This is a terrible article and I don't know why it's near the top of HN.
Libraries do a much better job of directly serving the poor. Universities, at best, tend to do this indirectly, if at all. Most university students and professors are already middle class or higher.
This came off as a rhetorical device with little meaning. First, there's an implicit value judgement that "serving the poor" is better than serving the "middle class". It's not clear why this should be true and even if the judgement itself were true, the author does nothing to backup his claim that libraries serve the poor and universities don't.
Maybe serving the middle class by producing a highly qualified workforce eventually helps the poor more than just throwing money at libraries. I don't know if this is the case, but if we're the in the business of throwing out assertions that we like I'd like to throw this one into the mix.
The author needs to do a much better job of convincing us that libraries are more of a social good than universities. And we're looking for more than just a few nicely written anecdotes.
Universities, while sometimes performing valuable research, are constantly wasting huge sums of money. Much of this money comes from loading up 17-to-21-year-olds with crippling student loans.
Universities are constantly wasting huge sums of money? How and where? I'd like to see some citations please. And why is the student loan system a criticism of the university rather than the financial aid system currently practiced in the US. Awfully muddled thinking here.
Libraries are famously impartial and nonjudgmental, and have no agenda other than to provide equitable access to information to anyone who desires it. Most university departments are rife with ideology and are hostile to conflicting views.
I'm going to ignore this bit which sounds suspiciously like right-wing propaganda.
Libraries are open and free to everyone. What they do only improves people’s prospects. The primary purpose of universities, granting credentials, is by definition exclusionary. They improve the prospects of a few at the expense of others, by fostering an environment where people are expected to have degrees before they can do anything of value, and erecting unnecessary barriers to individual prosperity.
This is a laughably poor argument. Who says people are expected to have degrees before they can do anything of value? Many of the most important innovators of our times do not have college degrees. And certainly nobody is erecting an unnecessary barrier to "individual prosperity".
If society or more specifically big business values college degrees, this isn't an indictment of the university itself and the solution certainly isn't to reduce funding so that fewer degrees are given out. Also, it's not a zero-sum game. Granting certifications to a few doesn't improve their prospects at the expense of others.
I think it's ironic that the OP used a computer and the internet to publish his propagandist rant; an action that would've been impossible without all the academic research into computing and networking systems in the last few decades. I'd argue that the economic fallout of that research alone has more than paid back whatever money the US government has invested in universities.
All of the above were unnecessary. I'll address the rest of your comment now.
> First, there's an implicit value judgement that "serving the poor" is better than serving the "middle class".
Typically, when cuts are being made, people across the political spectrum prefer to cut services for the middle class before cutting services for the poor. Most people agree that cutting services for the poor is a last resort. I am not arguing here that this is necessarily correct or that you have to agree, but that is the reason for the emphasis on "serving the poor" when discussing cuts to government programs.
> Universities are constantly wasting huge sums of money?
Administration costs, questionable research, credentialing, etc. That huge increase in tuition costs is going somewhere, isn't it?
> And why is the student loan system a criticism of the university rather than the financial aid system currently practiced in the US.
They are part of the same system. The connection between the increase in student loan limits and the increase in student tuition has been noted many times. See elsewhere in this thread.
> Who says people are expected to have degrees before they can do anything of value? Many of the most important innovators of our times do not have college degrees. And certainly nobody is erecting an unnecessary barrier to "individual prosperity".
In addition to what monochrome and yummyfajitas have said, anywhere you look, you can find job listings for relatively simple, entry-level positions that unnecessarily require university degrees. Ever since we started pushing the idea that everyone should go to college, we've seen a signaling arms race where you'd better get a college degree or face being passed over for someone else who did -- whether or not the job really needed someone with a degree. This is the unnecessary barrier. Now you have to spend money and time to get a degree just to keep up. If you can't do that, you're worse off.
Yes, many great innovators do not have college degrees. They help prove my point.
> Granting certifications to a few doesn't improve their prospects at the expense of others.
Of course it does. yummyfajitas has covered this already.
