Academic Libraries' Toxic Leadership
Wow. It’s been a while. I haven’t written a blog post in years. Also, this post has been in a “should I post this or not?” purgatory for half of a year. But the #lismentalhealth hashtag and some particularly personal and devastating accounts encouraged me to post this.
A big reason for my blog absence has been the turmoil in my professional life. I have in these past 3 years experienced bullying, intimidation, sabotage, and have been forced to work in a toxic environment. I have gone to my superiors hoping for mediation, sought out mentors, worked with my union – all to no avail. I have been portrayed as an expendable, unproductive person who is not worthy of continuing a career as a librarian. We’ll see if that is my ultimate fate. I hope not.
I’ve (not coincidentally) been reading a lot lately about toxic leadership in academic libraries. The main motive is for me to seek clarity and catharsis for my own situation; to not feel so alone. And the literature is quite clear: almost all librarians work in toxic libraries, run by toxic leaders, but for the most part, no one does or says anything about it. This is a very sad state of affairs!
Understandably, there is not much literature on the subject, but the literature that does exist is quite good, if mortifying. As if we didn’t have enough mental health issues in the profession, reading so many bizarre and traumatizing situations does not help one’s mindset! I should probably note here that I will not dive into closely-related issues like racial discrimination or sexual harrassment because I haven’t experienced or witnessed those, but suffice it to say those are massive issues in libraries that also are rarely discussed. And they certainly contribute to a toxic library. There is a comorbidity there, certainly.
The first article I read was “The Low Morale Experience of Academic Librarians: A Phenomenological Study” (Kendrick, 2017). It is a great resource, but an especially relevant reference quote notes the link between toxicity and career advancement:
Their [Freedman and Vreven’s] in-depth quantitative work linked career longevity, academic status, and promotion and tenure processes to workplace bullying and incivility and ended with a recommendation for a qualitative study.
There’s also a wonderful dissertaion on the topic, Academic Libraries and Toxic Leadership, by Alma Ortega (2019). Starting with stats, she says a survey indicated 65% of librarians experienced toxic leadership in their careers. Further, it was helpful that she broke down the types of toxic leadership into 5 general categories:
- Abusive supervision
- Negligent/laissez-faire leadership
- Authoritarian leadership
- Toxic leadership related to an institution’s culture
- Leadership provided by leaders who were perceived to be mentally ill
So, armed with the statistics that prove toxic leadership is pervasive, and a kind of grammar to account for it, an obvious question arises: what do we do about it?
I tend to look for systemic and structural solutions to problems like these, and in doing so I can’t help but examine this issue through that lens. The fact of the matter is that the modern academic library is neoliberal to its core. In practice, what this means is that libraries are envisioned as simply another factory of service work, which means it’s staffed with workers (librarians) subject to the whims of a bunch of middle and upper managers, with a big impressive boss at the top, who is almost always a man (despite the profession being 82% female). Library administrators are incentivized to keep adding hierarchies of managers, supervisors, assistant managers, assistant university librarians, and so on. The game is to raise through the ranks as quick as you can, to escape the expolitative and dangerous entry level. Even in our library school education, librarians are often forced to take some sort of business or management course, often next to actual business or management Master’s students. Thus even in academia, libraries are viewed as a quirky, non-profit business with a mission we would rather not consider anti-business. I once again have to give a shout out to Chris Borg’s wonderful The Neoliberal Library: Resistance is not futile, which excellently builds out the idea of the neoliberal library and its effects.
In practice, then, much like the average worker in the United States, those of us librarians at the bottom of the ladder have virtually no power to make decisions or defend ourselves. We may be in professionally vulnerable, temporary positions that are even below my precarious status. The situation is not dissimilar from the current adjunct crisis. The lucky (and often talented!) librarians promote quickly out of the lower rungs of the ladder, and are more insulated from toxic leaders.
The powerlessness I experienced, however, manifested in particular ways. Not only was I the lowest-paid librarian for many years, I also had three bosses simultaneously putting me under the microscope, coming up with ways to fault, discredit, and degrade my work. They froze my salary for four years, and have now decided to terminate me after two lengthy, lie-ridden performance reviews. My termination is possible because despite working in my current position for 5 years, I am still a “potential career” appointee, not a “career” employee. That “potential” status can exist for six years. That is job precarity.
We don’t learn this in school, but the reality of librarianship is that a first-year librarian might have excellent ideas. I’ve gained mentorship from senior librarians to be sure, but often the best, most cutting-edge ideas come from people relatively new to the profession. Or maybe they’re not even a ‘librarian,’ because they don’t have the degree. But because of our rigid hierarchies, along with belief in meritocracy and credentialism, we convince ourselves that new librarians haven’t paid their dues yet. ‘We’re just not ready for that kind of radical change. Maybe next time.’ And so the library becomes sites for gathering “Tall Poppy” librarians, until they are cut down for not being “rock stars.”
Because my termination is the result of performance reviews, there is nothing my union can do. And so, as much as I would love to think unions can solve this systemic issue, we have to acknowledge they aren’t that powerful in this country, and at the very least, can only be part of the solution. Plus, now nearly two years on from the Janus decision, it doesn’t look as if public sector unions will get more powerful any time soon. Successes like the Chicago Teachers’ Union strike are much-needed battle wins, and we can only hope for more union wins when there is a wider union movement in this country.
What librarians can do is take our mission seriously, have it inform our ideology, and help us reorganize our institutions around equity. We have to stop thinking of “leadership” as a thing bosses do. We have to critique the notion of leadership itself. And we have to ask ourselves why we think we need to value some librarians over others, or regard workers without library degrees as less valuable, or let those in power arbitrarily determine the worth and livelihoods of our fellow workers. Do we really think academic libraries are a meritocracy? All of us know people near the top of the ladder who don’t deserve to be there. Who perhaps are toxic. It is not an anomaly: it is a built into the system. We need to break that system.
So knowing what we know about people who don’t deserve to be at the top, and people on the bottom being unecessarily cut down, it makes sense that we need to organize libraries more horizontally. We don’t need hierarchies and endless salary scales that only serve to divide and antagonize us toward each other. We don’t need torturous performance reviews built around the assumption that the lie of meritocracy is an unquestionable truth. In short, we need to let librarians do their jobs, and for that, they need to be empowered to make decisions for the library.
So that’s it for now. I will return to posts about actual data work soon, I promise. Until then, I hope we as librarians can continue to speak out about our workplaces and find solidarity in our struggle.