Marybeth Meszaro’s article talks about authority in terms of learning and information. She starts out her article explaining that she is puzzled that librarians sometime blame themselves when students do not use their resources to their full advantage. She also explains that there is an assumption that the faculty commands more authority than librarians. This type of authority is what Patrick Wilson calls “administrative authority”. What this means is that students of undergraduates attribute most administrative authority to faculty as faculty controls their grade. There is a crisis as Meszaro explains that this distinction between authority causes students to favor and respect only certain opinions and this reinforces a question in authority. The author suggests that faculty and librarians should join forces and lean towards a more cognitive authority and thus this will be a better approach for students. The cognitive authority should focus less on “issues of access and retrieval and more on student attitudes and beliefs about knowledge”.
