The computer lab of the new library is seen Tuesday, Dec. 9, 2014, on the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga campus in Chattanooga, Tenn. The process of moving books from the old library to the new is expected to take until just before Christmas.Welcome to the Latte Library
Seems to me the new library at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga — while it may need a donor to help pay for it — doesn’t need a new name.
It already has one: the Latte Library. That was the clever headline on the front page Times Free Press story Thursday — “A Whole Latte Library.”
From the looks of the pictures and the content of the story, it has everything students could possibly want in a posh new study space. Except books.
Sure, technically the $48 million, five-story library has books — down on the bottom floor (think the basement) in movable “compact shelving.” But what it mostly has is 40 percent more space than the “old” 40-year-old Lupton Library, nearly twice as much seating, extra computers and laptops for loan, data jacks on virtually every surface, Wi-fi to die for, soaring windows AND a Starbucks.
Wait, wait, though. How can you feel like you’re in a library studying if there are no books around you to leak knowledge into your head?
I get that everything is online now. After all, stories that used to take at least one or two trips to the library for research and a lot of old-fashioned shoe-leather and telephone interviews now get done with Google searches along with email or text-message Q&As. But still — we’re talking atmosphere. If you study in a library, you need books around you to help provide the appropriate hush, dust and claustrophobic comfort.
Maybe UTC could at least paint some books on the pillars supporting the soaring windows and ceilings.
Butch Jones and his sundance millions
If people are blasting Kevin Spiegel’s new $234,669 bonus and boosted base pay of $748,000 a year for running a $500 million-plus-a-year business at Erlanger — one that deals with life and death matters every day — perhaps we might consider why University of Tennessee head football Coach Butch Jones is paid $3.6 million a year (just increased from $2.95 million a year before incentives) to run a roughly $40-$50 million a year football business supposedly built on amateur sports.
My colleague Dave Flessner — business editor and whiz at all things numbered — points out that Butch Jones is by far the highest paid state employee in Tennessee, making three and half times what Spiegel makes. Still, Jones is paid less than many or most SEC coaches and he got a raise and new contract this week after a report last week linked his name to an open head coaching job at the University of Michigan.
Both Erlanger and UT football are examples of escalating pay at the top, even as most workers’ pay isn’t increasing, especially in other state government jobs. Both UT sports and Erlanger, of course, are self-funding, and both Spiegel and Jones are simply getting paid in line with their peers, we’re told. But both also rely on public support and both men are government employees.
Coaches have long countered to critics that when professors get 100,000 or more people to show up for one of their lectures they should get big bucks, too.
All of us love our health, and most of us love football — somewhere. But seriously, isn’t something wrong with our priorities when a hospital president gets a 10 percent raise yet nurses and lab workers get 2 percent, and when players and college instructors scrape by but coaches bank millions?