Library Jawn

1. The number of students who have to go into debt to get a bachelor’s degree has risen from 45% in 1993 to 94% today.

2. There is now more than $1 trillion in outstanding student loan debt in the United States.

3. Over the last 10 years, tuition and fees at state schools have increased 72%.

4. During the late 1970s, Ohio spent 17% of their budget on higher education and 4% of prisions. Today, Ohio spends 11% on higher ed and 8% of prisons.

5. This year, national, state and local spending on higher education reached a 25-year low.

(via blackbutshining)

Colleges and universities occupy a unique position in our economy as both the producers and employers of academic labor. They have the ability to dramatically improve, or worsen, the situation of adjunct professors and other contingent academic labor. That is where students come in.

As students, we should be extremely concerned with the conditions faced by our professors. When our professors are forced to work at multiple schools in order to make a meager living, they cannot give us the attention that we need in order to reach our full potential in our classes. We are paying upwards of $3,500 per class. Think about when you have at least 20 students in a class and that is a total of $70,000 per class. Yet when our professors are not paid living wages, we cannot expect any guarantee of personal attention that smaller schools love to tout. We should not only be worried about the quality of our own education, but also the quality of life of our professors. Students need to show solidarity with our professors in their struggles for justice on campus. Across the country, students should heed the well-known chant of the student-labor solidarity movement: When students and workers are under attack, what do we do? Stand up fight back!

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Jessa Crispin arrived at the 2012 Public Library Association Conference in Philadelphia in March with high expectations. And by high, we mean abysmal.

“Secure in the knowledge that libraries are now permanently fucked,” wrote the editor-in-Chief of the popular “litblog” Bookslut. Surely librarians would crumble before her, the harsh fiscal realities having reduced the bibliognosts into heaps of despair, wailing about furloughs and nonexistent arts grants.

But the whole affair seemed rather … hopeful.

“I was not sensing any anxiety that day, and it was pissing me off,” Crispin says.

Librarians are simply too busy being innovative to waste precious moments commiserating. Back home, their communities need them more than ever.

The job of meeting the “variegated needs” of patrons, she says, requires a great deal of creative, flexible, and innovative thinking. For example, libraries offer the nation’s unemployed far more than a public space and free books: They provide significant support for job searchers, including resume-building workshops and essential technological skill development.

“This stereotype of the rigid, shunning librarian,” persists, Bourne says, but that’s just not the reality. Her colleagues are “dynamic and deeply committed to providing the public with free access to knowledge that could improve their lives.”

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