February 23, 2000
Dear Sirs,
As you know, the regents and commissioner have ordered review of academic programs in the university system based on graduation rates. Programs must show that they've graduated an average of five majors per year in any three-year period during the last six years. The wisdom of applying this number to all campuses, regardless of enrollment differences, is clear to all.
Your readers may like to know that our faculty group, the Committee for Reviewing Acceptable Programs at MSU-Northern, has anticipated the next level of review to be mandated by our commissioner and board of regents, and so is busily extending their criterion--to our library. Our preliminary review of the library's holdings suggests that many books will fail to meet the average checkout rate of five times per year over any three-year period in the last six.
We can tell already, for example, that Plato's ponderous Republic, the almost-in-a-foreign-language works of Chaucer, the similarly impenetrable King James Version of the Bible, and several nearly undecipherable novels like James Joyce's Ulysses and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow do not make the cut. Most of these works will serve students better in their Cliffs Notes versions (which consume much less shelf space) or in their abbreviated and modernized Classic Comics versions (which are simultaneously very thin and include visual aids). And why keep a 20-volume set of the Oxford English Dictionary when Webster's Pocket Dictionary for Secretaries is so much easier to lift and, being smaller, so much easier to find words in?
We expect that at least 50 percent of the shelf space will be freed up, the better to let the important books breathe and to provide space for displaying pictures of important administrators and athletes, wall space for which we have exhausted in all the other buildings on campus. Student efficiency in locating materials will improve concomitantly, their choices being so conveniently reduced to popular, speed-readable abstracts and digests.
Some of the more conservative and backward of our faculty believe that we move in a fashion counter to the purposes of a university, by our cleansing the library of unpopular works. They trundle out the old argument that what separates us from the brutes is our ability to transmit knowledge and ideas across time, primarily by warehousing books that anyone can read any time. But how can we justify taking up space for works that no one has read recently? If we've learned anything from the commercial world, it's that Americans want new and fresh packaging of ideas, in modest amounts and plain language, so as to be most easily understood. Thus we throw in our lot with the regents, to celebrate the popular because it's popular, and to disown the traditional because, frankly, it is too much bother to master.
Furthermore, the Internet is making libraries obsolete. We will soon be able to find and read any book on our computer screen. The Montana University System has wisely invested over $13 million in the Banner computing system, which will allow us to look up practically anything, as soon as it works. The educational potential of the Internet surpasses even that of television. See how TV has fulfilled the sage predictions of its social utility which accompanied its launch in the late 1940s! So amazing has been its impact that America now has more households with televisions than with telephones./1/
As use of the Internet grows, we predict a further reduction in library holdings, to the extent that within three years the entire collection will fit conveniently into one of the public lockers in the gymnasium, the highest traffic area on campus. The attendant reduction in library staff will free monies, a portion of which may profitably be used to purchase newer carpet, lighting, sofas, televisions, computers, video games, refrigerators, vending machines, and self-service bar for that particular locker room. Regent and commissioner opinions clearly prefer these amenities, which simplify students' lives, over stacks of old and heavy books, which don't.
We trust our plan will please you as much as it satisfies us. We look forward to visiting your campus's library soon.
Sincerely,
Johann Teufelsdröckh
Adjunct Professor of Popular Culture
C.R.A.P. chair
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