We have all come to know Johns Hopkins as a school that prides itself on unparalleled academic rigor. Graduate schools and employers look to our classes for prospective innovators and leaders. Year after year, U.S. News & World Report ranks our school among the top 15 universities in the country, and Hopkins has phenomenal name recognition in academia and the general public. Frankly, we'd better have some innovative ideas to offer the world by the time we graduate. For $120,000, I would expect nothing less than an intellectually mind-boggling educational experience designed to equip me with everything I'll need to live up to such astronomical expectations.
So I wasn't thrilled when I learned that a Barnes & Noble is going to be the cornerstone of the new Charles Commons project that administrators hope will be the new morale-boosting center of student life.
Barnes & Noble is not just a bookstore. It's a business. Barnes & Noble has made a fortune by selling the most popular, well marketed books, all of which are displayed in the store's choicest locations. As Hopkins students flock to the new Commons, they will be pitched the same top-selling, glossy-covered books over and over again: books chosen not by Hopkins professors or students but by Barnes & Noble managers.
Such a phenomenon may seem subtle or irritating, and for the most part, that's all it is. Thousands of white suburban Americans will continue to take pleasure in the predictable warmth of the Barnes & Noble/Starbucks conglomerate. They will gleefully skim the pages of The Da Vinci Code and savor their chai lattes with little detriment to America's intellectual integrity.
But Hopkins is not white suburbia. (Surprise!) It is a scholarly institution with an obligation to provide its students with ideas that are stimulating, creative, diverse, cutting-edge and provocative. The Hopkins Web site describes the founding of the University by its first president, Daniel Coit Gilman: "Building from scratch, rather than taking over an existing institution, freed Gilman to create something entirely new." Gilman himself said, "The best teachers are usually those who are free, competent and willing to make original researches in the library and the laboratory." A school that takes such pride in developing innovative "knowledge for the world" should be ashamed to be buying into a pre-fabricated, market-driven corporation like Barnes & Noble as its primary source of literary material.
Let suburbia delight in its bland image of comfortable upper-middle class scholarship, but we have been earmarked as the thinkers and leaders of tomorrow! And "we" includes not just Hopkins students; it encompasses students at every other major American university.
But don't expect our colleges to bail us out of this literary void. Not unexpectedly, the Barnes & Noble "College Division" has a virtual monopoly on all university book sales, which means that every American college student is statistically inclined to read the very same books -- books that are chosen based on their performance in sales, not classrooms.
Ideally, when the Charles Commons was conceived, the school should have recognized the project's potential for student involvement on every level. The Charles Commons could have been a dynamic tool for students to develop marketing skills or practice business management. It could have been an independent venue designed to host fundraisers, late-night study sessions and student performances. It could have been a blank slate for students to redesign year after year as a reflection not only of the mood on campus but of the mood in the Charles Village community as well.
An independent bookstore and coffee shop would have provided all of the amenities the Barnes & Noble promises: more foot traffic (and thus increased neighborhood safety), a comfortable place for students and locals to mingle and drink coffee and a solution to the hell-hole that is the Gilman bookstore during textbook-buying season. Alas, as anyone who has ever tried to call a shuttle or eat in a dining hall can attest, Hopkins does not specialize in efficiency or service. Consequently we've got a corporate-sized piece of cookie-cutter suburbia on the way.
--Naomi Garland is a junior public health studies major from Seattle, Wash.
