Harry Un-Fairhurst

The University library during exam time is right up there with the 38th parallel in the league table of volatile flashpoints teetering on the edge of all out violent conflict. People react in different ways to the stress and pressure.

At various points during last term’s essay deadline period I witnessed people lying face down on the floor, doing Tai Chi in the middle of Harry Fairhurst and in one particularly memorable incident heard what appeared to be someone typing on a laptop in a JB Morrell toilet cubicle. During these peak times of the year you have a situation where thousands of students are cramped together in one, not exactly enormous space. Tempers get frayed, people behave irrationally.

So you can cry rejoice and scream praises to the Library staff for helpfully wading in with its new policies, coming into action during its sinisterly named “Behaviour Awareness Week”. These policies are a new “Snitch Hotline” in which you can text in and cheerfully rat out irksome fellow students to the Library black shirts, who will presumably then take them to an alley out back and rough them up for you, and a new cadre of staff with stopwatches who will rove the library confiscating unattended items after thirty minutes to free up valuable space.

I can’t imagine what could possibly go wrong with any of that. Many thanks.

Like all inherently Fascist organizations the University library no doubt views this as being for our own good, and after all they are introducing it in lieu of feedback from students. But really, it doesn’t take a tremendous amount of imagination to see this scheme’s potential for descending into farce, and not in a good way.

You can almost picture it can’t you, a third year student working on a dissertation, stuck and stressed out, vents his frustration by having a first year ejected for eating his crisps too loudly. Another student goes for a cigarette break and returns to find their laptop and bag have been removed by the library police because some tense, overtired, raggedy denizen of the bookshelves without a seat protested that they had been “gone for absolutely ages” to the patrolling grey polo-shirted sentinels.

It would not take long before this Library Inquisition truly lived up to their Spanish inspiration, with almost everyone informing on almost everyone else all the time, creating an atmosphere of paranoid hysteria.

The Library’s decision to weigh in on what is ultimately an extremely unstable situation of coexistence between a large group of anxious, sleep-deprived individuals is frankly absurd. For one thing, by what measure do the library care to define disruptive behaviour? Ultimately, the staff will be relying on the testimony and judgment of people who are most likely verging on mentally unstable. Are they really placing that much trust in someone off their face on Pro Plus who has barely slept in a week? Similarly by what method is it going to be worked out exactly how long a bag has been left at a desk for with any real accuracy, and that’s not even getting started on the potential abuse of the system, which even if we’re talking about a tiny minority of cases, has got to outweigh the positives of the scheme.

It all rather reminds me of the story of the man who tried to get rid of his rodent infestation by releasing snakes into his house. It’s haphazard attempt to try and solve what is, let’s face it, a relatively minor problem bears the risk of causing a larger one. Is this really what we need, to feel watched and on trial at the Library? People are surely already under enough pressure without having to constantly look over their shoulders and ensure they are adhering to the letter of Debrett’s New Guide to Etiquette and Modern Mannersat all times. Do we get to the stage where a sharp, collective intake of breath is drawn every time somebody takes their phone out?

Being disrupted in the Library, is annoying, sure. Someone talking loudly when you’re trying to work or using up valuable space, yeah, I can see why it would stick in your craw. But is this knee-jerk authoritarianism a la The Lives of Others really the solution? Come on, seriously? Call me a paranoid, swivel-eyed, card carrying member of the tin foil hat brigade if you like, but the new “Library Police” is surely a step in the totalitarian wrong direction. This step seems to me to be an ill-advised and poorly thought out interjection on behalf of the library with potentially chaotic results.