> would've been impossible without all the academic research into computing and networking systems in the last few decades
You're suggesting the only possible way to do this kind of research is through the university system as currently structured. This is an outlandish, unsupported claim, and you denigrate the people who performed this research by claiming they could only have done it within the modern university system.
>Who says people are expected to have degrees before they can do anything of value?
Professional guilds - legal bars, medical boards, engineering, academia - you're pretty much excluded from all those fields lacking a formal degree accepted by the mentioned institutions, even tough you can have the required skills and even experience (as a skilled immigrant for eg., you can even have a degree from a non-accredited/foreign education institution). The monopolistic nature of this system is nicely illustrated by the "diploma mills" that allow people to get hired for the job requiring a diploma without completing the education program, perform their jobs successfully for considerable amount of time and then when/if discovered "cheating" get fired - without actually failing to do their job at any point, just because they don't have the degree. Granted this is logical from the employers point of view as the legal liability is huge but that's the result of the system.
>I think it's ironic that the OP used a computer and the internet to publish his propagandist rant; an action that would've been impossible without all the academic research into computing and networking systems in the last few decades. I'd argue that the economic fallout of that research alone has more than paid back whatever money the US government has invested in universities.
I'd argue that you don't consider the opportunity cost and the crowding out of R&D investment in that assertion and implied that without public funding the academic work wouldn't be done. Here's a different view of that argument :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_PVI6V6o-4 , also he has a book on topic.
If you want to argue that college is about human capital creation rather than signalling, be my guest. But insofar as college is signalling, it directly redistributes wealth from those without the signal to those with it.
>Most university departments are rife with ideology and are hostile to conflicting views.
>I'm going to ignore this bit which sounds suspiciously like right-wing propaganda.
You don't like this part of the argument, so instead of refuting it you declare it "propaganda" and move on?
Look at the campaign contribution numbers of university professors and tell me that they aren't incredibly one sided.
I don't think you'll find anyone who will seriously argue with the premise that there are far more left leaning than right leaning professors.
Anecdote: When I was in college, I was much more conservative than I am now. I experienced outright disdain for my relatively moderate political beliefs from the majority of my professors and my peers; so much so that after a year or two I got tired of it and just learned to shut up.
The article is, at best, heavy on the hyperbole and at worst factually wrong. The first sentence is:
"So, California is cutting library funding instead of, you know, anything else."
The state budget has forced cuts in many departments. We're talking a $12 million cut to libraries. Higher education has been cut hundreds of millions of dollars.
The article then goes on to claim that higher education serve poor people "at best, tend to do this indirectly, if at all." The next sentence says "Most university students and professors are already middle class or higher." If not all university students are middle class or higher then it is benefitting lower class students. Why say "if at all" when the next sentence implies that some poor people are helped? Does the author want professors to be poor? Of course most professors are middle class or higher. I expect all of them to be.
Then there is this statement: "The primary purpose of universities, granting credentials, is by definition exclusionary." This sentence, together with the sentence before it, suggests the author thinks this is a bad thing. Some students fail out of engineering. This is a good thing because not everyone is cut out for this type of work.
Libraries should be open for everyone. Universities should not grant degrees to everyone. The functions of libraries and universities are disparate. It's fine to think one is more important than the other. It's sloppy to not take into consideration the differences in focus between the two entities.
I couldn't have learned necessary hands-on chemistry and biology from a library. Good technique can't be read about; it must simply be learned in the laboratory from repeated mistakes. After the hand-holding freshman year, half of the chem/bio curriculum is dedicated to working independently, in the lab, under time constraints and pressure.
Theory can be learned from a book, but it's not necessarily easy for everyone. Only highly-motivated self-learners can teach themselves a subject, and then they must take on the additional work required to cut through "information space" to find exactly the texts they need. I don't think even a quarter of university students today have the capacity to learn in this manner, completely detached from the university system.
CS students are very lucky. We have mailing lists, IRC, HN/proggit, stackoverflow, good tools, documentation and tutorials freely accessible. These resources aren't as plentiful or accessible for other STEM majors. Outside of a few IRC channels, they don't even exist for chem/bio. (You can't cite databases--they are too complicated for new learners.)
