SINGAPORE: Workers’ Party (WP) Member of Parliament Jamus Lim commented on an issue concerning books from the library of Yale-NUS College, hundreds of which were allegedly marked for recycling or disposal on May 20 (Tuesday).
The college is closing this year, with its final commencement having taken place last week. However, the outcry from students and alumni over the disposal of the books has resulted in an apology from the university.
The WP MP, an academic, weighing in through a social media post, said that he had learned at an early age from his mother to treat books with respect.
“As a child, my mother routinely warned me never to sit on books. The logic, according to her, was that books were an embodiment of knowledge. To sit on them would be to disrespect knowledge itself, an affront to the value and wisdom they carried. Till today, I still won’t sit on a book, or even to treat it carelessly,” he wrote.
As both Assoc Prof Lim and his wife, a writer, are “stout-hearted bibliophiles,” he added that it had been distressing for them to hear about the Yale-NUS Library books being “unceremoniously discarded on a sidewalk, before they would then be shredded by a recycling service.”
He called it “at the very least, like a lost opportunity,” citing reports that said when students who saw the books wanted to take them home, they were not allowed to do so. He also cited Steve Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s book Freakonomics, which describes how “the mere presence of books is associated with a child’s success at school,” which other studies have corroborated.
“More generally, the whole sorry episode strikes me as yet another instance of how top-down decisions, made without widespread consultation with diverse stakeholders, can lead to undesirable outcomes. That’s why advanced societies do best when they embrace the messiness and uncertainty of democratic processes, because the result, while still unlikely to satisfy everybody, may at least avert the most egregious missteps,” Assoc Prof Lim added.
He linked a change.org petition from Yale-NUS College alumni regarding the books that calls for clarity on the issue.
On Wednesday (May 21), Associate Professor Natalie Pang, University Librarian of NUS, was quoted in CNA as saying that excess books are either brought to other libraries or given away. Those that are not taken are recycled, a common practice with libraries.
The excess books from the Yale-NUS College Library were only offered to faculty and not to students.
“We understand later that many students were interested in having these books, and we would have usually acceded to their requests. We did not do so on this occasion and we apologise for the operational lapse,” she said, adding that a campus giveaway for the books is now being organised. /TISG