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Kathleen McCook's avatar

As for DEI. It's been a long, long time that LIS has worked on DEI issues. In the 1980s I worked with Margaret Myers of ALA OLPR on a project called "Each One Reach One" for minority recruitment. The larger institutions are asking for more and more DEI commitment but in LIS with the ethnic affiliates (I'm a life member of REFORMA) and SPECTRUM there is a history of commitment.

That does not seem to have altered the overall demographics much. When I visited many HBCUs to recruit I was unsuccessful because of low salaries in the field. I did a small study of 2018 grads and found that Asian and Hispanic graduation rates have increased, but not Black graduates. [(Yoon, JungWon and McCook, Kathleen de la Peña. 2021. “Diversity of LIS School Students: Trends Over the Past 30 Years.” Journal of Education for Library & Information Science 62 (2): 109–18.]

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Kathleen McCook's avatar

The recent revocation of academic status for librarians in the Texas A & M system is an interesting case:

"Nearly 30 librarians at Texas A&M University have lost either tenured or tenure-track status after the administration opted to reorganize the system’s 10 libraries. Administrators had previously asked librarians to move to a new department to keep tenure or relinquish it.

In all, 24 librarians moved to other academic departments, thus maintaining tenure, while 53 converted to staff status. Of those 53 librarians, 19 waived tenure and another nine gave up their tenure-track status, according to The Houston Chronicle."...administrators say the reorganization was designed to streamline and simplify library operations and emphasize student needs over librarians’ research, according to The Houston Chronicle.

https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2022/05/25/texas-am-librarians-lose-tenure-reorganization-plan

I don't know the inside details of this but it certainly throws open academic status in academic libraries.

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