Thanks to Mike C.
By Tim Arango May 2, 2023 in the NYT
BERKELEY, Calif. — To kick off homecoming weekend last fall, the University of California, Berkeley, held a groundbreaking ceremony for its new data sciences building, known as the Gateway. At a cost of over half a billion dollars, the 367,270-square-foot 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-square-foot 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 archaeological 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, saving $400,000 annually.
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 A.I.
“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 a 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.
An acclaimed China scholar recently reported that as print library materials are eschewed for digitized replicas in China, the digitized materials easily can be revised to conform with current governmental policies, likes and dislikes,. This preference for revisionist history allows for any make-believe interpretations. All this without the interference of AI!!! Just think of the possibilities!