunities for students to participate in research based inquiry, librarians have become even more central to the basic educational mission of the university as key mediators of resources and knowledge to students and faculty.
Finally, I probably don’t need to mention that in our age of increased surveillance librarians have been at the forefront of protecting the privacy rights of borrowers. Or that in the age of social media we would want our librarians to have universities recognize the academic freedom rights of librarians as the very act of choosing which books to purchase and recommend can lead you into controversy.
There really are no good principled reasons for university negotiators to deny that academic freedom applies to professional librarians. In fact, it is difficult to understand how university negotiators could think that librarians should not possess academic freedom.
Locked out of California Hall!
After today’s brief rally, participants marched to nearby California Hall, the campus administration building, where two members of the bargaining team sought to meet with Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ. It will probably come as little surprise to readers of this blog that they found themselves locked out.
One negative takeaway from the event: pretty much no Berkeley tenured/tenure-track faculty (in UC jargon, Senate faculty, a concept that I plan to address at more length next week) attended! I hope that in future CUCFA members and campus senates will more actively participate in this important fight.
