College and Research Libraries


By M I L D R E D H . M c A F E E 

The College Library as Seen by 
a College President 
Dr. McAfee, president of Wellesley 
College, read this paper at the general 
session of the A.C.R.L. on June 21, in 
Boston. 

I F ANY other faculty member used the Wellesley College Library as little as 
does the president, his days on the faculty 
would be numbered in small numbers. It 
is common gossip that college presidents 
are apt to be illiterate, on the principle, I 
suppose, that they make so many speeches 
that they have no time to read. It would 
be truer to say that they have little time 
to use libraries because their desks are 
piled so high with publications which are 
sent to them to be reviewed that they have 
no time to pick their own reading matter. 

Yet I submit that there is no officer in 
the college who should have more under-
standing of the library than the president. 
Each of them directs his office as a service 
agency to an institution which uses presi-
dency and library as a means to the end 
of education. If either presidency or li-
brary becomes an end in itself, it fails to 
fulfill its essential function. 

You and I have a good deal in common, 
and are subject to certain common tempta-
tions. America's educational tradition 
makes us both more or less "symbolic" and 
it is hard to preserve a sense of humor 
when one is invested with symbolic attri-
butes. Presidents have colossal houses and 
impressive offices. T h e y wear lurid gowns 

in academic processions, have special park-
ing privileges on campuses, lend their 
signature to salary checks for monthly 
sums larger than the signer could ac-
cumulate in a lifetime. 

T h e librarian commands a building 
which is usually the most monumental one 
on the campus. H e approves expenditures 
of large items, always an appreciable pro-
portion of the total college budget. H e 
lays down laws, with or without tact, 
about the use of his library—quiet here, 
no smoking there, sign here, register there. 

W e ' r e potent, we are—'with property 
of the institution and in the interests of 
w h a t ? Certainly not ourselves if we 
would be true to our own purposes, but 
in the interests of the education which 
librarians and presidents facilitate. 

I t is easy to forget how really unim-
portant we are in our own right. A 
president has less reason for existence apart 
from the institution than the library does, 
but not much less. You know the danger 
signals for me and my presidential col-
leagues. W h i l e I was a teacher, I asked 
my college president for some advice about 
my office, and he said, " D o n ' t bother me 
with that. T h a t ' s what I hired you f o r . " 
" I hired you"—a bad symptom when the 
college president begins to think of him-
self as the boss, his colleagues as his em-
ployees. 

But having seen the threatened beam 
in my eye, I hasten to the potential mote 

SEPTEMBER, 1941 301 



in yours to remind you that there have 
been librarians who took satisfaction in 
having every book on the shelf all the 
time rather than in circulation where the 
book might be injured as a price for stu-
dent use of it. T h e r e have been librarians 
who demanded silence at the expense of 
free inquiry, and I suspect an occasional 
one who has let convenience to the librar-
ians be more decisive than service to 
colleagues in determining policy. 

But presidents and librarians are, by 
and large, a conscientious lot. W e are 
more apt to yield to a radically different 
type of temptation. In our full acceptance 
of the principle that we represent service 
agencies, we run the risk of letting our-
selves perform so many services that we 
handicap ourselves in rendering real service. 

Custodian of Tools 

T h e librarian is the custodian of the 
most important tools at the disposal of the 
scholar. H e must keep in touch with 
the latest models and see that they are on 
hand when needed, and he must keep the 
tried and true old ones in good, workable 
condition. H e must encourage students, 
faculty and undergraduate, to handle their 
tools as effectively as possible. H e is apt 
to do this best by being himself a workman 
who enjoys working with books, but he 
needs more than a fondness for books. 
H e needs the art of spreading his en-
thusiasm to other workers. 

If that be his task he needs to be the 
paragon which I have no doubt all of you 
are. H e runs a risk unless he is a paragon. 

W h e n he has accepted his responsibility 
he is tempted to fulfill it by usurping the 
functions of other people. 

Students must be encouraged to use 
books. Instead of teaching them how to 
do it, in close cooperation with his teach-

ing colleagues, there are librarians whc 
are so eager to be helpful that they do 
the work for the student. Instead of 
cultivating a mastery of the tools, that 
librarian is using the tool himself. 

T h e librarian and the classroom teacher 
owe it to each other and primarily to their 
students, to understand and supplement 
rather than to contradict each other, and 
in the interests of genuine service to the 
student there are some detailed services 
which the librarian will not render. 

T h e librarian who accepts his responsi-
bility will at once see the need of work 
which involves vast mechanical detail. It 
is of great importance—but it is the part 
of your work which is the hardest for us 
laymen to understand and, therefore, the 
hardest for you to interpret. 

