NextGen: Embracing My Authority

When I first started my current position as a reference and instruction librarian at Lafayette College, I was 29 and just out of graduate school. I had worked for six years as a successful public relations officer in New York City, but I was new to librarianship, and new to academia, and I would peer at the faces of the 18-year-olds as they straggled into the library and wonder: How would these students take me seriously?

For the first time, I had my own office (goodbye, cubicles!), and I was encouraged to arrange the furniture any way I pleased. So I chose the configuration I felt would convey the most authority and maybe even intimidate a student or two. I formed two rectangular desks into an L shape, with the longer part of the L taking up the width of my office. When students walked in, they saw me sitting behind an imposing desk, master of my domain. Atop my desk I placed an antique wooden sign bearing the word INFORMATION in big, bold letters.

As it turned out, I was more like Lucy in the Peanuts strip, offering psychiatric help at 5¢ a pop. Over the past three years, I've heard many student problems and not all of the reference kind.

One student dropped by to discuss her concerns about coming out as a lesbian. Another needed my company while she cleaned up a messy room in search of a centipede that had kept her up all night. Others have asked me to mediate conflicts, offer career advice, lend them my car, and write job recommendations. I've had students over to my house for dinner and study breaks. I have employed others as babysitters and dog-walkers. I even offered one a safe place to sleep when her living situation became difficult.

Sure, I'm trained as a librarian, but I've found that my role on this small residential campus extends far beyond helping students and faculty find scholarly books and articles. Without meaning to, I have become a role model to the students. Maybe because I am young, I'm the sort of authority figure with whom a lot of students (especially female students) feel comfortable sharing both personal and academic dilemmas.

The thing is, no one really prepared me for this part of my job. This has raised a lot of professional, as well as ethical, questions for me. How close can I get to students? Can we hug each other in greeting? If a student should confide in me the inappropriate behavior of a professor, am I obliged to report it?

In library school, I was prepped to pore over books, wrangle a reference interview, outsmart databases, and update web sites. But there was nothing my training could have done to assist me in navigating the personal and public aspects of librarianship.

I sometimes wish my college would do a better job of addressing the relationships between administrators, like myself, and students. Colleges are unusual places. Faculty and staff are encouraged to foster students' broad intellectual interests outside as well as inside the classroom, to receive students in their offices, and to take them out or invite them home for meals. Some of my most memorable experiences from my own college years took place in professors' homes. This is, in fact, one of the joys of academia, and of librarianship—to be able to take part in the shaping of young lives and minds.

But with that joy comes responsibility. For the most part, college students are still teenagers. They have strong ideals but lack practical sense. They want to experiment and be rebellious but don't always want to deal with the consequences of their actions. They shy away from conflict and ask others to step in and solve problems for them.

I may not feel much older than the average college student, but I recognize that my instincts are tempered by more life experience. I've been hired to multiple jobs, negotiated salaries, taken a landlord to small claims court, made decisions about my father's emergency surgery, gotten married, moved to various states, and completed graduate school. Almost two years ago, I gave birth to my first child.

The day I pushed my baby in his stroller for the first time, I saw my reflection in a passing window and marveled at my new role as mother. Suddenly, the question of how “grown up” I appeared to be was moot. The students on my campus had already invested me with authority. And my son, upon his birth, invested me with far more. All that remained was for me to embrace it from within.

So, I rearranged the furniture in my office. Students now find me not wielding my power from behind a big desk but seated at one of two areas designed for collaborative work and discussion. I continue to welcome students for all kinds of talks, but, now, I do so without trepidation about my age or experience. How far I've come in my three years of librarianship.