The unheralded administrative assistant

Isabella Losinger, a former academic librarian who now works at UBC, highlighted the role played by universities’ non-teaching staff in a chapter written for Solitudes of the Workplace: Women in Universities, edited by Elvi Whittaker (McGill-Queen’s, 2015).

In an excerpt published by University Affairs, Losinger wrote: “Writing in higher education has largely ignored the presence of the many different campus workers who do everything but teach….there needs to be a concerted effort on behalf of university leaders to understand the needs of an increasingly educated, politically aware and less deferential workforce. The systematic capture and preservation of historical and current working experiences of these workers would go a long way to mitigating the invisible nature of their contributions.”