Academic libraries are institutions of continuity.
We are built on relationships that deepen over time: partnerships with faculty, trust with students, and the quiet expertise of staff who understand the rhythms of academic life in ways outsiders often cannot immediately see. Much of what makes a library effective is not written down in policies or organizational charts. It lives in institutional memory and in the accumulated knowledge of people who have spent years learning how the campus truly works.
Because of that, libraries often develop a strong internal culture of competence and resilience. We learn to do more with less. We make systems work even when they are imperfect. We rely on colleagues who know the history behind every workflow, every service point, every long-standing compromise.
So when a position opens, the instinct to look inward is understandable.
Internal candidates already know the culture. They already know the students. They already know the politics, the personalities, the unspoken rules. Hiring or promoting from within can feel like the safest choice—especially in a profession where staffing is lean, change is constant, and capacity is stretched.
And in many cases, internal hiring is the right decision.
But when internal hiring becomes the default rather than the exception, something subtle begins to happen over time. The organization starts to reproduce itself. The same assumptions circulate. The same approaches get reinforced. The same ways of thinking become so familiar that they stop being questioned.
This is how an organizational echo chamber forms.
Echo chambers are not simply environments where people agree with one another. They are environments where organizational habits become indistinguishable from organizational truth. Over time, “this is how we’ve always done it” quietly becomes “this is how it must be done.” The library continues to function, and the work continues to get done—but innovation becomes narrower, perspectives become more aligned, and the organization’s imagination begins to contract.
And in a moment when academic libraries are being reshaped by AI, shifting student demographics, new expectations for access and belonging, and increasing institutional pressure to demonstrate value, contraction is dangerous.
This is why external hiring matters.
External talent is not simply about filling vacancies with new faces. It is one of the few structural ways an organization interrupts its own autopilot. External hires bring different defaults, different experiences, and different questions—questions that insiders may no longer think to ask, not because they lack creativity, but because familiarity has become invisible.
Academic libraries need external talent not because internal staff are insufficient, but because internal-only hiring is one of the fastest ways institutions become echo chambers.
External hiring expands what the library believes is possible.
Echo Chambers and Toxic Dynamics
There is another reason echo chambers matter, and it is one that academic libraries do not always discuss openly.
Echo chambers are not only innovation problems.
They are also workplace health problems.
In toxic organizational dynamics, silence and sameness often reinforce each other. When organizations become closed loops—where the same people, the same assumptions, and the same informal power structures circulate repeatedly—unhealthy norms can become normalized.
In these environments, staff may learn quickly what not to say, what not to challenge, and what is safest to accept. Over time, the organization becomes highly skilled at maintaining itself, even when what it is maintaining is dysfunction.
Echo chambers allow toxic dynamics to persist not necessarily through malice, but through familiarity.
“This is just how it is here.”
External hires do not automatically solve toxic cultures, and it would be unfair to place that burden on new colleagues. But external perspectives can interrupt the normalization of unhealthy patterns. A new voice may notice what insiders have stopped seeing. They may ask why communication feels constrained, why certain work is undervalued, or why innovation is quietly discouraged.
Sometimes the most important disruption is simply naming what has become invisible.
When External Perspective Changes the Question
Consider a familiar scenario: a library that has struggled for years with student engagement. Workshops are offered. Outreach emails are sent. Attendance remains inconsistent. Eventually, the organization settles into a quiet assumption: students simply aren’t interested.
Then a new colleague arrives from a different institutional context. In their first semester, they don’t propose a flashy new initiative. Instead, they ask a deceptively simple question:
Where are students already gathering, and why are we expecting them to come to us?
That question shifts the frame. Engagement is no longer about convincing students to attend library programs. It becomes about embedding library support into the spaces where student life already happens.
Nothing about the students changed. What changed was the organization’s imagination.
That is what external talent can do. It interrupts inherited assumptions and makes new approaches thinkable.
Hiring for Familiarity Replicates Culture—Hiring Externally Expands It
Internal promotion strengthens continuity, but it also reinforces existing culture. That is exactly the problem when culture has become too closed.
If the same people circulate through roles, libraries risk recycling the same service models, maintaining workflows because they are inherited, and solving new problems with old assumptions. Stability becomes confused with readiness.
External hires bring transferable innovation. Other libraries—and other sectors—have already solved problems that many academic libraries still treat as inevitable. External colleagues may arrive with experience in student-centered outreach, inclusive teaching practices, digital scholarship, or assessment models that connect library work to institutional priorities.
They import possibility.
Just as importantly, organizational echo chambers are not only innovation problems. They are equity problems. Internal-only hiring often reproduces the same professional networks, cultural norms, and expectations about what expertise “looks like.” External hiring is one way libraries widen participation and disrupt homogeneity—not only of ideas, but of lived experience.
How Libraries Can Hire Externally Without Reproducing the Same Dynamics
Breaking an echo chamber does not require constant turnover. It requires intentional practices that ensure external hiring truly expands perspective rather than assimilating difference into the status quo.
Libraries can begin by replacing the language of “fit” with the language of contribution. Instead of asking whether someone feels familiar, we should ask what new perspective they bring.
Recruitment pipelines should also widen beyond the usual professional channels. External talent does not only come from peer institutions. It comes from community-centered environments, interdisciplinary spaces, and sectors where innovation has been shaped differently.
Equally important is onboarding. External hires should not be welcomed only to be absorbed into “how things are done here.” The real value of external perspective is that it challenges inherited habits.
And finally, libraries must protect new voices. Echo chambers persist when new colleagues learn quickly that survival depends on silence rather than contribution. Healthy organizations create space for curiosity, dissent, and change.
The Question That Matters
The question is not whether internal candidates are capable. They often are.
The question is whether internal-only hiring allows the organization to evolve—or whether it allows unhealthy dynamics, outdated assumptions, and organizational sameness to persist unchallenged.
Sometimes the most strategic thing a library can do is invite in a voice that does not already sound like its own.
That is how echo chambers break.
And that is how institutions stay alive.
Add comment
Comments