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Books should be the heart and soul of the library
To the Editor:
PHOTO: DOUGLAS LEVERE
For a depressing experience on campus, go down to the undergraduate library in Capen Hall. In the newly renovated ground-floor lobby, some of the couches face the wall—the one where newly acquired books were once displayed—on which a flat-screen TV educates students with round-the-clock cable news. Past the couches and the check-out counter is the computing sweatshop, where anxious students with backpacks get 15-minute shifts, jostling each other at stand-up work stations.
Take the stairs down to the basement and, yes, there are books there. But all the activity is at large tables, where, as is normal enough, students are poring over assignments and pecking away at laptops. The aisles between the stacks are vacant. As I find from a cursory survey this morning, not one book is being consulted from the collection.
Wandering by the shelves, I see hardly any books from this century, and none more recent than 2004. At the very place where our eager and perky students—dressed in their best skull-and-crossbones T-shirts, their ears and cheeks freshly perforated—might get the chance to make acquaintance with some good books, all they will find is a collection that is old, dusty and musty. Not that an old collection is bad, but that it needs some grooming, some culling and some rejuvenation if it’s to remain appealing. If our library now inspires me at all, it’s to learn how it descended into such a disheveled condition.
My first impulse is to think that, as the signs brag, it’s now a “cybrary” not library, and the money has gone for cyclops screens instead of books. But then, I know that plenty is still spent on that quaint technology between covers, and many arcane titles, dutifully ordered from academic publishers, arrive on campus each year—so why do they not find their way to the this particular basement?
I’ll wager as one answer that our arch-cybrarians are no longer sure why there should at all be a place that is called the “undergraduate library.” Lockwood Library, our largest, is easily enough understood as a warehouse in which truckloads of books from the academic presses can be stored. But, why does a university need a small, general collection?
Well, it’s to such a library I would go to be introduced to a subject. It’s where I would hope to meet a good book or two on Roman history, or the art of Dürer, or the science of meteorology, without having to wind my way through acres of hyper-specialized volumes. It’s also where I would like to find the best and most enduring, whether among novelists or philosophers. The making of such a collection is daunting. It’s all the more so in our time, when many of our faculty members have acquiesced to the politicization of knowledge and are unsure how to identify, or don’t even trust in the existence of, the enduring and the excellent.
If we had such a library, it’s where I would go to browse, discover and savor books so written that I would be able to follow them through the twists and turns of argument, even if, as is highly likely, I have never taken a college course on the subject. That, too, is why the collection has to be of books. What’s marvelous about them is not that they’re made of paper, as the nostalgic persist in thinking, but that they’re still the only practical way to engage ideas at full length. The most outstanding books, the ones that merit some struggle, can reshape one’s very mode of thinking and change one’s life.
To have a relationship that intense and that satisfying with a book, we have to make a commitment to stay together long enough to pass through some difficult times together. The book is, therefore, an engagement, not a date. When we meet, we should be in a place where we can sip ideas and bathe in articulated knowledge instead of having to slurp data and surf sites. To become intimate, we need time, patience, privacy and an environment conducive to them. That environment is the library.
The library I have in mind is not particularly for undergraduates, though they’re invited too, but for all of us who want to take some time on a snowy day to rendezvous with our intellectual heritage, and not spend our college years twitching and jerking across wastelands of blinking information. If the old name is too bland, we can give it a cool, new one, say Planet Polymath or Bibliophilia. Our campus needs reading rooms designed and collections cultivated to foster intimacy with ideas.
Ernest Sternberg
Professor
Department of Urban and
Regional Planning.
School of Architecture and Planning
Safety alerts promote prejudicial environment
To the Editor,
I am a male, black student at UB who has never found the campus alerts—at least those that warn of suspicious people—to be of much use.
When I envision the alleged perpetrators through the provided descriptions, I cannot help but envision myself, my relatives, my peers, or any other black male for that matter. When I notice these messages, such as the one concerning a robbery at Northrup Place on Feb. 28, I only acknowledge the perpetuation of the brute caricature.
The alert only alerts me that it would be best not to walk around with a gray or brown hoodie for a week or two, nor blue jeans, nor baseball cap, nor shirt, nor boxers, nor socks, nor shoes. It would probably be best to walk around naked, or else I would attract suspicion, fear or hate.
I hate to attack a system used to maintain a sense of safety among the university community, but I cannot help but contemplate a better solution, for the one currently in use may create more problems than it solves. With the exception of a rare few alerts, who is endowed the ability to avoid the victimization these messages purport?
Let's examine the rare campus bulletins that make a difference. One that I noticed was a memo that stated the perpetrator’s routine—this particular person pretended to ask for directions to the university. This description at least provides more substance to work with than "beware of every black man 4 feet to 7 feet tall, weighing 120 lbs. to 320 lbs., between the ages of 10 and 40." Although I may now attract suspicion if I ask for directions, I now have to do more than merely be.
And we as a university community have to do more. As students, we must be more vocal toward these social retardations, such as being stopped on campus by university police and asked for identification while all other students traverse unmolested. As informers, we must not stimulate an oppressive or prejudicial environment through misuse of information.
A suggestion: Try two formats for campus alerts, one a broad format, the other a descriptive format. When you lack any real information to aid in the apprehension of criminals, try a broad message that informs the community of what took place and how to avoid victimization—no need to say "six to 10 black males, ages 14 to 17, all in blue jeans, stole a woman's purse on Englewood." Instead, try "a group of five to 10 juveniles robbed a student on Englewood. Remember to travel in groups, rather than alone," or something of the sort.
When there is a satisfactory description of the suspect—a picture, a scar, the location of a tattoo, the individual’s routine, a well-known person or a name—then provide a more detailed alert.
Fed up,
Sean Solitaire
UB student