Simplification of Mechanics 

T h e simplification of the mechanics of 
library administration seems to me a 
laudable development so that librarians, 
as soon as may be, can be relieved from thr 
limitations of multitudinous technical de-
tails. D o n ' t misunderstand me. T h e 
mechanics are vital. I suspect we have 
wasted personnel through the years, how-
ever, by not differentiating between 
clerical detail and library science. M y sug-
gestion is that librarians should become 
increasingly professional, scholarly, and 
executive, learning to delegate enough 
routine business to clerically-trained non-
professional assistants so that the routine 
services essential to the library may not 
preclude the rendering of the service es-
sential to the academic community. 

Librarians on college campuses have 
traditionally been the M a r t h a s of our 
academic life. It is time for you to assert 
your right to be M a r y instead of M a r t h a , 
though somebody is certainly needed to 

302 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES 



take care of the details. I t should not be 
the main job of the librarian though the 
head of the library, like the head of any 
other department, must know they are be-
ing cared for adequately. 

I have just asked the librarian to r e n d e r -
service rather than perform services. 
T h a t leads to the statement of a f u r t h e r 
problem for the librarian which he and 
his staff share with any other executive. 
W h a t group defines the service which he 
should perform? T o whom is he really 
responsible? W h o actually controls the 
library? Nobody knows better than you 
how many people want to. 

Value of Library-Conscious Trustees 

Presidents tie your hands with always 
and inevitably inadequate appropriations. 
T h e y are the spokesmen for the trustees 
who may or may not have more than a 
negatively financial interest in your work. 
I commend to you the important value of 
at least a few library-conscious trustees. 
If you don't have any, I strongly suggest 
that you begin to work upon your presi-
dents to encourage the nomination and 
election of some board member who will 
be especially interested in library prob-
lems. You might suggest that if a trustee 
committee became acquainted with your 
problems, it might suggest ways to econ-
omize. T h a t would sound promising to a 
gullible college president. If he knows 
anything, he will of course know that the 
more anyone knows of libraries the more 
sympathetic he becomes with the requests 
for more money. Be sure you keep the 
situation under control. D o n ' t ask for 
trustee advice and then stand politely aside 
and let inexperienced financiers decide 
how you could economize. Stay by them 
when they investigate and educate them 
patiently, but get as many friends as 

possible at court. 
Another way to make friends and in-

fluence trustees is to make friends with 
actual or potential donors. A far higher 
motive than the mercenary one implied 
herein is that of enlarging the circle of 
people who really care about the ultimate 
welfare of this, the frequently labeled 
"heart of the institution." 

Another group, and one often more 
accessible than the trustees-who-vote-
budgets, is the faculty. In most institu-
tions the faculty, of which the librarian 
should of course be a member, is charged 
with the responsibility of operating most 
of the institution. Because they are 
especially concerned with using your work-
room and introducing students to the tools 
therein, your colleagues are eager to tell 
the librarian just how to run his organiza-
tion. T h e only way I know for the li-
brarian to control the situation is to tell 
them first. T h a t ' s where the attitude of 
the service agency is of tremendous im-
portance. If you are there to serve the 
educational influences of the campus, you 
will be willing to take the time to confer 
with the senior users of your resources. 

Most faculty members, like most other 
people, are willing to let administrative 
officers, including librarians, do a good 
deal of work without much interruption, 
provided the reason for the program is 
clear and acceptable. T o make it clear 
and acceptable takes a vast amount of 
everybody's time. Any administrator 
knows that he knows certain obvious ways 
of accomplishing important purposes, but 
he must learn sooner or later that it saves 
great emotional expenditure if he makes 
them obvious to his colleagues before 
adopting them. 

Users of your books are the reason for 
your activity. It seems wholly reasonable 

SEPTEMBER, 1941 303 



that the faculty users should have excel-
lent suggestions about making your serv-
ice more serviceable. 

Faculty Committee an Asset 

T h u s we are led to the conclusion so 
normal in academic organization, the 
committee. I hope you all have a standing 
committee of the faculty to assist you. 
Keep it standing, on its toes and ready to 
go with you. D o n ' t let it sit upon you 
or your plans. T h e r e are some procedures 
which you will advocate which would 
commend themselves to your colleagues if 
they could all know as much as you do 
about library organization. You can't en-
lighten them all but, again, it is well to 
have friends at the court of faculty public 
opinion. A working committee of the 
faculty, giving you a chance to interpret 
your policies and dreams and, in time, 
making suggestions which have come to 
them from their colleagues—that can be 
a m a j o r asset in your efficient functioning. 

Your students are also users of your 
tools. T h e y approach you and your build-
ing from a different point of view from 
any of your other colleagues. Again you 
are fortunate if you can enlist the in-
telligent interest of a representative group 
which can assume responsibility for in-
terpreting students to the library and the 
library to students. 

I have implied, but have not stated it 
explicitly, that the librarian and his staff 
are one. T h a t does not always follow, but 
it is one of the important arts of the execu-
tive to include his colleagues within the 
library so that each staff member can feel 
that he, too, shares in the destiny of the 
library. 

