You wake up vowing to get things done today, to convert your in-person class to an online class. Within an hour the monumental task of dealing not only with that basic shift, which alone takes monumental amounts of time, but also the limitations of resources now available to your students to do any type of research outside of the books for class that you assign has overwhelmed you with despair.

History courses require research papers or research projects of some sort. I’m sure other departments do, as well, and I have qualms about the demands that we put on our freshmen since they were designed for students arriving from privileged high schools back in the 1980s, which is another story for another time. Still, whatever the department or scope of the project, in the liberal arts, humanities, and social sciences, everyone should expect students to do some sort of exploration of the subject outside of the classroom. That’s where the library comes in.

Most librarians will tell you that they have to fight battles about the function of a library. While they understand that the library building offers many services, including a gathering place for group study and, in the case of our school, a centralized location for tutoring-type services, they and the faculty also know that the core mission of a library involves access to information. Access to information costs money and, in the case of books, requires space, which also costs money.

Guess what happens to the library when it wants money for access to information and space that is not dedicated to anything social? The director actually has to fight with other people on the steering committee for books. Sometimes those other people come from STEM fields or business, where books are not the driving force of research or intellectual production, so they don’t understand the reason that the liberal arts, humanities, and social sciences require such archaic and non-environmentally sustainable things as “novels” (all objects made of bound pages seem to be called “novels,” these days, regardless of content). More often those other people come from administration; and at our liberal arts school, no one in a major decision-making administrative position has a liberal arts degree. Indeed, they do not even have a liberal arts-adjacent degree. It’s all management or professional.

Really, if you asked them to connect the dots of their talking points about “liberal arts” its “value” and what those professors do in the classroom and with their research, not a damn one would be able to draw a line.

But, you digress.

This here is a situation, even in ordinary times, in which the librarians themselves fight for the resources for research. One of those resource is Interlibrary Loan, but locally there is a state-wide consortium of colleges, Connect New York, that acts in much the same way, but speedier and at a lower cost for each individual institution. It is grand! With ILL, you may not receive a book for a long time, sometimes so long you have almost forgotten the reason you called it. With CNY, you get the book within two days. If it is an e-book, you get it immediately on your computer screen. This means that you have access not only to more libraries, but libraries with bigger, better collections. You have joked that the fancier college down the road must love subsidizing your own college’s nineteenth-century U.S. history collection.

The pandemic has forced budget cuts at many of these other colleges, however, and frivolous things like libraries get the hit. Yes, you know libraries are expensive and everyone has to suffer, but you have always wondered, ever since you yourself were a freshman, at the reason the academic life of a college goes so early to the chopping block rather than losing or unnecessary sports teams, collegiate equivalents of party-planning committees, and such.

Heck, if the CFO took the same proportional pay cut as everyone else beneath him, then some of the other financial problems might be alleviated. He knows that, but he made sure that the pay cuts stopped at a salary far below his. His, by the way, is the highest at the college.

Back to the libraries: Now, some of the best schools in the consortium are out. Students cannot physically enter the library on your own campus. They must request books be brought to them. That would be fine if the collections met their needs. They do not — at least not for the classes you are teaching this semester. If everyone gets sent home, students have no access to books. All papers must be written via databases.

This reinforces elitism in education. Students at the schools with the better libraries have better access. Just like professors at schools with lighter teaching loads and better research libraries don’t have to limit their research and writing to holidays, essentially purchase their own libraries, and raise funds for work-related travel. (They do have to put up with shitty comments about not truly being at the top of their field, despite winning the top award in their field, simply because they are not at the “right” sort of school, as happened to a friend of mine — but that’s another story.)

All of which is a long and grievance-riddled way to say that you now have yet another wrinkle. What level of research can you reasonably expect from students when their access to research material is so limited? What can you draw upon to supplement the books they must buy?

This is not just a matter of just switching to online, nor is it a matter of accommodating online by lecturing via Zoom (with 30+ students in a class). This is a matter of having fewer resources with which to do any of this, followed by a list of “suggestions” about making all activities “apply to real world situations,” not taxing attentions for longer than ten-minutes, and all sort of other grade-school-level “pedagogies” that do nothing to address the specific issues of teaching history, which is both skill and content along with convincing them that it is something worthwhile to know in spite of not training them for a job. All of this while not knowing if these “suggestions” are actually rubrics on which you will be evaluated but knowing damn well that all of this is for — what — actually, you don’t really know what this is for.

Every morning, the pile of obstacles grows with every step and every administrative e-mail, with every realization that the lessons that you took so much time to plan last year can no longer be done, with every realization that every existing assignment must be rethought and recreated and maybe even just scrapped and replaced. There is no reward here. Just an ongoing series of obstacles to obstacles to obstacles with no point except survival.

Really, you can’t blame anyone, in spite of your anger. Not anyone close, not the college administration nor the students nor their parents who, in their love, ill-prepared their children to face the world (much like your own, to be honest). You can blame the nation’s administration, the person in the White House that an Eminent Women’s Historian among your friends has named “Il Douche’,” and all his enablers. You’ve hit a point of numb, battle-fatigue with them, and to think about them means thinking about November and thinking about November makes you even sicker because you know history, and the next chapter is not going to go well, you fear.