If we want a more autodidactic society, a lot of changes have to be made to early childhood education. Additionally, we have to provide a lot of tools (guided curriculum to keep learners on track, etc.) to support this manner of learning.
I agree hands-on learning in a lab is important. I'm not suggesting everyone should stop this and only read books instead. But learning in a lab doesn't need to be tied to a $100,000-$200,000 four-year university degree program. As a society, we should be able to make this much more accessible. (I don't mean we have to literally put labs in libraries. I mean everyone should be able to learn this way cheaply, in the same spirit that a library makes information accessible for free.)
CS students are very lucky. We have mailing lists, IRC, HN/proggit, stackoverflow, good tools, documentation and tutorials freely accessible. These resources aren't as plentiful or accessible for other STEM majors.
You're right, and we should fix that. People interested in other STEM fields shouldn't be forced to spend tens of thousands of dollars and four years to gain access to this knowledge.
Good article. Unfortunately while reading it, it's difficult to ignore the fact that neither of these should be cut at all before cuts are made to overseas military campaigns, CIA, war on drugs, DHS, corporate welfare, cronyism, etc. etc.
Except the article is about a state cutting library funding. While California likely sends a fair amount of tax dollars to Washington, D.C., I'm fairly sure their state coffers are directly funding military campaigns and the DHS.
I think a lot of the argument for public funding of universities (and for K-12 education, even) is that public goods are created by having a highly educated population (workforce, voters, etc.)
To the extent that university education produces private goods (specific career training, credentials, etc.) there is a lot weaker argument for public funding.
The argument for public funding of universities is mostly not about it being a social safety net or producing equality of opportunity, at least not before the early 1990s or so, so that university students are generally from middle class or higher isn't as relevant.
Ironically, what do the best libraries traditionally contain? Works created by highly educated individuals.
Yes, you will always have your pulp fiction, but if a library's job is to disseminate knowledge to the masses, doesn't that make libraries reliant on a source to develop that knowledge?
Given the skyrocketing costs of university education, I would think that there was a lot of waste to be found there.
Still I agree with another commenter. The real issue is why we spend so much money subsidizing corporations as well as our foreign adventures and the drug war. All of which are not sustainable in the long run.
Hate to break it to you, but Universities also employ a LOT of trade workers as well, it's not all academics and students. I think it would be fair to say that cutting a similar amount of funding from the california university system would result in a similar number of janitorial, HVAC, maintenance, landscaping, administrative, _librarian_, technology support, and other job losses.
Sure, cutting something as important as state libraries sucks, but you'd be pretty naive to think that shifting the cuts to any other sector wouldn't result in the same amount of job losses.
Libraries have a short life left. I don't know many people who go to them anymore considering the vast amounts of information on the Internet and now eReaders.
Libraries may offer other services than just the loaning of books and dvd's but in that case community centers will appear or other businesses to fill those needs.
I know some people don't have access to the internet or a computer but that is changing. I don't think libraries will disappear overnight but they are going (as we know them).
I'm confused as to the popularity of this article, given California has cut funding to both universities and public libraries. It's not a zero-sum game; usually funding for both public goods follow hand in hand. Not to mention university libraries, a class of their own.
Yeah, higher tuition is exactly what I wanted. There's a reason state schools are so much cheaper than private: state funding.
As much as I love libraries, I hardly visit one thanks to the thousands (millions?) of public domain books I can get free straight to my Kindle. The only thing I would want to visit a library for would be books like O'Reilly books, but my college pays a subscription to Safari Books that allows students access to literally thousands of such books completely free; O'Reilly, Apress, etc. so my thirst is quenched for now. The beauty is that as soon as a new book is published, it's on the site. And there aren't HTML3 books from the 90's still wasting (virtual) shelf space like my library.
Random thought, but that could be the future of the library. What if a little bit of tax money went toward an online directory like Safari Books instead of a huge expensive library building? Always updated, easy access, and a much wider selection? I'd go for it. I guess baby boomers wouldn't though.
