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In April 2011, Jeffrey Trzeciak, then University Librarian at McMaster University in Ontario, gave the keynote address at Penn State University Library’s Colloquium Series. Entitled “Transforming Traditional Organizations,” the talk ignited a firestorm in the academic library community.
The cause? A single slide in the presentation in which Trzeciak noted that his library was unlikely to hire more librarians holding the master of library science degree. Instead, to meet the needs of the future, he planned to recruit candidates with doctoral degrees and those with information technology backgrounds. Rebuttals were visceral—one post was titled “Shut up, Jeff”—but in their obvious dudgeon, few of Trzeciak’s critics seriously engaged his central point: Which better serves the contemporary research library, professionals with expertise in diverse domains, or those sharing a single professional credential? And, critically, who, or what, defines one as a librarian in an academic library?
Though almost completely forgotten today, “McMastergate,” as the event and its aftermath were dubbed, exposed an enduring fault line within academic librarianship. Disquiet around the credentialing, status and identity of academic librarians has re-emerged repeatedly, like a chronic infection that periodically flares up. Earlier this year, another catalyst sparked a fresh outburst of concern: Bryn Geffert at the University of Vermont published new research suggesting that the M.L.S. is being increasingly bypassed in larger academic libraries in favor of alternative credentials.
Summarizing the work in Inside Higher Ed, Geffert prefaced his piece by noting, “No question is more likely than the following to provoke a donnybrook among academic librarians: Should every or even most librarians possess a master of library and information science (M.L.I.S. or M.L.S.) degree?” His answer is clearly no. One rebuttal appeared in Inside Higher Ed (and others have appeared elsewhere); Geffert has responded. The debate continues.
Questions of identity, boundaries and credentials certainly arise in other professions. But few other professions engage in public nail-biting over these matters so frequently—and with so little obvious benefit. Another rehearsal here of the advantages and shortcomings of the M.L.S. would add little. Instead, I suggest that the battle over the M.L.S. is better understood, at least in the academic and research library context, as a struggle over professional jurisdiction, identity and the evolving work of academic librarians.
The degree’s symbolic power as a group identity marker—and its utility in providing something Max Weber might have understood as social closure—has come to exceed whatever else it provides its holders. Viewed through this lens, we may understand more fully how alternative credentials concern traditionally prepared librarians, as any group might react to rips in the fabric of their self-definition.
Neither side of the debate typically acknowledges that the notion of the M.L.S. as the appropriate terminal credential for librarians is a relatively recent creation, and one slow to gain full recognition. While libraries have existed since antiquity, the existence of formal professional training for librarians dates only to the second half of the 19th century. Prior to the development of prescribed credentials, college and university faculty often served as their institutions’ librarians, overseeing the relatively modest collections of the day by following the practices of their predecessors or of the largest libraries, to the extent those could be learned and transposed into a key appropriate for the local environment.
Melvil Dewey, of decimal classification fame, was librarian of Columbia College when he founded the School of Library Economy there, the first such institution of its kind, in 1887. Other programs followed, in the U.S. and elsewhere, but the master’s degree took some time to gain hegemony. As John Richardson notes in his history of the University of Chicago’s Graduate Library School, of the various library schools in operation by the early 1920s, only three required college degrees for graduation, and only two were affiliated with universities.
Although the American Library Association has been the accrediting body for schools of library and information science for more than a century, it only formally recognized the M.L.S. as the appropriate professional qualification for librarians in 1951. The Association of College and Research Libraries, a division of ALA, first endorsed the M.L.S. as the proper terminal degree for academic librarians in 1975. The formal assertions of a graduate-level credential as the exclusive appropriate training reflected a growing consensus that only with that degree would librarians receive the recognition, remuneration and respect due to them as professionals and peers in academic libraries. It also finally established the primacy of the M.L.S. as the defining credential separating the librarian from others working in libraries.
Despite these affirmations, and the subsequent codification of the M.L.S. as a requirement in many institutions’ academic hiring guidelines or collective bargaining agreements, those without the degree have never really disappeared from the largest research libraries. In specialized positions—curators of rare or specialized collections, say, or IT leaders—librarians holding doctorates or other graduate degrees have served capably for decades. As academic libraries have become increasingly service-based, the need for new specialties has only increased.
In 2004, the Council on Library and Information Resources established its Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, offering scores of recent Ph.D.s alternative employment in academic and research libraries—no M.L.S. required. Writing in Library Journal, James G. Neal, one of Dewey’s successors at Columbia, dubbed these new M.L.S.-less hires “feral professionals” and concluded,
“Library professionals prepared and socialized outside the traditional M.L.S. education channel … are needed for their important contributions to academic library innovation and mutability. They will grow in influence and relevance to the future academic library.”
