https://www.berkeleyside.org/2023/03/03/cal-berkeley-library-closures-anthropology-physics-mathematics

The closures and cuts will save the university about $1 million per year, but critics say the cost to research and community life is higher...

Today, the university library makes up 1.8% $42 million of the university's $3.2 billion budget, down from 3.5% in 2006. Per student, the share of library funds provided by the the university have decreased by 40% in seven years, when taking into account inflation...

Critics say it's not a problem of funding, but a matter of priorities. They would like to see the university invest less money in athletics, which received $31 million of its $92 million budget from the central campus last year.

According to the article I read, the volumes have not and will not be digitized but stored in a warehouse.

Cal has is an elite research institution, and the vast amount of discretionary money flow moves to support that objective. I don't see any sheet show from Cal in what Cal has chosen to be. To the contrary, never better.

Even the folks here who obsessively claim everything is doomed have no good reason to go all "Chicken Little" about this.

wifeisafurd said:

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Cal has is an elite research institution and the vast amount of discretionary money flow moves to support that. I don't see any sheet show from Cal in what Cal chosen to be. To the contrary, never better.

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I agree! The modern day library is not used in anyway like it used to be. Almost any journal article can be retrieved online so there is no reason to store them in an inefficient manner like the past.

Will the buildings be repurposed into student housing?

UrsineMaximus said:

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Will the buildings be repurposed into student housing?

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The physics library is really small and is located on the top floor of LeConte Hall. Most likely it will be office or lab space. The math library is also small and on the bottom floor of Evans Hall which I believe will be torn down sometime.

Does anyone know where the Math department will be relocated once Evans is torn down? I know there will be no significant structure built to replace the Evans footprint.

I think the importance of this article for the board is that the $30 million subsidy Christ is giving to prop up Knowlton's incompetence in the "revenue" sports is uncertain and may not be continued by the next chancellor. If not libraries, it will be something else.

The AD needs to greatly increase revenues and reduce costs. We need Knowlton replaced by someone from professional sports management.

I think the biggest change that needs to be made is to have scholarships in the non-revenue sports limited to in-state tuition. Donors can make up the difference for top out of state recruits. This would virtually eliminate the "subsidy" without eliminating sports. It is illusionary, because it would be balancing the budget by eliminating payments to the university from the AD, but that would eliminate the need for the university to make payments to the AD.

Photo of the Mary Foster anthropology library

Perhaps someone will step up with a major donation to keep it open

When I was at cal, these smaller libraries were a place to study as well as a resource for books, but I find the thought of going through the racks to find and physically borrowing a book is somewhat outdated use of valuable space

Seems like a re-thinking of some of the smaller libraries would not be a bad idea

We should think of innovation in this area (while keeping the major libraries)

At this point I think the vast majority of students use the libraries as study spaces rather than for the actual purpose of checking out books

Big C said:

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southseasbear said:

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According to the article I read, the volumes have not and will not be digitized but stored in a warehouse.

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Yes, some volumes consolidated into other libraries, others to be stored away.

I don't claim to know enough about this situation to have an enlightened opinion, but there were graduate anthropology students quoted in the article I read (Chron) who said many works are not digitalized and it will be harder for them to access everything that's out there, if this goes through.

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THAT was the article I read.

eastcoastcal said:

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At this point I think the vast majority of students use the libraries as study spaces rather than for the actual purpose of checking out books

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This is how it was for me in the mid 2000s. We need student space in general, but libraries in the traditional sense are becoming less essential.

Worked in the Math Stat Library for a while when at Cal. Mrs. Hom was head librarian. Wonderful person.

It's no great loss closing some Libraries at Cal, especially the ones where you can't look through the stacks, but have to ask some one to get it for you.
In 4 years at Cal I check out ONLY 4 or 5 books. In high school or Jr. High I check that many out in a month, some time in2 weeks. But the libraries are a great place to study.

ColoradoBear said:

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calumnus said:

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I think the importance of this article for the board is that the $30 million subsidy Christ is giving to prop up Knowlton's incompetence in the "revenue" sports is uncertain and may not be continued by the next chancellor. If not libraries, it will be something else.

The AD needs to greatly increase revenues and reduce costs. We need Knowlton replaced by someone from professional sports management.

