From Inside Higher Ed:
Western Illinois University is laying off all nine of its library faculty — eight of them tenured or on the tenure track — as part of wider efforts to offset a $22 million budget deficit driven by rising operational costs and a 21 percent enrollment drop since fall 2019.Western is also closing a library at a branch campus, to be replaced by a service desk at which patrons can put in requests for materials, Monday through Friday, 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. It’s all part of “a new vision” for that campus.
While the university said in an Aug. 9 news release that it’s “made every effort to minimize the impact on students,” the planned elimination of the library faculty by May 2025 has academic librarians both inside and outside the institution questioning how WIU’s library will be able to effectively serve faculty and students in the future.
“It’s quite alarming,” said Leo Lo, president of the national Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), adding that in addition to assisting faculty in their teaching and research, librarians are especially helpful to first-generation college students finding their footing in higher education. “Without libraries to help them, it may hurt student retention” and recruitment, he said.
But Alisha Looney, a spokesperson for WIU, wrote in an email Friday that the university “will continue to have adequate coverage in the library” after the layoffs.
Loony, indeed.
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comments: 2
so have they laid off any of the massive number of management at the university that all of them seemed to have accumulated over the last some years. my campus set-up a graduate school of graduate schools: an additional administrative layer. still haven't figured out what they do.
librarians are your friend!!! and the person available-- want to guess that they will be so low level staff who has never worked in a library and has no idea of the materials available. that service desk: so if you realize on Friday at 3:01 pm that you need a certain book forget it until the middle of the next week.
how much longer do we have to keep beating our heads against the wall at the idiocy that runs campuses now.
kirsten
How much longer? Much!
These administrators seem incapable of imagining students and faculty who’d like to browse the stacks, go down rabbit holes, make use of reference materials (all sorts of stuff not available “online.”
Alisha Looney, quoted in the article, is the interim assistant vice president of communications, marketing, and media relations. In her administrative sector: a
graphic designer, a social media coordinator, a
marketing and design associate, a deputy director of publications, an assistant director of marketing, a marketing associate, an office administrator, and a communications and marketing associate. But there’s no money for librarians!
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