Opinion: Bronco One Stop and the Aftermath
posted by DorMiya Vance | March 8, 2022 | In News, OpinionMarch 2 was National Read Across America Day, promoting individuals to take time to read and “work towards improving education for children,” according to KLAW, the Las Vegas CBS affiliate.
Read Across America Day, for some, is traditionally the day “Green Eggs and Ham” author Theodor Seuss Geisel, or Dr. Seuss, is celebrated and remembered for his work and dedication to children’s books like “The Cat in the Hat” and “Oh, the Places You Will Go!”
Though this national day is an opportunity to learn new things and experience different cultures, what happens when students cannot indulge in this national day?
What happens when books and printed content are no longer available to students who need them?
To answer this question, nothing happens.
Faculty and staff, maybe even students, turn a blind eye to the disappearance of Black books and print content after the introduction of the Bronco One Stop experiment.
Charles W. Chesnutt Library has only one floor dedicated to literature that students check out and return at later date. The books on this floor are alphabetized and only have books with titles L-Z available to students. Some historical Black literature is not included among those books.
According to library staff, books A-K are in “storage” without a system organized enough to allow students to retrieve and check out the books under A-K.
“They just took them off the shelves,” said a Chesnutt librarian.
The library has an online eBook database for students to find some of the books that may have been properly replaced. According to Chesnutt Library staff, historical content cannot be replaced with an eBook, making them irreplaceable and unretrievable for students needing the “library” as a resource.
“eBooks can replace a manual book; it can. That’s not the issue. The issue is—What happened to all our historical books?” said a Chesnutt Librarian.
This makes it harder to appreciate Black artifacts, learn Black History, and harder for students and staff to understand cultural competency at an HBCU.
After talking to library staff, it has boiled down to this:
The new Bronco One Stop addition allowed FSU to stay “competitive” against other colleges and universities. The staff understands that Bronco One Stop is an experiment at the expense of our students and our library. We only have one floor of physical books and a spotty eBook database, missing vital historical Black literature like “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” (1867) by Harriet Jacobs.
Again, it just seems like FSU has forgotten about its Blackness and where we have come from as a piece of the Black community here in the “All American City.”
Where is the cultural company from our FSU staff and officials? Why does it seem like money, or its influence is more important to the people in charge?
FSU, you have let your students down again.
FSU, you have let your Black students down, especially me.
The Voice has reached out to FSU communications for comment and has received no comment as of the time of print.
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