Librarians Should Serve the Institution, Not the Profession

To the editor:

Bobbi Newman and Sam Helmick Views article “The Case for a Professional Foundation in Librarianship” (July 14, 2026) is a response to my essay, “6 Reasons Libraries Should Look Beyond the M.L.S.” (June 16, 2026). I reply here to their major points:

1. My essay urges academic libraries to hire Ph.D. holders in addition to candidates with a master of library and information science (MLS) degree. Newman and Helmick (hereafter N&H) characterize this recommendation as “a false choice between professional education and specialized expertise.” To the contrary: Simultaneously considering Ph.D. holders provides more choice: more candidates with more professional education and more specialized expertise. Why would expanded and more-rigorous credentialing “dissolve” rather than enhance the profession?

2. N&H believe only the MLS can train practitioners in “organization, metadata, curation, preservation, classification, and information literacy.” They thus ignore and dismiss my reports that Ph.D. hires can and do acquire these skills on the job. N&H dislike these reports, but they offer no evidence disputing them.

3. N&H suggest that MLS holders are uniquely equipped to deal with “intellectual freedom, privacy, information ethics, and research methods” and are “among the few professionals explicitly trained to ask critical questions about authority, provenance, access, bias, privacy, and intellectual freedom.” Such arrogance is both unmerited and certain to insult other academics.

4. My study surveyed every dean/university librarian at every R1 and R2 library in the U.S. But N&H believe library deans cannot be trusted with personnel decisions. Why? Because, deans face “structural incentives to favor hiring flexibility over professional standardization.” If, by “hiring flexibility,” N&H mean flexibility to hire candidates best able to meet constituent needs, then, yes, deans have “incentives” to be flexible. But why would such incentives register as negative incentives? If, however, N&H mean that deans are clueless about constituent needs, they should say so forthrightly and then survey the “rank-and-file” who—unlike (ostensibly) wrongly incentivized administrators—N&H are willing to trust.

5. N&H suggest non-MLS hiring may reflect budget pressures—an excuse to hire librarians on the cheap. This is demonstrably false: See the ARL study I cite indicating that non-MLS librarians earn more on average than MLS librarians.

6. N&H question claims that Ph.D. holders are more diverse than MLS holders. Census and NSF data is clear: PhD-holders are, on average, significantly more diverse than MLS holders.

7. Most deans working with non-MLS librarians report that they make excellent librarians. Such a finding, N&H suggest, merely evidences deans’ “choice-supportive bias” or “postdecisional rationalization.” Such cynicism must be sufficiently resolute to ignore the conversion testimonies of once-skeptical deans. Consider, also, that 92 percent who have hired non-MLS librarians plan to do so again; in contrast, only 61 percent who have not still will not in the future. Were hiring decisions explainable primarily by “choice-supportive bias,” the percentages among both groups would be roughly equivalent. Instead, they diverge by 31 percentage points!

8. N&H criticize my survey for targeting only deans and university librarians. Disinclined to trust administrators, N&H instead seek a study of “rank-and-file” librarians and alternate indicators of MLS and non-MLS effectiveness. So let’s have such studies. Those seeking different data bear the burden of gathering and interpreting that data. I am sure the profession would welcome N&H embarking on a study of such scope and ambition.

So what are the implications of N&H’s position? Shall we tell the 65 percent of university libraries planning to hire non-MLS librarians and the 48 percent that have already done so that they must not? Does Helmick, as the former president of the American Library Association, imagine censuring these libraries? Are we to inform non-MLS librarians working in university libraries they should not be librarians?

Most concerning is N&H’s characterization of our profession’s purpose. The medical profession exists to promote wellness and cure illness. The plumbing profession exists to hygienically deliver water and remove waste. But the library profession, in N&H’s characterization, exists disproportionately to promote the profession. Some variant of “profession” appears 29 times in their essay; in contrast, “service” appears twice. I understand constituent needs to be the proper “lens of institutional staffing needs.” It is thus alarming to encounter criticism of personnel decisions made through said “lens.” Such needs, N&H imply, should be subordinate to “professional identity,” “professional standardisation,” and perceived threats to “credential erosion.”

How healthy is a profession prioritizing “professional” conventions over the needs we exist to meet? If we are not willing to look far and wide in our quest to serve those who are not us, we will soon find ourselves on the path to irrelevance.