The Editor of "ALJ" has invited me to comment on my 2001 article "Losing the quality battle in Australian education for librarianship" (Harvey 2001). The article was prompted by a period I spent as a visiting professor in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA (the University of California Los Angeles) and was written while I was there. Coincidentally, I am writing this commentary while based at another top-ranked LIS school in the U.S, the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Simmons College, Boston. I have resided outside Australia for almost all of the last four years, teaching and researching at the University of British Columbia, the University of Glasgow, and at Simmons College. I explain this because it has inevitably modified my views and has distanced me from the Australian LIS education scene.