College and Research Libraries Stamp Out ~ -------L------W -------! IT MIGHT BE SUPPOSED that in the aca- demic world libraries would be regarded as wanted, inevitable, and required; with an indispensable commodity and a cap- tive audience, what more proper monop- oly could there be? Too, the academic library is everywhere vaunted as "the scholar's workshop" and "the heart of the university," and head librarians, both in hope and vanity, have been known to regard it as true. But while this blessed doctrine is widely heralded from desk and lectern, it is most formally observed qn such holy days as Commencep1ent. The library is indeed the heart of the university, circulating books and other materials and keeping a stream of vital services coursing through the institution's veins; . but much of the establishment's muscle, meat, and fat, it has · often been observ,ed, . seems to settle elsewhere . (and fat, we are reminded, is harmful in the blood). There are of course other cir- culatory . §YStems (like the lymphatics), and _ one of these carries through the aca- de~ic body that yellow, salty ingredient which enriches the blood stream, com- bats infection, and is filtered through tiny regulatory glands called budgets. Quite an independent set of valves con- trols this vital flow, and if the normal fiscal processes fail adequately to sustain the blood and heart, this will not prove fatal to the whole university for it can survive indefinitely through the animation of any .of its parts. This is no fable, for an academic li- brary must .fight for its life as does any other, and it is not accidental when some success is achieved. I shall not attempt to analyze here why university presidents, deans, and professors do not volunteer their sa~aries and expense accounts in un- stinted support for library service; it is enough to know that however vital it may MAY1964 BY NEAL HARLOW Mr. Harlow is Dean of the Graduate School of Library Service at Rutgers Uni- versity and President of ACRL. This paper was read to a meeting of the ALA National Library Week Committee at Chicago, Jan- uary 29, 1964. be to them, it is off-centerto thelr main concern. And if academic libraries are not the primary concern of those who de- pend upon them, how much more oblique are they likely. to , be to the attention of other people! · · · - This· year ALA President Wagman an~ National Library Week both tum ~he spotlight upon academic libraries as being particuhtrly , needy of attention and sup- port, and I, too, wish to champion this wide appeal. Academic libraries are cru- cially important, important enough to warrant your '· interest as w~ll as min~, your interest in academic . Jibraries even at some sacrifice to your own dearest con- cern, a .. concern which must embrace li- braries of all types atid -'levels if we· are together to approximate the services re- quired. · Education. is a means of effecting or avoiding change or of dealing with it; it is an instrument by which we adjust ·to our environment. Sometimes it is repres- sive, maintaining a status quo or enabling man to live peacefully with it, and some- times it is liberating, centered in the in- dividual and advancing with ·him to some self -determined point. As environment changes, society must take this into ac- count and compensate through its educa- tional pattern. When the rate of change becomes faster than the normal process of learning and relearning, education must build into the individual some means of self -adjustment;. the · gap between educa- tion and change can be narrowed in no other way. 177 Essentially, we believe that everything that happens, however unexpected or fan- tastic, derives from some cause which can ultimately be up.derstood. Learning as a key to meaning must therefore sup- plant education as a prop to conformity; specific knowledge becomes obsolete,~ but the process of extending and interpreting it is infinite. What we call "brain power" is the human capability of acquiring and reevaluating a store of knowledge by us- ing tools and a process which have been IPastered through education; it is one of the basic resources of an advanced society. It functions at many levels but is neces- sary in some degree to every intelligent citizen, and its discovery and develop- ment affects his place and contribution. The importance of education, and partic- ularly of higher education, is therefore plain to see. · It is indicative that the: level of what is called "functional literacy" has lately been advanced from five to eight years of for- mal schooling. Where a high school diplo- ma was once required, no less than a bach- elor's degree will now often do, and the degree has acquired new economic and social implications, Jncreasing the acces- sibility of collegeS ' rand universities satis- fies the democratic ideal of maximum opportunity for individual development. World conditions, too, foster higher edu- cation .to provide competence and skills in competition with rivals, and education and defense are officially joined in federal law. Many influences have