Michael Gabriel ’28 is a history major. Besides writing and editing opinion pieces, he contributes an issue of his Willy and Mary comic almost every edition. He is a big baseball fan, likes the outdoors and is always happy to talk to anyone about anything. Contact him at mdgabriel@wm.edu.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own.
Earlier this year, I visited my friend at Yale University. Listen, I knew it was going to be a cool campus. It is an Ivy League school after all, but wow, I was just taken aback. The giant Gothic-style towers, high-walled residential colleges and other traditional collegiate buildings all came together to create an extraordinary environment. What really caught my attention, though, was its library.
Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library was completed in 1930 and houses more than 2.5 million books. Resembling a giant European cathedral, the library has high arched ceilings, some 3,300 stained glass windows, cloisters connecting portions of the building and a literal altar that serves as the circulation desk. You walk into that building, and you are in awe. At that moment, I couldn’t help but wonder why couldn’t Swem be like this?
Now, don’t get me wrong. When it comes to resources, our Earl Gregg Swem Library is top notch. According to the Princeton Review rankings, Swem is ranked third in the nation based on student ratings of library facilities. Yale’s library does not even make the cut of this list of the top 25 university libraries. Swem houses Special Collections, the Tutor Zone, the Reeder Media Center and many other campus resources that students are free to use. It provides students with access to millions of books and hundreds of databases. It is also a nice perk that you can bring food and eat in the actual library, which is not allowed at many schools. There is really nothing more we can ask of a college library. My one gripe, as trivial as it may sound, is that Swem is not a pretty building.
For over 200 years, the College of William and Mary’s library was housed in the Sir Christopher Wren building, the longest continuously used academic building in the nation. In 1909, the ever-growing collection was moved to its own dedicated library building, which we now know as Tucker Hall. By the 1950s, though, the school was looking to build an even larger building that would better house the College’s continuously growing collection of books and resources. This new building would eventually open on Jan. 4, 1966 with the namesake of long-time librarian, Dr. Earl Gregg Swem. Like many of the buildings built on campus in the mid-20th century, Swem has a modern (for the time at least) design that contrasts with the more traditional buildings around the Sunken Garden. In another world, though, Swem could have been completely different.
While flipping through a book on the history of the school, I came across a hand-drawn rendering for a new school library, one completely different from that of Swem. This library would have been constructed in the Crim Dell Meadow facing the Sunken Garden and Wren. The proposed design would have been more in tune with the architecture theme set by the Wren and the other older buildings on campus. The library would have had three brick archways at the entrance, a north and south wing and a little cupola at the top. It wouldn’t have been the goliath of a building that Yale’s library is, but like their library, this proposed design would have fit the theme of the campus.
When I saw that rendering, I thought, “Wow, I would rather be stuck in that library, reading 50 pages of a book I’m not interested in from a class I’m not interested in, than in Swem.” All this to say, I really do believe the optics of the environment in which we learn have an effect on our success as students. Just like taking a walk on a sunny day can lift our mood up, studying in a beautiful building can too. I know it is not make or break, but if there is any school that deserves an ornate library, it is our school.
