Over at Information Observatory, Shinjoung Yeo and Dan Schiller just co-wrote a thoughtful piece called “Academic libraries in class society.” Since I consulted a bit on the piece, they graciously agreed that I could re-post it here on FGI. Please have a read and let us know in the comments what you think.

A shocking disparity defines the US system of information provision.  At one extreme is the multi-trillion-dollar corporate wealth of the for-profit information industry. At the other end is the growing – and deliberately inflicted – poverty of our public information sector.  During the past half-century, capital and class together have gravely worsened this disparity.

Scholars have analyzed the depredations visited by the for-profit information industry on the information sphere in general, and libraries in particular. Corporations have enclosed and raided governmental and other public information sites, while doing everything in their power to vilify the belief that information is, and should be, a social good.[1] A recent appellate court decision to ban the Internet Archive from lending out digital copies of half a million books to the public is only the latest troubling example.[2]

Concomitantly, libraries have faced declining budgets which have forced them to significantly hollow out collection development and other public services and relinquish their traditional functions to for-profit database providers and publishers – at the same time expanding and highlighting rare and precious special archival collections to prospective donors and possible political allies as if this is the sole function of libraries.

However, a closely related second factor has also been at work: a class logic. According to Mary Jane Petrowski, associate director at the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL),[3] between 2012 and 2021, 31% of full-time librarian positions, 54% of all other paid full-time staff, have been lost in community colleges. At colleges that offer Baccalaureate and Masters degrees, 34.2% of full-time librarian positions, 55.4% of all other full-time staff have disappeared. For universities that grant PhD degrees, by contrast, the number of full-time librarians has actually increased by 13.7% (while all other full-time staff has dropped 21.7%).

Community college libraries serving mostly working-class students, in other words, have been gutted. Eliminating more than 30% of librarian positions and 50% of staff over a decade means that these libraries find it difficult to remain open.[4] And within colleges that offer Baccalaureate and Masters degrees, there is a comparable disparity. For instance, Queens College, City University of New York (CUNY), has only 9 full-time librarians including cataloging and special collections librarians serving about 16,500 overwhelmingly working-class students[5] – among them 48% are first-generation college students.[6] Since 2019, the library has lost 10 full-time librarian positions to retirement and departure. These positions remain unfilled. Thus, the library is struggling to provide adequate public services like reference and instruction, and is only able to cover the bare minimum of collection development for many subject areas – 30 out of the 58 subjects defined by the library as needed to support dozens of majors, minors, and programs have no subject specialist assigned.[7]

These conditions echo across the country. California State University (CSU), Bakersfield, a 4-year institution with a little over 9000 students – over 50% of them first-generation college students^[8]  and many hailing from the lower fifth of the income distribution[9] — is served by 10 librarians and a total of 29 library staff.[10]  So much for the informational needs and aspirations of first-generation and working-class college students.

The situation at elite private colleges and universities could hardly be more different. Dartmouth College (NH), with an endowment of $7.9 billion,[11] is attended by approximately 6000 students – and sports no fewer than 134 staff including 23 subject specialists.[12] With about 25,000 undergraduate and graduate students[13]and an endowment of $50.7 billion,[14] Harvard has a system of 28 libraries operated by 700 librarians and staff.[15]   

It’s not subtle: the starvation of academic libraries that serve working-class students is counterposed to relatively generous support for institutions that cater to the children of the rich – and that sustain high-tech research.

In a radical democratic vision – one that has existed for centuries – the library helps to ground an emancipatory future as an active place for democratic living and learning, where everyday people have equal access to knowledge, and can dream of a different world by equipping themselves with it. To pursue this vision of the library, we need a great array of library workers who acquire, curate, catalog, maintain and preserve, provide instruction about, and circulate knowledge to and for all.

There are enough resources to reverse the current crisis of the library, but this will necessitate reorienting the US government’s priorities away from military spending and corporate subsidies toward social needs. It will also require economic redistribution. The obscene levels of wealth that disfigure today’s society[16] will need to be reduced, via adequate taxation – in order that the bottom half may be elevated, and granted resources sufficient for adequate housing, food, medical care, education, and libraries and public information. An urgent priority within this encompassing program is, once more, the need to democratize our system of information provision.

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Special Thanks to James Jacobs from Free Government Information for his insightful comments and feedback.  

[1] Anita R. Schiller and Herbert I. Schiller, “Who Can Own What America Knows?” The Nation, April 17, 1982,  461-63; Herbert I. Schiller and Anita R. Schiller, “Libraries, Public Access to Information, and Commerce,” in Vincent Mosco and Janet Wasko, Eds., The Political Economy of Information (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988),146-166; Herbert I. Schiller, Who Knows: Information in the Age of the Fortune 500 (Norwood: Ablex, 1982), 47-77.

[2] David Moscrop, “Copyright Keepers Just Destroyed a Huge Digital Library,” Jacobin,  September  20, 2024.

[3] Joshua Kim, “3 Questions on Academic Library Staffing for ACRL’s Mary Jane Petrowski,” Inside Higer Education, February 21, 2023.

[4] These changes are significant even if we take into account there are fewer post-secondary schools compared to 9 years ago, and overall enrollments are down. Worse, hiring temporary part-time and contract workers to manage extremely understaffed libraries is a normalized practice, reflecting the casualization of academic labor across the board.

[5] Queens College at a Glance (2023).

[6] Self-Study Design, Queens College.

[7] Queens College Library Subject Specialists.

[8] California State University, Bakersfield (2024).

[9] David LeonHardt, “America’s Great Working-Class Colleges,” New York Times, January 18, 2017.

[10] Walter W. Stiern Library Directory, California State University (CSU) Bakersfield.

[11] Dartmouth Endowment Report 2023.

[12] Dartmouth University Staff Directory.

[13] About Harvard.

[14] Harvard Fact Book: Endowment.

[15] Harvard University Libraries.

[16] Jake Johnson, “’Global Oligarchy’ Reigns as Top 1% Controls More Wealth Than Bottom 95% of Humanity,” September 23, 2024; Oxfam Media Briefing, “Multilateralism in an Era of Global Oligarchy,” September 23, 2024.