of late raised education to a highly urgent state at all levels, lent a less-jaundiced color to in- tellectual attainment, and made it seem reasonable in many ,places to devote up to half of local public fu.Qds to formal schooling. · · For a number of years we have watched with pleasure, anxiety, and disbelief the steady increase in college enrollment, in seeming obedience to some wild surmise. The graph has become familiar: in 1850 there were twelve thousand college stu- dents, in 1900, two hundred thirty-eight thousand, and in 1950, two million four hundred thousand; then in only twelve years between 1950 and 1962 the number almost doubled, to four million two hundred seven thousand; and it is predicted that in the eight years leading up to 1970 it will rise to seven million. My university, in a state 175 miles long, conservatively estimates growth from its present thirteen thousand students to forty-six thousand by 1980 (the outside figure being seventy-five thousand, with twenty-five thousand on an adjacent cam- pus for which the land is not yet assured. It seems obvious that we are not going to expand resources that fast. There will be shortages of space, teachers, and li- braries, and some millions of persons in the United States will be taken care of in new local junior colleges and technical schools rather than in four-year colleges and universities. Some thirty to forty of these junior schools are being founded every year, and it has been estimated that by 1970 about 70 per cent of all entering freshmen will be accommodated therein. These "higher" (as contrasted with "high") schools may pose the most im- portant and gravest educational problems of the immediate future: 1 often without academic tradition, governed by local public school officers who are oriented toward secondary education rather than the university, supported largely by lo~al tax funds, emphasizing terminal programs of training for technical positions, and gauging their success by how many of their graduates are placed in local indus- try, t~ey may not fulfill the primary man- date ·of higher ·education. When wisdom and suppleness of mind are most re- quired, it may be that the first steps in higher education will be directed toward training rather than education, toward developing immediately practical techni- cal skills to the exclusion of that supreme- ly practical skill of dealing with ideas. A failure to develop intellectual indepen- 1 See Frederick .J. Wagman, "Library Requirements Of the M'odern College," Library Quarterly, XXXI (.January 1961), 33-44. 178 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES dence in students and the basic habit and means of acquiring information and an- swers in books will cut them off from any dependable source of intellectual supply when they leave the organized support of the school. The library mirrors the problems of the educational scheme. Teachers with heavy schedules, large classes, perhaps with experience only in secondary schools, will have no greater opportunity to "teach with books" at the higher level than they did in the lower grades, and not only do many community colleges lack the "care- fully selected collection of at least 20,000 volumes," specified by the Standards, they may open with nearly empty shelves, counting upon public or other libraries to fill the gap, and may provide very in- adequate funds even for respectable cur- rent growth. The Standards for Junior College Libraries, 2 also prescribe two professional librarians for effective ser- vice to enrollments up to five hundred students, and then state that it is their professional duty to participate actively in the educational program of the insti- tution, give instruction in library use and bibliographic assistance to faculty, hold memberships in committees, and carry on other activities. Dr. Wagman has noted that "if both these librarians were freed of all duties relating to book selection, ordering, cataloging, and administration, if they never conferred with the faculty or a library committee or answered the phone, if they should spend every second of their time helping and advising stu- dents, and could schedule appointments as a dentist does, they would have 9.6 minutes per week for each of the five hundred. "3 And statistics do not often bear out the existence of these two. Nev- ertheless, worknig with the limited num- ber of students whom they can reach, the librarian can 1?~ one of the strongest in- fluenc~s in the community coll~ge for 2 CRL, XXI (May' r9so >, 199-206. 