Take a trip through the dusty stacks of Boettcher Library and you may notice something different. No longer can sleepy students take the big comfy chairs and mate them together to make a cozy little nap nest.

Last semester anyone could go up to the third floor during the lazy hours of the day, make a bed for themselves, set the alarm on their cell phone and catch up on some much needed rest before their next class.
But no more. Now all one can find are fancy desks with shelf room for books and other research materials. Though these despot-issued desks afford enough table space to put down your head for a rest, they lack the lumbar support and comfort the armchairs granted.

How will students pass their classes now that they are refused the required amount of sleep to function at college? How will the Math Major

recognize the problems that require the use of the Pythagorean Theorem? How will the English Major know the difference between synecdoche and metonymy, or recognize satire from seriousness?

The Boettcher Library is granting students some new freedoms. They now allow beverages in sealable containers into their hallowed halls of archaic knowledge, so sleepy students can use caffeine or soda (or both) to keep their taxed brains functioning.

So I offer the idea of embracing both worlds. The library should bring back the chairs, but put them into the little-used California Room, and instead of books taking up all the floor space, put in a coffee shop. This way tired students can find texts to copy into their term papers to make word requirement, and get their coffee fix simultaneously, all in the comfort of

armchairs.

Financing this endeavor would be easy. Do we really need Proquest, the Oxford English Dictionary Online, the Gale Literary Resource Center database, all the articles ever printed in the Sacramento Bee, or the Encyclopedia Britannica?  All this information can be found on any of the paper mill Web sites. The library needs to stop wasting money on these unused databases and offer students iced low-fat white mochas (with whip).

Many other universities have offered this service to students. UC Davis has a coffee house where students can study and socialize.

The more coffee students have the more successful they will be in class, and just maybe ARC’s graduation rate will increase. Anything is better than three percent.