As go the libraries…
Everything lately feels a bit too on the nose. On November 12, members of the MIT community opened their e-mail accounts to a message from the vice president of information systems and technology, inviting us to pilot Parley, a new platform that integrates multiple AI chatbots. Then, one week later, MIT’s president announced austerity measures that the Institute is choosing to enforce in response to the new federal endowment tax. Following a link buried in the President’s e-mail, I learned that administrators will shutter two of our four libraries in June. They will likely close a third during the 2026/27 academic year. Meanwhile, sixteen library workers have been given notice of termination; eleven of them serve in union-affiliated positions.
As literacy rates in the United States decline, MIT’s decision seems like a flailing effort to fortify the Institute’s laboratories at the expense of disciplines that depend on libraries. In my history, anthropology, and STS (HASTS) PhD program, however, MIT’s soon-to-close Dewey Library is critical infrastructure. Perusing the stacks and puzzling through drafts, Dewey is the place where my colleagues and I experiment with ideas and tune our dissertations. Still, campus whispers suggest that broader, Institute-wide budget cuts are likely on the horizon; the libraries are probably just the first to go. “Why not ditch the AI?” I could try asking Parley, which will presumably remain after Dewey’s staff are gone. But I am already sure that no algorithmically generated reply would make me evaluate the current moment as anything but a sad, slow race to the bottom.
Anthropologists remind us that austerity’s abstractions yield material and affective unsettlement. Those who subsist in its wake, Andrea Muehlebach writes, are often vexed by feelings of “out-of-syncness” when basic, let alone elective, services become inaccessible. The cognitive dissonance produced in my own juxtaposition of Parley and library termination is one such example of that unsettlement. It bears reminding, to be sure, that the effects of austerity we face at elite, privatized institutions like MIT are nothing compared to those that the U.S. government already imposes on disinvested K-12 schools and universities elsewhere in the nation. If anything, growing cuts on my campus are yet another reminder that pernicious policies enacted on the underserved regularly come home to roost. That, I would guess, is the kind of perspective I only gained by visiting a library.
As concerned community members frantically write to MIT’s Provost begging him to “save Dewey,” we are fatigued by years of exhortation to accept inevitability. In 2024, administrators framed their choice to raze our Palestine solidarity encampment and call the cops on their own, anti-genocide students as inevitable. Vested campus interests have similarly positioned applied research funded by Jeffrey Epstein, the fossil fuel industry, and the Israeli Ministry of Defense. Now, choruses of administrators and constituents alike raise their voices to insist that a university that lauds AI but cuts its libraries is without alternative. On my campus and others, I want more of us to counter austerity with the fundamental refrain of anthropological and historical thinking— that such events are conditioned by contingent ideology and values. Therefore, they could always be otherwise. These days, though, I find myself wondering about how many of us have settled into out-of-syncness, (self-)sabotaged by a political and administrative imperative to accept austere destiny. As go the libraries, I fear, so risk going we.
Bio: Zachary La Rock is a PhD candidate in history, anthropology, and STS at MIT.
