Risk-Taking and Academic Libraries

When I pulled into my local Starbucks yesterday, I parked in a space that had a message lettered on it. It read “Take a Risk Today”. A message like this either smacks you upside the head or you quickly read the message and walk away: thinking the message is for someone else. But perhaps it was for me; time will tell.

Risk taking in the U.S. is both lauded and disparaged. Many of us hear about adrenaline junkies who seemingly risk life and limb climbing some sheer rock cliff, skyscraper, or just running through a city participating in parkour. From our comfortable armchairs we sometimes make disparaging comments or shake our heads in disbelief, or perhaps we secretly wish we had the courage to do something so dangerous. On the other hand, we hear from our parents, friends, and almost every commencement speaker to be bold, to take risks, and change the world.

Regardless of where you fall on the risk-taking continuum, we live in a world that tends to reward the bold. Many believe that many Native Americans migrated from Asia across the Bering Strait upwards of 20,000 years, while others believe that humans arrived in a variety of ways, most likely by some sort of boat across one or more oceans. We do know that Europeans arrived by boat after risking life and limb in tiny boats on the open ocean for months at a time. These were bold and risky moves.  

Universities, especially in the United States, are often described as risk-averse organizations. In many ways this is true but this seems to be a more recent part of university history. Looking back at the early history of universities across the US, there have been many risky ventures to get our university system to where it is today.  I’m sure during the late 1800’s and during the two World Wars, many universities were taking risks in order to stay alive and thrive.

While libraries, especially academic libraries, have had times of not being bold or embracing risk, this has not been true of the last two decades.  More and more library leaders are being called on to reinvent/re-envision their library and to take on new roles in the academy. If this is going to be more than just lip service, then it is going to mean being bold and taking risks. The profession does recognize this. Library Journal every year publishes its list of “Movers and Shakers” and ACRL gives out annual awards for “Excellence in Academic Libraries” and the ACRL Academic/Research Librarian of the Year.

Self-help guru, Dean Bokhari, has an interesting post on risk-taking (https://www.meaningfulhq.com/risk-taker.html) entitled “7 Habits of Highly Successful Risk-Takers.” While the post is geared towards career growth and doing meaningful work, he does have five points that I think are applicable to risk-taking in academic libraries.

Be Ridiculously Irrational. Being ridiculously irrational is probably one piece of advice that you’re unlikely to hear in a very rational profession like librarianship. While there are librarians who are risk-takers, for many years we were a “plan to plan” profession where we would spend a year of committee work to get to an idea that then would take 6 months to a year more of planning to implement.

While I would not advocate throwing all caution to the wind and throw out the strategic plan, I think that moving to the next level of moving the 21^st-century academic library requires dreaming so big that what we want to do is beyond belief; a project that some may say is crazy or irrational. For me examples of this type of thinking would include the 2CUL collaboration between Columbia and Cornell (http://www.2cul.org/), SCOAP3 for particle physics (https://scoap3.org/what-is-scoap3/), walking away from the Elsevier big deal (the Netherlands, Germany, and now University of California- https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/02/university-california-boycotts-publishing-giant-elsevier-over-journal-costs-and-open), establishing an artificial intelligence lab in the University of Rhode Island (https://web.uri.edu/ai/), and the Shared Print Strategy in the State of Maine (http://www.maineinfonet.org/mscs/). Each of these projects, agreements, decisions would be viewed by many, when they were first suggested, to be impossible, out of scope, and perhaps even plain crazy.

A Successful Risk Taker Is A Short Term Pessimist And A Long-Term Optimist. We often think of risk-taking as a short-term thing with immediate gratification or soul-deadening or body-damaging results. While there is a sense of immediacy in some risk-taking, in most cases leaders are proposing something that is going to take to develop and mature; something that needs time to fly, perhaps crash but then fly again. Using flight as a metaphor for this type of risk-taking the Wright Brothers subjected themselves over and over again to some failures and tragedies before making history. They were both wildly irrational and took the long view.

Within the library world there are numerous examples. Fred Kilgour, in developing and launching OCLC as a shared cataloging utility, certainly saw both ups and down, but in the long-term OCLC became the largest bibliographic database in the world, and continues to grow. In 1994, Bill Bowen, President of the Andrew W Melon Foundation envisioned JSTOR as a way for university libraries to reclaim stack space from paper journals, by providing long-term secure digital access. Starting out small JSTOR has grown to a powerhouse in the scholarly world. It is one of the most common academic database and one of the few databases that most students can name. It provides access to more than 10 million academic journal articles, 50,000 books, and 2 million primary source documents in 75 discipline.

Radical projects are long-term efforts.

