Terms for Academic Library Directors

IN 1973, ARTHUR MCANALLY AND ROBERTDOWNSauthored a seminal article on the changing role of the university library director. This article takes a look at McAnally and Downs’s findings twenty years later to determine whether the changes outlined in 1973 are still valid today. Additional sources of strife for university library directors are outlined and requirements for today’s library directors are discussed. HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE My first professional position, upon completing my library science degree, was with the University of Oklahoma. A few months after my arrival, the Director of Libraries, Arthur McAnally, appeared in my office, handed me a typewritten manuscript, and asked me to read it and give him my thoughts on it in a few days. The manuscript was a draft for an article which later appeared in College 6Research Libraries under the title, “The Changing Role of Directors of University Libraries” (McAnally & Downs, 1973). I was, of course, highly honored but also amazed that I had been asked to comment on his manuscript, given the fact that the libraries had many well-respected and widely published faculty at the time. Only years later did I realize what unique qualification I alone, within the University of Oklahoma Library faculty at the time, possessed. I was a newly minted graduate. For those readers too young to remember McAnally and Downs’s article or its impact on commonly held precepts of university Dana C. Rooks, University of Houston Libraries, University of Houston, Houston, TX 77204-2091. LIBRARY TRENDS, Vol. 49, No. 1, Summer 1994, pp. 47-61 Q 1994 The Board of Trustees, University of Illinois 48 LIBRARY TRENDVSUMMER 1994 librarianship, the article was considered almost heretical when it appeared in 1973. My primary qualification for being selected to comment on the draft was my total lack of knowledge, biases, and preconceived ideas about the role of university library directors. My opinion provided, in effect, a blank slate upon which McAnally could test his premise. McAnally and Downs’s (1973) radical finding was that the directorship of a major university library could no longer be considered a lifetime post but was approaching an average span of five to six years (p. 103). Their investigation discovered that, among the seventy-eight university libraries holding membership in the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) in 1972, half had changed directorships within the past three years and four of them had changed twice (McAnally 8c Downs, 1973, p. 103). Publication of the McAnally and Downs article represented a major wake-up call to many university libraries and their directors. McAnally and Downs documented a trend that has not changed in the ensuing twenty years. In a study published after the McAnally and Downs article, Jerry Parsons (1976) compared the sociodemographic characteristics of forty-two United States academic ARL directors in 1958 with the seventy-eight comparable ARL directors in 1973. His data showed that the 1958 directors had an average tenure of more than eight years, a median tenure of nine years, and a range from less than one year (two directors) to a high of twenty-six years (two directors). In comparison, the directors in 1973 had an average tenure of less than eight years, a median of five years, and a range from less than one year (eighteen directors) to a high of twenty-seven years (one director). Parsons (1976) noted that only nine directors appeared in both groups (pp. 613, 617). Parsons’s (1976) conclusion: “Like college presidents, research library directors face so many diverse pressures that most incumbents may well opt for a short-term position” (p. 617). A separate analysis covering forty years of terms for ARL directors was conducted by William Cohn (1976) and published by College Q Research Libraries also in 1976. Cohn found that, of the seventyfour United States academic libraries that were members of the ARL in 1973, thirty-four named new directors from January 1970 to December 1973 (p. 137). Cohn found that the average tenure for all directors during the period 1934-1969 was 12.65 years compared to an average of only two years for the period 1970-1973 (p. 143). Cohn’s analysis revealed yet another interesting piece of data regarding the immediate predecessors of the 1973 incumbent directors. Between 1934 and 1969, the average tenure for the preceding director was 14.1 years, and in the 1970-73 period it was fifteen years (Cohn, 1976, p. 143). Cohn also noted that from 1934 to 1969, more of the ROOKS/TERMS FOR ACADEMIC LIBRARY DIRECTORS 49 incumbents’ predecessors left as a result of death or retirement than for teaching or to direct a different ARL or a non-ARL library (p. 143). Ten years after the McAnally and Downs study, Wong and Zubatsky (1985) found in a 1983 study, “the average tenure period for chief administrators of both ARL and non-ARL libraries has been slowly rising since the mid-1970s” (p. 76). One explanation offered by Wong and Zubatsky for this increase was a cycle of fewer opportunities created by retirements or resignations during the 19731983 period studied, combined with the increasing number of twoprofessional households which might hinder or delay a decision to change jobs (p. 76). While Wong and Zubatsky (1985) found that nearly 76 percent of the responding ARL directors had held their positions for ten or fewer years, fifteen of the sixteen women directors fell into the ten-years-or-under group (p. 72). In 1989, Anne Woodsworth authored an article entitled “Getting Off the Library Merry-Go-Round: McAnally and Downs Revisited.” Woodsworth (1989) contends that over half of the ARL libraries changed directors in the preceding three to four years. “What McAnally and Downs described as extraordinary turnover seems to have settled into the norm” (p. 35). Do these five historical studies prove a trend or do they offer conflicting data from a snapshot in time? Are the varying data at each time period illustrative of changes in higher education as a whole or proof of the growing complexity of research library administration? Are tenure rates of academic library directors attributable to societal or generational changes? Are these changes a result of economic trends or changes in the lifestyle demands of today’s library administrators? Do changing demographics of ethnicity and gender play a role in the terms of directors of research libraries? RE-EVALUATION AND DOWNSS OF MCANALLY BACKGROUND FACTORS McAnally and Downs (1973) cited twelve background factors within society and higher education which they viewed as contributing to the decreased tenure of library directors. These included: 1. growth of enrollment; 2. changes in the presidency; 3. proliferation in university management; 4. changes in the world of learning and research; 5. the information explosion; 6. hard times and inflation; 50 LIBRARY TRENDUSUMMER 1994 7. planning and budgeting; 8. technology; 9. changing theories of management; 10. unionization; 11. increasing control by state boards; and 12. no national system for information (pp. 104-09). While the specifics of each factor may have changed in the ensuing twenty years, the general premise regarding the impact of each factor on the terms of library directors remains valid today. Growth of Enrollment Directors of libraries in the decade of the 1960s struggled with the problems resulting from unprecedented growth in student populations, increased numbers of l‘aculty, and, as McAnally and Downs (1973) described, “a far more complicated institution” (p. 104). Today the increased complexity still exists. Only the underlying causes have changed. Universities today are confronting serious issues of retrenchment and downsizing in the face of declining enrollments and reduced or stable funding. Changes in the Presidency McAnally and Downs (1973) outlined some of the growing pressures upon the university president as rising expectations, growing militancy of students and faculty, a newly critical attitude toward higher education on the part of the general public, political pressure from hostile legislators, increased power by state boards, and declining or stable financial support (p. 105). Today these pressures remain largely unchanged. As presidents and senior university administrators come out of the faculty ranks, i t is all too common for these individuals to opt to return to the faculty, after relatively brief tenures, as the pressures become excessive. Thus today’s library director is all too often faced with the challenge of meeting yet a new set of expectations from yet a new president or provost. As Woodsworth (1989) so graphically states: There is a limit to the number of times a fresh and cheerful approach can be conjured up to educate someone who knows nothing about the complexity of managing a multi-million dollar service organization; has no conception of the external influences that affect research library operations; and has not a whit of appreciation of the rapidity of change needed in research libraries in order for them to remain responsive service organizations in the face of dramatic societal, scholarly, and technological changes.