I think the biggest change that needs to be made is to have scholarships in the non-revenue sports limited to in-state tuition. Donors can make up the difference for top out of state recruits. This would virtually eliminate the "subsidy" without eliminating sports. It is illusionary, because it would be balancing the budget by eliminating payments to the university from the AD, but that would eliminate the need for the university to make payments to the AD.

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I don't disagree that the $30 million in subsidies for the athletic department is a huge issue in that it could be spent elsewhere to help the general student population. There's also the hidden $7-8 million stadium subsidy.

Athletic Student aid comes in at $13 million for the entire department. That includes in state and out of state tuition, plus room/board/etc. I agree that there probably should be mechanism where out of state athletic aid should only be used when it's fully funded by donors. For non-rev sports, I'm not sure it ever makes sense. The State of California and UCOP have imposed caps on OOS enrollment so there is a true opportunity cost to using those slots for athletics. And compared to peer top tier public universities like Michigan, UW, and Virginia, Cal (and UCLA) are always going to the comparatively strapped for money in comparison because those schools enroll so many more OOS students. I'd say it absolutely makes the quality of life for students at Cal worse too.

BUT I'd also like to point out that the $13 million to student athletes is a small fraction of the 107 million operating budget, where $24 million goes to coaching and $25 million to admin salaries. So limiting OOS in the athletic department is not going to go very far in balancing the budget.

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The difference between in-state and out of state tuition is $30K

There are 900 varsity athletes at Cal. If 800 are on scholarship that is $24 million in "savings" If treated as instate vs out of state.

Your $13 million figure is very low (about $14K per athlete), some are non-scholarship, we know the cost of tuition, room and board is well over $50K.

I agree 100% about administration salaries.

calumnus said:

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ColoradoBear said:

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calumnus said:

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I think the importance of this article for the board is that the $30 million subsidy Christ is giving to prop up Knowlton's incompetence in the "revenue" sports is uncertain and may not be continued by the next chancellor. If not libraries, it will be something else.

The AD needs to greatly increase revenues and reduce costs. We need Knowlton replaced by someone from professional sports management.

I think the biggest change that needs to be made is to have scholarships in the non-revenue sports limited to in-state tuition. Donors can make up the difference for top out of state recruits. This would virtually eliminate the "subsidy" without eliminating sports. It is illusionary, because it would be balancing the budget by eliminating payments to the university from the AD, but that would eliminate the need for the university to make payments to the AD.

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I don't disagree that the $30 million in subsidies for the athletic department is a huge issue in that it could be spent elsewhere to help the general student population. There's also the hidden $7-8 million stadium subsidy.

Athletic Student aid comes in at $13 million for the entire department. That includes in state and out of state tuition, plus room/board/etc. I agree that there probably should be mechanism where out of state athletic aid should only be used when it's fully funded by donors. For non-rev sports, I'm not sure it ever makes sense. The State of California and UCOP have imposed caps on OOS enrollment so there is a true opportunity cost to using those slots for athletics. And compared to peer top tier public universities like Michigan, UW, and Virginia, Cal (and UCLA) are always going to the comparatively strapped for money in comparison because those schools enroll so many more OOS students. I'd say it absolutely makes the quality of life for students at Cal worse too.

BUT I'd also like to point out that the $13 million to student athletes is a small fraction of the 107 million operating budget, where $24 million goes to coaching and $25 million to admin salaries. So limiting OOS in the athletic department is not going to go very far in balancing the budget.

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The difference between in-state and out of state tuition is $30K

There are 900 varsity athletes at Cal. If 800 are on scholarship that is $24 million in "savings" If treated as instate vs out of state.

Your $13 million figure is very low (about $14K per athlete), some are non-scholarship, we know the cost of tuition, room and board is well over $50K.

I agree 100% about administration salaries.

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$13 million is not a made up number though:

https://calbears.com/documents/2023/1/25/FY22_UCB_Athletics_SRE_Online_Copy_.pdf

Outside of Football @ 85 scholarships, most other mens teams are splitting 5-10 total scholarships. While womens sports have higher limits to offset football:

https://scholarshipstats.com/ncaalimits

There are probably about 275-300 full scholarship @ Cal allotted to around 350-400 athletes with many receiving half scholarships.

