What's the Difference Gorman vs. Stripling?

There is a problem with the elections of the American Library Association (ALA). Voter "turnout" is so low that only 4,221 votes decided the incoming ALA president, and only 9,844 members cast ballots. ALA's enfranchised membership is getting close to 60,000. Unlike the electorate in national campaigns, which also suffer low turnout, ALA's voters don't even have to go out to the polls. Their ballots are delivered to them, and this year many members will be able to vote online. ALA leaders hope this new option will increase participation.

This report of interviews with the two candidates for ALA president is LJ's small contribution to the effort to get out the vote. It is our purpose to help answer the question: "What difference does it make how I vote in the ALA election?" It is by no means a definitive comparison of the candidates, Barbara Stripling, director of library programs at New Visions for Public Schools in New York City, and Michael Gorman, dean of library services at California State University, Fresno. They were more generous with their time than we can be with space here, but because they agree on many issues, we have chosen to focus on a few of the issues where the candidates differ, even disagree.

They talked of many excellent plans and discussed full platforms for what they intend to do as ALA president. Indeed, anyone interested can get full biographical details, platforms, and much more at each candidate's web site (Stripling: www.barbstripling.net; Gorman: mg.csufresno.edu ).

To begin, we'll consider one issue about which Stripling and Gorman have similar concerns. The two candidates agree in their optimism and fears about ALA's new online voting option.

"I'm a little worried. It looks complicated," Gorman says. "I hope we get an email telling us to click to a place to enter a membership number and we can go on. If that happens, the turnout will increase. If it is more difficult than that, it could drive away a lot of members. If people try and can't get in to vote, it could be a nightmare."

Equally concerned, Stripling says, "I'm not sure…. The underlying idea is wonderful. I've been distressed about the low number of people who vote in ALA elections. I'm a little nervous after comments from the ALA web advisory committee. They were reluctant, thinking that [online voting] is not quite ready. Some fear that the people who vote online may not understand the culture of ALA…. The reason people don't vote is that they don't know the candidates. We all try different ways to change that. I'm even using a [web log]."

While both favor using technology to extend ALA's reach to its members, they differ in approach and in the way they view the application of technology.

"I think things are changing," says Gorman. "The old ways are giving way to email lists and web sites. For an ALA campaign the web site is far more important than other things. That presence on the web is worth more than attendance at any number of conferences."

But Gorman has some doubts. "I'm not communicating on the web. I don't always think people's opinions are worth reading," he says. "They should not be published. I really like the filtering that publishers do. You don't publish maundering."

"Don't get me wrong," Gorman adds. "I'm for technology. I thought about a journal on my web site. I would stress that I am a strong believer in the intelligent use of modern technology. I'm also a strong believer in allowing technology to find its rightful place in the range of library services. I just think we've gone overboard with the hype."

"The online voting is not all we need to [give] ALA members," says Stripling. "We need to push out professional development, issue forums, and opportunities for interactive communication."

"Often library staff are not able to go to a conference," Stripling continues. "Why should members have to attend a conference to get value from the association? We ought to reach out to them and push out services. Yes, I know we have to remain financially viable. But we will be much stronger when we have stronger member involvement. We need to use technology to reach, to let our members understand what ALA is trying to do for them, what the issues are, how ALA can be helpful…. We need to extend ALA out to the members in every way we can."

"I did an awful lot of work on that," says Stripling, when asked why ALA turned down proposals to put its endowment in what is called socially responsible investing (SRI). "I began thinking that we ought to be able to do it. When we started, the available software was in its fledgling state. Our investment managers could not use the two main programs available at the time. The board decided that the screening criteria for ALA investing should match the values of the association. I felt good about that. You can choose either value-based or commodity-based screening. Typically, SRI is commodity based.… There are members of ALA who smoke, drink. There are military librarians in ALA. Commodity-based screening would seem to speak against some of our members.

"For value-based screening, we looked closely at diversity, human rights, and the environment as criteria….," Stripling goes on. "We looked at every quantifiable criterion, and we found that most companies are such conglomerates that when the screens were applied, even with a soft touch in areas like the environment, they knocked out a huge amount of our portfolio. In one case it was 66 percent.

Stripling's saga of the work of the committee gets detailed. "People said just invest in TIAA-CREF, which is a socially responsible fund. It is mostly bonds, and our investment portfolio strategy is more diverse. That didn't match the way ALA is trying to meet its fiduciary responsibility. It got extremely complicated, and every scenario we tried ended up knocking out more than ten percent of our portfolio. Our investment advisors said that if a screen knocked out more than ten percent, we would suffer financially. We had asked the investment managers to buy according to our values…. I was surprised that so much of the portfolio would be knocked out…. For example, any company that has anything to do with China would be knocked out under human rights…. We told the Executive Board that we could not figure out how to do it…."

