information technologies" [sic], has opined to me openly about how the library needs to be more of a social center: "it's a great open space. why don't kids hang out there more?" he compares it to barnes and noble, where there are books just lying about and people pick them up and read them, or where they just come and hang out.
I agree with Ellen: what exactly is wrong with making the library "a cool place to hang out"? However the corporatization theme is quote real and quite disturbing. Two recent events come to my mind: 1) Recently I was visiting Berkeley and discovered that the library has no public Internet access. For a public university I found this astonishing. And of course even with an AirBears account, there are all kinds of other restrictions about accessing research databases. 2) If you think "students are our customers" is bad, what do you think of "coporations are our customers" as a motto for a public university. Yet an executive from Intel quite explicitly suggested this at a recent conference to celebrate the newly developed hybrid on-chip laser. The Intel rep had the audacity to openly talk about Intel's efforts to lobby the NSF to reorient its funding priorities to this end. Even worse he declared Intel's preference to using inexpensive grad student labor that he claimed was a win-win proposition. Since we all know there is no such thing as win-win in capitalism, the question is: are we chumps for going to grad school? -raghu.
