SPOUSE: "it says in the paper Pat Schroeder's congressional study found that colleges aren't delivering the education they used to."

LIBRARIAN: "I don't know. Depends on where you go maybe. What about Eve who thinks it's more important to pay tuition to an Ivy than put a new transmission in the car?"

SPOUSE: "What about Yale? there's an Ivy, with departments wiped out, millions of dollars in deferred maintenance....wonder how their libraries cope?"

LIBRARIAN: "What about the university here with 8 pages of periodicals to cancel in order to meet the budget, and the college in NYC with no periodical budget at all. It doesn't help that MY book budget hasn't grown in ten years. We keep talking about access as though all we need to be good librarians is an OCLC terminal for interlibrary loans from some benighted school that still spends its money on book units. We cut the periodical subscriptions and use the excuse we stil have access. And then we cut the indexes (the access!), because the students are too frustratedand so what do we have left? a library of the safe, the common, the familiar...all outre and dificult, scholarly and mischievous ideas batting at the windows like dying summer flies.

If you had to choose between _Mother Jones_ and _Time_, which would _you_ buy for the library? The new _American Heritage Dictionary_, _concrete Foundations_ or Toni Morrison? Which? How can we _educate_ on our library budget we're given?"

SPOUSE:" The lights are going out. We have the greatest intellectual basis for freedom of any people in the world, but if we don't provide our people wiht the wherewithal to learn, we are cutting off the very thing that makes us great.Our political freedoms are meaningless if we don't keep the material basis in order."

Discussion following reading of Gary Will's _Lincoln at Gettysburg: teh Words that Remade America_. Simon & Schuster, 1992....let's hear your opinion...}

[Reprinted with permission from _the ASLS Newsletter_, p.6 (1994)]