Teaching the Library to Students of Higher Education

The academic library and its digital transformation are ignored in graduate programs of higher education administration, which train a significant number of postsecondary professionals. A course in scholarly communications in the digital age recently introduced at one such program includes an invitation to aspiring administrators to study the contributions of the library to the ways that faculty members are coming to understand and capitalize on new technologies in teaching, research, and career development. The library is represented in the course in its traditional and new roles. It is an essential campus location for attention to what technological change means for faculty work. Introduction: A Gap In Graduate Study of Higher Education Sociologist Wendy Griswold refers to the academic library as a “sacred space.” Its “aura” and the pleasures of reading, she suggests, should be conveyed by the faculty to all students (Cull, 2011). Nevertheless, the campus library can be poorly understood or underestimated even by PhD students in higher education administration. With many of our students dedicated to the academic “success” of undergraduates we might expect that they would be knowledgeable about the need for education in “information literacy” and the library’s role in it. But few are. And writing and publishing, with all they can signify across the disciplines, including what libraries do to maintain and advance the communications system, are rarely the subjects of deliberate attention, even by those aspiring to faculty positions. Of course, that is not unusual among PhD students in many fields. Still, to the degree that higher education administration claims a comprehensive view of academic work, it should make a place in its programs for attention to scholarly communications. In what follows there is first a brief account of higher education administration as a field of graduate study. There is then a report on a course that introduces PhD students at Michigan State University to current developments in scholarly communications. The course is presented in the context of the need to assert the significance of technology’s impact on academic communications in relation to the preoccupation among many postsecondary administrators and faculty with online teaching and learning. The premise was simple: some of our students anticipate faculty careers in higher education programs and thus can benefit from knowledge of what they will encounter as they seek to build publishing records. But the course reflected the belief that whatever postsecondary plans our students have—for most it will be academic middle management—knowledge of scholarly communications and the role of the library is important in understanding faculty work, an essential professional obligation in higher education administration. Examples of such work appear following the description of the course, as does a brief conclusion identifying the unruly and unpredictable nature of scholarly communications today. Higher Education as a Field of Study Michigan State University is one of about 100 PhD programs in higher education administration (ranked #4 in the field by U.S. News and World Report). Of the 14 members of the Big Ten athletic conference and the Committee on Interinstitutional Collaboration (CIC, which also includes the University of Chicago), 11 offer such programs. And so too do leading private universities like Stanford, USC, Vanderbilt, and NYU. There are over 200 institutions, including most of those offering PhDs, who offer MA programs in higher education, many featuring the Copyright of this contribution remains in the name of the author(s). http://dx.doi.org/10.5703/1288284316318 553 Charleston Conference Proceedings 2015 specialized field of student affairs administration (e.g., managing residence halls). Faculty and students associated with both levels of graduate education participate in the activities of the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE) and the American College Personnel Association (ACPA). And the field supports a sizeable group of journals and allied publications, but only rarely do these include an article or report on scholarly communications or libraries (Bray and Major, 2011; Lincoln, 2010). Why are there so many programs? Because whatever the state of the economy, and the budget difficulties facing many colleges and universities, managerial opportunities on campus continue to grow. While faculty hiring—to full‐ time tenure track positions—has declined, administrative work continues to expand (Ginsberg, 2011; Marcus, 2014). Campus jobs are available and appealing. Graduate students in higher education administration report that they benefited greatly from undergraduate experience and wish to contribute to the education of succeeding generations. Or, they are dedicated to the reform of the system, particularly in matters of social justice, like access to higher education for underserved minorities. Many students enrolled in PhD programs are actually working part‐time or full‐time in institutional positions (where they are enrolled or elsewhere), typically in non‐academic units like admissions and financial aid, or in advising and career development roles in academic units. It is not so uncommon to find a college or university president or provost with a PhD in higher education administration. But it is much less so to find a dean or department head with such a degree. In those positions, affiliation with a traditional academic discipline or field matters more. Moreover, while there are fewer PhD programs in higher education administration than there are in English or economics, or even criminal justice or social work, the field graduates hundreds of students every year. And, as postsecondary management grows, graduates of such programs claim increasing influence on campus. So, from institutional and scholarly perspectives the study of higher education is a sizeable field, worth the attention of academic librarians as a place to make the library’s role better known at a time of the digital transformation of teaching and research. The Other Digital Revolution on Campus When students of higher education (and faculty and administrators) are invited to think about the impact of digital technologies on higher education it is typically in relation to teaching and learning. And there is national and international attention in the media to MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), including what they suggest about leadership roles welcomed by leading American institutions like Stanford, Harvard, and MIT in the founding and management of Coursera and edX. When University of Virginia President Teresa Sullivan ran into conflict with the institution’s governing board it was largely because, in their view, she was not responding quickly enough, given what the competition was doing, to apparent opportunities in online education, in credit courses and degree programs as well as MOOCs. The new course described below addresses another technological transformation. Librarians hardly need to be reminded about the scale and significance of change now underway in scholarly communications (Marcum, Schonfeld, and Thomas, 2015). But their campus colleagues do, faculty and graduate students alike. That is what prompted Middlebury College media studies scholar Jason Mittell (2013) to urge the redirection of academic interest toward the Open Access (OA) movement, an effort that shares the goal of MOOCs in offering direct access to scholarly work. He puts aside the instructional utopian talk of Coursera and edX in favor of a realistic view of what might be accomplished with OA: “Access to the average journal article might do little to change the world. But making the bulk of scholarly research freely available could transform the possibilities of educational uplift, scientific discovery, and public engagement with academic work.” Mittell shares the perspective of the research library that OA has a role in “undercutting the