“Library F.U.T.U.R.E.s”™
From Shelvers to Strategists: On the Failure of Library Schools to Create Strategic Leaders
ALL MLIS graduates who work in the field will need to be leaders, whether you want to be or not. Your degree communicates to the libraries hiring you that you can lead, and because of that, you will be placed in a leadership role of some kind, such as a team, a service, volunteers, or a budget. Knowing how to be a strategic leader benefits not only you but also everyone around you.
I don’t do this often, but due to a recent event and watching an organization’s leadership hiring and responses to strategic issues, I feel compelled to address the strategic leadership development in our field. As a leader, one must be able to say things that others will not want to hear when it is to their benefit to know it. My purpose in the following statements is to help people understand why we need more strategic leadership, not to denigrate or offend. I am trying to convey this in a professional and constructive manner that will provoke/facilitate a constructive conversation/response.
In the style of Peter Drucker, with a scalpel, not a sword, yet a surgeon tired of amputating what could have been saved with foresight.
Peter Drucker once said, “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” The tragedy is that our library schools are not predicting the future. They’re preparing for a leadership past that no longer exists.
Let us begin with a question that library schools, tragically, no longer dare to ask: What is the function of a strategic librarian leader in the 21st century?
Because if you can’t answer that correctly, you certainly can’t teach it. And if you can’t teach it, then we don’t have it.
We are no longer in the age of the card catalog. We live in an era where information is ubiquitous, yet understanding is scarce. And yet, library schools continue to produce professionals who are exquisitely trained in sensitivity but dangerously untrained in strategy. They graduate with degrees that preach diversity but often overlook strategy and leadership, if these topics are mentioned at all. They are told they can change the world, but not taught how to read it and respond to it strategically.
The librarian leader today must be a strategist, not a sentimentalist. A sense-maker, not a shelf-stocker. A public intellectual who can articulate value, not merely a caretaker of collections or a steward of service scripts. And above all, a strategic leader, not a follower of best practices written a decade ago that have long expired.
But instead of this, what do we see?
When it comes to leadership, library schools today are producing followers with degrees. Capable, yes. Sensitive, certainly. But not strategic leaders. Not professionally courageous strategic leaders. And certainly not centered in ikigai: that quiet intersection where what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for all meet. This centering is critical, as what sense of leadership is instilled in or thrust upon someone if there is no purpose and alignment to guide it?
It is ironic, no, it is tragic, that library education, a field that should be producing the philosophical stewards of society’s memory and architects of access, has become primarily a vocational training program with a good thesaurus.
So, let us dissect this failure. Systematically. Strategically.
The Absence of Strategic Thinking
Library schools are failing to teach students to think strategically. They confuse process with progress, and confuse service with submission.
Students graduate knowing how to conduct a reference interview but not how to lead a strategic initiative. They can cite Ranganathan’s Five Laws, but can’t explain the purpose of a library to a city council or university provost. They’ve taken courses in information literacy but haven’t learned organizational leadership or literacy. They are fluent in APA but illiterate in power and how to ethically and morally use that power to make their libraries strategically effective and sustainable.
And so they enter organizations as docile functionaries at best. They wait to be told what to do or provided with an opportunity. They don’t create opportunities and challenge ineffective or outdated decisions. They don’t anticipate change. They don’t build influence. They cling to job descriptions like sacred texts while the building burns down around them. They worry excessively about the little things around them, missing the larger strategic picture of the Library’s current and future sustainability and survival, until it is sometimes too late.
A profession that once gave birth to the visionaries of classification, access, civic engagement, and intellectual freedom is now training risk-averse technocrats. This is not education. This is indoctrination into professional irrelevance.
The Cult of Consensus
Leadership, by definition, requires the courage to be unpopular. However, library schools are churning out graduates who are addicted to consensus, terrified of friction, and allergic to conflict. The goal of many programs is to produce professionals who can hold a meeting without offending anyone, rather than professionals who can lead a strategic movement that matters.
Conflict is not failure. It is feedback. And leadership is not empathy without edge. It is clear with consequences.
And yet, students are taught to worship process over principle. They’re told that leadership is about being “collaborative” and “inclusive” without ever being taught that, often, leadership is lonely, challenging, and the opposite of being liked.
What’s worse: this allergy to discomfort is masquerading as moral superiority. “Safe spaces” are admirable in promoting psychological safety. But when safety becomes censorship of strategic dialogue, you’ve not created a sanctuary; you’ve built a padded cage.
The result? Graduates who don’t push the library forward strategically, but make their values their priority instead. Who doesn’t provoke? Who doesn’t strategically lead?
