University of Missouri: “MU Library Looks for New Ways to Improve After Fee Failed”

From The Maneater (Student Newspaper/Website at Mizzou):

Funding options for improvements to MU Libraries look slim after MU’s student body voted to fail the controversial library fee Nov. 18, said Matt Gaunt, director of advancement for MU Libraries.
“Those ‘no’ votes really were saying: ‘We shouldn’t have to pay a fee to have a good library at Mizzou. That should come out of tuition,’” Gaunt said. “The reality of budgets on this campus is that’s a pretty simplistic view, to think that we can just reallocate tuition from other units. While we can make some progress towards that, it’s not going to get us where the fee would have gotten us.”
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f passed, the fee would have added $5 per credit hour, increasing by $2 each year to reach $15 per credit hour in the year 2022. At its peak, the fee would have encompassed 1.4 percent of the total cost of attendance and provided the MU Libraries with $13 million per year to improve campus libraries, excepting the School of Law Library.
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“I think a lot of undergraduates don’t know what they’re missing,” Gaunt said. “I had a lot of undergraduates say, ‘Well, that’s really more for the graduate students.’ You don’t understand what kind of services and information literacy skills are being developed by students at other universities.”

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Filed under: Funding, Libraries, News