Nocturnal browsers have had nowhere to go on Thayer Street ever since the College Hill Bookstore, which used to stay open until midnight, closed two years ago. But on August 21, the Brown Bookstore took an initial step toward filling this void when it began staying open six days a week until 8 pm.
Brown trumpets the new hours as the first in a series of “exciting new changes” at the bookstore, including the first major renovation in more than a decade. The revisions, including the departure of Larry Carr, who has long overseen the bookstore’s management, come after a university committee reversed course in May, deciding to keep the store independent and run in-house.
The Bookstore Review Committee had invited independent booksellers to make proposals on running the shop — and a few did, including the owners of Symposium Books in Downcity — but was leaning toward contracting with a university bookseller chain, like Barnes & Noble or Follett, until it decided to forgo contracting out altogether.
The reversal came after Save the Bookstore Coalition (SBC), an ad-hoc coalition of Brown graduate and undergraduate students, faculty, staff, alumni, and community members, led two months of intense public opposition to the privatization concept.
SBC worked quickly. From early March, when the Review Committee announced its recommendation to contract out the store, to the reversal in May, the coalition staged rallies, bought ads and published op-eds in the Brown Daily Herald, and collected the names of more than 1000 supporters, including novelist Dave Eggers, a recent recipient of an honorary doctorate from Brown. (Disclosure: Though not involved in SBC, I was asked to sign on as a local alumnus, and did so.)
Beppie Huidekoper, Brown’s executive vice president for finance and administration, credits Save the Bookstore with making a significant difference. “We wanted to hear the community’s response,” Huidekoper says. “They [SBC] took all the points that the committee had raised and found responses to those — they did what they were expected to do. Everybody learned a lot in the process.”
SBC, however, wanted to learn more. SBC co-chair Sian Roberts wrote that administrators repeatedly withheld information, and equivocated or misled the public regarding the bookstore’s profitability and other matters. The coalition also admonished Brown for not releasing a recent report by a consultant that had recommended keeping the store independent and run in-house.
The decision not to outsource belies an increasingly corporate stance of universities nationwide. John Funchion, one of a handful of student representatives on the Bookstore Review Committee, was frustrated by the tenor of the committee’s discussion. “We didn’t talk about, ‘What are Brown’s institutional values?’ ” Funchion says. “When those were gestured to, it was always in a PR context. It wasn’t, ‘How do we address these concerns?’ It was more, ‘How do we manage them?’ ”
Huidekoper says Brown is looking at ongoing ways to engage students and faculty about changes at the store. But Funchion remains skeptical, saying he hasn’t been told about any such mechanisms, and he points to how the review committee was dominated by university administrators.
