Editorial: Is LIS Competition Healthy?

Ken Haycock started it. The Professor and outgoing director of the School of Library and Information Science (SLIS) at San José State University (SJSU), CA, severed the relationship between the school and the California Library Association (CLA). At issue was an agreement between CLA and Drexel University Online's I School (slis.notlong.com).

Drexel has partnered with library groups all over the United States, but Haycock feels that in addition to neglecting his students, CLA allowed Drexel to invade SJSU's California turf, breaking a perceived CLA promise not to do so. Everyone knows the SJSU SLIS has the largest enrollment of any U.S. or Canadian LIS program. It is a totally online enrollment.

Let's hope it was just a hissy fit or an angry parting shot, not the opening salvo in future battles for turf in library education. After the rhetoric, the issues were quickly deconstructed and debated by the always vocal contingent of LIS faculty fogies on the JESSE discussion list (Open Lib/Info Sci Education Forum, listserv.utk.edu). The most important concerns got only cursory comment in those debates.

I call the Haycock statement a “parting shot” because he retires from SJSU this month to return to his native Canada. SJSU has no grounds for complaint. It is the most aggressive and invasive program on the continent. This growth was engineered by Haycock, a very competitive entrepreneur on many fronts. Competitive invasions of any program's traditional “turf,” while always criticized by the invaded program, do not violate any rule or ethical principle with which I'm familiar.

Many of the debating faculty say the “competition” strengthens all LIS programs. I'm not so sure. It certainly didn't help some of the strongest, most distinguished programs—at the University of Chicago, Columbia, Case-Western Reserve, Southern Cal, Oregon, and a few others—which were surely strong enough to compete but not to survive. Competition didn't kill them, but competitive brawn didn't save them.

The details of the dispute between SJSU and CLA are less important than the larger questions raised by the episode. The profession needs to determine definitively whether totally online programs are qualitatively different from face-to-face on-site programs or those that are a blend of both. We need more study of the real educational limitations of each method of delivery. Programs like Drexel's and SJSU's, which require no face-to-face contact with fellow students or faculty nor any visits to a physical library or campus, obviously vary from the many traditional LIS programs. We should know whether the resulting credential (degree) is equally “good” from both experiences or better from one than from the other, and what, if any, are the differences.

I am frequently told that online teaching is more work for the faculty, requires more “output” from the students, and is, thus, more “rigorous.” I'm not convinced that “output” has the richness of classroom interaction.

There is little data about whether the kind of competition for enrollment represented in the California turf war makes for better or worse LIS programs. We need to know if wide-open, marketplace-style competition for “customers” bolsters LIS programs. We know, at least, that it doesn't help us find jobs for graduates or reduce the apparent oversupply of the degreed.

The questions I ask reveal my own biases. We need some restraint on the invasion of one LIS program's geographic or specialty territory by another. While some programs are richer in some areas than others, the marketplace is not the most trustworthy place to learn about variations in quality. Competing advertising and marketing claims will not improve LIS education nor the credential it delivers.