Reflections on Paper

Reading Time: 4 minutes

I will be taking my research and writing students on a tour of the law library soon. It’ll include a walk through our collection floors and past my office, as well as other nooks and crannies. I don’t keep any diplomas on the wall which, while I’m not defensive about it, I know is not the expected behavior. I started to think about what my response would be if a student asked where they were.

Credentials have been on my mind a lot lately. My article on law library hiring was just published in AALL’s Law Library Journal and I’ve already heard from a couple of readers, which has been fun. The promotion and tenure folks at my university probably don’t want to hear it, but I find feedback from a reader far more valuable than a citation. I’m familiar with attempting to skim a stone and see it sink right into the water on the first wave. It’s nice when you get a couple of skips.

This article has been a pretty slow burn. The kernel of the article came from a blog post from six years ago (The Law Librarian Pipeline ) and has been itching at my brain ever since. As I was on my own job search recently, it seemed like a good time to feed two birds with one scone. As I scanned the job postings, I started to capture them, and look at the degrees and experience that various law library employers were seeking.

While the article has been germinating, the limiting conditions that I was going to touch on got worse. The number of adults under 35 living at home has risen over 6% in the last decade, with rents in cities rising 4% per year. Household mobility has hit a record low, with only about 12% of households moving, and only 2% of those over a state line. The cost of law and library degrees are obviously not falling, even if student loan caps start to force some students out of the option to get a graduate or professional degree. Law libraries are fishing in relatively narrow pools of candidates, in that a job posting’s reach may not be beyond the county line.

But I’m not going to restate that article. If you end up reading it, I’d be interested in your thoughts. I have a couple of ideas about how I could take action beyond my own four walls on this topic, but that will have to wait for a bit. I need to get some other irons out of the fire first.

What does this have to do with certificates on the wall, though? I started my career with them hanging on my office wall. When I got to the ABA, where there was a lawyer caste, it seemed normal and even advantageous to have degree certificates on the wall. I think this may have soured me on posting them at later jobs. When they were on the wall, they were less an expression of my pride at completing the degrees and more about signaling to others something about my worth. Long ago, I noticed that my dad, who was first generation to university, didn’t have his Ph.D. at work; it was posted in his home office. He had work achievements in his work office, like his metallurgy patents, instead.

Now that I’m thirty years into working on information teams, I feel disconnected from those credentials. I occasionally think about whether the experience I have has been built upon those credentials and experiences or if those were merely ways to kick open the door to the roles I’ve had. As I look at the law school curriculum more closely, and library school through the eyes of one of our kids and recent grads, I find that most of the things I do in my role, particularly in management, aren’t reflected in a curriculum. It feels wrong to require others to have to learn to kick open doors in the same way with the same outcome.

I recently referred back to an earlier role during my research and writing class, at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, in the late ’90s. Someone had asked about free printing in law school and I was a bit amazed this was still a topic of discussion. My very first professional presentation was at SWALL on printer accounting. But when I mentioned when I’d been at SMU, someone said, “Oh, I wasn’t even BORN then!” as I collapsed into a pile of dust.

For me, then, the credentials and their embodiment aren’t things that really represent anything related to my work for me. They are things whose impact has been absorbed, perhaps as a foundation, and are now submerged under years and years of additional and often contrary information and skill development. I would not want someone to judge my work based on whether—and worse, from where—I had acquired a particular degree.

I expect my folks are still proud that I had some educational attainments. Going through both a professional and graduate program meant that my own kids had someone to model, just like I did with my parents. I made some great colleagues during law school who have been part of my entire professional life. The value of those experiences are important, but they’re very personal. They’re not something I feel that I can represent with a certificate. I expect I will eventually unpack those frames and put them up in my home office. I might even finally frame my MLS.

Some of this is probably obvious to someone outside my head. I made an effort soon after arriving in Chicago to bring in some artwork to my office. It’s the only personalization I tend to make to my office, where you will not see any photos or references to my family or outside life, due to an acute sense of personal privacy. But you’ll see a photo of Ontario’s Great Library, gifted to me by colleagues there, a lithograph by my sister, and a print of James Ensor’s “Skeletons Warming Themselves“.

If you turn around, you’ll see a print of what is probably my favorite painting, “The Pool” by Tom Thomson.

These are things that mean more to me than displaying my credentials, as well as representing things I’m comfortable talking about. I would much rather talk to someone who visits my office about something that is on my wall that is meaningful to me. I suppose the fact that I am willing to drag a bunch of art onto a train indicates how much more invested I am in them than much smaller paper degrees.

There’s another reason, though. I wouldn’t want certificates on the wall to ever impact my interactions with people. I don’t want my staff and people I work with to think I’m signaling anything (like the caste system I felt at the ABA) by having degrees on the wall. I’d rather they make their judgment about how I present myself and the reputation of my work. Anyone for whom my attainments are important can quickly do a web search and find out that sort of information from my online bios. There may even be those folks who may judge me based on which school I went to, as law school hiring committees are wont to. They can do that on their own time.

One of the benefits of returning to academia later in my career is that a lot of the law school trappings that mattered when I was attending one have disappeared. A graduate of a T14 law school? Big whoop. Judge? Whatever. Unless those experiences manifest themselves in ways that contribute and create value, I’m really not into it. There is too much legacy and rot in the legal profession to have any sense of deference for someone’s pedigree. We are watching in real time as people from elite institutions attack the rule of law and the administration of justice. I have met too many people with a couple of degrees or who have held fancy roles who don’t contribute. Move along and make room for people who will, even if they may not come with a specific set of degrees.

Same, Rabbit, same.

I am hoping that in what remains of my career, I see more law librarians who come with the same fire and curiosity for making information accessible, even if they don’t carry the same papers. Where getting a degree in the past might have been a sign of curiosity or commitment, I worry that now it is a measurement of financial resources, excluding people who would make great law librarians.