skynesher/E+/Getty Images
Bryn Geffert’s recent essay in Inside Higher Ed arguing that academic libraries should look beyond the master of library science degree in hiring raises important questions about hiring practices and the evolving skill needs of academic libraries. But it ultimately presents a false choice between professional education and specialized expertise.
No mature profession expects its foundational degree to provide every competency a practitioner will need throughout an entire career. Medicine offers an obvious comparison. A medical degree alone does not prepare someone to be a neurosurgeon, oncologist or pediatrician. Law school does not produce specialists in every area of legal practice. Rather, these degrees provide a shared body of knowledge, ethical grounding, professional identity and conceptual framework upon which specialization is built through experience, continuing education, advanced study and practice.
Librarianship has historically functioned in much the same way. The M.L.S. was never designed to produce experts in every emerging area of library work. Instead, it provides grounding in information organization, metadata, information behavior, preservation, access, collection development, intellectual freedom, privacy, information ethics and research methods. These are not incidental skills. They are the foundational principles that distinguish librarianship as a profession rather than a collection of technical tasks.
The central challenge of the 21st century is not information scarcity but information excess. Every day, people encounter an overwhelming volume of content: posts, videos, articles, advertisements, algorithmic recommendations, synthetic media and AI-generated text. Most of it arrives without context, hierarchy or clear indicators of authority. Librarianship exists to transform this abundance into something usable. Through organization, metadata, curation, preservation, classification and information literacy, librarians help people move from undifferentiated content to information, and from information toward knowledge and understanding.
The Methodological Problems
Before engaging Geffert’s six reasons for why academic libraries should not require the M.L.S. in hiring, it is worth understanding what his research shows. Geffert surveyed top library officials at R-1 and R-2 universities. His respondents are exclusively senior administrators, a population with structural incentives to favor hiring flexibility over professional standardization. He did not survey rank-and-file librarians, who bear the direct professional consequences of credential erosion. He did not survey library school faculty, who have direct knowledge of what M.L.S. programs teach in line with accrediting standards. He did not survey the faculty and students libraries serve. His question asking whether it is “prohibitively difficult” to hire librarians if searches are limited to M.L.S. candidates is leading—the word “prohibitively” primes respondents toward agreement.
His in-depth interviews, which generate the richest and most quotable material in both his book and Inside Higher Ed piece, were conducted exclusively at M.L.S.-optional libraries. Of course, the people he interviewed who opted to hire non-M.LS. librarians are going to stand by their decision: It’s standard cognitive dissonance, or, more specifically, postpurchase rationalization. Geffert never systematically interviewed administrators at mandatory-M.L.S. institutions to understand their lived experiences or their reasoning. He presents findings from this narrow slice of academic librarianship as if they apply to the profession broadly.
Geffert’s 6 Reasons
- Library school graduates lack the skills research libraries need.
Geffert leads with administrator complaints that M.L.S. programs are not producing graduates with skills in STEM, data science, digital scholarship, geographic information systems, computational methods and other areas. This criticism appears consistently enough in his survey data that it must be taken seriously. The problem identified is that M.L.S. programs may not be preparing graduates for every specialization current library work might require. But that is a curriculum question, not an argument against the credential itself, any more than a shortage of neurosurgeons would be an argument against the medical degree.
The information environment is evolving too rapidly for any degree program to encompass every specialized skill a library may require, whether that degree is an M.L.S. or a humanities Ph.D. Indeed, if librarians are being asked to navigate increasingly complex information ecosystems, steward research data, support digital scholarship, evaluate algorithmic systems and help communities understand emerging technologies, then the need for professional preparation has grown rather than diminished. No mature profession responds to new demands by abandoning its educational foundation. Medicine did not eliminate medical school when genomics transformed health care. Law did not abandon legal education when digital privacy, cybersecurity and artificial intelligence reshaped the legal landscape. Instead, these professions expanded curricula, developed new specialties and strengthened pathways for continuing education. Librarianship should do the same.
- The M.L.S. imposes “a narrow disciplinary mandate” that other fields don’t impose.
Geffert compares librarianship to interdisciplinary academic fields that hire faculty from across the disciplinary spectrum, arguing that the M.L.S. mandate is an anomaly librarianship imposes on itself for no good reason. The comparison misunderstands what kind of credential the M.L.S. is. Other academic fields hire subject-matter experts to teach and research within their own subjects; a religion department hiring a sociologist makes sense because sociology is a legitimate disciplinary approach to religious phenomena. That is not the situation librarianship is in. A better comparison is to professions with a shared foundational credential, as described above, rather than to a single interdisciplinary academic department.
- Administrators who have hired non-M.L.S. librarians believe they make good librarians.
- And they would hire them again.
Geffert presents these as two separate reasons, but they are one piece of evidence counted twice. Both rest on the same weak foundation: People who make decisions tend to believe those decisions were correct, particularly when the decision was controversial and is now the basis of a published study that they agreed to participate in. This is a well-documented pattern in decision psychology, sometimes called choice-supportive bias or postdecisional rationalization. Geffert surveys administrators who engaged in non-M.L.S. hiring, finds they support non-M.L.S. hiring and presents this as evidence that non-M.L.S. hiring works. The circularity is hard to miss.
