LSU changes tenure rules for librarians to improve its research rankings

The LSU Library sits in the middle of campus on Monday, March 20, 2023, in Baton Rouge, La. (Matthew Perschall for Louisiana Illuminator)

As LSU makes its bid for membership in a prestigious academic organization, its librarians have been put on notice to publish more research.

In a meeting last week for all librarians in the university system, LSU administrators informed them their campuses would not hire any more tenure-track librarians and that those on the tenure track or with tenure would have one year to decide if they want to maintain their status and publish more often. Several librarians in the meeting shared details from the discussion with the Illuminator.

The changes are part of LSU’s bid to join the American Association of Universities (AAU), a group of 71 premiere research institutions in the United States and Canada.

To join the association, LSU has to significantly increase its research spending, faculty awards, books published and the number of times its research is cited among other academics.

LSU lags significantly behind AAU institutions in citations, with member organizations being cited an average of 208 times per faculty member in a five-year period. LSU’s average citation count per faculty member in the same period was 82, according to a report LSU’s Office of Data and Strategic Analysis formulated.

Few AAU institutions offer tenure to librarians, Haggerty said. However, most other universities in Louisiana, including the University of Louisiana Lafayette, the only other top-tier research institution in the state, provide librarians with a tenure track.

Proponents note that tenure for librarians can play a key role in preserving their academic freedom in an era when libraries and librarians are increasingly under attack.

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LSU Provost Roy Haggerty said the university isn’t increasing the requirements for librarians, but rather holding them to their job descriptions, which generally require that 15% of their job is research-related.

“It’s not appropriate for librarians to receive tenure,” Haggerty said. “The purpose here, really, is to improve or really add integrity through our … tenure process and for teaching and research faculty.”

“You can’t have a research university without an excellent library,” Haggerty added.

The new plan for librarians is in line with the LSU System’s plan to use the combined weight of all of its institutions to bolster the data it puts forward for AAU consideration.

When asked why LSU’s librarians are not currently meeting that threshold, Haggerty said it was a matter of academic tradition.

“The culture of a library is typically not focused around the production of knowledge,” Haggerty said. “It’s focused around the culture of creating access to knowledge.”

Haggerty said there is not a specific number of publications librarians will be required to meet, but they will instead be measured on the quality of their work, which he added their peers ultimately decide.

Librarians will be invited to participate in writing or rewriting system policies to reflect the new changes.

Tenure changes are not being considered for any other faculty within the LSU System, Haggerty said.

“The purpose of this is to strengthen tenure by increasing the integrity of the way in which we measure teaching and scholarship,” Haggerty said. “So there’s no consideration whatsoever of changing it for the rest of our faculty. Nor would I allow any consideration.”

This is not the first time a university has sought to boost its AAU citation numbers by making changes in its libraries.

Before the University of Nebraska was voted out of the AAU in 2011, it searched for areas of improvement and determined its inclusion of library faculty in its total faculty count put it out of step with other universities.

A document detailing the school’s membership review said this practice resulted in an over-count of tenured and tenure-track faculty and harmed its rankings.

Haggerty said he was aware of this, but that it had not come up when the university was deciding how to proceed with its own changes to librarian tenure.

LSU’s librarians who give up their tenure or go off the tenure track will not take a pay cut, Haggerty said. They will be offered three-year contracts after their third year at the university.

LSU will have to make other vast improvements to attain AAU membership, which is by invitation only.

In 2022, LSU ranked 84th overall with $345 million spent on research according to the National Science Foundation. The NSF, an independent federal agency, tracks research and development expenditures at American universities to compile its annual rankings. The NSF rating for LSU includes the main campus, the LSU Ag Center and the Pennington Biomedical Research Center, all based in Baton Rouge. The university hopes to combine all of the system research spending to join the top 50 universities in this metric.

By comparison, the 50th-ranked institution, the University of Colorado Boulder, spent $611 million on research in the same period.

But according to a National Science Foundation spokesperson, LSU can’t fuse together all of its campuses into a single slot to improve its research rankings.

“Each campus with its own chancellor, president or similar head is considered its own institution, a categorization established in 2010 … That allows for more comparable data between private institutions and multi-campus state institutions,” the spokesperson said. “We approach the Louisiana State system as we approach all state systems, per those parameters.”

Even if LSU were able to do so, other university systems are likely to follow suit, erasing any ranking advantage LSU gained.

LSU faculty will also have to nearly double the number of books published annually to catch up with AAU institutions and triple the average number of awards, fellowships and academic organization memberships per faculty member.

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