Libraries Are Wasted on Columbia Students

‘This entire building and all the knowledge it holds will be liberated for good, and every book will belong to the free children of the world.” Thus tweeted Columbia University Apartheid Divest on May 7 after storming Butler Library in protest of Israel, injuring two public-safety officers in the process. Among the most privileged people in the world, the terrorist sympathizers linked arms in the main reading room and chanted that they had nothing to lose but their chains.

Libraries are wasted on elite college students.

Perversely, then, maybe the students have a point. The knowledge held in private libraries by Columbia and its peer institutions should be “liberated”: made available to those who would actually appreciate it and protected from activist university librarians. Even as institutions such as the University of Austin and Hillsdale College grow in prominence, they can’t touch the research libraries of the Ivies, which, along with a handful of peers, have a near-monopoly on holdings of scholarly material that are exceptionally broad and deep. 

Liberating the libraries might mean open-access digitization of all materials. People are often surprised to hear that many of the works that one of us (Mr. Katz) has consulted in his career as an Indo-Europeanist are either unavailable online or accessible only via the most elite institutions. He once used Interlibrary Loan to access an article from the African Small Mammal Newsletter while researching a piece on a Sanskrit word for mongoose.

Continue reading at the Wall Street Journal…

Ms. Gold is a senior fellow at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. Mr. Katz is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.