The official on campus budget is 38k to the university, or 44k including personal expenses. It's always been unclear if the athletic department scholarship actually cover true cost of attendance in Berkeley, but $13 million is consistent with ~ 300 scholarships.

https://financialaid.berkeley.edu/how-aid-works/student-budgets-cost-of-attendance/

I think one could add up the per sport limits in the website above and get an actual max for number of scholarships offered, and its going to be around 300.

DiabloWags said:

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calumnus said:

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I think the biggest change that needs to be made is to have scholarships in the non-revenue sports limited to in-state tuition. Donors can make up the difference for top out of state recruits. This would virtually eliminate the "subsidy" without eliminating sports. It is illusionary, because it would be balancing the budget by eliminating payments to the university from the AD, but that would eliminate the need for the university to make payments to the AD.

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Interestingly enough, UW, WSU, and UA, ASU are able to recruit out of state athletes and their athletic budget is only charged "in-state" tuition. If only our own legislature in Sacramento could pull their heads out of their arse and do the same.

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Interesting, as my daughter, out of state, was recruited by Cal and the primary reason she wasn't offered a scholarship was they were emphasizing in state recruits to save money.

UrsineMaximus said:

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Will the buildings be repurposed into student housing?

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That might have come off as a sarcastic remark to some, but why not think a little outside the box? Maybe the rehab and relocation costs are too high to combine academic areas to clear suffiencient space for housing? Don't know. But mixed-use projects are the rage in urban environments. Really good question.

calpoly said:

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UrsineMaximus said:

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Will the buildings be repurposed into student housing?

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The physics library is really small and is located on the top floor of LeConte Hall. Most likely it will be office or lab space. The math library is also small and on the bottom floor of Evans Hall which I believe will be torn down sometime.

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yes, but can you replace these library spaces by moving academic units to create new space in one building for students housing (probably grad housing)?

ColoradoBear said:

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calumnus said:

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ColoradoBear said:

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calumnus said:

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I think the importance of this article for the board is that the $30 million subsidy Christ is giving to prop up Knowlton's incompetence in the "revenue" sports is uncertain and may not be continued by the next chancellor. If not libraries, it will be something else.

The AD needs to greatly increase revenues and reduce costs. We need Knowlton replaced by someone from professional sports management.

I think the biggest change that needs to be made is to have scholarships in the non-revenue sports limited to in-state tuition. Donors can make up the difference for top out of state recruits. This would virtually eliminate the "subsidy" without eliminating sports. It is illusionary, because it would be balancing the budget by eliminating payments to the university from the AD, but that would eliminate the need for the university to make payments to the AD.

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I don't disagree that the $30 million in subsidies for the athletic department is a huge issue in that it could be spent elsewhere to help the general student population. There's also the hidden $7-8 million stadium subsidy.

Athletic Student aid comes in at $13 million for the entire department. That includes in state and out of state tuition, plus room/board/etc. I agree that there probably should be mechanism where out of state athletic aid should only be used when it's fully funded by donors. For non-rev sports, I'm not sure it ever makes sense. The State of California and UCOP have imposed caps on OOS enrollment so there is a true opportunity cost to using those slots for athletics. And compared to peer top tier public universities like Michigan, UW, and Virginia, Cal (and UCLA) are always going to the comparatively strapped for money in comparison because those schools enroll so many more OOS students. I'd say it absolutely makes the quality of life for students at Cal worse too.

BUT I'd also like to point out that the $13 million to student athletes is a small fraction of the 107 million operating budget, where $24 million goes to coaching and $25 million to admin salaries. So limiting OOS in the athletic department is not going to go very far in balancing the budget.

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The difference between in-state and out of state tuition is $30K

There are 900 varsity athletes at Cal. If 800 are on scholarship that is $24 million in "savings" If treated as instate vs out of state.

Your $13 million figure is very low (about $14K per athlete), some are non-scholarship, we know the cost of tuition, room and board is well over $50K.

I agree 100% about administration salaries.

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$13 million is not a made up number though:

https://calbears.com/documents/2023/1/25/FY22_UCB_Athletics_SRE_Online_Copy_.pdf

Outside of Football @ 85 scholarships, most other mens teams are splitting 5-10 total scholarships. While womens sports have higher limits to offset football:

https://scholarshipstats.com/ncaalimits

There are probably about 275-300 full scholarship @ Cal allotted to around 350-400 athletes with many receiving half scholarships.