The Professional Risk Management and Courage Deficit
Let us not mince words: librarianship today requires risk management and courage. Political courage, intellectual courage, ethical courage, strategic courage, and moral courage. The courage to say this collection does not reflect our values. The courage to say this policy is inequitable. The courage to say this institution is not serving the community it claims to champion.
But risk management and courage are not being taught in library school. Instead, students are trained to manage microaggressions but not macro-issues. They are taught to defer to the administration instead of challenging assumptions. They are not prepared to be ethical disrupters; they are trained to be professionally polite followers.
And in a profession where book bans are on the rise, public funding is shrinking, and trust in institutions is falling, this lack of courage is not just problematic; it is catastrophic for our future. We don’t need more polite professionals. We need strategic lions in the stacks and strategists in the boardroom.
And I am not saying that you have to be inclusive/considerate, or strategic? What I am saying is that you have to be both. Inclusivity and consideration without a strategy yield confusion; a strategy without inclusivity and consideration yields no impactful results.
The Absence of Ikigai: Purpose Without a Paycheck
Too many graduates leave library school with idealism, but no map to sustain it. They are passionate, yes. But their passion is unanchored. They know what they care about, but not how to turn that into a meaningful, sustainable, and strategic contribution.
This is where the Japanese concept of ikigai, your reason for being, is essential. And library schools would do well to teach it. Because when your work connects what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for, you don’t burn out. You burn brighter for longer, creating a lasting positive impact.
Right now, graduates are being dropped into broken systems without the tools to navigate the gap between idealism and pragmatism. They are trained to serve, but not to question the strategy or systems they serve. They are taught to care, but not to create the conditions that enable care to be scaled to their communities’ needs.
The result? Passionate professionals who are quickly disillusioned, emotionally exhausted, and politically invisible.
The Mistaking of Management for Leadership
Library schools conflate administration with leadership. However, learning how to manage a schedule is not the same as learning how to shape a library’s future.
Leadership is vision, influence, and the ability to catalyze action toward meaningful change. Yet most “leadership” courses in MLIS programs are, in fact, management courses in vague disguise: focused on budgeting, org charts, and committee protocols. Important, yes. However, it falls well short in developing a strategic leader.
We need strategic leaders who can define the mission, not just the metrics. Strategic leaders who can reimagine what a library needs to be now and in the future, rather than just maintaining what it was, leaders who can translate public value into institutional power.
A spreadsheet can track hours. It cannot build trust. It cannot create culture. And it cannot ignite a movement. That takes a strategic leader.
The Comfort of the Known vs. The Necessity of the New
Library schools have become temples of tradition rather than incubators of innovation. The past dominates the curriculum, including classification systems, historical theories of reference, and legacy technologies. These are valuable, but not visionary or strategic in nature.
Meanwhile, there is little attention paid to entrepreneurship, human-centered design, community leadership, innovation leadership, or power mapping. There are no courses on how to dismantle oppressive information systems or how to design services that foster civic resilience. There is no requirement to understand the political economy of information. There is no incentive to challenge the power structures embedded in knowledge itself.
And so, graduates enter a world shaped by AI, surveillance capitalism, and epistemic collapse with little more than a citation manual and a prayer.
What Should Be Done
If library schools want to produce strategic leaders and not followers, they must completely redesign what they teach and how.
They must:
Prioritize ikigai exploration, not as a side project but as the foundation of every career plan.
Create a leadership culture/environment in their programs, not a manager or follower culture.
Teach strategic thinking and foresight as a core competency.
Provide access to leadership courses, resources, and opportunities outside of the MLIS programs to enable a diversely educated strategic professional.
Emphasize community leadership and development, not just the old traditional professional skills.
Require coursework in ethics, systems thinking, design, and civic innovation.
Develop professional courage/risk management training, including navigating conflict, speaking truth to power, and managing political and professional risk through real-life interaction in the professional world before being placed into our systems.
And above all, they must stop pretending that safety is synonymous with growth. Leadership is not safe. It is not easy. And it is not something you should inherit with a diploma. It is something you earn by stepping into ambiguity, navigating conflict, and being willing to stake your career on the truth that needs to be told.
In Conclusion: Enough Is Enough
The library is not neutral.
The world is not safe.
The profession is not thriving.
And yet, our schools are training students to survive in institutions that no longer exist or to continue the traditional as followers, instead of preparing them to create the institutions that must be built to ensure the library’s future.
Library education must shift from focusing on training employees to cultivating strategic, purpose-driven, and courageous leaders. If we do not, the library will become a mausoleum of good intentions and missed opportunities, staffed by empathetic followers who are afraid to speak their minds.
It is time we demand more. From our institutions. From our educators. And from ourselves.
Because the next generation of leaders is already walking through the doors of our library schools.
The question is, will they graduate as followers? Or as strategic leaders?
What do you think?
Where can we get this training that we're missing?