This commentary is by Diane Alberts, a retired teacher who lives in Rutland.
This is an open letter to Gov. Phil Scott:
Let me propose for you a brief analogy. My neighbor has a small flock of chickens. Recently a couple of hens started to have problems eating due to a fungal infection. He reluctantly had to terminate them rather than to have them suffer and spread their disease to the rest of the flock. That was the logical and humane way to handle the problem before he lost the whole flock.
The current trustees of Vermont State University and its president, Parwinder Grewal, would advise my neighbor to cut nourishment for all the chickens and maybe somehow that would make the sick ones better.
It seems pretty obvious that the president and trustees of Vermont State University have lost confidence all around, from students and staff to the general public, in their ability to run a healthy state university system — that is, an institution for sharing learning and knowledge.
Learning and knowledge require access to as much existing, revealed knowledge (food for thought, if you will) as possible. After teaching staff, books are the next most fundamental source of information and education. Removing books from a university library is a ludicrous suggestion, as is the firing of librarians whose job it is to help students access those books.
A university without books is like a Statehouse with no governing bodies. These apparently unqualified “leaders” have rendered the concept of a state university in Vermont a joke.
Apart from the blatantly obvious violation of fundamental sourcing of information, this board is assuming that somehow an internet provider of “books” will never raise rates for such “borrowing.” Should students accept it when a bot informs them that the internet source doesn’t have the book they seek, but maybe this one will do instead? How many primary sources of Vermont history will the internet source have? Will a bot provide an interesting variation on their topic, like a good librarian can?
In this age of politicians and ideologues deciding what students can know, there is another frightening aspect of relying strictly on the internet whose administrators will bend to the pressure of the loss of income and not concern themselves with quality of information.
Will the internet source accept censorship of books that politicians have declared inappropriate, in violation of the views of their constituents (or donors)? Furthermore, all the internet, as we have seen, is subject to hacking either by a high school kid home for the day or someone in a Russian warehouse of hackers looking to bend the views of Americans their way. Ever hear of a book being hacked?
Then, of course, there are the usual flaws of the internet: breakdowns, bugs, availability, and other glitches that, well, just don’t exist in books.
Many Vermonters critical of this decision have pointed out that sometimes learning happens best when one picks up in his or her hands a hard-copy book. Studies are just starting to reveal physical and psychological harm done by too much screen time, especially in younger people. Imagine reading about physiology, psychology, microbiology on a screen for hours at a time!
If there are enrollment problems causing financial woes, it would seem that you don’t starve students of the sources of learning in a university; instead, you find where the weakness in enrollment exists, and cut there. It may be painful locally for a bit, but does it really make sense to have students scattered in various corners of the state to maintain a couple of institutions that can’t keep up?
Does a responsible board kill all the state colleges because a couple are no longer able to attract enough students? Do they really think that weakening the entire system will draw more students?