Commentaries are opinion pieces contributed by readers and newsmakers. VTDigger strives to publish a variety of views from a broad range of Vermonters. Commentaries give voice to community members and do not represent VTDigger’s views.
This commentary is by Glenn McRae of Burlington, who has taught, conducted research and led programs at the University of Vermont for the past 20 years. He is a former member of the Library Commission at the Fletcher Free Library and was director of public policy at the Snelling Center for Government.
I have an ancestor, Samuel Swett Green, who is considered to be the “father of reference work” and, as a founding member of the American Library Association, was a relentless advocate for libraries and librarians as bedrock institutions and resources in our communities.
His voice seems very muted today in the current cost-cutting action by Parwinder Grewal, the inaugural president of Vermont State University, to eliminate libraries and librarians at our state college campuses.
Grewal argues that “interest and circulation in physical library materials had plummeted in the past five or six years — even taking the Covid-19 pandemic into account. He argued that digitizing books and other materials will make them more accessible to students who may not be on campus often.”
His limited vision of what libraries provide makes me wonder about his leadership qualifications to lead our state university. I am a graduate (1977) of a state university system that allowed me to obtain an excellent education at an affordable cost and move out into the world with little debt to explore and mold my future without the burdens that so many graduates face today.
The library at my university was not just a vast repository of books and documents, though I loved wandering the stacks, and in searching for specific books or references often came upon the unlooked-for gem that took my thinking in a whole new direction.
There were the librarians as well, skilled researchers, teachers, and coaches who helped hone my abilities in research and problem-solving, and encouraged new paths of inquiry. I have valued and benefited from their continued support over the past five decades, including the ability to access books and archives today that are contributing to my current research and writing.
Samuel Swett Green said “the school and the library are practically one enterprise … they interlock … each is imperfect and insufficient without the other.”
While he did not have access to the vast resources now available digitally, he did recognize that whatever the resources (print or electronic), it was the guide that mattered, and the institution needed to support that guide.
If our local communities, all facing similar budgetary shortfalls and challenges, were to take the same disdainful attitude toward the local library (some 180 such institutions in Vermont) it would be easy to save a few dollars and eliminate the books, the building, and the people as community resources and inform the patrons that they will do just fine on their own searching the internet, and in fact they will be better off because it will be more accessible to those who don’t come often to the village center.
In her edited volume “Libraries and Democracy: The Cornerstone of Liberty,” Nancy C. Kranich begins the discussion by referencing back to World War II, a time like our own, when the future of democracy faced uncertainty. She notes that President Franklin D. Roosevelt described libraries as the great symbols of the freedom of the mind, essential to the functioning of a democratic society.
Given that the purpose of higher education is to produce more empowered citizens ready to take their place, not just in the economic sphere, but in the role of full citizens, why would we jeopardize that with the elimination of the basic institution that has been at the forefront of advancing democracy and freedom of thought? Is a university still a university without a library? Is the internet, with all its resources, a reliable tool for building an understanding of how to weigh opposing thoughts and information and come to a grounded conclusion?
In my current research on the educational experimentation in higher education immediately after World War II, I am struck that the first action of temporary universities built for GIs in Europe awaiting redeployment back to the U.S. was to build libraries, scrounging books from around the continent, having local citizens donate their books, and recruiting librarians from among those in service as well as from colleges in the U.S. (including Norwich University here in Vermont) to come and serve the soldiers-turned-students.
Simply deleting libraries from our state university campuses may provide temporary financial respite for our beleaguered state system, but it undercuts the core purpose of having that university in the first place.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Glenn McRae: Libraries are more than books.