Today, graduate students at the University of California at Berkeley are occupying the anthropology library to protest the university’s decision to close it. Administrators, while simultaneously investing more than $500 million in a new data-sciences center, say they cannot afford to keep it open.
This is no local fight. Two visions of the university are clashing. One vaunts technical mastery and promotes corporate will; the other supports voices from people and places regularly excluded from universities and, often, turns critical attention toward industry and academe itself. There is no question that the first vision — tied to both big business and donors — now dominates higher education; you can see it on every campus in the country. But at Berkeley, one of the nation’s flagship public institutions, it is a particularly ugly sight.
This is not a new struggle. Efforts to reduce education to corporate goals date back to the early 20th century. The philosopher John Dewey openly criticized the movement to subordinate education to the needs of the labor market. Dewey resisted the idea that students should study in order to serve the prevailing industrial regime. Instead, he insisted, they should learn to challenge and change it.
The library is a place where students do this together. I know because I spent hours every week at the tables and among the stacks as a graduate student in Berkeley’s anthropology department. Over those tables, students gathered books and articles written by anthropologists and mastered the history of their field. That field, in the United States, was born in precarity. Columbia University tried valiantly to push anthropology out; it always preferred engineering. But it accepted money from the feminist scholar and benefactor Elsie Clews Parsons, who offered to sponsor offices for the burgeoning field. Soon, though, the university relocated anthropology to an attic. Nonetheless, anthropology students — like Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ella Cara Deloria — established the foundations for the expansive way we think about gender, sex, and race today.
In the library, we learned that anthropologists are their own fiercest critics. We found out about the complicity of anthropologists in war making and colonialism around the world. It even happened at Berkeley. In the anthropology museum, a man known as Ishi, a member of the decimated Yahi people, lived as an exhibit to educate others about his Native American ideas and practices. (The library now sits above the museum’s new location.) Alfred L. Kroeber, the anthropologist whose name adorned the building when I studied there, stewarded Ishi’s captivity and in 2021 had his name removed from the building for his role. Kroeber, though, was also the father of the haloed speculative-fiction novelist Ursula K. Le Guin, who counted cultural anthropology and Indigenous stories among her influences and whose work inspires readers around the world to imagine futures beyond the confines of our social and political present.
The library is not only a place where students read and study; it is a place that creates lasting connections. Studying together, students turn learning into knowledge and research into action. Students from Berkeley’s anthropology department examine the health effects of Nafta on working-class neighborhoods in Mexico City, and how the design tactics used by gambling corporations foster addiction in Las Vegas. They also study the social conditions of innovation in the technology industry and in the science departments of universities. It’s ironic that anthropologists, particularly Gregory Bateson and Mead, were critical thinkers in the development of contemporary communications technology, the field where those who earn degrees from the new data-sciences center will find jobs. The questions they raised — about openness, accessibility, power, and authority — are as relevant today as they were in the 1930s. But by closing the anthropology library, Berkeley is muting their voices.
The administration of the University of California says that by removing the books and eliminating the staff who oversee the anthropology library, it will save $400,000 per year. The cost to students and faculty at UC Berkeley will be considerably higher. They will lose access to cultures and ideas that we need to get through today’s crises. They will lose access to ideas about how to change the world at a time when we desperately need them. They will lose access to a sacred community gathering place on an increasingly corporate campus.
No one in the data-sciences center will know how to count the damage.