What would constitute evidence? Longitudinal data measuring library service quality or research support effectiveness before and after credentialing changes. Comparative studies of M.L.S. and non-M.L.S. librarians performing the same roles. Systematic data on failed non-M.L.S. hires, not just successful ones. None of this exists in Geffert’s research. He himself concedes in the book that no rigorous qualitative measure of librarian effectiveness exists, which means the satisfaction data he leans on tells us almost nothing about whether these hires served students and faculty better.
The article also evaluates librarianship largely through the lens of institutional staffing needs rather than through the profession’s broader societal role, and that framing shapes which evidence counts as success. An administrator’s satisfaction with a hire who fills a technical gap is not the same measure as whether that hire advances the profession’s responsibility to the people libraries serve.
- “Practices are evolving toward alternative credentialing.”
The trend toward M.L.S.-optional hiring may be real, but prevalence alone does not establish wisdom. Librarians, perhaps more than most professionals, understand the distinction between observation and conclusion. The existence of a trend tells us that a phenomenon is occurring; it does not tell us why it is occurring, whether it is beneficial or whether it should be encouraged.
Throughout its history, librarianship has been grounded in principles of inquiry, evidence and intellectual honesty. Librarians are trained to evaluate sources, identify bias, distinguish correlation from causation and follow evidence even when it challenges our assumptions. In other words, we are expected to let the evidence shape the theory rather than shaping the evidence to fit a preferred theory.
That is why the evidentiary foundation of Geffert’s argument matters. His trend line relies partly on historical studies that are now more than a decade old and partly on surveys and interviews drawn primarily from administrators who have already embraced credentialing flexibility. Such evidence may document attitudes and practices, but it cannot bear the weight of the broader conclusions he asks it to support. The data may show that M.L.S-optional hiring exists and is increasing in some contexts. It does not demonstrate that it improves library service, strengthens the profession, advances diversity or better serves the communities libraries exist to support.
Indeed, alternative explanations deserve equal consideration. The growth of M.L.S.-optional hiring may reflect budget pressures, labor market constraints, specialization demands or broader institutional trends toward workforce flexibility. The growth of M.L.S.-optional hiring may well tell us more about chronic underfunding of library positions and persistent pressure on administrators to fill specialized roles quickly and cheaply than anything else.
- Mandatory M.L.S. requirements perpetuate a homogeneous profession.
The concern about diversity is legitimate. But it is notable that this argument is rarely applied to other professions. Medicine, law, social work, nursing, public health and business all continue to grapple with demographic disparities in their professional pipelines. Yet no one suggests that the solution is to eliminate medical school, abandon law degrees or dispense with other foundational professional credentials. Instead, those professions invest in scholarships, mentoring, recruitment and partnerships designed to broaden access to professional education.
Geffert never demonstrates that institutions that don’t require the M.L.S. had greater success in hiring people from diverse backgrounds. He acknowledges in his book that this question was never studied. The claim that Ph.D.-holder demographics are out of step with M.L.S.-holder demographics also doesn’t hold up well under scrutiny, particularly for the humanities Ph.D.s who are most likely to be recruited into subject librarian roles, and who are more likely to be white than their counterparts holding doctorates in STEM fields. The diversity argument depends on which Ph.D.s are under discussion, and Geffert never specifies.
If the M.L.S. pipeline is insufficiently diverse, the answer is to diversify that pipeline through increasing financial support for students, partnerships with minority-serving institutions and improved salaries for professional librarians. Eliminating the credential requirement does not fix the diversity problem. The goal is to diversify the profession, not dissolve the profession.
What the Essay Misses About the Profession’s Role
As noted earlier, Geffert’s article evaluates librarianship almost entirely through the lens of institutional staffing needs, treating the question as one of filling positions efficiently rather than sustaining a profession with a distinct societal function.
In an age increasingly shaped by generative AI, algorithmic recommendation systems, platform monopolies, synthetic media and information disorder, librarians are among the few professionals explicitly trained to ask critical questions about authority, provenance, access, bias, privacy and intellectual freedom. Librarians do not merely help people find information; they help people evaluate, contextualize, preserve and ethically engage with it. Subject expertise and technical expertise are valuable, but they are not synonymous with information expertise. A data scientist may understand algorithms. A librarian must also understand how algorithms shape discovery, privilege certain voices, obscure others and influence public understanding. A scholar may possess deep disciplinary knowledge. A librarian is trained to connect communities with knowledge across disciplines while safeguarding equitable access and free inquiry.
In a world where information itself has become contested terrain, the principles, ethics and intellectual traditions of librarianship remain not only relevant but essential. Indeed, at a moment when misinformation spreads faster than correction, when information literacy is a survival skill and when the institutions that teach people to evaluate sources and access reliable knowledge are under sustained attack, professionally trained librarians are more important than they have ever been.
