By: Mikayla Boyd, Asst. Opinion Editor
On Friday, Oct. 25, President Steve Stoute and Dr. Harold Fields, Vice President for Student Affairs, visited the weekly United Student Association as special guests. They answered questions that students submitted via a Google Form sent out to all students. Students shared concerns spanning from budget cuts that might result in program cuts, the new Buffalo Promise scholarship program and the new Student Success Center.
The new center will be on the third floor of our Andrew L. Bouwhuis Library, displacing the current silent floor and around 88,000 books. Those books are “being disposed of, donated, and relocated in the library according to Daeshyon Riley, the library liaison of the United Student Association (USA),” as reported in the Oct. 4 edition of The Griffin. You can find bins of books outside the library with signs reading “These books are free to take. Please give them a good home. Sincerely, The Library Staff” as well as signs on the third floor itself announcing that books marked with “Discharged from library” can be directly taken from shelves.
The disposal, transfer and donation of these books is upsetting, to say the least. Plenty of times now, I’ve found myself outside the library, flipping through old books among fellow students and commenting on how disappointing it is to see these once-treasured publications banished to bins. Features Editor Madelynn Lockwood shares this sentiment in the Oct. 11 edition of The Griffin, expressing “[these are] books that hundreds of other people may have touched and held and cried over during a bad midterm…them leaving the library makes me sad.” Books are tangible manifestations of our dedication to the human desire to keep learning, keep sharing information, and keep advancing as a society.
At the Oct. 25 Senate meeting, President Stoute and VP Fields were asked “With around 50,000 books cleared from the library’s silent floor and the Success Center moving to the top floor, are there plans to relocate the silent study area to maintain a quiet space for students?” President Stoute’s answer was that libraries are changing– libraries are no longer “museums for books, but a place to foster learning.” A ‘museum of books’ and student success are not mutually exclusive. Having a vast array of resources available to our students is intrinsically conducive to student success. To deprive students of these resources would have practical implications like making research more difficult, for example.
Regardless, this change is happening. Students and faculty should seek to understand the reasoning behind this change. VP Fields explained that the Student Success Center consolidation plan was inspired by a model that incorporates resources to create spaces that are student-centered in nature. Recently, Marquette University, a fellow Jesuit institution, opened its new student success center in one of its libraries. Co-locating essential services is thought to encourage students to use them and decrease barriers to their usage. Along with the new student success center will come a revised advisement model that will have four professionals serve as advisors for the first two years of a student’s college journey and then a faculty mentor for your final two years.
We must focus on what we can expect as a result. Although it seems like this reaps many benefits, we must heed President Stoute’s advice to probe and question the facts presented to us. What does this change mean for students? It means that for future Griffs’ freshman and sophomore years, they will not work closely with a faculty advisor. Students will miss out on forming a relationship with an individual who knows exactly what they’re passionate about, who can recommend classes that they or their colleagues teach, and who can provide them with enhanced resources that a student success professional cannot. That’s not to say that these professionals don’t have an important job to do– but should they take the role of a faculty advisor in such formative years? Our faculty-student relationships here are one of the attractive and fruitful aspects of our Canisius education. If we preclude future first and second-year students from having this opportunity, how exactly are we advancing student success?
Dr. Mick Cochrane, a beloved professor of English, put it best when he said that real student success “is not performed by a center – it happens, like all real learning, in a relationship.” While the consolidation of resources may make it easier for students to seize opportunities afforded to them, what happens when the consolidation of those resources compromises the very resources themselves? This is just one of the aspects of the larger question– what exactly are we saving while we purge $15 million? In one of his remarks, President Stoute asserted that in the future, our institution will look incredibly different, and students who will have become alumni will be proud of that. Will we? Or will we be nostalgic for a Canisius that will have ceased to exist by then?
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