^ W h a t I have been saying implies that 
the librarian is pre-eminently an adminis-
trative officer whose primary task is that 

of educating his associates sufficiently so 
that they will aid and abet his plans for 
library development. But nobody is only 
an executive, I hope. O n e of the chronic 
problems of all members of the library 
staff is that of deciding how to distribute 
one's personal efforts in the best interest 
of the institution. Shall you spend all 
your time in conference, at your desk 
holding interviews, circulating about the 
library keeping in touch with its actual 
functioning? Shall you try to be a scholar 
in your own right, demonstrating by your 
use of your tools how others might make 
use of them ? Shall you write for popular 
or professional consumption? 

Growth and Development Important 

Nobody knows the answer, which must 
depend on you and the situation in which 
you find yourself. Suffice it to say this, 
however. Most people are useful in direct 
proportion to their own growth and de-
velopment. T h e r e is a chronic contro-
versy over the relative importance of 
teaching and research in college faculties. 
College administrators have been widely 
criticized for insisting on publications as 
a basis for promotion and tenure. I t is 
absurd to ask for writing just for the 
sake of writing. It seems, however, rea-
sonable to urge teachers of undergraduates 
to keep themselves exposed to the critic-
isms of their own contemporaries as well 
as of their students. I n like manner, a 
librarian who can be something more than 
a f a i t h f u l staff member is apt to be a more 
stimulating human being than he would 
otherwise be. T h e library, like all other 
parts of academic institutions, needs stimu-
lating human beings. 

Wellesley undergraduates have a song 
whose chorus goes like this, "Problems 
such as these have we, college is no snap 

304 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES 



you see. . . ." It might well have been the 
text for this paper up to this point. In 
conclusion, I want to suggest that what-
ever the problematic nature of the li-
brarian's life, the task he undertakes is 
worthy of all the ingenuity which he puts 
into it. T h i s was so well formulated by 
the Wellesley College librarian, Blanche 
Prichard M c C r u m , in her annual report 
for 1939-40, that I leave you with her 
message, hoping that I will thereby reveal 
the source of most of my ideas of what a 
college president should think about the 
college library. 

Pr otection against Shoddy Thinking 

The Crux of the Library Matter Today. 
Whatever the problems are that are pre-
sented by the practical and mechanical work 
of a library—and these are numerous be-
cause the library deals with small physical 
objects scattered on miles of shelves, with 
the facts of which these objects are the 
source, and with the unpredictable in the 
actions of human beings—patience and in-
genuity can find for them either a solution 
or a workable compromise. But there is a 
much more serious implication in the present 
library situation than that of techniques. It 
is the need to do much more than has been 
done to make a discriminating reading so 

attractive that the habit becomes fixed as a 
protection against shoddy thinking. No one 
responsible for serving the book needs of 
students today can fail to feel a sense of 
terrible responsibility in the light of Adolf 
Hitler's reaction to the books of a few ex-
tremists. It is said over and over that the 
works of Nietzsche, the Ludendorffs, Alfred 
Rosenberg, H. S. Chamberlin, and a few 
others are the sources from which have 
been drawn the monstrous doctrines of 
Mein Kampf and the inspiration for the still 
more monstrous aftermath of those doctrines 
objectified in war. The course of history 
might have been different if this one man 
had had the mental habit of wide, critical, 
dispassionate reading, surely one of the 
greatest forces at work in the world for the 
maintenance of what America calls civiliza-
tion. 

In a college, the inculcation of this habit is 
primarily the obligation of the teaching fac-
ulty and it would serve no good purpose for 
the library—the auxiliary arm of the faculty 
—to set itself up to go beyond its function. 
But the fact remains that that function in-
cludes the provision of an intellectual home 
within library walls for a changing group of 
students, shown by actual count to number 
a third of the whole student body every day. 
T o make such a provision a living, breathing, 
quickening part of college life for students 
is the supreme opportunity for college librar-
ians, forever beyond their complete accom-
plishment, forever the object of their hopes. 

The American Culture Series 
A N N O U N C E M E N T was made recently by 

University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, 
Mich., that the work was finished on a 
microfilm collection of contemporary ma-
terial which reflects American culture in 
the colonial period. T h e series includes 
approximately 250 texts and editions of 
representative writings about America and 
Americans. T h e main criterion in selec-
tion was cultural significance. Rare but 

basic works, never reprinted, were given 
preference. About seventy-five thousand 
pages were filmed for this series which is 
a companion to the American Periodicals 
Series and which can be ordered in the 
same manner and at the same price. T h i s 
series makes available a selected group of 
Americana beginning with Christopher 
Columbus' Epistola, 1493, and ending 
with Benjamin Rush's Essays, 1806. 

SEPTEMBER, 1941 305