The Berkeley Faculty Association urges all Senate faculty to join our efforts to refund the university library. The library is the beating heart of the university’s research and teaching mission. Without its collections and professional staff, Senate and instructional faculty can neither educate the next generation of graduate students, nor the growing population of undergraduates. We depend on the library to engage in the scholarship that makes Berkeley a world class research and teaching university.
Almost a decade ago in 2013 The Commission on the Future of the Library was created by the campus to assess the impact of years of reductions in expenditures on library materials, staffing and other services. The Commission’s report documented how the then decade-long underfunding of the library accelerated after the financial crisis. Between 2008 and 2012 funding for the library fell from $57.8m in 2008 to $51.3m in 2012. The Commission expressed great concern that these reductions imperiled the campus’s capacity to realize its teaching mission, as well as to maintain its reputation as a world class research university. Accordingly, it called on the campus to increase its annual funding by $13m, as well as to contribute an additional one-time injection of $5m (to “catch up” on collections).
The Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost’s Office agreed to meet the Commission’s recommendations almost half-way, committing $5.6m of increased annual funding in January 2014. In 2014/15 the campus met this commitment and the library’s budget ‘rose’ to $46.5m, although this figure was still $5m short of its funding in 2012. Thereafter the campus has largely failed to meet its pledge to provide “permanent” increases. Not only was library funding cut the following year, but the small increases in funding between 2016-17 and 2019-20 failed to keep up with either inflation or growing student enrollment. This year the library received $44.5m, that is $2m less than it received in 2014/15, despite annual cost increases of 4.5% from salaries and escalating subscriptions, to say nothing of the 27% increase in student enrollments. The cumulative shortfall from the campus not meeting its commitment of $5.6m a year since 2014 now amounts to $20.7m if we ignore inflation, or $88 in real terms.
No wonder the Library has had to cut staffing and acquisitions. For several years it was able to minimize the cuts to services, collections, and online subscriptions by spending down its reserves. However, it no longer has any reserves to offset future cuts. It has closed departmental and disciplinary libraries, including most recently the Ed-Psych, Public Health, and Optometry libraries. It has had to cut collections, especially in non-English language print materials.
In addition, the campus has asked the Library to add and staff costly new services such as the Office of Scholarly Communications Services, the Digital Lifecycle Program, and the Data Services Program. Ironically, it has also had to hire fundraising and communications personnel to attract philanthropic donations to make up for reduced campus funding. To deal with rising student enrollments, stacks have also been converted to student study space, which has involved extending its hours and concomitant staffing. The library now faces a structural deficit of $5m a year.
Each year our dwindling staff of librarians are asked to do more and more with less and less. Since the pandemic the library has lost 17% of its staff, many of whom struggle to survive on their salaries in the Bay Area. The growing population of students will need skilled librarians, not the growing army of work-study staff, to help them navigate the rich collections of electronic, audio-visual, and printed collections built up over 150 years, if they are to be able to unlock the possibilities of a liberal arts education. Faculty also need discipline-specific librarians to help them access, maintain, and build collections so that they can conduct their research and train graduate students.
If we are to protect the quality of research and teaching on this campus, campus leaders must restore funding to the library at the very least to the minimal standard it committed to in 2014. And let us recall that that was less than half of the annual increase the Commission believed was necessary, long before the dramatic growth of student enrollment, to say nothing of inflation, had placed more pressure on its collections and staff. Nonetheless, for the campus to restore the level of funding for the library from 2014/15, when it met its pledge of an additional $5.6m, would now amount to an inflation adjusted figure of $62m a year (that is $17.5m more than the current funding level of $44.5m).
We are cognizant that there are finite resources on campus and refunding the library will require defunding something else. Given the crucial role the Library plays in the academic mission of the campus, we ask that the administration honor the commitment it made to refund the library in 2014. This must be done before we can no longer maintain our campus’s international reputation as a world-class teaching and research institution.
The Berkeley Faculty Association has placed the following resolution before the next meeting of the Academic Senate:
“The Academic Senate resolves that, to protect the quality of the university’s research and teaching mission, the library must be refunded in line with the commitment made by campus in response to the Commission on the Future of the Library. This would amount to a permanent restoration of the annual funding level in 2014/5 which, accounting for inflation, would be $62m, $17.5m more than the library currently receives.”
Please attend the Senate meeting on October 19, 3-5pm at Sibley Auditorium to let your voices be heard, and votes counted, in support of refunding the library.
James Vernon
Chair, on behalf of the Board of the Berkeley Faculty Association