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Re: Article in Chronicle of Higher Ed



Friends and colleagues:

I have benefitted a lot from this discussion -- and frankly have been amazed by its restraint. I
just re-read the CHE article, wherein Lucy Young writes:

> When my supervisor evaluated my performance six months after I started, I
> proudly enumerated my accomplishments: I had designed and created
> photographic exhibits for our Reading Room, I had given a slide presentation on
> images of university women at the campus Women's Center, and my paper on our
> photographic collection had been accepted at a regional conference, all of which
> promoted our collections. After listening patiently, my boss let me know that,
> while he appreciated my efforts, they were irrelevant to my position. He
> commented that I had done a good job learning to catalog new photograph
> acquisitions and to process photographic-reproduction orders. All the "extras" that
> I did were only for my own enrichment. I gulped and stifled a scream.

If this report is accurate -- and I have no reason to doubt it -- then the root problem is not
academia, the archives profession, the library profession, the curatorial profession, the promotion
and tenure system, the graduate school system, or any other abstraction we have mentioned.

The problem is HIM!!! This one individual. Her boss. The a**hole who doesn't understand that those
accomplishments of hers really ARE accomplishments, and are worth a LOT to that university. Those
accomplishments are NOT irrelevant. His attitude toward them is. Lucy deserves a raise and her boss
deserves to be fired, if not drawn and quartered.

FWIW,

Eric

--

Eric v.d. Luft, Ph.D., M.L.S.
Curator of Historical Collections, Health Sciences Library
SUNY Upstate Medical University, Syracuse, NY 13210
<http://web.upstate.edu/lufte/> -- 315-464-4585
Listowner: ALHHS-L <http://web.upstate.edu/lufte/alhhs-l.html>
For e-mail pertaining to libraries, librarianship, or the history of
 medicine, please use <lufte@mail.upstate.edu> not <lufte@upstate.edu>
For all other e-mail, please use <gegensatz@alumni.bowdoin.edu>

"Be always sure you're right, then go ahead."
                                          -- Davy Crockett
                                [Autobiography, 1834, title page]

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