A years-long misunderstanding may be at the heart of recent noise complaints
Photo by Paul Voll.
Students have taken to the Reddit page r/uvic to complain that the silent study areas in McPherson Library are becoming louder.
The bottom and third floors of the library are designated “quiet study spaces” intended to offer students a place to concentrate on their work with minimal talking around them.
However, many students perceive the bottom and third floors as enforced quiet spaces, where no talking is permitted.
“Downstairs is for people who want to work in absolute silence, and people just don’t seem to respect that. Can the library staff start kicking out people who go downstairs and talk? Or at least put up some stricter signs?” wrote one Reddit user on a recent post to the r/uvic page.
A spokesperson for McPherson Library told the Martlet that although the library would like to classify the two floors as “silent study” or “no talking” areas, enforcing these standards isn’t practical. Instead, the library considers the bottom and third floors to be “conversation discouraged” areas.
During COVID, said the spokesperson, the spaces were much quieter. For students who began their studies in those years, the noise level now may seem egregious in comparison.
The signs on both floors of the McPherson Library read: “This is a space for quiet study. Please keep conversations to a minimum,” which also seems to have created room for misunderstanding between the university and its students about what kind of experience they can expect on “quiet” floors.
In a separate post on the r/uvic page, another user wrote, “the basement of the library and third floor are quiet areas! Not whispered conversations areas. I can work with shuffling or footsteps but I can’t focus on my work while you have a conversation.”
Several similar posts to the r/uvic page complaining about loud talking in the McPherson Library’s quiet areas have been written in the past nine months — each post prompting several comments from other students reporting similar experiences.
Despite the fact that quiet study spaces at UVic are apparently becoming noisier, silent places to study are just as important now as ever.
Steve Lindsay, a professor of psychology at UVic expressed concern about the loss of these spaces for a number of reasons.
Quiet study spaces are “pretty important,” said Lindsay.
Lindsay also said he’s concerned that students will choose to leave campus more often if quiet spaces are not consistently available.
“I think it’s very desirable to work together to build a culture in which there’s spaces that are respected as places where people have an opportunity to study without a lot of distractions,” said Lindsay. “I would like to see more people on campus — that’s part of what makes a university community, especially for people in first or second year.”
Study rooms and Tek Booths are both private, noise controlled study spaces that students can reserve online — but there are far fewer of these spaces than there are students who frequent the library’s quiet floors.
Lindsay would like to see more of a variety of study spaces — including quiet spaces — available to students, but acknowledged that reduced funding for universities in general means that’s unlikely to happen.
Noise canceling headphones — which some students use to drown out noise while studying — are available for loan from the Help Desk on the main floor of McPherson. But it’s not a way to drown out the noise that students are hoping for, it’s a promise that quiet spaces will remain quiet.
So is the library getting noisier? Or were students’ expectations — that the basement and third floors of the library be completely silent — misguided from the start?
Students, in their Reddit posts, and library staff, who explained that they are currently trying to find a way to manage excessive noise on quiet floors, alluded to the former.
“It is something we’re working on internally because we’ve seen a lot of complaints,” said a library spokesperson.
If the McPherson Library doesn’t see enforcing silence as practical, they’ll have to find a way to manage “minimal conversation” guidelines.
And we might just have to make peace with studying on a post-silent campus.
