In Berkeley, a library protest is a fight for anthropology in an AI era

BERKELEY, Calif. — To kick off homecoming weekend last fall, the University of California, Berkeley, held a groundbreaking ceremony for its new data sciences building, known as the Gateway. Costing more than half a billion dollars, the 35,000-square-foot building, with “extensive sightlines and natural-light-filled corridors,” is being billed as a hub for research in artificial intelligence, data analytics, and machine learning.

That may represent the future, but the past is just a short walk across campus in the stacks of the anthropology library. For decades, the repository has served generations of scholars in a space as humble as the Gateway is grand: a 150-square-foot corner on the second floor of the Anthropology Department building, featuring a cozy reading nook with armchairs and computer terminals along one wall. .

The library has been a scene of occupation for days. Students have filled it with tents, sleeping bags and air mattresses in a last-ditch effort to save the 67-year-old institution dedicated to anthropology, which encompasses the study of humanity, societies and cultures. The university is preparing to move its collections of archaeological field notes and books—about 80,000 books in total, covering topics as diverse as folktales, black culture, and Mexican-American social movements—to a nearby warehouse and the main library, saving $400,000 annually .

For the student occupiers, the battle is as much a battle for a library as it is for the humanities and social sciences at a time when the world is obsessed with technology and eager to replace the physical world with virtual experiences powered by AI

“It’s about fundamentally writing a different story about what education is, what the university is for,” says Jesús Gutiérrez, a graduate student who works at the library and is writing a dissertation on folk art forms of the African diaspora.

In the past five years alone, the number of Berkeley undergraduate students choosing anthropology as their major has fallen by about a quarter, part of a generation that struggled to pay student loans and streamed into science and engineering in the lucrative shadows from Silicon Valley.

Faculty members say they are impressed by the intensity of the young students protesting to save the anthropology library, a cause that otherwise depended on the support of Ralph Nader, the liberal activist and sometime third presidential candidate, and Jerry Brown, the former governor of California who majored in classics at UC Berkeley more than half a century ago.

As a third-year anthropology student, Ian Molloy, one of the protest organizers, has heard the giggles of science and engineering classmates, describing his subject choice as “Oh, you don’t want to make money.” He called the library, where he has found titles on taming animals vital to his research, the “backbone” of the department and central to rebuilding the community after the isolation of the pandemic.

Despite the outcry, the administration says it won’t budge, explaining that the cuts are necessary as they face a Budget deficit of $82 million. In March, Carol Christ, Berkeley’s chancellor, pointed to increases the UC system had agreed to pay graduate student instructors and support staff as one of the drivers of new costs.

The university has said it will save about $1.5 million by doing so closing not just the anthropology library, but also the math and physics libraries, and other cutbacks in hours and services. The other closures have not evoked the intense opposition that the closure of the anthropology library has.

“We are aware of the protest and are monitoring the situation,” the university said in a statement. “As for the closure of the anthropology library, we also wish that the library could remain open, but that is not an option at the moment.”

At 93, Laura Nader remains a prolific scholar and teacher, decades after becoming the first woman in the anthropology department to be tenured in 1960. “But I couldn’t have done it without the library,” Dr. said Nader’s sister. She worries that students interested in anthropology will instead prefer other universities with dedicated anthropology libraries.

Dr. Nader sees the planned library closure as another step in the decline of the humanities and social sciences in general – and anthropology in particular.

“So all of a sudden it becomes a job application,” she said. “You don’t need anthropology.”

Under the administration’s plan, some of the materials in the library, founded in 1956 and later named after George and Mary Foster, two prominent Berkeley anthropologists, will be moved to a storage facility in nearby Richmond, California. Other parts of the collection will be distributed throughout the university’s main library.

Alexander Parra, who studies computer science and Chicano studies and who has occupied the library, said one of the things that would be lost if the library closed was the possibility of serendipity — finding a book you didn’t know. Searched for. When students staged an occupation earlier this year after the university announced closure plans in February, Mr. Parra happened upon a title about Mexican-American youth organizations, a topic he was researching.

“That’s me,” he said. “That’s me in that book.”

Some students and professors also see the struggle as a matter of equity. Of those studying anthropology, 43 percent of students belong to underrepresented minority groups, compared to 5 percent for computer science. The library also serves students majoring in Chicano Studies and African American Studies, disciplines that also have a higher proportion of unrepresented minority students.

Mr. Brown, who once taught a course in Berkeley’s anthropology department, has contacted members of the University of California Board of Regents, urging them to spare the library.

“Great and spacious minds have graced that building,” he wrote in an email to the chairman of the board. “To replace it now, even partially, with a mere warehouse in Richmond is unthinkable.”

Charles Hirschkind, the chair of the anthropology department, said that since 2004 the university has reduced the number of graduate students it accepts in anthropology by just over half, due, he said, to the “weaker financial situation” of the department and the increase in costs to support graduate students.

“When we talk about budget constraints, we are also talking about priorities and where people decide to invest,” he said. “And I think the university feels little incentive to invest in the social sciences and humanities.”

Dr. Hirschkind said some faculty members were pleasantly surprised to see the younger generation fighting for the library, after assuming that students who grew up in the digital age might have less appreciation for physical books or the joys of a library. And the library’s occupation is reminiscent to some of an earlier Berkeley activist era.

“There’s a strong sense of communitas in the air — it’s not like identity politics at all — we need a new word for it,” Nancy Scheper-Hughes, anthropology professor, wrote in an email to Mr. Brown. “They want to read. They want to be with open communities of people with very different ideas.”

The students have been living in the library for more than a week now, studying for final exams, playing board games and having breakfast with croissants and granola. The students worry that the university is trying to run the clock down until summer break and then dismantle the library, saying they will stay as long as necessary.

“They can give us the library tomorrow,” Mr. Molloy said, “and then we’ll all be happy to go home.”