Is it really worth comparing them so simplistically? This is a point-of-view from one side, pointing at a few flaws (of many, ignoring the positives) of universities, and a few positives (of many, ignoring the flaws) of libraries.
Yes, university funding has already seen some cuts, but I’d rather see more cuts to universities and fewer cuts to libraries. They’re not the same thing.
Of course they are not the same thing. So why are we comparing them as if they were? Rather than identifying a library's strengths and comparing that directly to universities, you should identify a library's strengths and a university's strengths, and compare the two sets.
Respectfully, I don't think I've done what you say I've done. I say "they're not the same thing" because, as I said in the post, a lot of people lump them together as "investing in knowledge for society" or the like.
I didn't set out to identify a library's strengths. I believe many of the university's supposed strengths are actually better applicable to libraries.
While this post focuses on universities and libraries, and I'm serious about preferring university cuts to library cuts, obviously there are plenty of other things that could probably be cut first.
If there are plenty of other things to cut first, why are we comparing the two? Why not complain that they should cut something else instead of universities?
I know the answer to this, and it makes me a bit sad. It's easy for Americans to resent their university system because, at least in CS, it is arguable that they don't actually need it. In some cases, it even hurts American kids. But before we all jump on this bandwagon (again) let's consider that we are perhaps being a bit myopic.
In the first place, libraries are a great repository of knowledge. But knowledge does not equal production, and whether you or I or anyone else here wants to admit it, a tremendous amount of stuff has been invented, either totally, or almost totally, as a component of university research. What would the world be without transactional databases, A* search, quicksort, cryptography, the idea of programming languages and so on ad infinatum. I could probably fill up literally a whole book listing the things in CS that were invented at Universities. There are more for other fields. You might contend that they all would have been invented eventually, but the question still remains: what would the world look like if universities had not been around to foster these ideas? New ideas need friends, and Bell labs can't employ all the geniuses.
I know, I know, you might contend that most research in universities is either pointless or close to pointless. Unfortunately, you'd be right. But remember, that's the Zipf curve. The ideas that are big are really, really big. Not just in universities, either: ideas produced by universities (for example, the ones I listed above) have changed the way that the world operates at a fundamental level, and they continue to do this. And when people come to universities and engage in work related to it, they carry it home, they carry it to their job, and they carry it out of the country. This is the way the world works. I know HN hates this opinion, but it is true.
The other thing I want to mention is that the vast majority of these life-changing ideas come out of American universities. This is a truly global system now. People come from all over the world to study here, and when they do, they sometimes stay here. Do people come to America to study at libraries? The simple and fact of the matter is that not all talented people are born in the US, and American universities are a very important gateway to get talented people into the US. In contrast, the library system is a purely domestic product for the public that happens to be inside US. I know that you think that universities don't "help the poor", but consider that this is really only true for the domestic poor. They are an irreplaceable resource for the poor outside. I'm not pitting "our" poor against "their" poor, but it's just something to think about.
The last thing I wanted to point out is that the fact that libraries are a useful repository of knowledge does not mean that it will make people productive. Universities are not good at this either, but the consistent usership of public libraries is pitifully small. The fact that they exist does not mean that people will use them, since they do exist, and people clearly mostly do not.
The bottom line is this: your points all have some grain of truth to them, or they are true outright. But when you don't bother to examine why this system exists to begin with before you state that another systems should be preferred, you are undermining your own point in a huge way. In particular, to say that we should toss an incredibly important and global system for some domestic system that people don't use is utterly wrong. That all said, the correct answer is: cut neither, and instead cut part of the military.
[+] [-] microarchitect|14 years ago|reply
Libraries do a much better job of directly serving the poor. Universities, at best, tend to do this indirectly, if at all. Most university students and professors are already middle class or higher.
This came off as a rhetorical device with little meaning. First, there's an implicit value judgement that "serving the poor" is better than serving the "middle class". It's not clear why this should be true and even if the judgement itself were true, the author does nothing to backup his claim that libraries serve the poor and universities don't.
Maybe serving the middle class by producing a highly qualified workforce eventually helps the poor more than just throwing money at libraries. I don't know if this is the case, but if we're the in the business of throwing out assertions that we like I'd like to throw this one into the mix.