The official on campus budget is 38k to the university, or 44k including personal expenses. It's always been unclear if the athletic department scholarship actually cover true cost of attendance in Berkeley, but $13 million is consistent with ~ 300 scholarships.

https://financialaid.berkeley.edu/how-aid-works/student-budgets-cost-of-attendance/

I think one could add up the per sport limits in the website above and get an actual max for number of scholarships offered, and its going to be around 300.

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Thanks, I was rushing my prior response before a meeting and didn't mean to be dismissive, I know you were just reporting the published number and appreciate your further research to explain it.

It is actually appalling that our AD's expenses are as high as they are given how little actually is spent on the athletes themselves.

calpoly said:

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dimitrig said:

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eastcoastcal said:

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At this point I think the vast majority of students use the libraries as study spaces rather than for the actual purpose of checking out books

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It was like that when I was a student in the 1990s.

I don't think there is anything wrong with students using these spaces for that and I would like to know what the space will be used for if not a library.

I assume that the cost savings here isn't in maintaining the space, which is free to the university, but in cutting staff. What value was that staff providing to the research community?

I seem to recall that the Math Library also housed Astronomy. I used to pull a lot of AAS journal articles at the Math Library. Is that no longer the case?

Closing libraries at a major research university like Berkeley is very concerning to me. Consolidation makes sense. Digitizing makes sense. That is not how this is being sold.

The university has its priorities out of whack:

"In 10 years, the university library has slipped in its rankings compared to peer institutions on every metric, from the number of volumes it holds to how much the library spends each year, according to an annual ranking by the Association of Research Libraries. However, UC Berkeley remains one of the top libraries in the country by many counts."

We are falling behind UCLA and soon we will fall out of the Top 25 universities altogether unless we do something. Campus has a lot of shiny new buildings compared to when I was a student but it is rotting at the core.

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I have a couple comments about your post. First off, I'm in academia and I don't know anyone that goes to the library anymore to look up journal articles or to check out books. They are all online and there is no need to scrounge through the stacks to find papers that are relevant to your research. Just use Google scholar! A matter of fact, the library at the Stanford Accelerator lab. closed several years ago because of the lack of use.

Second, Cal is certainly not falling behind UCLA as a research graduate school. Cal is in the top 5 well above UCLA's ranking (please look at every major graduate school ranking).

Third, there are many study space at Cal that are not libraries. In the physics department they had a huge study room in LeConte that had much more room than the physics library (the physics library was really small).

BTW, the Math library is separate from the Physics-Astronomy library.

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Well, I am not in academia but I work with and supervise people that do research. Of course people pull digital copies when they exist. However, not everything has been digitized. There are some often referred to dissertations and articles that either do not exist digitally or else the version that exists digitally is not the final version. I agree with you that 90% of what we need is available digitally but certainly not all of it. Also, some people still like thumbing through books instead of reading on a monitor or (even worse) printouts. There are a few frequently referred to texts in my field for which the hard copy is constantly in circulation.

As for UCLA, we are not behind UCLA but they are catching up to us and even surpassing us in some aspects including undergraduate rankings.

I was a math major at Cal so I am very familiar with the math library. It was hardly used even when I was in school since math is not a very big department. Before math I switched from physics (was actually trying to double major) so I know LeConte well also. I do know that an astronomy professor I was working for as part of my work study job had me make copies of journal articles and I often (usually) obtained them in the math library and not the physics library.

I used to like to study in the math library because it was so quiet and rarely used and in close proximity to my classes which were mostly in Evans. I don't know if the department needs to maintain its own library anymore but what upsets me is that the people making the decision aren't doing this to be more efficient or make better use of space. They don't even know how they want to use the space!

In my opinion this isn't some well thought out strategy. Someone just needed to make some cuts and this seemed like an easy target. Maybe next they will get rid of the Bancroft Library because those old manuscripts take up so much space! Who needs Milton's original Paradise Lost when I can read it on my iPad?

Seeing folks here freaking out about something the library has said for the past decade they were planning on doing... relax.

75bear said:

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Does anyone know where the Math department will be relocated once Evans is torn down? I know there will be no significant structure built to replace the Evans footprint.

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A new building at the parking lot west of Dwinelle Hall, is being built to accommodate those relocated by the Evans Hall demolition.