Adrian De Leon, a multidisciplinary scholar who attended UTSC for undergrad, looks back on his efforts to make the library a better — and quieter — study space for students.
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0:05
In terms of tangible, kinda like institutional change, so one of the things we worked on was the library. Notice how quiet it is now? Compared to like —
0:15
[Nathaniel:] I haven’t been in that library in a while. I don’t study there for that reason. I stopped.
0:20
[Adrian:] Okay. Yeah and so before 2012, it was like a frickin’ marketplace, man. Like, there was, they tried to ad hoc — I think the policies there wavered between not doing anything about it
0:35
or being extremely draconian about it, right? And so I came in — they got me to run SCSU because I staged a sit-in in the library for several days.
0:47
And we, one of the things we were protesting was, directly because like they wanted to kick us out for like, staying overnight too much. It was overnight hours. And like, what else are we gonna do? It’s a commuter, it’s a commuter campus.
0:58
Most of us live in like North York, et cetera, right? Even the ones who live close, like we don’t want to go home, we need to study for this stuff. Right, like you’re not provide the kind of support?
1:07
We’re gonna sleep in here! We’re gonna bring like, sleeping bags and all that stuff, which pissed off administration [Nathaniel laughs], which was great. Like this was in my second year, like after first semester, right?
1:16
And then like, I remember, they got really bad. I sent e-mails out to like, higher admins and like the union and stuff like, I’m like, ‘what the hell are you people doing about this?’
1:26
It was a long e-mail, I was reading it recently. Like, holy crap, I was mean. They told me how like I marched into like, the Office of Student Affairs and like met with the Dean of like, Student Life.
1:36
[Nathaniel:] You just marched in there. [Adrian:] I marched into Desmond’s office, with like Desmond [Pouyat, Dean of Student Experience and Wellbeing, UTSC], Liza [Arnason], Department of Student Life Director. That’s how they got to know me. And like I was on the radar after that. It was fun.
1:45
It was fun being like, ‘yo, this library, this library is like yo, it’s messed still’. It’s not — I wasn’t blaming the librarians or like the school. It was just like, it was — in retrospect, it was a teetering between them just not knowing what to do anymore. Because of this epidemic, right? The library was built for collaborative work, and yet people expected it to be quiet, but it wasn’t, right?
2:08
It was built in 2000, early 2000s or like 90s, I forgot which, as the Bladen Library. And they built it in, as a forward-thinking, collaborative learning centre, which is why you have this Info Commons, which is why it’s open concept.
2:20
And they thought about study space plans after the fact. And that’s how UTSC, until our year-ish thought about it, right? Like, you put study space here, there’s space, let’s put study space here. There was no big long term plan. And so it got noisy, right?
2:35
And so one the things I did coming in, was like, okay, how the hell do we fix this, right? And so we ran this, we ran this, kinda like student space audit? And we did it in two phases. We did the student space audit in the summer,
2:48
where we started with a questionnaire. We interviewed like, a few hundred students, and one of the ideas that came about was, why don’t we have a patrol force, right? And like a specific library policy that addresses noise issues in the library, right? Why don’t we have more proactive mechanisms?
3:03
It was some girl in the Science Wing who told me this. And I’m like, so I brought it up to — so we sit on the —
3:08
[Nathaniel:] The troublemakers in the library, they call them the uh, the ‘library Nazis’. [Adrian:] Yeah. Oh gosh. That’s a horrible name.
3:15
But yeah, so, they…yeah, the yellow shirts. No, those — I’m really glad we were able to put the yellow shirts in.
3:23
[Nathaniel:] It was, that’s a very good idea. [Adrian:] Yeah, so like the VP Academic sits on the Study Space Working Group in the school. It’s a bunch of stakeholders. And I brought this up, first time I brought it up, they were like, ‘yeah, we can’t really do that. Who do we hire?’, right? The second time, the more we pushed for it, then Victoria [Owen], who is the Chief Librarian right now, Head Librarian, was like… ‘actually, this is kind of a good idea’, right? And so we started meeting with different librarians who decided to take the project on.
3:48
We had a library protest. We had protests and stuff. But we also proactively like, started meeting librarians, establishing this rapport. And we launched the program in 2012, when, like the 2012 fall exam schedule. And the first day the fall exam schedule opened, I walked in, and it was dead quiet. Like someone ran into my office like, ‘Adrian, you gotta run to the library right now.’ Why? I walked in, it was dead quiet and I’m like, ‘what the hell is this?’
4:15
It was great, like the greatest moment as a student, one of them, right? But like, it was, it was one that got heavy-handed. And like the long-term culture was like, ‘build a culture of quietness’, right? And so they got rid of the, they got rid of them,
4:30
the yellow shirts, but left the policy in place. And I walk in the library, it’s quiet. And when it’s loud, there’s a culture of quietness, where people are like, ‘if you don’t shut up, I’m gonna report you’.
4:41
And there’s an online reporting mechanism, so you can do it anonymously without getting targeted. And so like, that’s just one of the things — that was probably my favourite thing, among the different things we did.