The author needs to do a much better job of convincing us that libraries are more of a social good than universities. And we're looking for more than just a few nicely written anecdotes.
Universities, while sometimes performing valuable research, are constantly wasting huge sums of money. Much of this money comes from loading up 17-to-21-year-olds with crippling student loans.
Universities are constantly wasting huge sums of money? How and where? I'd like to see some citations please. And why is the student loan system a criticism of the university rather than the financial aid system currently practiced in the US. Awfully muddled thinking here.
Libraries are famously impartial and nonjudgmental, and have no agenda other than to provide equitable access to information to anyone who desires it. Most university departments are rife with ideology and are hostile to conflicting views.
I'm going to ignore this bit which sounds suspiciously like right-wing propaganda.
Libraries are open and free to everyone. What they do only improves people’s prospects. The primary purpose of universities, granting credentials, is by definition exclusionary. They improve the prospects of a few at the expense of others, by fostering an environment where people are expected to have degrees before they can do anything of value, and erecting unnecessary barriers to individual prosperity.
This is a laughably poor argument. Who says people are expected to have degrees before they can do anything of value? Many of the most important innovators of our times do not have college degrees. And certainly nobody is erecting an unnecessary barrier to "individual prosperity".
If society or more specifically big business values college degrees, this isn't an indictment of the university itself and the solution certainly isn't to reduce funding so that fewer degrees are given out. Also, it's not a zero-sum game. Granting certifications to a few doesn't improve their prospects at the expense of others.
I think it's ironic that the OP used a computer and the internet to publish his propagandist rant; an action that would've been impossible without all the academic research into computing and networking systems in the last few decades. I'd argue that the economic fallout of that research alone has more than paid back whatever money the US government has invested in universities.
[+] [-] johnnybgoode|14 years ago|reply
Yes, many great innovators do not have college degrees. They help prove my point.
Of course it does. yummyfajitas has covered this already. You're suggesting the only possible way to do this kind of research is through the university system as currently structured. This is an outlandish, unsupported claim, and you denigrate the people who performed this research by claiming they could only have done it within the modern university system.[+] [-] moonchrome|14 years ago|reply
Professional guilds - legal bars, medical boards, engineering, academia - you're pretty much excluded from all those fields lacking a formal degree accepted by the mentioned institutions, even tough you can have the required skills and even experience (as a skilled immigrant for eg., you can even have a degree from a non-accredited/foreign education institution). The monopolistic nature of this system is nicely illustrated by the "diploma mills" that allow people to get hired for the job requiring a diploma without completing the education program, perform their jobs successfully for considerable amount of time and then when/if discovered "cheating" get fired - without actually failing to do their job at any point, just because they don't have the degree. Granted this is logical from the employers point of view as the legal liability is huge but that's the result of the system.
>I think it's ironic that the OP used a computer and the internet to publish his propagandist rant; an action that would've been impossible without all the academic research into computing and networking systems in the last few decades. I'd argue that the economic fallout of that research alone has more than paid back whatever money the US government has invested in universities.
I'd argue that you don't consider the opportunity cost and the crowding out of R&D investment in that assertion and implied that without public funding the academic work wouldn't be done. Here's a different view of that argument : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_PVI6V6o-4 , also he has a book on topic.
[+] [-] yummyfajitas|14 years ago|reply
Yes it does. Please learn about signalling.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics)
If you want to argue that college is about human capital creation rather than signalling, be my guest. But insofar as college is signalling, it directly redistributes wealth from those without the signal to those with it.
[+] [-] learc83|14 years ago|reply
>I'm going to ignore this bit which sounds suspiciously like right-wing propaganda.
You don't like this part of the argument, so instead of refuting it you declare it "propaganda" and move on?
Look at the campaign contribution numbers of university professors and tell me that they aren't incredibly one sided.
I don't think you'll find anyone who will seriously argue with the premise that there are far more left leaning than right leaning professors.
