Faculty members say they’re impressed by the intensity of the young students protesting to save the anthropology library, a cause that otherwise has relied on support from Ralph Nader, the liberal activist and onetime third-party presidential candidate, and Jerry Brown, the former governor of California who majored in classics when he was an undergraduate at U.C. Berkeley more than a half century ago.
As a third-year anthropology student, Ian Molloy, one of the protest organizers, has heard the snickers from classmates pursuing science and engineering majors, framing his subject choice as “Oh, you don’t want to make money.” He called the library, where he has found titles on the domestication of animals vital to his research, the “backbone” of the department, and central to rebuilding community after the isolation of the pandemic.
Despite the outcry, the administration says it is not budging, explaining that the cuts are necessary as it faces an $82 million budget deficit. In March, Carol Christ, the Berkeley chancellor, pointed to raises that the U.C. system had agreed to pay graduate student instructors and support staff as one driver of new costs.
The university has said it will save about $1.5 million by closing not just the anthropology library but the mathematics and physics libraries as well, and cutting hours and services at others. The other closures have not drawn the intense opposition that the anthropology library shutdown has.
“We are aware of the protest and are monitoring the situation,” the university said in a statement. “Regarding the anthropology library’s closure, we, too, wish the library could remain open, but that is not an option at this point.”
At 93, Laura Nader remains a prolific scholar and teacher decades after she became the anthropology department’s first woman to gain a tenure-track position, in 1960. “But I couldn’t have done it without the library,” Dr. Nader, Mr. Nader’s sister, said. She worries that students interested in anthropology will instead prefer other universities with dedicated anthropology libraries.
Dr. Nader views the planned closure of the library as another step in the decline of humanities and social sciences generally — and anthropology specifically.
“So all of a sudden it becomes a job question,” she said. “You don’t need anthropology.”
Under the administration’s plan, some of the materials in the library, founded in 1956 and later named for George and Mary Foster, two prominent Berkeley anthropologists, will be moved to a storage center in nearby Richmond, Calif. Other parts of the collection will be dispersed throughout the university’s main library.
Alexander Parra, who is majoring in computer science and Chicano studies and who has been occupying the library, said that one of the things that would be lost if the library closed was the possibility of serendipity — of finding a book you didn’t know you were looking for. When students staged an occupation earlier this year, after the university announced the closure plans in February, Mr. Parra by chance noticed a title about Mexican American youth organizations, a subject he was researching.
“That’s me,” he said. “That’s me in that book.”
Some students and professors also see the fight as an equity issue. Among those majoring in anthropology, 43 percent of students are from underrepresented minority groups, compared with 5 percent for computer science. The library also serves those majoring in Chicano studies and African American studies, disciplines that likewise have a higher share of unrepresented minority students.
Mr. Brown, who once taught a course in Berkeley’s anthropology department, has reached out to members of the University of California Board of Regents, urging it to spare the library.
“Great and capacious minds have graced that building,” he wrote in an email to the board chairman. “To replace it now, even in part, by a mere warehouse in Richmond is beyond the pale.”
Charles Hirschkind, the chair of the anthropology department, said that the university had reduced the number of graduate students it accepts into the anthropology since 2004 by a little more than half, reflecting, he said, the department’s “weaker financial situation” and the rise in costs to support graduate students.
“When we’re talking about budgetary restraints, we are also talking about priorities and where one decides to invest,” he said. “And I think the university feels little incentive to invest in the social sciences and humanities.”
Dr. Hirschkind said some faculty members had been pleasantly surprised to see the younger generation fighting for the library after assuming students that grew up in the digital age might have less appreciation for physical books or the pleasures of a library. And the occupation of the library, to some, is reminiscent of an earlier activist era at Berkeley.
“There is a strong sense of communitas in the air — it is not at all like identity politics — we need a new word for it,” Nancy Scheper-Hughes, an anthropology professor, wrote in an email to Mr. Brown. “They want to read. They want to be with open communities of people of very different ideas.”
The students, meanwhile, have been living in the library for more than a week, studying for finals, playing board games and eating breakfasts of croissants and granola. Worried that the university is trying to run out the clock until summer break and then dismantle the library, the students say they will stay as long as it takes.
Tim Arango is a Los Angeles correspondent. Before moving to California, he spent seven years as Baghdad bureau chief and also reported on Turkey. He joined The Times in 2007 as a media reporter.
An acclaimed China scholar recently reported that as print library materials are eschewed for digitized replicas in China, the digitized materials easily can be revised to conform with current governmental policies, likes and dislikes,. This preference for revisionist history allows for any make-believe interpretations. All this without the interference of AI!!! Just think of the possibilities!