What's Wrong With Students Today?

Today's online Chronicle Careers is an article by Thomas H. Benton entitled "On Stupidity". In it, he briefly reviews a spate of books warning of America's burgeoning anti-intellectualism. He then lists a number of complaints that come out of his own direct observations as an educator. He sees too many students who are:

• Primarily focused on their own emotions — on the primacy of their "feelings" — rather than on analysis supported by evidence.
• Uncertain what constitutes reliable evidence, thus tending to use the most easily found sources uncritically.
• Convinced that no opinion is worth more than another: All views are equal.
• Uncertain about academic honesty and what constitutes plagiarism. (I recently had a student defend herself by claiming that her paper was more than 50 percent original, so she should receive that much credit, at least.)
• Unable to follow or make a sustained argument.
• Uncertain about spelling and punctuation (and skeptical that such skills matter).
• Hostile to anything that is not directly relevant to their career goals, which are vaguely understood.
• Increasingly interested in the social and athletic above the academic, while "needing" to receive very high grades.
• Not really embarrassed at their lack of knowledge and skills.
• Certain that any academic failure is the fault of the professor rather than the student.

Among other things, he proposes,

"We need to reverse the customer-service mentality that goes hand-in-hand with the transformation of most college teaching into a part-time, transient occupation and the absence of any reliable assessment of course outcomes besides student evaluations."

I was struck by his recommendations, coming as they do from an undergraduate, university perspective, as they are similar to issues that we are discussing at our seminary. I spent three profitable days last week at a Higher Learning Commission workshop on making student learning assessment a core institutional strategy. Graduate theological education faces many of the same trends and challenges that Benton notes above.

I also increasingly feel the importance of one solution that he does not mention in his article: Libraries can play a significant role in addressing student learning barriers. To the extent that higher education today is trying to make (keep?) education a marketable commodity by side-lining traditional learning environments, it often does so by also diminishing the role of the library. Libraries are significant places of learning, and librarians are well-positioned to engage student interest in learning at that most critical stage of learning: research and discovery.

To misquote Shakespeare, "Stupidity, sir, does walk about the orb like the sun, it shines everywhere." Libraries are one place, though, where stupidity's light grows dim.

Teaching, Learning, & Faculty Collaboration

Most of my time during the first day of the conference was focused on issues surrounding library involvement in teaching and learning. (Though there was the ever highly stimulating ATLA business meeting led with decorum and aplomb by Martha Lund Smalley and distinguished members of the ATLA staff.)

Paul Myhre from the Wabash Center conducted a juiced-up roundtable on teaching and learning that took us through about two days' worth of Wabash seminar-style discussion in just one hour. (And we even got chocolates for attending!) Paul began by shamelessly flattering us, telling us all the wonderful things about theological librarians that we have so much difficulty communicating to our administrators. Then he split us into groups and took us through a series of reflective questions on teaching and learning that forced us to critically examine our assumptions about our roles as librarians. Some tidbits of collective wisdom that floated to the surface of our frenetic thinking:

• Librarians should sit in on classes to observe teaching
• Even when rebuffed, we should patiently persist in seeking opportunities to collaborate in teaching and learning
• Even when it is out of character for us, we should cultivate our inner extroverts
• Make opportunities to discuss course content and syllabi with faculty
• Invest the time necessary to build a relationship of trust with faculty
• Provide faculty with free beer/coffee/chocolates
• Actively volunteer to teach in the classroom; begin with the assumption that faculty welcome our involvement

Two more books that I want to track down and add to our collection:

Assessment & Learning: The ICE Approach by Young & Wilson

Library Assessment in Higher Education by Joseph Matthews

Then, in the afternoon, I took part in the first-ever meeting of the newly formed Teaching and Learning Interest Group (TALIG). There was discussion of how to pronounce the acronym -- with a short "a" or a long "a"? (Kudos to Paul Myhre for suggesting the Brit-sounding pronunciation, "talley-gee".) The by-laws were approved, and the steering committee was elected. We then spent the rest of the meeting brain-storming ways that TALIG can encourage librarian involvement in teaching and learning. We left the steering committee with quite a list. It will be interesting to see what they choose to tackle first.

Seminariphobia?

The most recent In Trust online newsletter includes a One-Minute Commentary on local church ambivalence towards seminary learning. The One-Minute Commentary is responding to a May 6, 2008 Christian Century article by Stephanie Paulsell from Harvard Divinity School who notes that, in America, ecclesial suspicion of seminaries dates back to the very beginnings when Increase Mather questioned the value of a Harvard education in 1723. Either seminaries are suspected of impracticality -- Paulsell evokes the image "of a bearded Victorian poring over his books while the needs of the world collect unmet outside his closed door" -- or they are suspected of subverting right doctrine with cleverly devised tales.

All of which can leave a theological librarian wondering what to do. Our stacks are full (if not overfull) of that dangerous fruit of theological learning apt to be so unsettling to the casual reader. Indeed, I'm unsettled by some of it myself. Quite apart from all the human ignorance that is distilled in a library, there are also resources that teach that humility is the end-product of true learning, that self-control is essential to service, that God's glory inhabits my neighbor whether I recognize it or not. Who in their right mind would want to read some of this stuff?

Part of my conviction as a theological librarian is that I am not in my right mind, and that great cloud of witnesses that has gone before me and that exists around the world in very different places from me has something to say about that. So I do what I can to preserve their witness and make it accessible, especially for those who are in training to be church leaders.

Our recent accreditation review involved much discussion of the mission of the seminary and how to assess our success in carrying out that mission. It would be interesting to track library usage with future success in ministry. (For the sake of argument, let's define success as not quitting in five years.) Maybe the bookish student haunting the lower level study carrels is a poor fit for the daily realities of pastoral life. Or maybe such a student is beginning to learn how much there is to learn, something that I consider to also be part of spiritual formation.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. After that, I would argue that theological education is a good next step. Exposure to a theological library is a significant part of that next step.

