In my 511 class this week my professor talked about the word “radical.” He stated (if I am remembering correctly, my notes seem to believe so) that librarians are radical. However, radical in biology means core, as opposed to what we usually mean when we say radical, extreme.  He seemed to suggest that librarians are both radical in the extreme sense and radical in the sense that we are the core—of libraries, of society, of an apple, take your pick, though probably shouldn’t go with the apple, people might start thinking your weird like they know I am (I take weird as a compliment just in case you were thinking I was being negative).

            I have never considered myself radical, of either definition. As far as the core, I have just never stopped to think about it. Personally, I don’t like writing about myself and I don’t want to think more of myself than I actually am. This brings us to why I don’t see myself as extreme.  I always ere on the side of caution, sometimes to my detriment, and I take a long time to think and make a decision. That’s why I don’t go to restaurants very often…that and I am poor.  I guess I am a little extreme, I switched to a creative writing major in undergrad and I have taken the plunge into grad school, for Library and Information Science no less. Perhaps it just takes another way of looking at yourself, like we have to look at libraries and more specifically our mission as librarians.

            Another thing I want to talk about is something that got me riled up. One of my friends posted on her Facebook (mentioning another social network on a blog, what are the rules of that?) that in her life she always chose female jobs, one of which she listed was in a library. I half-jokingly responded that librarianship was co-ed. Then later another one of her friends, a guy no less, posts that maybe men just don’t want to be in a place of higher learning and that he has never seen a guy in a library except to get a book for a class. He may have just been trolling, but I had to defend my people, which include male librarians. I went on a rant of how there were plenty of men that go to libraries, and there were plenty of male librarians, including many of my professors and classmates. I did concede that it is a field dominated by women, but to deny the fact that there are male librarians is the same denial women have fought against for decades, most notably in the United States with the suffrage protests. Thoughts?