At the upper management ranks, hiring those with no formal library training (or any library experience at all) has been long-standing practice. Several directors of major libraries in the United States, including members of the Association of Research Libraries, an organization of 125 of the largest libraries in North America, have no formal training in librarianship. When Carla Hayden was appointed librarian of Congress in 2016, she was not only the first woman and first African American to hold the post; she was also only the second among her 13 predecessors to have a library degree.
Why, then, do many academic librarians defend the M.L.S. so vociferously? Geffert summarizes several of the typical defenses offered and challenges each of the claims persuasively. He is hardly alone in raising critical questions about the degree’s fitness for purpose. Boyd Keith Swigger’s 2010 book, The M.L.S. Project (Bloomsbury), offers a useful historical perspective. Swigger evaluates the graduate-only credentials model established in the 1950s—the project of the title—against its intended aims: greater respect from other professionals, including university faculty; increased pay; and higher status. He writes,
“Changing the level of the accredited degree did not produce anticipated changes in the substance of library education, nor did it produce the anticipated rewards for graduates of library schools.”
He goes on to add that many consequent developments, especially those driven by technology, altered the landscape in which libraries functioned. Networked electronic resources, powerful commercial search engines and other developments “created unexpected circumstances in which the M.L.S. … became an impediment to adapting successfully to new environments.” What began as an attempt to define and improve the lot of the librarian both materially and reputationally has, in Swigger’s telling, fallen short of its ambitious goals.
Critics like Geffert and Swigger offer a compelling case about the disappointments of the M.L.S. But they also miss something. The debates have never really been about preparation, capability or effectiveness. They are about identity. Empirical evidence alone seems unlikely to persuade the M.L.S.’s defenders, who point to socialization and acculturation, among other things, as values the M.L.S. still uniquely imparts. In a brief survey I conducted in spring 2026 of Association of Research Libraries member directors, the 47 respondents overwhelmingly rated non-M.L.S. hires at least as effective in overall performance (98 percent), contributions to the profession (85 percent) and even commitment to the values and goals of librarianship (91 percent) as their traditionally trained counterparts.
In many areas, these directors felt non-M.L.S. professionals exceeded their M.L.S. colleagues’ performance. Yet they still pointed to the role the degree plays in shared professional language, norms and self-identification. When asked about future hiring of these “feral” librarians, a significant minority (46 percent) said they would only hire such people in limited circumstances, with about 4 percent saying they would do so only reluctantly.
Whatever its practical shortcomings and despite its relatively brief existence, many retain faith in the M.L.S. because of its power as a tool for social closure. Weber and those who followed him outlined how groups, including professionals, leveraged credentialism to divide insiders from outsiders and to establish and protect the status and privileges of group members. The educators and practitioners who coalesced around the M.L.S. as the terminal degree sought, as Swigger recounts, to achieve precisely those goals. That by many metrics, the degree has missed the mark matters little if its real importance is emblematic rather than strictly instrumental. Its function as a device for social closure certifies its importance to the group and conceals, without resolving, any contradictions behind it. The M.L.S. thus holds something like a totemic status, defying ordinary evidentiary standards and leaving a stubborn residue that no empiricist criticism can scrub away. Only a collective loss of faith will do that. But such an apostasy does not seem forthcoming.
The debate over the M.L.S. in academic libraries has fallen into hardened binaries that resist resolution. Defending the degree has become synonymous with defending librarianship itself. But the work of today’s academic libraries is highly diffuse. We need expertise across many domains: navigating a chaotic research environment, understanding the complexities of scholarly publishing, confronting the increasingly challenging task of discovering authentic information, preserving the historical record in its myriad manifestations, understanding artificial intelligence and its use (and misuse), among other things.
Ironically, the greatest successes academic libraries have enjoyed involved tackling many of these challenges directly, adapting to new realities and stepping in where gaps in support for students and faculty emerged. These successes were achieved by both M.L.S. holders and those without that degree. Defining the profession exclusively through a passe-partout credential provides social closure and the reassurance of elective affinities, but it also threatens the adaptability needed to serve effectively.
Across many professions, credentials fashioned for an earlier age may later collide with work transformed by economic, social and technological changes. The M.L.S. emerged from and for a different world. Redefining academic librarianship around strong commitments to free expression, long-term preservation and equitable access is achievable through a variety of preparatory pathways. Absent a more expansive view of who may claim the title “librarian” in the academic context, those who insist on making one degree the sole marker of professional identity risk finding themselves among the totems of earlier eras—as objects in museums.
