Author: J. Mohorcich
I am in the stacks, surrounded by books. In front of me is a document entitled “Conceptualizing the Academic Commons.” The document is meant to explain to you and me why these books should be removed to make space for, as the document puts it, “a nexus of transformed spaces.”
I don’t know what that means. Ditto for the rest of the document. I know what the words mean, of course, and I can visualize the semantic connections between them. But, see, so far as I can tell, they refer only to themselves.
This document is in your e-mail. The subject line is “Town Hall About Oxy’s Academic Commons.” There’s some very nice blue-colored Comic Sans at the top. Go read it. If you can make any sense of what it means to “cultivate subjectivities” or foster “serendipitous intellectual encounters,” please e-mail me. I’ve gone through it four or five times. I’ve got adverbs leaking out my ears.
I don’t think whoever wrote “Conceptualizing the Academic Commons” is a bad writer. I don’t think she or he is being willfully unclear. I think muddled ideas resist being written down.
Every student knows what it means when phrases like (and I quote) “thereby allowing us to understand ourselves as members of an academic community that exists in meaningful relation to the larger civic artistic communities around us” start filtering into his paper: his grip on the material wavered a bit here. His internal vision of his own ideas got a little blurry.
The only kernel of certainty in the proposal regards what we ought to ditch: “The general print collection will be smaller eventually by 40-50%.”
I don’t want to be unfair to authors of this proposition. I know many of its members. They are nice people. I don’t think a single one of them is allergic to paper. And they seem too thoughtful and too smart to be taken in by vague, deterministic notions of “inevitable technological progress” and “totalizing digitization,” either.
So why am I reading a proposal to eliminate nearly half the library in favor of a series of adjectives?
Here’s what I think happened. I think some troublesome trend lines in the publishing world were taken to imaginary endpoints. I think there hasn’t been a whole lot of hands-on, eyeballs-on engagement with the electronic readers that are supposed to replace print collections. Ever tried to annotate on “e-brary”? Ever even considered reading a Google Books scanned novel cover to cover? My cousin owns a Kindle. She uses it to play word games. I don’t know if she’s finished a novel since she got it.
We’re gambling half the library’s collection on technology that doesn’t exist. Maybe, beneath and behind this whole “reconceptualization,” there has been too much asking, “What do kids these days actually want?” This is a tired and absurd question, not in the least because the answer is mostly “Facebook and coffee. Also sex.” Maybe, just maybe, the library is not for giving students what a focus group imagines they want, but for providing what everyone at Occidental needs.
These stacks, they are beautiful. They breathe around me. I would hate for them to become a memory.
J. MohorÄich is a senior politics major. He can be reached at jmohorcich@oxy.edu.
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