Anecdote: When I was in college, I was much more conservative than I am now. I experienced outright disdain for my relatively moderate political beliefs from the majority of my professors and my peers; so much so that after a year or two I got tired of it and just learned to shut up.
[+] [-] yequalsx|14 years ago|reply
"So, California is cutting library funding instead of, you know, anything else."
The state budget has forced cuts in many departments. We're talking a $12 million cut to libraries. Higher education has been cut hundreds of millions of dollars.
The article then goes on to claim that higher education serve poor people "at best, tend to do this indirectly, if at all." The next sentence says "Most university students and professors are already middle class or higher." If not all university students are middle class or higher then it is benefitting lower class students. Why say "if at all" when the next sentence implies that some poor people are helped? Does the author want professors to be poor? Of course most professors are middle class or higher. I expect all of them to be.
Then there is this statement: "The primary purpose of universities, granting credentials, is by definition exclusionary." This sentence, together with the sentence before it, suggests the author thinks this is a bad thing. Some students fail out of engineering. This is a good thing because not everyone is cut out for this type of work.
Libraries should be open for everyone. Universities should not grant degrees to everyone. The functions of libraries and universities are disparate. It's fine to think one is more important than the other. It's sloppy to not take into consideration the differences in focus between the two entities.
[+] [-] possibilistic|14 years ago|reply
Theory can be learned from a book, but it's not necessarily easy for everyone. Only highly-motivated self-learners can teach themselves a subject, and then they must take on the additional work required to cut through "information space" to find exactly the texts they need. I don't think even a quarter of university students today have the capacity to learn in this manner, completely detached from the university system.
CS students are very lucky. We have mailing lists, IRC, HN/proggit, stackoverflow, good tools, documentation and tutorials freely accessible. These resources aren't as plentiful or accessible for other STEM majors. Outside of a few IRC channels, they don't even exist for chem/bio. (You can't cite databases--they are too complicated for new learners.)
If we want a more autodidactic society, a lot of changes have to be made to early childhood education. Additionally, we have to provide a lot of tools (guided curriculum to keep learners on track, etc.) to support this manner of learning.
[+] [-] johnnybgoode|14 years ago|reply
CS students are very lucky. We have mailing lists, IRC, HN/proggit, stackoverflow, good tools, documentation and tutorials freely accessible. These resources aren't as plentiful or accessible for other STEM majors.
You're right, and we should fix that. People interested in other STEM fields shouldn't be forced to spend tens of thousands of dollars and four years to gain access to this knowledge.
[+] [-] Lendal|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bmj|14 years ago|reply
* Edit: grammar
[+] [-] johnnybgoode|14 years ago|reply
The way I see it, libraries are so incredible, and so important, that even the mighty university should be cut before libraries are.
[+] [-] rdl|14 years ago|reply
To the extent that university education produces private goods (specific career training, credentials, etc.) there is a lot weaker argument for public funding.
The argument for public funding of universities is mostly not about it being a social safety net or producing equality of opportunity, at least not before the early 1990s or so, so that university students are generally from middle class or higher isn't as relevant.
[+] [-] sliverstorm|14 years ago|reply
Yes, you will always have your pulp fiction, but if a library's job is to disseminate knowledge to the masses, doesn't that make libraries reliant on a source to develop that knowledge?
[+] [-] chaostheory|14 years ago|reply
Still I agree with another commenter. The real issue is why we spend so much money subsidizing corporations as well as our foreign adventures and the drug war. All of which are not sustainable in the long run.
[+] [-] pbnjay|14 years ago|reply
Sure, cutting something as important as state libraries sucks, but you'd be pretty naive to think that shifting the cuts to any other sector wouldn't result in the same amount of job losses.
[+] [-] apedley|14 years ago|reply
Libraries may offer other services than just the loaning of books and dvd's but in that case community centers will appear or other businesses to fill those needs.
I know some people don't have access to the internet or a computer but that is changing. I don't think libraries will disappear overnight but they are going (as we know them).
