Hi Horacio,

Thanks for the comment. As previously commented, I have read the petition (several times, in fact) and I'm sorry if you feel the GSU sounds hostile to the petition and its supporters. In fact, while we are uncomfortable supporting it for reasons already explained, we are not hostile toward it. Our opposition has nothing to do with this petition not emerging from the GSU, but about questions of what are the best ways to accomplish grad student goals. Overall, the GSU is not convinced the grad student community would benefit from its official representative signing on to a petition whose tone we have concerns about. That said, our position toward the petition qua petition is not hostile, or at least that was not our goal. I think it has unfortunately seemed so due to the rather hostile comments I have had to address on the website against our position of neutrality, but I'm not convinced that's the GSU's fault. I have sought to be civil and to explain why we're taking the position we're taking. People are naturally welcome to disagree.

In short, I have previously explained why the GSU feels that there are better channels to work through, but I welcome your dissent and appreciate your points. They are well made and provide a worthy contribution to the discussion as individual students consider whether they should sign this petition.

Finally, rest assured that the GSU is granting "full attention to what faculty and students are saying about our often meager research" (by which I assume you mean research resources--meager research would ultimately be our fault as scholars, not ND's :-). We are watching the petition's progress and will incorporate its concerns into our discussion with the university. Our job is, after all, to represent grad student concerns to the university--whether they emerge from efforts we helped organize and support or not--and we fully intend to do that. I actually wonder if bringing this into the discussion as something we did not endorse may make it all the more compelling to the university and as we are already arguing for superior resources, will add another prong to our argument. We'll see how that plays out, but in short, please know that we are listening and are not hostile to the goals expressed in the petition even if we are uncomfortable with aspects of its approach. As to the overall goal of improving resources for grad students, we're all on the same page and we're working toward the same goal, albeit through different approaches and means.

Take care,
Andy

Andy,

This is all the more confusing. You say the GSU agrees on the need for improving ND's library resources. Yet GSU members are also claiming, quite foolishly I might add, that "we don't have any room for more books" or "we have fewer students, so we don't need as many books as bigger schools." Whoever said such idiotic things should not be on the GSU. They have no concept of what research is or or how it is conducted in the humanities.

What is worse is that you keep saying that "certain concerns" bothered the GSU. Apparently this refers to the tone. What exactly is GSU afraid of? Why doesn't take a stand for once on something important?

This is precisely why nobody takes GSU seriously anymore. It either doesn't understand the real concerns of graduate students (indicated above), or it fails to do anything concrete to address graduate needs.

As one of the supporters of the petition, I respectfully disagree with the reasons you give in this reply. First, to say that the GSU believed that not all the statistics were relevant because "Big 10 schools also have a lot more students, so one would expect them to need more books just to be even with ND" is a very weak reason. Library acquisition decisions at Big 10 and other large institutions are made on the basis of research needs, not in proportion to student body size. While many of these larger schools do have larger library collections than ND, other schools such as those in the Ivy League (e.g. Yale with over 12 million volumes) have vast numbers of books in proportion to the size of their student populations. Second, to say that the GSU believed not all the statistics were feasible because "storage space is already a problem for our library" is yet another weak reason. One of the things that the petition calls for and that has been echoed by many faculty and some library officials is the library's need for some kind of offsite storage facility in which certain volumes can be housed and recalled by patrons as needed. This would free up space in the stacks for more volumes. Other universities use offsite storage for books and when one looks at the recent construction such as the Jordan Hall of Science, one can see that it is entirely feasible for Notre Dame to construct an offsite storage facility for books. Just because something may seem to be a difficult problem to solve at first blush, does not mean that we should shut down thinking about how to solve that problem. The petition is precisely about generating solutions to such problems.

I hope that the GSU will take these points into consideration.

Sincerely,

Damian Zurro
History Dept.