Librarianship continues to witness the closing of its professional schools, including the recent elimination of two of its oldest and most prestigious graduate programs. The closures raise important questions about the profession and suggest that critical scrutiny is needed, not only of the processes of change that bring about the closings but also of librarianship's own rhetoric of response to the closings. This article is a critique of the July 1991 Library Quarterly symposium on graduate library school program elimination. It focuses on the rhetoric of three of the symposium articles.