Is this happening to your college library?

Nice article by slate dot com's Rebecca Schuman here,* about the move among university libraries to put more and more printed material in compact shelving where people cannot browse.

Schuman sees these moves as one more instance of administrators and staff turning universities into strip malls with frats:

But there’s one wholly unsentimental reason the stacks are both vital and irreplaceable, and that brings us back to Colby’s decision to replace theirs with a gleaming shrine to the corporate bottom line. As more of the books disappear from college libraries, the people in charge of funding those libraries will be more tempted to co-opt that space for events that bring in revenue, or entice students for the wrong reasons: food courts. Gaming lounges. I expect rock-climbing walls soon. Unless administrators make a protracted effort to preserve the contemplative and studious feeling, that feeling will disappear altogether, and the whatever-brary will become just another Jamba Juice.

Faculty around the country have been trying to fight the strip-mallification of their campuses, but in most cases the administration and staff argue that financial necessity dictates whatever thing it is they are doing to make the campus worse. In most cases the faculty don't have access to what the money is really being spent on, so no way to adjudicate the claims.

At LSU we did win one small battle last year. The Coca-Cola corporation put machines on campus with screens and speakers in them that ran cartoon advertisements 24/7. It was absolutely maddening to be teaching a class or doing work in your office with the incessant noise. Likewise it made it impossible for students to study together in the public spaces with the machines. How could anyone have thought that this was a good idea?

After Faculty Senate got involved they finally agreed to turn them off. Then six months or so later the volumes went back on and we had to complain again. There's still the horrifying uncanny valley Coca Cola polar bear doing his thing on the front of the machine, but at least it's quiet.

I don't think T.S. Eliot had universities in mind when he wrote:

If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the spoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;
And the light shone in the darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the center of the silent Word.

Oh my people, what have I done unto thee.

Where shall the word be found, where shall the word
Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.

[Notes:

*Unfortunately, Slate is one of the many webpages using the modern CSS version of frames to do to your screen exactly what Shuman is bemoaning with respect to colleges.**

If you are using firefox go here, and download "Remove it Permanently." Once it's installed you can right click on any offending part of a webpage and scroll down to "remove this permanently" and the part will disappear. This is important because adblock plus doesn't do its full job, for example, with respect to the distracting strobelight/slideshow adds on the both sides of Leiter Reports.***  But "Remove it Permanently" allows you to get rid of them and enjoy the content commercial-free.

It would be cool if there were a meatworld version of these programs that would eat people's car stereos, televisions in public places, and billboards.

**For about a decade every book on HTML design told desingers never, ever, ever to use either moving gifs or frames. I don't know why most web pages have junked this sensible advice over the past year.

***I realize that there may be moral arguments against using tools like "Remove it Permanently." If anyone sends me an e-mail in reference to this post, I won't open it. Please just say it here publicly, anonymously if you want.]