The Politics of Professionalism

This book presents a retro-progressive proposal for the education of librarians: the removal of library education from the jurisdiction of universities, which in recent decades have become increasingly corporatized, internalizing market-based concepts such as performance metrics and "audit culture" to the extent that, ideologically speaking, they are indistinguishable from corporations. The author presents a detailed, alternative model for library education, building upon Ralph Waldo Emerson's idea of a librarian as a "professor of books."