I remember when studying perception in undergrad psychology that the term ‘cue aware’ started to fall into our vocabulary to reflect the experience we have of increased experience of phenomena once we knew of their existence. I feel this way about accreditation. Every book or article I find myself reading now seems to have some example of accreditation within. Up first, a couple of articles in the latest issue of Law Library Journal, where James Milles, professor at SUNY Buffalo states in his title that ‘law libraries are doomed’ This is followed by a rejoinder by Kenneth Hirsh, professor at Cincinnati, suggesting it might not be quite that bad. In both, there is much discussion of law school accreditation and how it basically does little to protect the old library function that some argue is central to the great law school experience. Perhaps most telling from some perspectives, the new standards on ABA accreditation no longer require that a law library director have both a law and LIS degree, this now being softened to ‘should’ with numerous cases cited of where even this urging is ignored.
The general arguments about law education are familiar to folks who follow LIS literature — the disconnect between the faculty and the profession, the diminishing demand for the degree, the costs of education, the shifts in research and reading behavior in an online world. So is it reassuring or worrying that law schools are sharing the same pain?
Hot on the heels of this I land on a report from the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions which tackles higher education accreditation head-on. In it, the major criticisms of current accreditation models are stated (familiarly to those of us who read this type of stuff) — it doesn’t reflect quality, it stifles innovation, it’s costly, burdensome and bureaucratic etc. Their recommendations are of the kind some of us have suggested e.g., refocus on quality not compliance, allow more flexibility in review processes, etc. It’s not rocket science, but one imagines we’d never have got a rocket into space if accreditation had been applied to those engineers and scientists.