If it is true, as Cicero said, that a room without books is like a body without a soul, what can it mean now that all books in the libraries of our Vermont State University are about to be removed?
Parwinder Grewal, Vermont State University’s soon-to-be president, recently announced that the collections in all campus libraries will be eliminated. “As of July 1, 2023, these spaces will no longer provide services including circulation and physical materials …”
According to Grewal, the books and other materials will be replaced with “an all-digital academic library.” His claim that students will still have access to the same materials is blatantly untrue and shows his lack of knowledge about the scope of digital information as well as his ignorance about scholarship.
Our libraries contain items that cannot or will never be digitized: irreplaceable documents, clipping files, manuscripts, books, archival materials, art and music. Even someone who has casually spent time in the stacks of a library also knows the value of serendipity: discovering an entirely new train of thought by the juxtaposition of books on a shelf.
Likewise, the presence of a librarian is invaluable to successful research. Setting aside the fact that, after years of service our dedicated librarians are about to laid off, students now will be paying a lot of money for an inadequate and insufficient education.
According to Grewal, the library collections will be “offered first to the VSCS community” — whatever that might mean — leaving our state university without its soul.
Alan Boye
Barnet
Emeritus professor of humanities
Vermont State University, Lyndon
