Path to the Stacks

Or, Wait, I Can Do What With My Degree?

Graduate school at a large research university exposes one to the peculiar variety of faculty temperaments found at an institution where the phrase “publish or perish” is bandied about over coffee. On the one hand, it brings in excellent faculty, trotting around waving their Ivy league doctorates, their prestigious awards, fellowships, committees, obligations, and, in a few cases, demanding entourages. There’s the group that loves to research their field, and resent having to teach at all. There’s the group who loves to teach, and is annoyed by the pressure to publish profusely or be replaced. And largely, there’s a group trying frantically to balance it all and have a real life, too, you know, one with a mortgage and kids and a lawn to mow and maybe the time to see a movie once in a while.

In the perfect world, grad students are expertly trained in their field of study and properly prepared for a career path, whatever the path may be in their chosen field. Choosing a career path is dependent on student motivation, and also on advisor willingness to make the student aware of options they may be overlooking. And this particular balance has been the subject of freak-outs by those in the archival profession for decades. Research and presentations on the subject of archival awareness and training date back at least 40 years in the trade journals, such as the Journal of American Archivists. Who are these students? How many are there? Are there enough to support and expand the field as people retire? Are they getting the right education to be ready for employment without too much investment on the part of their employers? Do they even know that the archival profession exists and is a viable option? How do we recruit more? Etc.

If (sigh) only (alas) those were the problems nowadays. Budget cuts have closed archival training programs at major universities (and for that matter, at least one also suspended its history teaching & certification program, creating a history-major crisis among students and setting the stage for an entirely new set of problems in the future [No history teachers!]). Archives themselves have been the subject of enormous cuts across the country. Some close, some dissolve, some are “restructured” into nonexistence or folded into sister institutions or libraries that are also facing red tape. Now the opposite problems face the archival profession – too many cuts, not enough money, a too-tight job market, no hope, general despair, and the concerning problem of what will happen to these priceless documents if all the archives are gone.