The Issues

It's amazing to me that people are willing to just accept this decision and the process for reaching it - but that aside I think the conversation should continue about the many inter-related issues this flap has brought to the surface. Please feel free to disagree, add, comment, modify, ammend any of the following items.

• the use of existing (or not existing, meaning create one) university educational technologies to offer a beta test for iSchool research and distance learning infrastrucutre. Why not use WEBCT or WebIQ as tools to support the town hall meetings in the fall?
• iSchools and/or/vs. distance learning and/or/vs. other growth engines for CLIS
• The loss of PWL is not about convenience or other library school libraries, though they are interesting and related questions
• The loss of PWL is not about saving the old at the expense of the new
• The loss of PWL is not about a Wasserman v. McKeldin (spy v. spy) landscape/intellectual geography

I would like to suggest that the decision to close PWL is an example of leadership techniques that are bad for morale (not isolated to CLIS or Jenny Preece), exclusionary, non-data driven (at least to this point) and political at the expense of the quality of knowledge products possible (including Ph.D. candidates and faculty), student input was not considered in the decision (that's just fact) but used after to provide a defacto rubber stamp support.

The loss of PWL is about institutionalized response to perceived external and internal forces that relate to individual jobs more than CLIS as a college, or CLIS as a college would have been given the time and space and support to problem solve and team-build. The loss of PWL is about institutionalized competition in the information age, and is a stark contrast to myths the the information age is more democratic, more transparent, more efficient than the days....of yore....

Let's discuss these and other topics in general and in specifics....