3 Op. cit., p. 37. MAY 1964 self-education (hopefully assisted by a good book store) . The old-line colleges and universities do not remain unchanged. There are large classes, some in scores of sections, read- ing textbooks, outlines, excerpts, and syl- labi, and shunted onto new mechanical devices-all specifically useful but di- recting attention away from the library, the source of knowledge with an infinite prospect for education beyond the school. Reading, alone, is a highly portable and variable tool, and when motivated by per- sonal interest, disciplined by experience, and sustained by the habitual use of li- brary resources and method, it plays a , primary educational role. Greater en- couragement must be given to the usury of the book-at a rate of interest above that now considered normal-if we are truly to educate the mind. Bodily hunger has built-in signals and motivations to ward off starvation, and society has from the start given the bulk' of its attention to gratifying physical needs. Now, late in the evolutionary proc- ess, when the life of the mind begins to have primary survival value, satisfying. the rising demands for intellectual food arid exercise must be given at least equal precedence. Academic institutions have wider re- sponsibilities than are symbolized by the defenses which have sometimes been raised around their intellectual and geo- graphical boundaries. Justified by many fine arguments, even their libraries have been reluctant to accept equal responsi- bility in cooperation, although gestures in this direction have long been standard practice, chiefly in the form of reference service (largely by telephone) and inter- library loan (within the academic and research community) . But new attitudes toward intellectual development, a wider spectrum of university students, the ex- pansion of research, and financial encour- agement from state and federal sources begin to predispose them toward ·closer affiliation with the rest of the intellectual 179 world---'-at a time, be it said, when a gross enlargement of their primary load takes place. In New York a statewide plan to associate academic, research, and reference libraries to constitute a single network, with state support through di- rect subsidy or grants-in-aid, seems head- ed for implementation, and in Pennsyl- vania, to name one other, college libraries serve (tentatively at least) as local and regional library centers, and the useful- ness of creating a statewide resource for reference-and research in which academic libraries will be the core is under explora- tion. The millennium of library service draws nigh when academic libraries in every region proffer their major intellec- tual stores as stockpiles and supermarkets to support the affiuent mind. The strategy now most urgently re- quired for library development cannot be laid out upon a large-scale map where all the fine details can be clearly seen- salaries, recruitment, tax base, central processing, paperbacks, book catalogs, machines. The master plan must be de- veloped at a higher elevation, with the whole continent of library use in view; and with this perspective, our major ob- jectives should be identified, responsibili- ties assigned, and a schedule adopted, specifying what we have to do. Then we should reach every reader, educator, and politician, every professional man, par- ent, and citizen, who is making up his mind about libraries (or not giving them a thought) and convince him they are as essential as jobs and schools. Thus, ulti- mately, we may achieve universal, com- pulsory library service, based upon the intellectual needs of people rather than upon their more superficially expressed wants. It is a dereliction on the part of the library profession that no one has yet produced so substantial a plan, for we have ready at hand a powerful protago- nist for libraries that can speak to and awaken the very people we ought to reach; this is of course the N. L. W. If (representing libraries of all types) we could consolidate our major hopes, needs, and intentions, and even in a tentative way allow our small-scale objectives and fractional aims, our doubts and uncer- tainties to be absorbed in a comprehen- sive, optimum plan, we could use the structure of National Library Week to our great purpose. It is there, like the tide and sun, set in motion by all the national media of communication, and we can utilize its force to generate library service in every sector of the nation. I am not going to discuss National Li- brary Week (even to say what ACRL is gomg to do)-others will speak to it bet- ter than !-but what I want to reveal to you is that N. L. W. can stand for Na- tional Library Weakness, too, and that when this double m~aning becomes firmly fixed in our minds, the importance of National Library Week will be more easily recognized. We are embarrassed that National Library Week in many places promotes patently inadequate ser- vices because no decent popular image of libraries exists-a reproach to our un- readiness to propose a library program we can honestly push. My N. L. W. slo- gan for 1964 will be: Stamp Out National Library W eakne~Ss with National Library Week! ' •• Conference Reports in July CRL 180 THE OFFICIAL ALA-ACRL CONFERENCE MATERIAL usually not available for publica- tion in CRL until the September issue will be published in the July issue this year. This will necessitate a later publication date than usual; members and subscribers should receive their copies approximately three weeks after the usual date. • • COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES