“Great and capacious minds have graced that building,” he wrote in an e-mail to the board chairman. “To replace it now, even in part, by a mere warehouse in Richmond is beyond the pale.”
Charles Hirschkind, the chair of the anthropology division, mentioned that the college had diminished the variety of graduate college students it accepts into the anthropology since 2004 by just a little greater than half, reflecting, he mentioned, the division’s “weaker financial situation” and the rise in prices to assist graduate college students.
“When we’re talking about budgetary restraints, we are also talking about priorities and where one decides to invest,” he mentioned. “And I think the university feels little incentive to invest in the social sciences and humanities.”
Dr. Hirschkind mentioned some college members had been pleasantly stunned to see the youthful era preventing for the library after assuming college students that grew up within the digital age might need much less appreciation for bodily books or the pleasures of a library. And the occupation of the library, to some, is harking back to an earlier activist period at Berkeley.
“There is a strong sense of communitas in the air — it is not at all like identity politics — we need a new word for it,” Nancy Scheper-Hughes, an anthropology professor, wrote in an e-mail to Mr. Brown. “They want to read. They want to be with open communities of people of very different ideas.”
The college students, in the meantime, have been dwelling within the library for greater than per week, learning for finals, taking part in board video games and consuming breakfasts of croissants and granola. Worried that the college is attempting to expire the clock till summer time break after which dismantle the library, the scholars say they may keep so long as it takes.
“They can give us the library tomorrow,” Mr. Molloy mentioned, “and we’ll all be happy to go home.”
Source: www.nytimes.com