The death of quality public libraries?

You hear the story from university executives and VCs all the time. Science, mathematics and economics are out – sports management, media studies and marketing are in. The reason, they say, is demand. Students, as consumers, prefer the latter to the former.

I have never accepted this view for an instant since the two parties transacting (teachers and students) have asymmetric information. Suppliers of student services have much better information than students have as consumers of these services. This potentially creates a ‘lemons problem’ with universities offering inexpensive less intellectually challenging courses to clients who are in a poor position to judge their worth. Moreover, in the Australian university scene, any queries about academic direction get the same response – everyone else is doing it, why not us? A bad eventual equilibrium from such shallow thinking is that the ‘bad’ courses drive out the ‘good’ and universities end up teaching only poor courses. It hasn’t happened yet everywhere but it can.

Indeed, I have never liked to think of students as ‘consumers’. University teachers are in much the same position as physicians receiving patients who seek medical advice. The responsibility of a physician is not to meet any perceived demand for services but to offer accurate medical advice. Ditto for universities – it’s a moral responsibility not to offer a second rate educational product.

In this week’s Wall Street Journal (I can’t find an electronic link but a briefer blogged version of the main idea is here) an analogous point is raised in relation to public libraries. John Miller notes that, while ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ is perhaps Ernest Hemingway’s best novel, nobody has borrowed it from the Fairfax Public Library in Washington for 2 years. And now the ‘bell may toll for Hemingway’ – the library director will get rid of the book on the basis of such evidently low demand. Books by Charlotte Bronte, William Faulkner, Thomas Hardy and Alexander Solzhenitsyn have already been pulled.

Libraries will accordingly come to accommodate mainly cheapskates with mass tastes. They will not be cultural storehouses that contain the best that has been written but simply operate to subsidize the reading habits of a mass audience too cheap to buy their own low-level reading – mass circulation books are, after all, cheap these days. You can even download audio books into MP3 players. And, from this perspective, why have public libraries at all? Are libraries outmoded? Do they now provide mainly welfare for middle-class readers who are too stingy to shell out a few dollars for the latest Stephen King trash that you can buy discounted at Target?

John Miller argues that:

‘Instead of embracing this doomed model, libraries might seek to differentiate themselves among the many options readers have, using a good dictionary as the model. …New words come and old ones come out, but a reliable lexicon becomes the foundation of linguistic stability and coherence. Likewise, libraries should seek to shore up the culture against the eroding force of trends’

Miller sees librarians as experts who are teachers, advisors and guardians of an intellectual inheritance - not as clerks who fill their shelves with whatever their ‘customers’ want.

I agree. Libertarians and ideologically-disposed free market economists take tastes as something immutable and god-given that production emerges to satisfy. Tastes are not exogenous in this sense – they are determined, in part, by commercial interests and capricious fashion as well as by ‘lemons problem’ market failures. Libraries (and universities) should exist to help preserve what are valuable beliefs and preferences. Neither libraries nor universities should be run purely on the basis of demand signals from poorly-informed customers.

There are links between the two 'lemons' issues here - books and universities. The next time you visit a large university bookshop compare the number of books for sale on tourism, marketing (or, even worse, feminism or Marxism) with the number of books on mathematics or science. Its an important index of university quality though one that I am certain the market-driven ideologues running mmodern universities would be embarrassed to embrace.