Last month, I posted to this blog the results of my study comparing the salaries of tenure-track law professors and law librarians who teach required, credit-bearing classes. The reaction was overwhelming; clearly, the proof that law librarians were underpaid – something many librarians had assumed for many years – hit a chord within the profession. Librarians across the country contacted me publicly and privately to express their shock (or lack thereof), their frustration, their personal anecdotes about being underpaid and struggling to make ends meet. Eventually, this culminated in an event hosted by the AALL Research Crits Caucus on Monday, February 28, to discuss the study and the pay disparity facing our profession. The event was held on Zoom and was not recorded. Below is a summary of high points in the discussion along with some of my thoughts in the week since.
Data Discussion
One of the central points of discussion was the data I’d collected, its implications, and suggestions for further research. For example, comparing faculty and librarian salaries isn’t necessarily comparing apples to apples because faculty are typically paid for nine months of work whereas librarians are year-round employees. Another point of comparison could be to law school administrators who don’t teach, like those in career or student services roles. It is not unlikely that, to some extent, law school faculty and staff salaries are linked to the elements of the U.S. News ranking scheme; those who work in bar prep might see higher salaries because the outcome of their work is tightly connected to the school’s bar pass rates, which in turn impact the school’s U.S. News rank.
Another suggestion was to consider the cost of living and specifically the average student loan debt of those in the study. Law schools are often in cities with higher costs of living, but law librarian salaries across the country are relatively equal. And academic law librarianship has a high cost of entry: an entire Master’s degree. Law librarians thus likely have higher-than-average amounts of student loan debt, making it even more difficult for them to survive on lower salaries and widening the gap between the law faculty and librarian salaries even more. Our profession seems to be in a minor hiring crisis, struggling to find librarians to fill open positions across the country (and struggling still to attract students and practicing attorneys to librarianship in the first place). Raising librarian salaries to at least make the career path comfortable for graduates with high debt burdens might be a worthwhile solution to consider.
There was much discussion around the role of gender in the salary disparities. Law librarianship is a “pink ghetto,” where mostly (white) female librarians are paid less and have less status than other members of the academy. One cannot help but wonder about the impact of a mostly-female workforce on salary decisions at institutions of higher learning. There is of course a racial factor, likely mirroring the United States workforce as a whole where women of color earn less than white women and men of all races.
Read full article at https://ripslawlibrarian.wordpress.com/2022/03/09/on-the-academic-librarian-pay-disparity/