Thoughts on Library Staffing

After a prolonged silence, I am returning to my blog with a few thoughts, appropriately enough, about library staffing.

While I tend to do much of my blogging in off hours, I have also relied on times when I have been able to do some blogging at my desk at work. Not only did I have a very busy fall season in my personal life (with shoulder surgery thrown into the mix), I have found my life at the library to be busier this academic year, too. We lost a part time staff position, bringing our library down to three full time staff members (including myself) plus a complement of part time student workers. This has been a busier year for everyone here.

This raises questions in a library director's mind like, "How much staffing is enough? How much staffing is not enough?" Like good looks and money, one can probably never be endowed with too much (competent!) staffing.

The difficulty is finding the right balance. I suspect that theological libraries are not alone in the struggle to achieve that delicate balance between:

• materials (books, journals, e-resources),
• operations (infrastructure, especially technology), and
• personnel.

At least in Illinois, state library programs are continuing to see reductions in funding, and from what I read in the library bulletins, it sounds like levies are not getting any easier to pass for the public libraries.

In the theological libraries where I have worked, I have felt like there is a swinging budgetary compass that allows one to concentrate and move forward on one front--materials, operations, or personnel--but not on all three at once. Does one take a hit in the book budget to allow for the upgrading of computer equipment? Does one choose to invest in more materials to expand the collection, or to invest in personnel to catalog the collection?

Then there is that seductive siren of grant funding. At our library, we continue to be very grateful for a Chatlos Foundation grant in 2006 that allowed us to significantly upgrade library staff workstations. The difficulty, of course, is that in tight budget times, if you can't land a grant, you often can't make progress that year, either. There is also the danger of finding one's job description expanded a notch with the expectation that the library director become a de facto member of the advancement office, writing grants in order to make a living. And it is difficult to get grants that will support your personnel needs, at least on a permanent basis.

So I find myself comparing my departmental needs to those of other campus departments. Does it profit a library if it has staff members, but they all break their necks walking in to work because there is no one to salt the sidewalks? (A genuine concern this winter.) Can adding a cataloger contribute more to student recruitment than adding another person in enrollment? These, however, are false comparisons and cannot answer that fundamental question, "How much staffing is enough?" The answer to this question has to be guided by mission, both at a campus level and at the library level. Adequate library staffing has to grow out of the integration of library services with the overall campus mission.

Which means that this posting is not really about library staffing--it is about library assessment. Having just lived through our joint accreditation visit from ATS and HLC, I am acutely aware that assessing our library's performance requires much more than just counting books and borrowers. I am encouraged that ATLA is taking a look at updating the annual statistics form reported to both ATLA and ATS. We need to be collecting data that tells us how well we are doing at supporting our campus missions. Do we have sufficient library staff to get the job done and to do it well? While there are not any magical formulas to help answer that question, posing the question in these terms will hopefully move us closer to coming up with useful answers about library staffing.

LibQUAL+ and Library Assessment

Back in May, I had posted about library assessment. As we near our 10-year accreditation visit this November, library assessment continues to be very much on my mind.

Yesterday, at The Ubiquitous Librarian, Brian Mathews reported on some interesting work that he is doing with ARL's LibQUAL+ service quality measurement tool. At a cost of $2,250, LibQUAL+ may be out of reach for smaller libraries like mine, but the kinds of results that it is yielding look very interesting. In the ongoing quest to start measuring how well our library is doing rather than what our library is doing, this kind of tool looks promising.

Library Assessment

This posting is thanks to the great session on library assessment at a recent CATLA Conference led by Robert Roethemeyer from Concordia Theological Seminary.

Over the past decade or so, theological schools have been adapting from an assessment process that tended to be quantitative to a process that is now more qualitative -- outcomes-based assessment that demonstrates how an institution is living up to both local institutional mission statements as well as national standards. As Mr. Roethemeyer pointed out in his presentation, most of the library statistics that we gather and report each year are focused only on quantitative measurements. Our door counts, circulation counts, and budget counts all tell what we did during the past year; they do not really tell how well we did our work.

One of the things that I learned at the CATLA conference was that in September 2006, the Association of Theological Schools published section 9 of their Handbook of Accreditation, Guidelines for Evaluating Library and Information Resources. These guidelines include a long list of questions to assist in qualitative library assessment. For example:

• Does the institution have a written plan with criteria for information resources, information technology, and policies for information management?


• How are software, hardware, and network resources evaluated and regularly upgraded in response to emerging technology?


• How does the library integrate print collections, access to electronic information, and other resources to foster information literacy? Are there adequate policies to guide this integration?


• How are librarians and information specialists directly involved in shaping the use of resources and in fostering the informational literacy of students and faculty? How are they involved in long-range curricular and institutional planning?

Questions that are easy to ask, but harder to answer. I left the CATLA conference reminded of two things that I have known but still do not always heed:

1) The library collection development policy remains a critical institutional document to assist with answering many of these questions. "Collection development policy", though, seems too limited in scope to address all the issues being raised today. I really need a "Library Service Plan" or an "Overall Informational Resources Master Plan for Getting Everybody the Information That They Need When They Need It". (Yes, I have applied for a trademark for that last one.)

2) Statistics have to be accompanied by narrative information. Library statistics alone will not demonstrate competence in providing library services. Part of my job as library director is to think about and record that narrative--no one else is tasked with the responsibility of focusing on these questions.

Like New Year's resolutions to lose weight or to refrain from frowning when singing praise choruses at church, I cannot promise that I will always heed these two items. But I thank Robert Roethemeyer and CATLA for keeping me mindful of them.