Where have all the books gone?

So here I am, up before dawn in the Palo Alto Sheraton, recovering from two days at a first-rate conference. Veterans like me, young professors and advanced students — including one of my own who started things off with a terrific talk — presented and argued over new research on intellectual communities in early modern Europe. As always, Stanford seemed wonderful — even before their football team miraculously beat Cal Saturday afternoon. The humanities departments, which have excellent faculty and students, receive generous research support — generous enough that the division of literature, on its own, could fly in faculty from all over the world for our conference.

Even more impressive are the facilities that Stanford humanists occupy. The buildings that house their offices and classrooms are handsome and dignified, unlike some Gothic monsters I could mention. And as the former head of Princeton's Council on the Humanities, which hosts visiting scholars and professors on leave, supports conferences and workshops, and promotes conversation, I am always struck with envy for Stanford's handsome humanities center with its comfortable lecture theater and spacious offices for visitors. True, there are some small snakes in this palm-tree lined paradise. Even here, near the legendary land of Alice Waters, the catered sandwiches come on soggy white bread and the catered coffee tastes only of acid. But every time I visit Stanford, I find myself dreaming that we had a real humanities center in Princeton.

Despite the weather and their advantages, my friends at Stanford seemed worried, even morose. And with good reason. Just before I arrived on campus, the university had held a town hall meeting to discuss the fate of Stanford's libraries. The authorities have decided to tear down Meyer Library, the former undergraduate library. The fast-growing East Asia collection largely housed there has to move. But the university's General Use Permit places narrow limits on what can be built on campus. Meanwhile the Provost, according to Stanford's library director, "is on record as opposing using precious square footage on campus for stacks facilities; he supports its use for people, not things."

It's a puzzle: more books to store, and no more shelves to store them on. The proposed solutions are pretty radical. Some of the East Asian collections will find a new home in Green, the main library. But as many as 93 percent of books and journals move off campus. The university also plans to transport 2 million books from Green to offsite storage.

Stanford is the alma mater that gave birth to Google, so it's natural for the university to think of libraries in terms of shiny flat screens rather than dusty books. University and library officials spoke consolingly at the town hall meeting about the ways in which digitization will make up for the loss of direct access. But — so my friends told me — they conflated the future powers of digitization — which are immense, though not unlimited — with its present abilities (which are weaker for Asian languages than for western ones). More worryingly, they seemed not to understand what open stacks and the possibility of serendipitous discovery mean to humanists. Professors in attendance at the meeting explained, eloquently, that the library is their lab, but no one seemed sure that the authorities received this message.

Above all, the process worried everyone. Decisions had been reached on general principles, not through consultation. Administrators who had no direct experience of humanistic research made decisions that might shape its future at Stanford for a generation or more. It all struck home. For we too have limited space, a growing stock of books and a central library to reconfigure.

Happily, our authorities have worked out a process for consultation. Students and faculty have been given opportunities to offer opinions on the state of Firestone, and a steering committee will look at other recently updated libraries before any decisions are made. With any luck we will be able to transform the discussion of Firestone from a desperate scramble, department by department, to keep vital spaces and resources in a reconfigured building, into a much broader effort to improve working conditions substantially.

This is a fine outcome, and I'm all the more grateful for it now that I've been down on the Farm. Yet it should be not an exception, but the model, for future decisions about matters of broad academic interest. I'm not sure that I agree with The Daily Princetonian's editorial board that the University needs a policy planning think-tank. For all my respect for McKinsey and Co.., I'd rather not import their sleek, cool ways of doing things into a world where traditions still matter. But I agree, passionately, with their general view that the committee needs a new way to think collectively about those aspects of the future — the academic ones, the ones that have to do with curriculum and research — that directly concern the intellectual life of students and faculty. If we don't find something better, we too will end up holding grumpy, inconclusive town meetings — and coming away from them worried about the future of what should be our golden University. Anthony Grafton is the Henry Putnam University Professor of History. He can be reached at grafton@princeton.edu.