The Teachers College Bookstore shuttered its doors four months ago, a move that administrators hope will bring TC students closer to the University’s main campus and help alleviate the school’s space shortage.
“Senior leadership made the determination, and the decision, that it was no longer financially viable to operate a stand-alone bookstore at any site, or that particular site,” said Jim Gardner, the TC associate vice president for external affairs. “Affecting this decision was our recognition that we needed more office space for our faculty, and we needed to bring more of our academic operations ... closer to the core of campus.”
As for plans for the empty space at 120th Street and Amsterdam, Gardner said it will be filled with administrative offices of some sort, to ensure that classrooms and faculty offices remain at the center of the TC campus.
“Whatever moves to that vacant space will be administrative space, because that location we regard as the perimeter of campus,” Gardner said.
Although the individual TC bookstore is now gone, Gardner said that Teachers College now coordinates with the Columbia University bookstore, located in Lerner, so that TC students can buy both textbooks and TC paraphernalia at the main University bookstore.
“The only thing that has been lost, if you want to call it lost, is a matter of convenience,” Gardner said, adding that he has yet to hear complaints from students.
TC students have said they have mixed feelings about the bookstore’s closing.
“I buy my textbooks online,” Kathryn Minas, a new TC student, said, adding that she probably would not have utilized the TC bookstore if it was still there.
Another new TC student, Leah Harrell, has encountered difficulty with getting textbooks for her classes.
“There was a miscommunication between Columbia bookstore and Teachers College, and only certain [TC] classes have textbooks available at the Columbia bookstore,” Harrell said, although she added that she most likely would have purchased her books online rather than at the Columbia bookstore, even if they had been available there.
Jennifer Herard, another TC student, expressed concern about losing the bookstore as a representative display of TC’s identity.
“I didn’t really buy books there, but I thought it was nice to have our own bookstore,” she said, adding that it was a good place to take visitors when they came to look at the school.
Anna Park, a first-year doctoral student at TC, said she was a little sad to see the store go, as she considers it a TC landmark but said the school’s space crunch is a more important problem.
“I definitely think we need more classroom space,” she said, adding that one of her classes was held in a “closet between staircases,” where all the desks were left-handed.
Herard felt that having a more tightly knit campus would be beneficial, but that there are changes beyond the bookstore closure that the administration must make for this to occur.
“I feel like we are kind of isolated here. We don’t really have many benefits from the main Columbia campus,” Herard said, mentioning printing quotas in particular.
Park said that she hopes additional trips to the main campus will encourage more communication between schools.
“I feel like if we share resources, it will be beneficial for everyone,” she said.
Gardner said he hopes that the decision to close the standalone bookstore is one that will help change the sense of isolation some TC students describe.
“We always put the needs and concerns of our students and faculty first, and we made this decision with them in mind,” Gardner said. “It’s about creating the synergy, when the faculty and students are closer together, and the spaces are contiguous.”
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