Yale students angered by plan that would reduce number of books in undergraduate library
Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University in New Haven, Conn. By David Yaffe-Bellany and Jacob Stern April 21 at 10:00 AM NEW HAVEN, Conn. — During the past few years, Yale University has seen more than its fair share of student activism. In 2015, protests over issues of race and discrimination rocked the campus for weeks. After President Trump’s inauguration in 2017, more than 1,000 students rallied in opposition to the administration’s immigration policies.
In response to the uproar, Gibbons in February announced an updated renovation plan under which the library would keep 61,000 print volumes rather than 40,000. A new timeline for the project guaranteed the library would reopen before the start of the fall semester. Gibbons also circulated an Excel spreadsheet for students and professors to use to indicate which volumes they want to keep in the library.
Under Gibbons’s plan, the books in Bass — some of which are duplicates or have not been checked out in years — would move to the upper floors of the nearby Sterling Memorial Library, where they would remain accessible to students. Undergraduates interviewed, however, said poor lighting makes browsing the Sterling shelves difficult and the densely packed stacks can intimidate underclassmen who have never embarked on a major research project.
His movement quickly garnered support among a large swath of Yale’s undergraduates, from science, technology, engineering and mathematics majors who hardly ever check out books to budding historians who frequent the library stacks. “It might seem like the default is to first go online and see what’s available on the given topic you’re trying to study,” said Leipzig, now a senior. “But at least for me, that experience definitely indicated that there’s all sorts of scholarly questions that come to the front of your mind when you’re really engaging with the library as a physical space that holds physical books.”
“We are balancing two important competing needs: ample study space for a growing student body and a vital, engaging print collection immediately located in that space,” she said. “We are using this opportunity to reevaluate and renew the collection, and I am optimistic that the post-renovation collection will be stronger and more relevant to the undergraduate curriculum than the current, larger collection.
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