August 11, 2024

President Michael V. Drake
Office of the President
University of California
1111 Franklin St., 12th Floor
Oakland, CA 94607

Delivered via Email to: michael.drake@ucop.edu

Dear President Drake,

The Council of University of California Faculty Associations (CUCFA) is an independent faculty advocacy organization representing Academic Senate faculty from all ten campuses. We represent faculty on employment and welfare conditions, academic freedom, and shared governance. As such, we expect to be consulted on any significant changes in the academic status of UC academic appointees such as the UC Librarians.

We want to ensure that UC libraries continue to meet the needs of the UC research community. This necessitates acknowledging the unique expertise of librarians, who engage with their work as academics, including research. Their research takes on many different shapes and forms, such as the controlled vocabularies and tools used to describe collections, how to navigate copyright and licensing content that supports the needs of researchers, and developing pedagogical information literacy frameworks to support instruction of library resources. Librarians are at the forefront of research on everything from AI and digital archiving to international open-access efforts.

The University of California has repeatedly stated during the current contract negotiations that librarians do not engage in research, even though this has been a part of the definition of UC librarians since Clark Kerr first made them academic appointees in the 1960s. Now, the University wants to update the definition of librarians through an update of the APM 360. It serves no one to deprofessionalize librarians by denying them the ability to serve as PIs on research grants.

Recognizing the role of UC librarians as academic appointees who conduct research makes them equivalent to librarians at UC’s peer institutions. After finishing my doctoral work at Berkeley, I saw the great benefits of this academic role for librarians when I took up my first tenure-track position at the University of Illinois-Urbana/Champaign. At UIUC, librarians hold tenure-track positions and engage in research with other UI faculty members and external researchers. We knew that the UI librarians intimately understood our research needs and how to secure available resources because they were themselves researchers. UI’s respect for librarians contrasts with that of other universities that have eroded the role of librarians as academics, such as Texas A&M, as part of the larger trend of deprofessionalizing academics.

UC-AFT Librarians have been in contract negotiations with the University of California since November 2023. UC must recognize librarians for their role as subject matter experts and professionals to ensure that the university can fulfill its mission of supporting independent research and knowledge creation. We are better than Texas!

Sincerely,
Constance Penley
President, Council of University of California Faculty Associations
Professor Emerita, UCSB Department of Film and Media Studies

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