Editorial: Lehigh’s open, its bookshelves should be too

Lehigh looms large over the South Side. For decades, the university has expanded its reach, reshaping the community in ways that have come at the expense of its residents.

Rising housing prices, the loss of community spaces and the influx of students living off campus have simultaneously deepened the divide and blurred the line between the university and the South Side.

As Lehigh has expanded in terms of its offerings, campus and size, students have increasingly flowed into the surrounding community. Following them are student housing conglomerates, like Amicus Properties, eager to make a profit.

But the university is also contributing to buying up the South Side. In the 1950s, this looked like straw actors buying up swaths of neighborhoods, including the area where Fairchild-Martindale Library currently stands. In recent years, it’s looked like Lehigh buying three local historical churches while offering little transparency about the university’s intentions.

As Lehigh continues to reach further into the surrounding area, swallowing up what was once the city’s, the university should welcome residents with open arms.

Since Lehigh students benefit from full access to the South Side and all it has to offer, it wouldn’t be surprising that someone from the South Side would want to have access to some of the resources that the university possesses.

Lehigh is an open campus, which means anyone can walk through it, spend their day working remotely at FML or simply lounge at a table at the Grind with a book — and many do.

But we believe the university should do more than maintain its open campus status. It should openly share its access to knowledge with the local community, beginning where so much knowledge is housed — in its libraries.

Even though it is not unusual for a university to have an open campus, many do not.

Columbia University, for example, closed its ornate, iron-clad gates to the public in 2023 — allowing only students with an ID card to enter.

Residents of New York’s Morningside Heights neighborhood, who once strolled through the luscious green quad on campus to cut from one side to the other, told The New York Times the closure of the gates made a once 10-minute walk take 20. They also thought the decision represented a sense of entitlement and elitism.

Like with Columbia and Morningside Heights, Lehigh has not been a good neighbor to the South Side. While it is a positive that the campus remains open to residents, the university should take further steps — including allowing community members to check out books without having to pay a $75 Friends of the Library membership fee.

Lehigh has an opportunity to democratize its access to information by lowering the price for this service or by allowing South Side residents to sign up for a library card based on their address — just as many public libraries do.

Some universities in Pennsylvania, like Pennsylvania State University, already grant this privilege to state residents. But expanding access to educational resources is becoming increasingly crucial, especially as United States citizens’ access to information is increasingly under threat.

The digital burning of Alexandria is happening right before our eyes with the current administration purging records from government websites. The Department of Justice erased any mentions of the January 6th insurrection, and the page explaining the Constitution disappeared from the White House’s website.

It’s imperative that the public has access to information, especially since the federal agencies that maintained the public’s access to information are slowly being starved — the Trump administration cut the Administration of Library and Museum Science and fired the head of the National Archives and Records Administration, which maintains the official texts of the nation’s laws, throwing once-reliable public resources into disarray.

At the same time, book bans have surged across the country. The 2023-24 school year saw a 200% increase from the previous year in books being pulled from school libraries. These bans also extend to public libraries, affecting not just students, but entire communities.

In Pennsylvania, banned books have included “The Hate U Give” by Angie Thomas and “Beloved” by Toni Morrison, both of which explore racism in the U.S.

While the Bethlehem Area School District has not yet banned any books, bans have been proposed in other Lehigh Valley districts. This shows there’s a growing sense of anti-intellectualism, and the only way to fight it is to foster a culture of learning.

The South Side branch of the Bethlehem Area Public Library is a much smaller institution and has fewer books than either FML or Linderman Library. It’s also situated in the middle of a student housing block, rather than among South Side residents.

Amid federal grants from the Museum and Library Services being cut from state libraries, like the Bethlehem Area Public Library, Lehigh should be eager to fill in the gap of information and become an important third-space — especially because the land under FML is part of the rich history of the South Side.

A commitment to the growth and dissemination of knowledge is exactly what an academic institution should represent in the face of censorship and anti-intellectualism. As federal grants continue to be cut and polarization continues to grow, Lehigh must open their book shelves, too.