Don’t Listen To Dream Killers. Dream killers are probably the biggest problems in the world of risk takers. We’ve all encountered people on our staffs or at our universities who always see the glass as half-full or even only one-quarter full. For every new and interesting idea, they have a wide of reasons why it won’t work or why we shouldn’t do it or why they’re not willing to help with. While every good leader wants to have someone on staff who plays the role of asking hard questions, the glass-half-full people are sometimes difficult to overcome.

Throughout history, there have been people who have refused to listen to dream killers. Martin Luther King had a dream as did Rosa Parks. They were certainly subject to many naysayers but yet they did not give up. ALA’s Spectrum Scholarship program began as a dream by Dr. Betty J. Turock and Elizabeth Martinez and now more than 20 years later the program has helped hundreds of racial and ethnically diverse students achieve an MLIS degree and enter the library profession. Creating a sustainable scholarship program of the size and scope that Betty and Elizabeth envisioned was not without its challenges. Who would give enough money to make it happen and would it be sustainable? Big dreams and big dreamers look past the naysayers and do the impossible.

Learn From Making Mistakes, Rather Than Letting Mistakes Make You. Many times I’ve been asked in an interview about my biggest professional mistake and what I learned from it. While I won’t bore people with the details of what I consider my biggest mistake, it is something I learned from and what I learned shaped how I approached similar issues in my next position. Your biggest mistake is not learning from each and every mistake.

Learn To Deal With Your Fear Of Failure. Fear of failure is something that keeps most of us venturing beyond the ordinary. As a library leader, it not only behooves us to overcome our own fear of failure but to build a workplace culture that librarians and staff can be risk-takers. We must build a workplace culture that emboldens all staff to contribute at their full potential and to try new things and fail without penalty and to raise issues that need to be addressed without fear of repercussion or censure.

BE BOLD AND TAKE A RISK TODAY!

Libraries as Safe Spaces/Brave Spaces

In a recent job talk at an interview, I talked about the need to develop the library as a safe space/brave space. I framed this broadly to include the idea that all students should feel comfortable and at home in the library, and also that the library should foster difficult conversations that challenge our boundaries, our understanding of ourselves and others, and our racist and cultural basis. Certainly, a big challenge.

A review of the literature and the popular press will show that “safe space” and “brave space” are concepts that have been both widely promoted and widely disparaged. In some cases, people are using the same terms differently and in others, they push back against the concepts because they raise issues that we do not want to confront.

Several years ago, John Jay Ellison, Dean of Students, at University of Chicago, sent a letter to the incoming class of students stating that the University of Chicago does “not support so-called “trigger warnings,” we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual “safe spaces” where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own”.

Around the same time, Northwestern University’s president, Morton Schapiro, noted that experts tell him “that students don’t fully embrace uncomfortable learning unless they are themselves comfortable. Safe spaces provide that comfort. The irony, it seems, is that the best hope we have of creating an inclusive community is to first create spaces where members of each group feel safe.”

These two examples show “safe space” being used somewhat differently. I believe that John Jay Ellison is stating that coming to university is to enter a “brave space”; a space where one encounters ideas and people different from themselves, and navigating that space and growing culturally, intellectually, and socially is a type of bravery.

Safe spaces and brave spaces are terms that have been used in a variety of ways, specifically in Western countries. Safe spaces in the US grew out of the women’s movement and was later adapted and widely used in LGBTQ circles. In both cases the idea of safe space was to provide a space of intellectual and emotional safety; a place for individuals who were members of these communities can be themselves. First used in 2013 in a publication by Brian Arao and Kristi Clemens brave space was described as safely having difficulty and challenging dialogues in the classroom. I want to expand that idea from the classroom to the academic library.

When I speak of the idea of “Library as a safe space”,  I am not thinking of the library as an intellectual hiatus or intellectual milquetoast. Rather I’m thinking of the library as providing a space where individuals can be their own true selves. This would mean that Chinese or Hispanic students would feel free to speak their own language without castigation or language shaming. Muslim women would proudly wear an hijab and Muslim students would feel comfortable rolling out a prayer rug. Jewish students would comfortably wear a yarmulke or kippah. African American students would not hear racial slurs or be subject to any number of microaggressions. Native Americans, Asians, gay, lesbian, and trans students would feel accepted as equal members of the community. International students would feel welcome.

While “Library as safe space” may seem outside the realm of possibility, it is an ideal which we strive towards.

In order to get past the all too real racism, exclusion, privilege and cultural normativity that is Western society we must find ways to create dialogue and understanding and move beyond lip service to diversity and inclusion. I think the Library is perfectly poised to serve as a “brave space”; a space where difficult conversations around intellectually and culturally challenging ideas can happen. This will take the work of the community; not white people telling the story or concerns of the other but allowing those who have been marginalized and discriminated against to teach all of us. “We must build a community where “we really do need each other”.

If the library is truly to be this type of hub on campus then it must also wrestle with its own culpability in promoting a white heteronormative view of the world to the detriment of the many. The Library must be both a safe space and a brave space.