Libraries — in the digital age, should universities build more of them and spend more money on them? More importantly, should students pay for them? Former Fox News host Greta Van Susteren clearly doesn’t think so.
In a tweet she sent Monday, Van Susteren called libraries “vanity projects,” which angered librarians across the country.
Colleges should stop building vanity projects like huge libraries and billing students-full libraries are on our smartphones! https://t.co/QBeVKZvIKZ
— Greta Van Susteren (@greta) 2016年10月31日
Van Susteren’s tweet was in response to a Yahoo Finance article regarding increased tuition rates at private and public colleges. Her argument in the tweets claimed that universities should not bill students for the building of libraries. Instead, universities should renovate existing ones, especially since students can find journals and research on their smartphones.
Many Twitter users criticized Van Susteren’s statement, stating that libraries are not usually a large factor in increasing tuition.
Boston University Librarian Bob Hudson was among those left angered with Van Susteren’s comments.
“This statement that everything is available on a smartphone is ignorant, considering we subscribe on behalf of the university to over 55,000 online journals,” Hudson said. “You can imagine if you, as an individual, tried to subscribe to 55,000 journal titles how much that would cost you. So, it’s in fact the existence of the library that makes access to all that information possible.”
Hudson said libraries are not a huge contributor to the inflated costs of colleges and universities, especially at BU. In fact, Hudson said those like the Mugar Memorial Library are saving money.
“Certainly we’re not building libraries on this campus anyway, except in virtual and digital ways and in transforming our spaces to serve the needs of our students and our researchers,” Hudson said. “The university’s open access policy urges researchers to publish their results in freely available resources. That is just one way the university library saves money for students and the university.”
Hardin Coleman, dean of the School of Education, wrote in an email that he disagrees with Van Susteren’s judgement because it is “simplistic and overly personal.” Coleman said he loves the ability of his smartphone, but it cannot necessarily provide everything.
“I do love my smartphone for reading the paper and books, but I have not found it a useful tool for doing serious research,” Coleman wrote. “A library is a repository of information that experts have produced and experts in the field have deemed worthy of considerations, and librarians help the learner find this information. Those services do not exist on my smartphone.”
Several students said BU’s library services are a great environment to study and conduct research, and they don’t believe investments in libraries are a waste of tuition.
Katherine Brandon, a junior in the Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, said she doesn’t see the library as a waste of her tuition at all.
“There’s a lot of really old stuff in [the library] that you just can’t find on the internet,” Brandon said. “For example, I have a lot of friends who study archaeology who really need the ancient texts in the library.”
Anna Oehlberg, an SED sophomore, said students from different majors can all benefit from the library’s resources.
”I go to the library for studying purposes, but there are times when my classes actually require us to check out books,” Oehlberg said.
Tony Pham, a freshman in the College of Arts and Sciences, said he sees the value of the library through reducing stress and costs for students.
“Some articles can’t be accessed online,” Pham said. “You have to go through the library system. Especially for science papers, you have to pay a lot for certain journals, but libraries usually will have them.”
Hours after Van Susteren’s first tweet, she posted a video on Facebook, stating that she is “anti-spending money,” not “anti-college libraries.”
“I’m very much in favor of libraries, we need them,” she said in the video. “But do we need all new libraries when so many of these book is on the internet? You’ve got it on your smartphone, you’ve got it on you iPad, you laptop. So why are we building all these buildings?”
