Business School Library Doesn’t Want To See You Again
Terrible news for those partial to the business school library’s wonderful study rooms: this preference is no longer an option for you, and please get out. According to a Bwog informant — and confirmed by the man who just picked up the phone at Watson library — the study rooms are going to be business-schooler-only come fall.
Our informant (who moonlights as a library employee) says she was asked to hang signs announcing that September 1st would be the last that the study rooms would be undergrad-friendly. But she is conflicted about performing these cruel tasks: “I thought the whole point of the university system was that we have access to tons o’ fun and resources, including as many business-y and economic-y books as required to fill our bellies. So are we paying for a share of the goods, or aren’t we?”
In any event, see you in the Lerner Piano Lounge, where the duration and volume of someone’s piano playing is always proportionate to your workload.
Tags: business school, business school library undergrad expulsion, libraries
11 August 2008 @ 8:12 AM · 25 comments
on 
If you don’t want to hear someone playing the piano, don’t study in the piano lounge. As told by a grad student to a bitchy girl:
“Is the piano lounge a place where pianos can go and rest after a long day of being played? Because if so, I have totally misunderstood the concept and I apologize. Otherwise, quit complaining and leave.”
“I thought the whole point of the university system was that we have access to tons o’ fun and resources, including as many business-y and economic-y books as required to fill our bellies. So are we paying for a share of the goods, or aren’t we?”
Not being allowed to use the study rooms is a far cry from being denied access to the library and its books. If demand for the rooms exceeds the supply, it is reasonable for the library to restrict access to B-school students.
then tell the barnard girls to get the hell out of butler.
Not a good analogy. A better one would be telling them to stay out of specific rooms that are primarily for another division of the university.
More to the point, Barnard pays Columbia a great deal of money every year so that its students can access the libraries just like other CU undergrads. (One of the main reasons Barnard’s library is small is that funds which might otherwise have gone toward a bigger building and a larger collection were paid over to Columbia’s libraries instead.) I’m not sure Butler could discriminate solely against Barnard under the terms of that agreement.
“Imagine the IPO for the company that stops global warming”… Imagine it people!
That must’ve been a conflicted decision– in building your own library, you have a base of resources that’ll last years. In using those funds to access another’s, there is no substantive investment in one’s own resources should that party pull out of the agreement later.
Given that Barnard’s vision, I think, is to be a distinguished complement to the Columbia University, and not strive toward complete autonomy, it probably doesn’t have much concern about future detachment. Nor should it, in my opinion.
/Has anyone actually encountered Barnard vitriol in real life? I’ve only seen it online… Is that just a function of cowardice /the internet being a megaphone for malcontents?
I’m sure the contract between CU and Barnard includes a penalty provision if CU breaches. Besides, Barnard’s limited space is a very strong incentive for it to not build a large library of its own.
Barnard likely isn’t interested in autonomy. Many of its faculty and students choose Barnard in large part because of the CU connection. Barnard would survive on its own, but its quality would suffer immensely. It might even have to go coed to survive beyond the medium term, which would eliminate its raison d’etre.
One time a girl at a party said, “You’re nice…for a Barnard girl.”
Does every discussion on Bwog have to turn into a Barnard fight? It’s just boring, like an atheist arguing with an evangelical Christian.
p.s. Agreed, #1. It’s a big city and a big campus, so it’s a lot easier to find another place to study or have a meeting than to find another piano. Also some of us enjoy listening to the people that come and play there. Music is nice.
B-school kids need to learn how to share. First they stop accepting dining dollars at uris and now this? We need to either start beating up b-school kids on sight or protest in the fine Columbia tradition.
Their wireless is also inaccessible for non-BSchool students. Same with the law school. But insular professional school buildings make the best place to study and do work…
…could be because, you know, they’re in business school and only there to learn how to hoard the rest of the population’s money for themselves.
I always found SIPA and Uris to be great places to work. Something about being around all those thirtysomethings.
are undergrads still allowed in the main floor of the library though?
MBA’s know how to read? They need their study space to learn advanced dick-sucking? Come on, Columbia, seriously?
they only mention study rooms…but can we still use the actual library?
I propose we revoke their swipe access at Lerner (the center for UNDERGRAD student life). Demand exceeds supply for undergrad space on campus too. Also, if there’s a university-wide pot for Alumni donations across schools, threaten to have them excluded (assuming their alums are less giving than the average school’s donor) since they prefer to exist as a school in isolation anyway.
I don’t think Lerner is just for undergrads.
that undergrads can’t reserve the rooms, or that they’ll be actively kicked out of them? Every time I’ve gone to use them there have been quite a few that were empty
i wonder how they plan to enforce this. i can’t imagine they’d deny undergrads access to the library itself. maybe they’ll rely on b-school students who want rooms to challenge people who look like undergrads. not a great system, and it’ll probably leave ample room for evading the policy, at least when the rooms aren’t in high demand.
long as students can still access the business library for books, I’ll be able to stomach this.
Can we take away their access to Butler then?
“Busniess School Library Undergrad Expulsion”
The previous policy made sense. It stands to reason that Business students should get priority over others in their own library. What, however, is the purpose of denying undergraduates access to these facilities when they are not otherwise in use? I propose that the monstrosity that is the Business School simply be relocated. If they don’t want to be a part of the community, they shouldn’t be.
hence the plan to move to M-ville
1) Undergraduates could never reserve study rooms at the Business Library. So the Business students always had priorities, except most of them are too lazy to actually reserve a room.
2) Aside from 3-4 specific days during the school year, the Business school students often spread out with 1-2 people to a room. So I’m not sure that the demand is so high, rather than that they think they can use the study rooms as a private, one-person study space and sometimes end up filling the rooms in this manner. (Although yeah, there are also plenty of times when there are lots of rooms leftover… So why can’t undergrads and other grad students use the rooms then?)
3) Apparently, some representative body of B-school students had ideally wanted the library to be exclusive only to them. But this idea was shot down.
4) Even before this exclusivity policy, certain B-school students were already contemptuously questioning the B-school status of students in study rooms who looked too young, were reading Lit Hum-looking books, etc. But now they can legitimately use their disdainful tendencies to boot people from rooms. (And, according to new signs in the study rooms, swipe access is now going to determine who can get in? But I might be reading them wrong.) But my reading of the policy for now (unless/until swipe access gets installed) is that people won’t be challenged unless B-school students request such action. And they’re haughty enough to do it. Constantly.