Not About the Library

Last month, I joined a plenary panel at Leading with Impact, PALCI’s 2026 Retreat and Conference in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Our session was built around a predicament many library leaders know intimately: leading within institutions whose priorities were set without them in the room. Budget pressure, turnover in senior leadership, policy shifts, artificial intelligence, accreditation scrutiny, and enrollment volatility are all recalibrating what campuses treat as urgent. The question is not whether libraries matter to that calculus. It is whether the people doing the calculating know it.

The panel was the prelude to “The Institutional Strategist,” a leadership workshop that gave library leaders a structured, repeatable process for three things:

1. Reading institutional priorities accurately, from demonstrated behavior as well as from strategic plans.
2. Mapping library work against those priorities.
3. Communicating in the language of those who make resource decisions—provosts, presidents, and deans.

The governing premise was disarmingly simple. The library’s role is not to strictly think about the library; its focus should be on the institution and its students. In our panel, we all responded to the prompt, “Tell me about a time …,” and then discussed real resource decisions and what libraries did, or failed to do, to shape them. After a brief reflective interlude, participants moved into a working session built on Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey’s Immunity to Change framework. This framework is designed to surface the competing commitments that quietly stall change so that leaders can make deliberate choices rather than default ones.

Three vantage points, one question

I shared the stage with colleagues representing a range of perspectives. Mickey McDonald, president of the Great Lakes Colleges Association, drew on nearly a decade of senior leadership at Kalamazoo College as provost and, for a term, as acting president. Consuella Askew, vice president for University Libraries and university librarian at Rutgers University, brought deep expertise in library assessment and change management. I spoke from my vantage point at Ithaka S+R, where I lead research portfolios spanning teaching and learning, academic libraries, and the research enterprise.

Gwen Evans moderated, and she pressed us for candor and specifics. She brings more than two decades of experience bridging libraries, publishers, and research infrastructure, including leadership roles at OhioLINK and Elsevier, and she will soon become interim executive director of the Greater Western Library Alliance.

Standing in the provost’s shoes

One question went to the heart of the matter: What is the most significant thing a library leader can do differently, starting this week, that would change how the library is perceived by the people who make resource decisions at their institution?

I argued that we need to change the vantage point. Library leaders should examine the problems their campus is confronting from the perspective of their provost or executive sponsor. Many libraries are absorbing resource constraints and experiencing them as a verdict on the library’s worth. They rarely are. Nearly every unit on campus is living under the same constraints, and many institutions are facing substantial changes to their academic profiles, with degree programs closing or merging.

I challenged the room to stand in their campus leaders’ shoes for a moment and weigh the strain they are under. Provosts walk a narrow line. They must remain faithful to the institution’s mission while making decisions that often end in layoffs and lost positions. It is natural for a campus community to react negatively when that work begins. The library leader who meets it with empathy rather than grievance serves the library, the campus, and their own standing far better.

Consider how this looks from the provost’s office. A library leader who acknowledges that the choices are hard, and who shapes the library’s own decisions around that reality, is embraced as an ally. One who responds with resentment, or who quietly undermines decisions the provost has already made, reads as one more problem to manage, or possibly a position to eliminate. Only the first is invited back into the room when the next decision is made.

To be clear, I’m not counseling library leaders to stay silent. Empathy is not acquiescence, and understanding a provost’s constraints does not mean surrendering the library’s case. It means making that case from inside the institution rather than from outside it. Few units on campus touch as many students, disciplines, and research programs as the library. That breadth is a strategic asset, but only if the people allocating resources can see it.

Confidence in the message, doubt about the listener

I shared with attendees a pattern from the last two cycles of the US Library Survey that deserves more scrutiny than it receives. Library leaders are confident in their own ability to make the library’s case, and far less confident that anyone is persuaded by their message.

Statement wording is from the 2022 report. The 2022 figures are the share rating the statement 8 to 10 on a 10-point scale; the 2025 figures are the share who agreed or strongly agreed.

The 2025 cycle sharpens the contrast. Ninety-three percent of library leaders agreed that they can effectively lead their library through times of organizational change. Yet only 31 percent agreed that they are involved in key decision-making processes at the campus level, and just 24 percent agreed that academic deans and other senior administrators regard their role as one of equivalent standing. The longer trend is no more encouraging. The share of directors who say they are considered part of their institution’s senior academic leadership fell from 64 percent in 2013 to roughly half, where it has hovered since 2016.

This dichotomy should be challenged, not merely reported. When three in four library leaders are confident in their message and only half believe it is landing, the instinctive diagnosis locates the problem in the audience. To a provost, that can read as blame assigned elsewhere. Communication has two parties, and when a vision is not understood, the burden of translation falls first on the one who delivers it.

Aligning the Research Library to Organizational Strategy, a report undertaken by Ithaka S+R, ARL, and CARL (and published a few months before I joined the organization), makes the same point from the other side of the desk. Drawing on interviews with 63 presidents, provosts, senior research officers, and chief information officers at research universities in the United States and Canada, it found that some leaders held modest expectations of the library and could not offer concrete examples of its support for institutional strategy. Others believed the library could offer substantially more value and were discouraged by the pace of change. Many wanted the library director to act “not as the chief manager of the library but rather as a university leader.”

Read together, the two studies describe a disconnect with consequences. Library leaders believe they are conveying a compelling vision, while campus leaders struggle to see what the library contributes to the strategy they are executing. In that environment, the library is unlikely to be regarded as an essential partner when difficult decisions are made, and it may be left out of the room by design. The 2025 figure on campus decision-making suggests that, for most library leaders, a seat at that table is not yet a given.

10 words or fewer

Gwen closed by asking each of us to say, in fewer than 10 words, what a library leader could do to improve their standing with campus leadership. My answer came easily: stop starting every discussion with “the library needs.” Think in terms of campus needs, not library needs.

I make that argument as someone who has spent a career in and alongside academic libraries and who believes they are indispensable to teaching, learning, and research. Reframing the library’s case is not a retreat from advocacy. It is advocacy practiced with discipline. Collections, expertise, space, and services are institutional infrastructure, and they advance the very priorities provosts and presidents are charged with protecting. Our task is to make that contribution legible in the terms decision-makers already use. A library understood as essential to the institution’s priorities will not need to request a seat at the table. It will be expected there.