Arguably greater than housing and different points that usually appeal to extra consideration, the newest battle at UC Berkeley threatens the center of the college: its libraries.
Distressingly, the college says it desires to shut three libraries, together with its anthropology library, as a result of it says it could possibly’t discover the cash in its $3.1 billion finances to maintain them open.
It might not look like a lot amid all of the challenges going through larger schooling. But the destiny of the anthropology library, the one one among its type within the state, and its almost 45,000 volumes are on the forefront of a deliberate transformation of the whole library system on the oldest public college within the UC system.
UC Berkeley intends to shrink the variety of libraries from 23 to 10 “hub” libraries, and 7 “satellite tv for pc” libraries, the latter with fewer providers, shorter hours if budgets are lowered, and with out a librarian in attendance in some circumstances. Others will likely be by appointment solely.
The arithmetic statistics library and the physics-astronomy library would additionally shutter below the so-called long-term house plan. Among the books will likely be transferred to the primary library, however others will likely be despatched to its off-site “shelving facility” in Richmond, miles from the campus, the place one other 48,000 anthropology volumes are saved.
The modifications, at the very least partly, mirror a motion happening all through larger schooling in response to altering studying habits. College students more and more are utilizing libraries not a lot for his or her books however extra as examine halls.
However college librarians say the primary purpose for the deliberate closures is a budgetary one. They are saying that the library system has 40% fewer workers than it did 20 years in the past, at the same time as enrollment elevated by roughly 12,000 college students. It isn't, says college librarian Jeff Mackie-Mason, “a results of judging any self-discipline as much less necessary than another.”
However what does this say about college’s priorities? Dropping the anthropology library represents not solely an assault on essentially the most distinguished image on the College of California’s seal (a guide), however successfully undermines the anthropology self-discipline itself.
The library is a “essential part of anthropological inquiry at Berkeley, each for its legacy and for what it has to supply to future generations,” wrote anthropologist Charles Hirschkind, the division chair, in an anguished letter to school officers final fall.
“The library is the central hub holding collectively the disparate and sometimes disconnected elements that make up, not simply the division, however the mental subject of the self-discipline on campus as nicely,” Hirschkind wrote.
I really feel an in depth reference to the college on this situation. I spent a variety of time within the library after I was a graduate pupil within the division — admittedly in pre-internet days once we relied solely on arduous copies of books and journal articles for our courses and analysis.
But the testimonials of present college students — lots of whom not too long ago participated in a “sit-in” within the library for 2 days and nights to protest the deliberate closure — have been shifting. They instructed me that, regardless of the profound modifications in how data is conveyed, the library nonetheless performs a necessary function within the mental and social lifetime of the division — and, in lots of circumstances, their psychological well being.
What’s extra, they are saying they really use the books. Most of the library’s holdings, they level out, aren’t obtainable on-line.
“The College and the Library can not exist with out one another,” a high-level fee on the way forward for the Berkeley library declared a decade in the past. The fee referred to as for a “severe main technique of reinvestment.”
But the college is embarking on simply the other technique, disinvesting in a repository of information that encompasses and helps maintain a whole self-discipline, with particular significance for California.
It isn't too late to vary course.
Louis Freedberg, a UC Berkeley-trained anthropologist and veteran schooling journalist, is former government director of EdSource. He wrote this commentary for CalMatters.