Of the ruins that the COVID-19 pandemic has made at Cornell, none feel more abandoned than the libraries. Though technically open, the once vibrant centers of Cornellian life often lie dormant and unused. Uris still sees some traffic, but Olin feels like a school building after hours, Catherwood is practically abandoned and Mann is so quiet you can hear a pin drop in downtown Ithaca. Cornell’s libraries are a ghost yard, and it’s time to resurrect them.
Cornell’s Libraries have previously been lauded as incredible centers of research and academic culture. According to The Princeton Review, Cornell’s libraries are the 7th best in the nation. The libraries are one of the best aspects of Cornell, as students say, with graduates “consistently rat[ing] the Library the No. 1 service on campus,” according to the University Librarian.
The libraries are a central aspect of the Cornell experience, as exemplified by their location. Olin and Uris libraries make up two of the five buildings surrounding Ho Plaza, the de facto “heart” of campus, with the other buildings being Sage Chapel, The Cornell Store, and Willard Straight Hall (the Clocktower is a part of Uris Library). Furthermore, no major quad on central campus is bereft of a library; The Arts Quad has Olin and the Mui Ho Fine Arts Library, the Ag Quad has Mann Library, the ILR Quad has Catherwood Library, and the Law School has the Law Library.
The sheer number of libraries are another testament to their importance at Cornell. The Cornell library system consists of twenty libraries, at least five of them big enough to be the central libraries of smaller schools. Among the Ivies, Cornell is outstripped only by Harvard (70) and Columbia (22). As one can imagine, non-ivy schools typically have even fewer. For instance, Binghamton University, a school with a comparable undergraduate population to Cornell, has but three libraries. Cornell’s library system is one of its distinguishing attributes, both within the Ivy League and nationally.
Yet for all their past importance, the libraries have remained relatively empty, even as other facilities have reopened. The reason? Inaccessibility and inconvenience. While students are permitted to access parts of some libraries via key swipe, Cornell’s major libraries (Olin, Uris, Mann, Engineering and Catherwood) require reservations for access. Counterintuitively, these reservations are not for the purpose of guaranteeing seating; the libraries, with the exception of some rooms in Uris, are never fully booked. The reservation process is designed to discourage use.
Indeed, the reservation process seems deliberately designed to be complex, arduous and inconvenient. Students must navigate to the CU Chatter app, where they must search availability using a search engine that is, at best, clunky. They can then make reservations for specific chairs for time slots of 1 hour. To secure a reservation totalling more than one hour, students have to re-register multiple times, for each hour they plan to study (though, to be fair, time limits are rarely enforced). It is impossible to make a reservation for general access to any library. Most irritatingly, walk-in reservations are not tolerated; staff members will refuse access to students without reservations while standing in front of rows upon rows of empty desks. For college students, this system requires an abundance of forethought and is wholly unconducive to brief, between-class study sessions.
Another factor that discourages library use, especially prolonged use, is the cutting of popular library amenities. The Bhatia Libe Cafe in Olin, for example, sat closed for the entirety of the Fall Semester. It reopened in limited capacity in the spring, but stipulated that students exit the library after purchasing food. To clarify, students had to leave the library building, eat their food outside and walk back around to the front for readmittance. For students who want a snack while studying, many will not even bother with the libraries, electing to study in dining halls or their dorms instead.
It seems that Cornell University has deliberately and stealthily attempted to make the libraries less attractive and more inaccessible. They’ve installed stringent access rules, made the reservation process unnecessarily arduous, and cut amenities and services that increase the libraries’ attractiveness. These actions disincentivize use of the libraries, and threaten Cornell’s vibrant library culture. Clearly, the intent was to reduce crowding during a semester of Covid-19, which is not an unworthy goal. Yet Cornell should have learned from the fall semester, and should be improving during the spring semester, doing all it can to safely re-expand and re-incentivize use of the libraries. This is especially true as the vaccine rolls out. Instead, Cornell seems content to let their libraries waste away unused, the situation unchanged from the fall.
As the state of the pandemic continues to improve, Cornell should be scrambling to re-open whatever it can safely. The school should remember that its primary purpose is, in fact, education, and that the students on campus knew the risks they undertook when they came seeking that education. Without its libraries, the Cornell education is greatly diminished, and students are hurt every day the libraries remain inaccessible. Worse, Cornell risks creating a generation of students who prefer to lock themselves away in their rooms, leaving the libraries permanently deserted. Libraries are supposed to be quiet. But not that quiet.
