Guest Column
UTEP Library in Receivership: Racism Still a Factor in Top Hires
- The paucity of Hispanics in the top rungs of the university’s administration exposes the plantation mentality of the institution. The wonder is that the His-panic community of El Paso puts up with it. For more than four decades now the activist Chicanos of El Paso have sought to change that situation, but to no avail. Cuando?
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- Dr. Felipe de Ortego y Gasca, Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of English Language and Literature Texas State University System--Sul Ross [English, Linguistics, Journalism, Information Studies, Bilingual Education, Chicano Studies]
- Dean Emeritus, Hispanic Leadership Institute, Arizona State University
- Chair Emeritus, The Hispanic Foundation, Washington, DC
- Visiting Scholar and Lecturer in English and Bilingual Studies Texas A&M University—Kingsville
- Dr. Ortego is husband of the female Hispanic finalist. He is professor emeritus of English, Texas State University System– Sul Ross and currently Visiting Scholar and Lecturer in English at Texas A&M University–Kingsville.
- E-mail: p-ortego@tamuk.edu or felipeo@usawide.net
- Copyright ©2005 by the author. All rights reserved.
By Felipe de Ortego y Gasca
In a surprise move on August 16, 2005, the administration at the University of Texas at El Paso announced that it had selected an interim director for the university library since none of the three finalists recruited by Greenwood and Associates for the position were acceptable to the administration. As interim director of the university library, the administration selected a previous director of distance education at UT El Paso who does not have a Master’s of Library Science degree and is not a career librarian. It appears he is a retired white male university administrator from California living in El Paso with the aforementioned ties to the university and a cozy friendship with the Vice President under whom the library fits organizationally. At UT El Paso, the intermediary between the library and the Academic VP/Provost’s office is a VP for Information Resources and Planning with little working knowledge of con-temporary academic libraries. The Library Director reports to him because there seemed to be no other place in which to fit the library organizationally. This anomalous organization is not the practice of academic institutions nationally. These shenanigans anent the UTEP Library smack of cronyism at its worst, appointing loyal hacks who possess no relevant qualifications whatsoever. This is like putting termites in charge of maintaining the house.
The barest library qualification the interim director has is that he was once interim director of the library in a California college for 9 months pending selection of a finalist. This action on the part of the UTEP administration is tantamount to placing the UTEP library in receivership. This is like selecting an engineer to administer the Fine Arts department pending selection of a Fine Arts chairman.
More than anything else, this situation at UT El Paso underscores how little the administration knows about libraries and their centrality in the academic matrix and, also, the scant regard the administration has for librarians and their profession, the inference being that the job of librarians is to stamp and check out books–that’s it!
But libraries have come a long way from that 19th and early 20th century stereotype. From their very ancient beginning, libraries were more than just repositories of books where librarians stamped and checked out books. In actuality, librarians established collection guidelines, a classification system, user policies, ascertained literacy levels of the service community in order to promote readership constituencies, and myriad other considerations.
In a fairly recent ACRL (Academic College and Research Libraries) conference, I pointed out in a presentation the kinds of ligatures required between academic instructors and librarians, paramount ligatures for planning and development of academic pro-grams and/or courses, pointing out the critical role of librarians in those transactions. Librarians are a critical support element of academic planning and development. Far too many universities seem to have lost sight of that consideration. That’s why in most exception-ally well-managed universities directors of academic libraries are part of the academic council and not an isolated appendage to an information unit at consider-able remove from academic discourse. For these reasons, a university library needs an experienced director whose expertise is in the field.
The three finalists for the position of library director at UT El Paso had been screened by a recruiting firm with solid credentials in academic "head-hunting." The three finalists were all directors of academic libraries with considerable experience in the field. The most qualified was a Hispanic female with a Ph.D. in Library and Information Studies and 13 years of experience as an academic library director in two comprehensive state universities. The other two finalists–a male and a female– were Anglos with less experience than the Hispanic female. In a bilingual/bicultural city like El Paso, the Hispanic female, a native of the community, was both bilingual and bicultural and had accumulated an array of awards for her professional leadership.
Unconfirmed scuttlebutt had it that the president of the university was looking for an innovator while the VP for Information Resources and Planning wanted a manager. The Hispanic female finalist would have satisfied both considerations as innovator and manager. Yet despite the fact that the Hispanic female finalist had been recipient of a rare Silver Award from the National Commission on Library and Information Sciences for her contributions to the field, she was characterized by some members of the library staff– mostly Anglos–as singularly lackluster. She is the only Hispanic and the only Texan thus far to receive that award. And she continues to be, as she has for the last 13 years, the only Hispanic to head an academic library in a Texas state college or university. Her professional experience includes being one of the founding indexers of the Chicano Periodical Index, a critical bibliographic tool in identifying Chicano materials for library acquisitions and collections. Moreover, she was one of the nurturing librarians of the Mexican American archives at the Benson Latin American Library of the University of Texas at Austin. She was also one of the founders of the trans-national US-Mexico Foro of Librarians, and a founding member of the TexShare Commission. She’s a Tejana with long commercial roots in the El Paso community.
Also unconfirmed is the division in the library director search committee between those who favored the Anglo male or female and those who favored the Hispanic female. It seems that the better course of action in this case, per the administration, was to select an unqualified candidate with 9 months experience in the field in preference to a qualified candidate, regardless of the appointment period and regardless of the job description it had circulated. It’s not likely that another search is going to turn up a diversity candidate as qualified as the Hispanic female of this go-round. The situation engenders suspicion that the female Hispanic finalist was ditched on both gender and ethnic grounds. But Hispanic females have had to contend with that double whammy all the time.
There’s a twisted logic in the appointment of the interim library director at UT El Paso. Why is it preferable to have someone with such extremely limited library experience as interim director of the university library than to give the most qualified finalist a shot at the challenge? Despite the apparent ethnic bias, this appointment underscores the perception that anyone can direct a library or that there is something rotten in Denmark. By all accounts, the outgoing director fell fall short of the standards established for the new director. Where does this put the interim director?
As an alumnus of the university (BA 1959, MA 1966) I am appalled by the shenanigans and intransigence of my alma mater. This whole situation is so patently racist that it boggles the mind. What distresses me more, however, is the institutional disregard for the library and its staff. More importantly, where is the American Library Association in this matter, especially since the president of the American Library Association was a member of the search committee? Where is the Texas Library Association’s outrage? Where is the Southern Association of Colleges? Where is LULAC? It is said that the unexamined life accrues what it deserves. In this case, the university and the El Paso community do not deserve what they are getting. To date, the Hispanic female finalist has not received a notification letter of her non-selection or thanks for participating as a candidate in the search.
It should be noted that in the entire history of the University of Texas at El Paso there has never been a Hispanic director of the library despite the significant number of Hispanics who have comprised the student body there over the years. By its own statistics, the university touts its student enrollment as 82 percent U.S. Hispanics (principally Mexican Americans) and 10 percent Mexican national students for a total of 92 percent Hispanic. The University is a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) and does indeed graduate a higher percentage of Hispanic students than other HSIs.
At the top rungs of the university administration– Deans, VP’s and higher–Hispanics are a rarity. In the 35 years since the Chicano "uprisings" on campus" this situation has improved little. To date there has not been one Hispanic president of the University of Texas at El Paso, despite the fact that at a number of other UT campuses there are Hispanic presidents. The cur-rent president of the University of Texas at El Paso has a Hispanic sounding name, but she is an Anglo.
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