Injustice will be served

Tiny little article buried in the New Tork Times:

"FORT BLISS, Tex., Aug. 18 (AP) - A jury on Thursday spared Pfc. Willie V. Brand from prison time, reducing his rank a day after he was convicted in a brutal attack on an Afghan prisoner. Prosecutors had asked that the defendant, 27, be sent to a military prison for 10 years with a dishonorable discharge.

On Wednesday, a jury of four enlisted soldiers and three officers convicted Private Brand of assault, maltreatment, maiming and making a false official statement in connection with an attack on a detainee known as Dilawar at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan while Private Brand worked in a detention center there in December 2002.

The jury acquitted him of charges that he had abused a second detainee, Habibullah. Both prisoners died in December 2002."

Notice that the attack ocurred in December of 2002, and the prisoner died in December of 2002. So apparently murder is legal now in this country. Tell your friends.

In other news, I wanted to address some issues raised in that article I talked about yesterday. I started thinking that the problem with the MLIS degree as it now stands is that us plebes think of the degree as our ticket into the library profession, whereas apparently employers don't quite see it that way. While you must have the degree to be a professional librarian, having the degree does not in and of itself make one a professional librarian. This is some weird shit, because it means that people like me, who cannot afford to work part-time, sans benefits library assistant/ library tech jobs for five years till they go get their master's, cannot be librarians in the system as it is now. According to employers, I do not currently have enough 'library experience' to be a librarian, even though I have the degree. So what about people in their 30s, 40s, or 50s who have families to support, but who want to change careers midlife? According to the system, they are shit out of luck as well (although they probably have previous careers to draw from experience-wise). I cannot think of any other profession where this is the case - if you have a medical degree, you are a doctor. If you have a law degree, you are a lawyer. These fields understand that its new grads won't have much practical experience, and thus build entry-level positions into its structure to make room for them to develop.

So I have a proposal. The library profession likes the idea of a master's degree (as do I - I think it's a good idea for librarians to have a bachelor's at the very least), and yet they also think that professional librarians need years of experience in order to be conferred with that title. Therefore, why not make one year of the master's program an apprenticeship? The first year can be made up of classes on bibliographic organization and other theory, while the second year will be a practical experience in a real library, doing real librarian work. This would require a lot of cooperation from the library community, but on the other hand it also means libraries would get a lot of free labor. The students would work for credit, and would pay for the program the same ways they would if they were going to classes (student loans or part-time work). This cuts through having to take a lot of bullshit courses, and also means that people who've been working in the library field for several years could get automatic credit towards their MLIS degree - they would be able to finish in one year instead of two. I think it's genius. And I also think that the library profession needs to acknowledge that they can't have it both ways - they cannot keep pretending to be a 'scholarly' profession while requiring practitioners to have practical skills over academic ones.

That's just the way I see it.