I wanted to share the following editorial with you. It appeared in the
Sunday July 18 Los Angeles Times Opinion section (on the front page).
Albert Brecht, abrecht@law.usc.edu
CAN DEMOCRACY SURVIVE
IF INFORMATION IS CONTROLLED?
by Kevin Starr
At the core of every great university there must be a great library,
just as at the core of every great city there must be a flourishing public
library system. How shocking, then, to find both UCLA and UC Berkeley
making war -- arrogant, suicidal war -- on their schools of library science.
Berkeley has directed its School of Library and Information Science to
accept no new students, pending review by a planning committee and the
academic senate. The School of Library Science at UCLA will admit students
in the fall -- but this school, founded in 1960 by UCLA Librarian Lawrence
Clark Powell, one of the great librarians in U.S. history, is scheduled for
elimination in the near future. These moves by Berkeley and UCLA will soon
leave only the School of Library Science at San Jose State University active
in California.
Before bashing Berkeley and UCLA for their myopic, snobbish, crypto-
gnostic arrogance (and I will, in a second), I must also point out that
Columbia University and the University of Chicago have also eliminated their
library schools. The most unkindest cut of all, as Shakespeare might put
it, because university-based library education began at Columbia at the turn
of the century, under Melvil Dewey, and reached its heights as a scholarly
enterprise at the Library School of Chicago in the mid-20th Century.
When university administrators and faculty eliminate schools of
library science, they usually point to money. We can't afford it, they
say. Untrue. Library schools cost very little. What they really mean is
that library schools are not staffed by Nobel Prize-winners, and their
alumni, generally speaking, do not go out into the world and make a fortune
and contribute big bucks back to alma mater.
Like the ministry, like social welfare, like primary and secondary
education, librarianship is not a short cut to riches or prestige. It is a
mode of service, a vital branch of education, connected via its gift of
self-instruction to the information needs, the intellectual and imaginative
needs, of a lifetime.
In an academic setting, librarianship, operating as bibliography,
acquisitions, classification and cataloguing, is an intricate intellectual
exercise. Without it, every university will soon devolve into a Tower of
Babel, a nightmare of undigested, irretrievable information of value to no
one.
Big-time universities hide out behind the money issue, but are really
saying librarianship is not that sexy, which they translate to mean, not
academically valid. Academics are embarrassed by the service orientation of
librarianship and its democratic spirit, its calling as a profession to
serve each and every library user, be he or she a Nobel Prize-winner or a
high-school kid in South Los Angeles. More hypocritically, on their own
campuses, they take for granted the constant act of intellect and
administrative will that keeps their own university libraries accessible and
in use.
Thus prestige universities such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton and
Stanford never established library schools. Prestige universities such as
Columbia and Chicago disestablished them. A decade back, USC disestablished
its library school despite the fact that it cost comparatively little to run
and was academically ranked as the seventh best in the nation. And now
Berkeley and UCLA, which should be secure in the matter of self-esteem, are
making every effort to eliminate theirs.
Berkeley, I am told, will most likely reorient its School of Library
and Information Science into a computer engineering and
information-system-oriented institution -- far removed from the task of
training librarians to serve the people of California or to pursue research
applicable to the upgrading of public library systems. And with Berkeley
going this way, UCLA is sure to follow. Chancellor Charles Young has all but
pledged himself to root out the virus of librarianship -- a craft, a
calling, not a science! -- from the Westside campus.
The good news is that San Jose State University, working with Cal
State Fullerton and the renowned Pasadena Public Library, is doing all it
can to keep librarianship alive in the public sector. San Jose State has
more than 350 students in its San Jose campus program and nearly 200 in the
program it operates in conjunction with Cal State Fullerton.
That's nearly 600 Californians committed to entering a field as
challenging -- and frequently under-regarded -- as any comparable mode of
public service. Even more significantly, the Pasadena Public Library system
has been cooperating with San Jose State to train librarians and will be
joined this fall by the library system of San Diego.
That brings the education of librarians back to where it began -- in
the libraries themselves: at the library school of the state library in New
York, for example, which Dewey brought down to Columbia, or the school in
the New York Public Library, or the school which operated so successfully at
the turn of the century in the Los Angeles Public Library.
We hear a lot these days about universities making money from the
research carried on under their auspices -- research that is publicly
supported through taxes. Perhaps the universities now disestablishing
library education would like to see knowledge commercialized as well.
Perhaps the dream of publicly supported libraries will go the way of the
dream of publicly supported primary and secondary education.
Just as expensive private schools are rapidly replacing public schools
that can or will, no longer do the job, perhaps we will privatize access to
libraries and information as well. Certainly, many librarians have found a
lucrative market in the private sector, charging hundreds of dollars per day
for in research and reference work that their counterparts in the public
sector perform for free.
But is that what we want -- the re-elitization of access to books and
other sources of information? No wonder support among the general public is
falling off for the UC system. For that system, among other offenses,
brushes aside as beneath its notice the all-important work of insuring the
survival of equal access to information in a democracy.
Kevin Starr teaches urban and regional planning at USC. He holds the Master
of Library Science degree from UC Berkeley. From 1973 to 1976 he served as
the city librarian of San Francisco.
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