I'm afraid I may have to step out of character this week in order to take on a more serious issue and make an appeal to the Tufts community at large. Since a proposant is not merely one who proposes something, but one who proposes himself as the proper person to solve a problem or take on a political office, this week's offering will be, strictly speaking, a digression. Yet I feel compelled to use the only soapbox I have in order to argue for remedying a certain circumstance that I feel is currently being overlooked.
The Tisch Library's current closing times are as follows: Sun.-Thurs., 1 a.m., Fri. and Sat., 9 p.m. I know that this statement may not immediately awaken in my fellow students the depth of anguish that causes me to write it. It may even be new information to some, but there are nevertheless very good reasons to think this does not reflect the underlying values of Tufts University. The fact that students do not have access to a library after these times has a far-reaching negative impact on the school, one which is hardly mitigated by the radiantly awkward prerecorded references to "late-night study." One intuitive reason that students' access to the library should be prioritized beyond what is reflected in the current opening hours concerns the nominal reason students are here in the first place: to learn something. No matter who is supporting a student's career at Tufts, what happens at the library is undoubtedly a large part of what it is they think they are supporting. I do not intend to instill some sense of duty in my fellow students that is not already there by saying this. Rather, I argue that students should wield a much stronger sense of entitlement than they presently do. Ideally, of course, no student's access to knowledge should be limited by when and how it comes upon him to seek it. Would that the weakest mind and least intellectual among us, having never before shown interest in even the pretense of knowledge, should late at night, in the very process of stumbling home with the fire of drink in him from some properly Neanderthal diversion, come upon its heady scent, then even the claims of such a student should be honored; nothing should stand between him and even the dimmest and most degenerate sophistry by which he seeks to illuminate the gaping cavern of his mind. Even if it were certain that such an experience would not deter this Tufts student from his bestial path by the slightest hair, and would in fact be lost to memory upon his next awakening, the student should still, in my view, have a claim on those resources he needs to fulfill this desire. Of course, I think that the current limitations on resources imposed by the large swathes of time for which no library is open go far beyond this case, but the example seems pertinent here for several reasons. First of all there seems to be a special brand of puritan disdain in Massachusetts for those who stay up late. However legitimate one's reasons may seem to be, the people of authority on this coast hold very firm in the conviction that those who stay up late into the night are not only probably up to no good but are in some very basic sense not real people. Thus people who run into the library clutching a citation they just came across at 12:50 a.m. on a Tuesday are viewed with the sure knowledge that they are more likely cretins of the sort described earlier than dedicated philosophy majors who are taking seven classes. This general intuition does not apply to students from some other schools on this side of the river, who are encouraged to burn the proverbial candle whenever it suits them. The sharp disconnect between the perception of student needs and actual student needs is made even greater by the contrast between studying in the library and studying almost anywhere else on campus. Tufts has seemingly, and I believe successfully, spent a lot of money and other resources to try and make its libraries not just functional, but pleasurable to use and a focal point of the campus. This is especially true in Tisch, which is so important to undergraduate students in the Arts and Sciences. Besides its non-circulating reference and periodical collections, the most important things offered by the library are space and quiet, and it usually has these in sufficient abundance. The lower levels of the library are especially useful in avoiding the groups of tragically social (and distracting) faux-students and freshmen extra-giddy from the thought of their first all-nighter. Notice that these are not features shared by the late-night study room, which packs students in on Sunday nights with the jovial air of a 19th Century tenement. Nor is it a feature shared by many undergraduate students' living situations. I, for instance, happen to live in a downhill, suite-style dorm which is rather well-known for its debauchery. After edging around Scarface-style scenes in the common rooms and finally having learned to tune out the constant sound of vomiting from either intoxication or withdrawal from who-knows-what, I have to laugh every time I read a Viewpoint by some freshman in Metcalf detailing the evils of cocaine from afar. Needless to say, the pitch of such activity heightens on the weekends, when the library's times of operation are most limited. I can only imagine what it must be like to be an assiduous freshman in Physics 12 stuck in a forced triple. Beside my personal anguish at the library's hours, I rue them because they represent a major drawback of Tuft's atypical place in the collegiate hierarchy. The Carnegie Foundation identifies Tufts as a National Research University, and indeed I think it stands among the best. Yet it is common for large national universities and small liberal arts colleges to offer their students 24-hour facilities, either because of night staff or because of secluded locations and honor codes. Can't we at least get the library to stay open until 3 a.m.?Benjamin Rolfe is a senior philosophy major. His email is brolfe01@trumpeter-store.tufts.edu.
