Deconstructing Faculty Status: Research and Assumptions

Arguments for faculty status have traditionally been based upon a comparative model: librarians want their roles to be compared to those of faculty, not administrators. The author of this article, however, finds almost no empirical research on the status, roles, and benefits of faculty, librarians, and administrators to support this model. She posits several alternative approaches to the faculty status issue. Approximately half of all librarians currently employed by U.S. colleges and universities possess "faculty status."1 Such librarians have been accorded a status equivalent to teaching faculty in terms of rights (notably tenure and participation in governance) and responsibilities (notably research and publishing). The advantages and disadvantages of faculty status have been debated in academic librarianship for years. Indeed, the issue is almost a professional obsession. College & Research Libraries published two nearly identical reviews of the literature on the subject in consecutive issues in 1987.2 Taken together, these writings reveal a concept or model of faculty status that is built on a series of logically connected assumptions. The basic assumptions are (1) that teaching faculty hav