This commentary is by Tom Papeika, a resident of Shrewsbury.
Officials at Vermont State University have decided to eliminate its physical libraries, and the public outcry has been swift and harsh. If one were tasked with damaging the nascent Vermont State University, one could hardly find a more effective way than creating a university without books.
The often tearful reactions are not just nostalgia for libraries or furor at the ham-handed way the decision was handled, but also a visceral reaction to the damage done to the hopes and dreams embodied in the library and promised by a university education.
A library is not merely the repository of texts and ancillary materials relevant to a particular course of study. A library is a culturally significant shared community space. Its collections of books, artifacts, documents, photographs, recordings and other objects serve as an academic memory in the pursuit of truth. Its librarians are keepers of a living legacy.
Communities are damaged by the loss of libraries. Medieval scribes demonstrated the importance of books when they would include a “book curse” on the last page of a manuscript, promising long physical suffering or eternal damnation to one who had the temerity to remove a book from the library.
A library, in all its diverse richness, is the tangible manifestation of the pursuit of boundless knowledge and the unbridled hope promised by a good education. The dubious merits of an ostensibly hyper-efficient all-digital access point of certain texts point to a virtual symbol of lifeless bits and bytes of mere information.
The Library of Congress Reading Room or the stacks at Trinity College are infinitely more inspiring than a password on an electronic device. Books serve an aesthetic as well as an educational purpose wherein their noble beauty cultivates noble minds. Until recently, most civilizations have understood this.
Gutting the library is tantamount to killing the hope that unfettered intellectual curiosity offers. The protests against the death of the library are also protesting the death of hope.
Having developed an inaccurate tool deployed in a manner guaranteed to fail, the Vermont State University officials claim they made the decision to get rid of books on what they knew was faulty, inaccurate and incomplete data. That a poorly conceived email survey would be the deciding factor in the fate of certain academic libraries across Vermont stretches credulity.
To escape the reaction to their unfathomable actions, officials criticized the response of the very library patrons they purport to serve. Seemingly unencumbered by the capacity for meaningful self-reflection, Vermont State University’s response is a kind of abusive intellectual violence, blaming the library victims for the university’s hope-killing actions.
Vermont State University is a public university, and as such must occasionally listen to and answer to the public it serves.The decision to eliminate books was communicated poorly. The response to the reaction of the stakeholders was mishandled. The lack of an effective communication strategy surrounding a transformational change in Vermont’s higher education landscape damaged irreparably the credibility of those making decisions.
We rightly expect a higher degree of professionalism and transparency from those that would shape the future of Vermont.
