Faculty and staff said GW Libraries continues to face staff retention and morale issues eight years after budget and staff cuts.
Reports in the spring by the Faculty Senate Committee on Libraries and the Staff Council highlighted continued staff shortages and morale issues among existing staff, which have persisted since pre-pandemic layoffs. Geneva Henry, the dean of libraries and academic innovation, which manages Gelman, Eckles and the Virginia Science and Technology Campus libraries, said LAI is actively working to maintain and backfill vacancies and thinking “strategically” about staffing for the future.
Henry said staff acquisition and retention continue to be a priority despite the libraries’ “very low” turnover rate, with the exception of its overnight shifts due to their challenging schedules. Henry said LAI has worked to promote employee satisfaction through an “emphasis” on career growth, an internal “LAI Institute” to share knowledge and skills, newsletters and meetings with workplace updates, employee appreciation events and participation in University-wide employee engagement surveys.
“The dedicated librarians and staff of LAI take great pride in providing exceptional services to support GW’s teaching and learning mission and they continue to do so despite some challenges that include reduced staffing levels since 2015,” Henry said in an email. “Retaining our current staff and strategically adding additional positions would allow us to better prepare for and meet the needs of the future.”
Holly Dugan, an associate professor of English and co-chair of the Faculty Senate’s Libraries Committee, said the issues facing the libraries’s staff are a combination of the long-term effects of pre-pandemic layoffs and the additional responsibilities library staff have taken on since the COVID-19 pandemic, like facilities management and event planning, which used to have dedicated staff roles.
Dugan said some staffing issues date back to 2015 and 2016, when officials cut numerous library positions after a decline in graduate enrollment spurred a budget crisis. Former University President Steven Knapp directed officials to cut 40 jobs across the libraries, technology, student affairs, safety and security and treasurer’s offices in 2016.
“Many of those positions remain unfilled, backfilled, they were cut, they haven’t been reopened and been filled,” Dugan said. “From that moment, the needs of the library have also changed.”
In 2021, members of the libraries committee said the University’s hiring freeze in March 2020 prevented the libraries from recruiting new staff to fill vacant positions as it had intended to do before the pandemic.
She said the libraries experienced issues including staff turnover and employees covering multiple roles pre-pandemic, which other departments like the Multicultural Student Services Center and Disability Support Services offices only started to experience during the pandemic, because the libraries’ staff was already “bare-boned.”
The Libraries Committee expressed concern in their 2021 interim committee report that library staff had to pick up more duties outside their job description including managing Gelman Library’s book deliveries and overseeing building maintenance issues.
“What did impact and change was the nature of the work, and the shift to central services left a lot of the support and wraparound of the library, like facilities, left librarians having to now take on additional roles to shepherd us through that crisis,” Dugan said.
Dugan said the additional roles that library staff had to take on during and after the pandemic have led to a “crisis of morale.” She said library staff are now splitting their attention between running the daily operations of the library and helping faculty and students adjust through transitions in learning like using generative AI tools.
“You have these incredibly talented and skilled people who are also managing all kinds of tasks that are linked to keeping things running smoothly but that were outside of the normal job description,” Dugan said. “And certainly folks in other areas in University did that, but I think it was particularly acute in LAI because of that dramatic change and what the work entailed in terms of new learning environments, both virtual, hybrid and back in person.”
During an April Staff Council meeting, Tricia Greenstein, the representative for Libraries and Academic Innovation and GW Museums on the council, said leadership of specialty libraries like the Jacob Burns Law Library and the Himmelfarb Health Sciences Library, were reporting “immense” turnover and actively searching for new librarians. She added the lack of staff has had a “considerable” impact on student experience and research goals across all three major University libraries.
A recent survey conducted by the Staff Council reported that nonexecutive level staff across the University are facing “overwhelming” burnout, heavy workloads and inadequate job training.
“If you don’t fill in the spots, you don’t fund spots, for us to be fully staffed, the work it’s going to stay there and the work it’s going to go on the remaining staff and librarians and that puts an impact on how they serve the missions of the student experience and research,” Greenstein said.
Dugan said the committee is currently working to raise awareness among faculty and administrators of the current staffing and retention issues facing the libraries and partner with other Faculty Senate committees where issues overlap like the Physical Facilities & Campus Safety, Research and Educational Policy & Technology committees.
“This committee is really a good example of the partnerships,” Dugan said. “We need multiple folks looking at these issues and balancing sort of the needs, but we also need faculty being willing to recognize and celebrate the work that our librarian faculty and staff contribute to our work of research and teaching.”
Experts in academic libraries and higher education staffing said cutting roles and having existing employees cover multiple job responsibilities can lead to burnout among staff and hinder the services it provides to students and faculty.
Krista Soria, an associate professor at the University of Idaho’s College of Education, Health, and Human Sciences said her research shows that when students use libraries, it leads to higher grade point averages, retention and graduation rates. She said cutting library staff positions “undermines” research, student support and the resources a library can make available to a campus.
“Academic libraries are so vital to college student success that to make any cuts to the folks that are leading the libraries, making them function and operating them on a day-to-day basis is sort of criminal and is sort of going against what institutions desire to do, which is to support student success,” Soria said.
Alex McAllister, a professor of library science at Appalachian State University, said libraries can’t afford to lose employees to burnout or budget cuts due to how specialized library roles often are and the monthslong length of the hiring process to replace them.
“So to lose a team member that has certain responsibilities can also be stressful to employees that are on that team that have to pick up the slack and try and contribute extra when they were likely already doing their full-time job,” McAllister said.
