The Australian Library Journal

Pressure points

A recent unpleasant rumour suggests that an iconic Australian school of library and information studies is about to close, following that at the University of Canberra into oblivion. The reasons did not come with the rumour, but one can speculate. The primary cause probably has little to do with the school itself, its courses, the quality of its graduates, the market for them; nor its staff. The reasons for the closure lie elsewhere: opportunism, perhaps as a cohort of the school's academic staff reaches retiring age, and with continuous funding pressures, few VCs or deans would pass up such an opportunity.

Many courses in LIS have vanished by these means: but we are not a particular target. All academic institutions - or at least the publicly-funded ones - are currently on a fiscal hiding to nothing. The historian of Australian tertiary institutions over the half century since 1955 will have an extraordinary spectrum of events and policy reversals to draw upon. The range of courses in subjects once considered seminal in the arts or the sciences and which now verge on extinction by closure, amalgamation or re-badging, is astonishing. Physics? Classics? Indonesian? Italian?

There is no pattern and only an ad hoc rationale within and between institutions for these closures: no attempt to distribute the effects rationally, or to consider national needs, now or in the future. In a short historical space of time we will be crying out for, or importing from other less prosperous countries, probably more in need of them than we are, experts in a great many fields, options for study in which have been contracted to vanishing point in this country by governments devoid of imagination or a horizon more distant than that of the next election.

The implications of the disarray of our universities and the closures of LIS schools as distinct from the immediate impact on the educators, are imponderable. Although there has been some criticism of LIS education from within the profession due to the extraordinary volatility of the workplace, the rash of school closures has not been so rational as to be due to any perceived disconnection between preparation for the profession or its practice, or between the profession and the occupational environment. In fact it has shown an extraordinary capacity - or at least its individual members have - for adaptation, that evolutionary necessity - and the exploitation of niches. Not a few of us have gone further, and under fiscal, organisational and technological pressure have mutated.

There are some begged questions here, the most critical arising from the nature of the 'profession'. In some occupations - law is an obvious example, the necessity to evolve due to external pressures, has been less urgent. Technology has certainly been affective in the legal field, but its application there has been to enhance the ways in which the 'letter of the law' is stored, accessed and applied. The fundamental processes of the profession remain what they have been for centuries: the existence and cumulation of a body of law which is the core resource of the profession; its moral qualities and the issues which arise from consideration of them; the precedents - the various ways in which the law has been interpreted and applied; the structure of the fields into which law actively divides and applies itself, and its literature - by which I mean works on the law and its implications and practice, rather than studies in the law.

One might argue that the law is closer to the centre of human affairs than the profession/s which we follow. Medicine is the same. They thus are perhaps less pressed to justify their existence than we are. At least it might be argued so: but closer consideration suggests that both law and medicine are under pressures which may be at least as significant as those to which we are subjected. Walk into any GP's surgery: wander through any large hospital: talk to anyone who labours in the treadmills of the large law partnerships, and observe the processes in any LIS environment - and you will begin to be aware of a common phenomenon - which can be spelled out in a single word - pressure.

Once upon a time the term was applied to the purely physical environment - atmospheric pressure; hydraulic pressure; steam pressure, and was assessable in relatively simple quantitative terms - 'units' of pressure. But my Chambers Dictionary hardly touches on these physical aspects: what it says about pressure is couched largely in sociological terms: coercion; the need to perform a great deal at speed; tension, strain or stress; cause of anxiety, urgency; a strong demand. A very familiar outcome is the need 'to do more with less'. Less what? Less time? Less money? Fewer colleagues? Fewer LIS schools? But this mantra does not stand up to close examination: few mantras do. What, for example, is the more? Who determines it? How? For academics: more students? More contact hours? More published, refereed 'research'? For service staff: more queries answered? More shifts worked? More client interviews?

How can a reasonable level of education or service be sustained in such circumstances? The notion of 'more with less' is a logical fallacy, a piece of double-speak to conceal the conscience-less posturings of policy-makers, media mediocrities and the generally amoral agendas of large entities - corporations, universities, businesses. The phrase usually means 'more for us and less for you', us being the executives, the directors, the institutional shareholders and the you the employee, the small shareholder, the line manager. I have a friend who is a chef: his salary is around $100 000 a year, which sounds good, until you work out his hourly rate. In the restaurant business as in many other workplaces, the more means more hours worked, more meals plated: the less a brutal and inhumane curtailment of the individual private life.

For you simply cannot do more with less: at the start of a cycle, there may well be efficiencies which can be achieved: it's like deciding to economise on household expenses by eating out of the freezer and the store cupboard: the quality of the food is immediately reduced, but you can do it for a while. Eventually though, the reserves run out: it's like that in the workplace. People can only give so much, do so much before intellectual and physical exhaustion sets in. Why does the film They shoot horses, don't they? come to mind?

In this issue Marina Garlick and a small group of his friends remember Allan Horton with affection. He was one of the more colourful characters in an interesting era, and he possessed that increasingly rare, now almost extinct quality, a social conscience. Today he would be called 'Old Labor'. We also resume the publication of award citations, with Dr Marianne Broadbent's Fellowship citation, and John Dwight's for the Redmond Barry. David Jones takes us back in time for a tantalising glimpse at the foundations of the Free Library Movement in NSW almost seventy years ago. Kim Moody points the censorship finger at...us, while Peter Pierre gives post-modernism a touch of the digit. Jodi Johnstone enters a forthright plea for the employment of the disabled in Queensland academic libraries, and Candy Hillenbrand also takes the stick to the post-modernists. Must be something in the water: but it's refreshing to see some serious philosophical discussion on our current position. Whatever it is. Book reviews get a bit short-changed this issue. Apologies all round.