Letting Go
Laura Wimberley is a 30 year old reference librarian at Lane Community College in Eugene, Oregon. You can read her blog at Libri & Libertas or follow her on Twitter.
I’m beginning to wonder if we librarians, as a profession, spend too much time worrying how people perceive us.
Yes, I know that the shhhhing bunhead image keeps people away, but the sexy librarian means we’re not taken seriously, yadda yadda yadda. But there were two pop culture moments last week that made me think we might be blowing this out of proportion.
September isn’t just the start of the school year. It’s also (just as importantly for some people) the start of a new television season. And the first episodes of two different shows highlighted how two different comparable professions react to mainstream media depictions of themselves.
First, the season premiere of How I Met Your Mother shows our protagonist Ted Mosby on his first day as an adjunct professor. (They never use the word adjunct or discuss the working conditions, but that’s another post.) Ted spends most of the episode anxious about how to present himself to the class, as an authoritarian or cool guy, and winds up rapidly and awkwardly alternating between the two. (“I’m Professor Mosby. Call me Ted. Professor Mosby. T-Dogg. DON’T call me T-Dogg.”) It’s the same set-up as an episode on the sixth season of Friends where Ross is so nervous on his first day of adjuncting that he fakes an English accent.
These issues of self-presentation and authority in the classroom are important, live concerns for faculty, and are often discussed in the faculty blogosphere, but this show has not, and, I confidently predict, will not make a dent. (In fact, the only mention I could find of the show on a faculty blog or website was on the CV of a theater professor who actually appeared on it.)
Why not? Public university and community college faculty are, like librarians, also dependent on public perception (although, as states slash their support, increasingly less so.)
I think there are a few reasons. One, faculty won’t admit to watching sitcoms (Buffy or Big Love, maybe, but not something this truly mainstream). We, on the other hand, are responsible for disseminating all media, so it’s less detrimental to our credibility to notice schlock. Two, faculty don’t see themselves as a larger collective – they see themselves as historians, or mathematicians, or anthropologists first, and professors en masse second; librarians see ourselves as librarians first and as academic, public, special, or school librarians second. This minimizes the number of portrayals a professor will identify with and bother to critique, versus the number a librarian might. Finally, though – and here’s the part we should consider emulating – I think faculty let their work speak for itself. If you have conviction that your teaching and research make a difference, it doesn’t much matter if people think you’re absent-minded or effete or stodgy or any of the other professor stereotypes. When people attack the work itself, then yes, faculty will stand their ground. But the pop culture caricatures? Who cares?
Case in point – contrast How I Met Your Mother with the series premier of Community, a new show set at a community college. Community doesn’t depict any librarians (yet), but nearly the whole episode takes place inside a library. It’s an homage to The Breakfast Club (and a very funny one at that), but in that movie, the kids were locked in the library as punishment. Here, a diverse group of adults chooses to come to the library to study and accomplish their goals.
Check out the clip “Sharks, Pencils, and Ben Affleck.”
Who wouldn’t want that happening in their library?
This is a great depiction of library as place. And that, in the end, is what matters – what people think of the library as an experience. How they think of librarians in general is something we can let go.
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