The “compromise” offered by the Vermont State University administration in the libraries controversy is of a piece with the original decision.
They say they’ll retain one-tenth of the library collections, choosing to keep “academically valuable” books that have been checked out since Jan. 1, 2018.
This is as meatheaded an approach as the initial plan to shred everything. It ignores the facts that many books are used in the library but not checked out, and that many printed materials are not available online. Do President Grewal and those enabling his projected vandalism think that print materials contain no potential value for researchers and scholars, merely because they have been recently neglected?
It might be salutary for them to remember that humanism and the consequent renaissance were sparked by the rediscovery of volumes that had lain neglected on shelves for centuries. A library is a conversation with the past. We can drop in and out of that conversation at our will. But to silence it, as VSU threatens to do, is nothing less than willful stupidity, impoverishment, and an abomination.
Seth Steinzor
South Burlington