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] keithvan|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] twiceaday|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] feralchimp|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] firefoxman1|14 years ago|reply
As much as I love libraries, I hardly visit one thanks to the thousands (millions?) of public domain books I can get free straight to my Kindle. The only thing I would want to visit a library for would be books like O'Reilly books, but my college pays a subscription to Safari Books that allows students access to literally thousands of such books completely free; O'Reilly, Apress, etc. so my thirst is quenched for now. The beauty is that as soon as a new book is published, it's on the site. And there aren't HTML3 books from the 90's still wasting (virtual) shelf space like my library.
Random thought, but that could be the future of the library. What if a little bit of tax money went toward an online directory like Safari Books instead of a huge expensive library building? Always updated, easy access, and a much wider selection? I'd go for it. I guess baby boomers wouldn't though.
[+] [-] learc83|14 years ago|reply
Indirect state (and federal) funding, in the form of scholarships, grants, and loans, is one of the reasons tuition is so high in the first place.
If student loans weren't so plentiful colleges wouldn't cost 10-50k a year, because no one would pay.
[+] [-] twelvechairs|14 years ago|reply
'Comparisons are odious' as they say....
[+] [-] sliverstorm|14 years ago|reply
Of course they are not the same thing. So why are we comparing them as if they were? Rather than identifying a library's strengths and comparing that directly to universities, you should identify a library's strengths and a university's strengths, and compare the two sets.
[+] [-] johnnybgoode|14 years ago|reply
I didn't set out to identify a library's strengths. I believe many of the university's supposed strengths are actually better applicable to libraries.
[+] [-] nnnnni|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marshray|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnnybgoode|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antics|14 years ago|reply
I know the answer to this, and it makes me a bit sad. It's easy for Americans to resent their university system because, at least in CS, it is arguable that they don't actually need it. In some cases, it even hurts American kids. But before we all jump on this bandwagon (again) let's consider that we are perhaps being a bit myopic.
In the first place, libraries are a great repository of knowledge. But knowledge does not equal production, and whether you or I or anyone else here wants to admit it, a tremendous amount of stuff has been invented, either totally, or almost totally, as a component of university research. What would the world be without transactional databases, A* search, quicksort, cryptography, the idea of programming languages and so on ad infinatum. I could probably fill up literally a whole book listing the things in CS that were invented at Universities. There are more for other fields. You might contend that they all would have been invented eventually, but the question still remains: what would the world look like if universities had not been around to foster these ideas? New ideas need friends, and Bell labs can't employ all the geniuses.
I know, I know, you might contend that most research in universities is either pointless or close to pointless. Unfortunately, you'd be right. But remember, that's the Zipf curve. The ideas that are big are really, really big. Not just in universities, either: ideas produced by universities (for example, the ones I listed above) have changed the way that the world operates at a fundamental level, and they continue to do this. And when people come to universities and engage in work related to it, they carry it home, they carry it to their job, and they carry it out of the country. This is the way the world works. I know HN hates this opinion, but it is true.
The other thing I want to mention is that the vast majority of these life-changing ideas come out of American universities. This is a truly global system now. People come from all over the world to study here, and when they do, they sometimes stay here. Do people come to America to study at libraries? The simple and fact of the matter is that not all talented people are born in the US, and American universities are a very important gateway to get talented people into the US. In contrast, the library system is a purely domestic product for the public that happens to be inside US. I know that you think that universities don't "help the poor", but consider that this is really only true for the domestic poor. They are an irreplaceable resource for the poor outside. I'm not pitting "our" poor against "their" poor, but it's just something to think about.
The last thing I wanted to point out is that the fact that libraries are a useful repository of knowledge does not mean that it will make people productive. Universities are not good at this either, but the consistent usership of public libraries is pitifully small. The fact that they exist does not mean that people will use them, since they do exist, and people clearly mostly do not.
The bottom line is this: your points all have some grain of truth to them, or they are true outright. But when you don't bother to examine why this system exists to begin with before you state that another systems should be preferred, you are undermining your own point in a huge way. In particular, to say that we should toss an incredibly important and global system for some domestic system that people don't use is utterly wrong. That all said, the correct answer is: cut neither, and instead cut part of the military.
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] glomph|14 years ago|reply
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