Berkeley students fight for an institution

Anthropology library is at stake

BERKELEY, Calif. — To kick off homecoming weekend last fall, the University of California Berkeley held a groundbreaking ceremony for its data sciences building, known as the Gateway. At a cost of more than half a billion dollars, the 367,270-squarefoot building, with “extended 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 modest as the Gateway is grand: a 1,500-squarefoot corner on the second floor of the anthropology department’s building, with a cozy reading area of armchairs and computer terminals along one wall.

For days now, the library has become a scene of occupation. 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 the collections of archeological field notes and books — about 80,000 volumes in total, on subjects as varied as folk tales, Black culture, and Mexican American social movements — to a nearby warehouse and the main library.

For the student occupiers, the fight is as much a battle over a library as it is over humanities and social sciences in an age when the world is obsessed with technology and seems eager to replace the physical world with virtual experiences driven by AI.

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

In the past five years alone, the number of Berkeley undergraduate students choosing to major in anthropology has dropped by about one-quarter, part of a generation that has struggled to pay student loans and flocked toward science and engineering in the lucrative shadow of Silicon Valley.

Faculty members say they’re impressed by the intensity of the young students protesting to save the anthropology library, a cause that otherwise has relied on support from Ralph Nader, the liberal activist and onetime third-party presidential candidate, and Jerry Brown, the former governor of California who majored in classics when he was an undergraduate at UC Berkeley more than a half-century ago.