A Wide-Open Widener

Physically, but even more so in the minds of those who study there, Widener Library is the heart of Harvard. Michael McCormick, Francis Goelet Professor of Medieval History, has termed visiting Widener “an almost ineffable experience.” Nobel Prize winner Dudley Herschenbach described the construction as “a huge Mayan temple.” He also wrote of “the spiritual impact” of entering the stacks, those “sacred, otherworldly precincts.” Even the recently completed renovations, which have made the library easier to navigate and less forbidding, have not eliminated the sense that there is something sacred about the stacks.

The fact that many are precluded from entering contributes to this feeling of reverence. While free access to knowledge is ever expanding for those of us who belong to the university, those who do not are essentially banished from paradise. Travelers visiting Harvard are stopped at the main entrance—at most, they illicitly take photographs before being chased away by the library staff. The stacks, the reading rooms, the Sargent frescos and even the uncannily silent Harry Widener memorial are all out of their reach. What is worse, even many members of our clerical staff are excluded from using the libraries. Yet decisions about how to present such a central part of the university speak eloquently about how we relate our work to the surrounding community.

Despite its prominence, Harvard remains relatively sealed to outsiders. Booted from the library, visitors can certainly view the Harvard art museums and stroll through the Science Center. Only with luck, however, can they enter Memorial Church, and Memorial Hall’s unique collection of stained glass is reserved for the freshman class.

For Beth Brainard, communications director of the Harvard College Library (HCL), the needs of the general public have little to do with the library’s mission “of supporting the teaching and research activities of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the University,” which she wrote in an e-mail. The only extended community which HCL recognizes is “the larger scholarly community,” which it serves as much as possible. Widener “was never intended to be a public library,” explained Brainard, but rather “as a library to house the special collection of the late Harry Elkins Widener and the general library of Harvard University.”

This limited understanding of what purpose Widener serves has not always been the norm. Matthew Battles, Houghton librarian and author of the recent book Widener: Biography of a Library, pointed out in an e-mail that until about a decade ago, “library access was granted on the honor system. Students of local colleges in particular were welcome to use the reading room and had reference privileges. Under the umbrella of this policy, people entered Widener who only wanted to see the place.” Nonetheless, security concerns, noise and crowding all contributed to the restriction of access. “The stated reason for the policy is that a stream of visitors would interfere with the research environment,” said Battles.

Clearly security and noise concerns are important. But we lack openness to the outside world, lack willingness to explain what it is that we do here, the myriad forms that “veritas” takes on. Tours provide superficial anecdotes about the buildings, and tourists leave Harvard with only a vague impression of bricks and trees to accompany their $9.99 T-shirts from the Coop.

It is not impossible to envision a Widener that allows for public visitors. As Battles points out, the expanding collection now stretches far beyond the original building, which houses a paltry three million books of HCL’s 13 million strong collection, distributed over about 90 institutions. “As these specialized collections have left the building, the serious research needs of outside students and scholars have been met in buildings other than Widener,” writes Battles. Widener’s reduced function makes its preservation as the center of scholarly research increasingly symbolic and less actual. In view of this, it might well be worth losing some space in Widener for the benefit of a visiting public. Guided visits might lead tourists to the memorial room, the reading room and part of the stacks. Current tours which halt on the steps outside provide tourists with frivolous stories about the founding of the library, but do not offer an insight into its inner workings. Yet it would be crucial to help our guests understand the meaning of a library—how it is not a repository for knowledge so much as a tool for creating new knowledge; how scholars make old texts yield new answers by posing new questions, and why our ever-expanding collection matters. In this day it is irresponsible to ignore the needs of the many who are cut out from our thriving cultural life, and are not able to understand it.

The inaccessibility of Widener is really about a much larger problem. The wealth of ideas our university produces does not reach the majority of the population. Visitors to Harvard might traipse through the Yard and glimpse the outer forms of our activity, but the “ineffable,” in Professor McCormick’s expression, that takes place here daily is beyond their reach. We coexist in Cambridge with a largely undereducated population, served by a public school system in turmoil, whose students are underperforming on statewide tests. Despite talks open to the public, such as those offered at the Science Center or the Institute of Politics, our university makes no concerted, meaningful exertion to explain itself to the world. If an individual makes the effort to come all the way here, we ought to do our best to welcome him into our world, to help him see why we think our activities so vibrant and so crucial.

Hopefully it is not too late for Widener. With the $90-million-plus renovations just completed, there might be a limited desire to change anything about the library. The mysteries—not just of Pusey 3 or of the hallowed top-floor faculty offices, but even of the frescoes and the memorial room—will remain the domain of those with a precious university affiliation. Nonetheless, as the university plans its growth into Allston, the needs of visitors should not be ignored. To an important extent, Harvard is a public institution, and its halls must be thought of also as public spaces. Pursuing ever more exalting and inaccessible tasks makes it far too easy to forget our necessary affiliations with the rest of society. However, the confused crowds jostling at the entrance to the sacred spaces of Widener should make us question exactly why we choose to bar their entrance with a flaming sword.

Alexander Bevilacqua ’07, a Crimson editorial editor, is a history and literature concentrator in Leverett House.