The Librarian in the College Novel

HERMAN MELVILLE, a frequenter of libraries, left an apt memorial and tribute to librarians. Fortunately, it was buried deep in the whale and is scarcely noticed by present day practitioners. In part it reads: "So fare thee well, poor devil of a sub-sub ... thou belongest to that hopeless sallow tribe which no wine of this world will ever warm." And so the portrait of the American librarian of the mid-nineteenth-century partakes of what went before and embellishes what came after. There are many other early, quaint prose pictures of librarians that could be cited here, but rather than enumerate them, let the reader hurtle through the century to the present. Academic librarians today are obsessed by the image they cast in their specific community. Professional and semiprofessional journals are filled with articles tracing causes of past images and offering nostrums for future ones. Librarians must become more professional. They must have status. It is true they have won some skirmishes in their cold war with faculty colleagues and administrators. But have they really "arrived"? What is their true image in the halls of learning? No universal test exists. Individuals can sometimes assess their own situations to a certain extent; yet, for apparent reasons, subjectivity can and will skew these appraisals. An objective approach is needed to take the measure of the librarian in this situation. The modest proposal of this paper is to use the academic novel as a contemporary yardstick. The academic novel is not a new genre. Recent increased productivity in this form has had its rewards. It has been legitimized by a scholarly, booklength study and by several articles. John Bv EARL TANNENBAUM