When Deferred Maintenance Rears Its Head | From the Bell Tower
It's a huge problem for higher education institutions - and though most academic librarians never give it a second thought, we will when our library buildings fall apart Steven Bell, Associate University Librarian, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA Aug 11, 2011
What's the first thing you notice when you step on to a new college campus? A sweeping view of magnificent buildings-or the cracks in the parking lot blacktop? Beautiful landscaping on the idyllic quad--or weeds growing up through the uneven sidewalk? With the exception of perhaps the most well maintained campuses, every one has warts that we try to ignore. For the most part we can - until a ceiling collapses or a boiler conks out. That's when the deferred maintenance issue rears its ugly head.
It's easier for institutions to focus energy and resources on maintaining the visible elements of a campus. That's what visitors to the institution see, and what they see plays a large role in the emotional connection to the place. The campus tour guide isn't about to take prospective students and their parents into the catacombs of your library to look over your old leaky pipes.
Individual cracks here and there look manageable, but when all the minor faults add up you can be talking about millions in deferred maintenance.
It can happen anywhere
I first heard the phrase "deferred maintenance" when I was sitting in a higher education administration course and heard the instructor say that Yale University had accumulated over $1 billion in deferred maintenance projects. "Excuse me, professor - did you just say a million or a billion?" It still seems difficult to comprehend how an Ivy league institution with a considerable endowment could allow itself to simply put off that many maintenance projects. According to a 1998 article in Yale's alumni magazine, the institution thought its buildings would simply hold up better than they did:
"Like many colleges in the 1970s and 1980s, we had a period of deferred maintenance," University Planner Pamela Delphenich acknowledges, using the favored euphemism for neglect. In the 1970s and 1980s, the thinking was that money needed to be spent to expand the faculty, raise salaries, and pursue other critical objectives. The assumption in some quarters was that a few years of indifference to the physical plant might not be such a bad thing. "The buildings were so beautiful and so substantial," Delphenich says. "Yale thought they would be more forgiving." They were not. After the evidence of deterioration became too great for administrators-let alone applicants and their parents-to ignore.
The Yale Library fell into a spectacular state of distress:
The four million volumes in the 16-story stack tower were beset by leaks in the roof and walls, broken windows, and the absence of adequate temperature or humidity controls...Every window-there are more than 1,000 windows in the book stacks-was replaced.
In the late 1980s, Benno Schmidt, Yale's president, decided to come to terms with the problem by allocating nearly a billion dollars to fix some buildings while others needed massive refurbishment.
I had not seen much recently on the deferred maintenance problem until I came across reports of a program about deferred maintenance at NACUBO.
Even greater consequences
Since the recession hit in 2008 many more colleges and universities have tightened their belts to deal with cuts in national and state funding. One of the first items put on the back burner are those out-of-sight and out-of-mind maintenance projects. The institution may be planting flowers to keep things looking nice, but there's a power infrastructure mess hiding just below the surface. This is becoming more common. Moody's reported that spending on capital improvement projects was at its lowest point in many years.
This is a cause for concern not only because of the consequences of putting off maintenance until a small problem becomes a huge one, but because credit ratings agencies such as Moody's are indicating they're likely to start taking deferred maintenance into account when assigning credit ratings. A rising amount of deferred maintenance could now lead to a lower rating-and that means paying higher interest rates on debt.
Matter of pride
I would find it hard to imagine any academic library that is totally void of the signs of deferred maintenance. In a former position I took as the director, I inherited a building that was then not yet ten years old: a real asset because you spend far less time on building issues, time that can then be put to good use creating and implementing user-centered services. But even that building required constant attention, even if just to lighting, painting, or carpet stains.
There are two reasons why it's important to take care of even these minor routine maintenance matters. First, because we academic librarians take pride in our buildings; we certainly spend a large chunk of our lives there. However, more than that, we want a facility the campus community appreciates. We want them to see the library facility as a destination.
Second, when prospective students and their parents come around we want them to be impressed by the library. If the paint, carpet, furniture, and other basics are in terrible condition, then we fail. What does it say about the institution that cares so little about its library?
Take it personally
Times are hard indeed, and academic librarians have many difficult choices to make. Do you eliminate a collection or forego a student assistant so you can have funds to refurbish beat-up study rooms? Perhaps we can avoid getting into that kind of trade-off. The real problem is when little problems once ignored become big problems. The more we can prevent that the better it is for our community members, our staffs-and our budgets. Doing so requires a full commitment from staff so that everyone in the library organization is paying attention to any small problem that could be fixed quickly before it escalates into a far more serious and expensive mess. It will be a challenge, but it should be personal. Make it your responsibility to fix that mess you see.
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Steven Bell, Associate University Librarian, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, will be the incoming vice president/president-elect of ACRL. For more from Steven visit his blogs, Kept-Up Academic Librarian, ACRLog and Designing Better Libraries or visit his website. |