Stripling went on to describe attempts to find mutual funds to meet the criteria. "There were no mutual funds that were value based," she says. At Midwinter the board decided to try SRI with some $200,000 of ALA funds. "We'll tell people that we can't do it with our entire portfolio, but now we'll have a basis to compare."

"That is absolutely bull, complete bull," says Gorman. "They say you can only do it through mutual funds, and ALA doesn't invest in them.... They think that all ALA should do is maximize whatever profits it can. I proposed, and I thought the Executive Board went along, that the evaluation of all these investment advisors, these brokers they appoint, should be made in part based on their social responsibility. We give you this money, show us which portfolios you have invested in. I don't believe their explanation.

"ALA's investments must be made transparent to our members. They should know which areas we invest in and which companies so that they can be challenged. We need an open, transparent challenge process."

"The $200,000 is a start," says Gorman, "unless it is rigged to show that ALA can't invest that way. I think procedural arguments are being used to mask a political stance. They always ask how I know our members believe in it. I've known tens of thousands of librarians, and it is the rare individual who doesn't believe in investing ALA's money in a socially responsible way."

Both candidates favor change in library education but with dramatic differences in their approach and in the result they favor. "The fundamental problem is that the core faculty in most library schools are not interested in teaching librarians," Gorman asserts. "They are interested in other things like information science. When we get applicants for our library jobs we have to check to see which courses they have taken. Just having an MLS or MLIS or one of these other degrees doesn't mean anything. You might find you have a graduate who has taken four courses on JavaScript and no courses on cataloging.

"Clearly the Congress on Professional Education didn't work," Gorman says as he warms to the subject. "The product has not been successful. We can't even agree on core values or core competencies. I plan to meet with Ken Haycock, the incoming president of ALISE, to try to set up a working conference to develop a national agenda for library education and the schools.

"I would like an event that isn't just another gabfest, a conference that comes up with ways to reform library education," Gorman adds. "We must think innovatively about such questions as: Do library schools have to be in research universities? Why couldn't they be housed in major urban public libraries? These questions are worth thinking about. The information scientists tell us they have to meet the expectations of their institutions. 'I'm sorry,' they say, 'I'm not interested in cataloging, I have to study business taxonomy.'"

Gorman sees library education reform as a top priority for ALA because the profession is aging. "We just have to have a diverse group of younger people coming into this profession," Gorman states. "Trying to disguise this by telling them to go to library school to get a job not working in libraries is not a positive way to go."

"I hope that the MLS holds up for us," says Stripling. "It is a strength that our association recognizes two pathways as the first degree, the MLS and the NCATE-accredited degree. I see real pressures on library educators. Schools are closing, they are asked to show a profit and a certain number of students. This means we need to recruit heavily, but we must work with library educators to make sure that there are schools available. Once we recruit people we've got to have a place for them to go.

"The new certification program builds on the professional degrees, so it will strengthen library education programs," Stripling asserts. "They will be the providers and that works better if some of them deliver that education online for some classes. It is important for certification programs to be equitably available. This might provide a way for established LIS programs to provide certification without having to come up with class sites and times or seats."

"When ALA speaks out for our underlying values, for the First Amendment, for the right to confidential access to information, it comes across very well to the public. What doesn't come across well is when we speak about the politics, or get embroiled in political issues without rooting it in the fundamental values and why we feel the way we do," Stripling says, asked about public reaction to ALA's opposition to filtering and the Patriot Act. "As long as we keep rooting back into our fundamental values I think the general public response will be more favorable."

"It is easy for me, I'm surrounded by colleagues who agree with me," says Gorman. "If I were the only school librarian in Boron California where the morons of Boron are going to ban Catcher in the Rye, they would fire me. We don't show any sympathy for the real-world issues that many people in rural small libraries face. We should have helped them develop ways to cope, and we should have explained over and over again that filters don't work. We should have said we'd look at ways to protect children, but the rights of adults should never be infringed. That would have put the filterers on the defensive."

It is important to look for more about these candidates and their positions on many other issues facing the profession. For example, Gorman expressed deep concern that the ALA Washington Office was out of control and needs "to be much more in the business of taking orders." He fears that current efforts to come up with a new model for scholarly communication have overlooked the fact that you can't support such efforts selling one use of one article at a time. "Maybe we'll have to subsidize the process," he says.

Stripling is concerned about the "siloization" of ALA and the inability of ALA's divisions and units to work together or even communicate. "I'd like to be in that role of someone who is not in the middle of any effort, looking at the overview, to make the needed connections." She focused on working to "value the diversity of expertise within ALA and the diversity of viewpoints."

We've only touched an a very few of the many issues discussed in these interviews. The questions selected—SRI, library education, and ALA's uses of technology—are important, but both candidates have strong platforms for ALA's strategic planning.

Michael Gorman and Barbara Stripling are strong candidates, and ALA will have strong, committed hands whoever wins.