During the past student election, junior class Student Senator Ken Simon won the presidency on a platform which included, among others, a promise to look into getting the library opened 24/7. While a noble idea, attempting to extend the library’s hours to open 24/7 will not come to fruition, at least in the short term, for numerous reasons. 

The first reason addresses the sincerity of the promise more so than the promise itself. Mr. Simon, in his mass-emailed campaign video, presents an erroneous piece of information (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSMkfr6MtM4). Of note, at about 2:25, he maintains that Ferrum College’s library – from which Dr. Cy Dillon, the incoming Library Director, comes – is open full-time. In fact, Ferrum College’s Stanley Library is open almost 4 hours less per week than our own Bortz Library. Moreover, one of the few schools with a 24/7 library in Virginia is Washington and Lee which draws on a larger, co-ed student body and a law school. However, that alone does not account for a 24/7 library as even Longwood and UVA do not have libraries permanently open, as will be discussed later. 

Second, Mr. Simon never contacted or consulted with the administration. If you plan on changing a policy, it helps to find out all of the details behind that policy and gather information about it. For this policy, the go-to people are Dean of the Faculty Dr. Robert Herdegen and Library Director Dr. Sharon Goad, both of whom love the possibility of keeping the library open full-time – a fact Mr. Simon would have uncovered had the time been taken to confer with them. Dr. Herdegen eagerly points out that 5 years ago, there were only 40,000 visits to the library that year while, as of February 1, over 145,000 have occurred this year. And use of the library has increased yearly despite a smaller student body. However, Dean Herdegen never heard from nor met with Mr. Simon. Dr. Goad was also kept in the dark about this. In fact, she contacted Dean Herdegen after hearing about a student candidate running on keeping the library open to ask if he had met with that candidate. She was surprised to hear from him that he had not.  

Which brings us to the third reason: the funds to accomplish this goal do not exist. The college even now is making some extremely painful cuts to balance the budget. Even if the student body president has, as Mr. Simon claims, “the ear of the Board [of Trustees]”, it is doubtful he would have their collective wallet to pay for the roughly $125,000 yearly the library estimates (conservatively) it would need to go 24/7. Although Mr. Simon’s claim that Dr. Dillon could help the Bortz library run longer with less staff, he fails to realize both that the library entered this semester with fewer staff and that Dr. Dillon’s small staff owes more to budget cuts than efficiency. In addition to filling its current vacancies, the library would still need to find somebody willing to staff the 24/7 opening during the 9 months of the year it would be open that long. “We’re [the library] at the margin as is,” the Dean affirmed. Moreover, W&L’s success, as suggested by Dr. Goad, is that W&L has managed to find staffers that can and will work those late-night/early-morning hours. The reason that the 24/7 opening for finals has really worked, according to Dr. Goad, is threefold: we found Mr. Ferenc Varga who could and would work those late hours during finals (whether or not he could work those hours full-time is a different matter); the student workers “really stepped up” and put in much extra time; and the library worked hard to find the resources to compensate those students willing to work the 1-8AM shifts during finals time. Dr. Herdegen echoes Dr. Goad’s sentiments about the student workers. There would need to be more student workers – and money to pay them – to work the newly opened hours (one is hard pressed right now to find a single student library worker who thinks, at best, ambivalently about this idea) – an idea that worries Dr. Herdegen, as a psychology professor and personally, because of unintentionally institutionalizing sleep deprivation. Dean Herdegen said that while the 24/7 library is under long-term consideration, it very probably won’t occur in the next few years.

The final reason that I will mention here is that there is no way anyone could justify the use of the funds if they were available. From personal experience working 3 years in the library (including one summer), for most of the year, the library is underused early in the morning, the late evenings, and Fridays and weekends. Even during the final exam schedule, the door counts between 1AM and 8AM on the third day of finals show an exchange of only 10 students. Please do not take these statistics to mean that the library is not used, just that near to and at the times that Mr. Simon has promised to open the library, it is already currently underutilized. 

Lack of communication, shamefully inaccurate information, lack of funds, and even less justification for using them form the bulk of the reasons why this campaign promise was a more than usually hollow one. Maybe we should have listened to Shirley MacLaine when she said, “It is useless to hold a person to anything he says while he is in love, drunk, or running for office.” For those students who still desire a quiet, climate controlled place with Wi-Fi and printing to do work when the library isn’t open, don’t despair. Perhaps Crawley Forum, Venable Hall’s Parents and Friends lounge, or the Computer Lab could be arranged to be open to serve this reasonable wish. Just think it out, gather information, put a plan together, and muster support. Otherwise, it’s just typical déjà vu.

- Adam Lees ‘11

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