Crerar Ups the Ante

In a bid to retain patrons forced by the addition of temporary shelving to flee from the Regenstein's all-night study space , Crerar has opened a cafe near its Usite facilities located in the science library's lower level. Though Crerar administrators have claimed that the new cafe is intended only as an ad hoc replacement for the likes of the Maroon Market, C-Shop, and Ex Libris--which formerly served those evening Regenstein patrons who were preparing to spend late nights and early mornings on the A-level--speculation has already surfaced that this is but the first move in the University's grand stratagem to phase out humanistic studies entirely.

As one patron, who wished to remain anonymous, declared, "All your faux-sciences won't put Humpty Dumpty back together again. What I mean is, to speak less metaphorically (which I know is a bastardization of rational language which you lit crit pansies have dropped with the lightest twirl of your lisping tongues on our beautifully ordered world)--where was I?--Oh, whatever you say about Boccaccio, he's dead. I can prove it. He was corpulent and lazy, and he died, and so will you, unless you stop funding useless investigations into the [makes quotes sign with hands] "aesthetic positions" of David Hume and Jack Weber and Peter Nietzsche, whose stupid...uh, his just laughable...oh shit, I forgot what I was gonna say again...hey, you know there's coffee in the basement of Crerar now? Oh, anyway, you guys should learn how to add. Multivariable calculus is nirvana. This is the beginning of the end for the 'Humanities.'"

Others were more coherent. "I think they just don't wanna make kids walk all the way to the Maroon Market to get coffee in the evening. I don't think there's any kind of ideological struggle going on. The Reg's just got too many books. Hey, weren't you in my Milton class?"

Certainly we have not heard the last word on the possibility of an arms race between the University's ego and id, but at the moment the biblio-polemical balance on campus is stable. On the lower level, the first patrons sidled up to the new cafe's counter to try out the latest of U of C coffee editions, while the science library's co-director composed an email to members of the Crerar community, announcing the recent ranking of the University's Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department as the best in the nation by U. S. News and World Report. It remains to be seen whether the Reg will counter with claims for the superiority of the Germanic Studies Department.