BERKELEY, Calif. — To kick off homecoming weekend final fall, the College of California, Berkeley, held a groundbreaking ceremony for its new knowledge sciences constructing, often known as the Gateway. At a price of over half a billion {dollars}, the 367,270-square-foot constructing, with “prolonged sightlines and pure light-filled corridors,” is being billed as a hub for analysis in synthetic intelligence, knowledge analytics and machine studying.

That will symbolize the longer term, however the previous is only a quick stroll throughout campus within the stacks of the anthropology library. For many years, the repository has served generations of students in an area as modest because the Gateway is grand: a 1,500-square-foot nook on the second flooring of the anthropology division’s constructing, with a comfy studying space of armchairs and pc terminals alongside one wall.

For days now, the library has grow to be a scene of occupation. College students have stuffed it with tents, sleeping baggage and air mattresses in a last-ditch effort to avoid wasting the 67-year-old establishment devoted to anthropology, which encompasses the examine of humanity, societies and cultures. The college is getting ready to maneuver the collections of archaeological area notes and books — about 80,000 volumes in complete, on topics as assorted as people tales, Black tradition and Mexican American social actions — to a close-by warehouse and the primary library, saving $400,000 yearly.

For the coed occupiers, the battle is as a lot a battle over a library as it’s over humanities and social sciences in an age when the world is obsessive about expertise and appears keen to interchange the bodily world with digital experiences pushed by A.I.

“It’s about basically writing a unique story about what training is, what the college is for,” mentioned Jesús Gutiérrez, a graduate scholar who works on the library and is writing a dissertation about people artwork types of the African diaspora.

Prior to now 5 years alone, the variety of Berkeley undergraduate college students selecting to main in anthropology has dropped by a couple of quarter, a part of a technology that has struggled to pay scholar loans and flocked towards science and engineering within the profitable shadow of Silicon Valley.

School members say they’re impressed by the depth of the younger college students protesting to avoid wasting the anthropology library, a trigger that in any other case has relied on assist from Ralph Nader, the liberal activist and onetime third-party presidential candidate, and Jerry Brown, the previous governor of California who majored in classics when he was an undergraduate at U.C. Berkeley greater than a half century in the past.

As a third-year anthropology scholar, Ian Molloy, one of many protest organizers, has heard the snickers from classmates pursuing science and engineering majors, framing his topic selection as “Oh, you don’t wish to become profitable.” He known as the library, the place he has discovered titles on the domestication of animals important to his analysis, the “spine” of the division, and central to rebuilding group after the isolation of the pandemic.

Regardless of the outcry, the administration says it isn’t budging, explaining that the cuts are crucial because it faces an $82 million funds deficit. In March, Carol Christ, the Berkeley chancellor, pointed to raises that the U.C. system had agreed to pay graduate scholar instructors and assist workers as one driver of latest prices.

The college has mentioned it is going to save about $1.5 million by closing not simply the anthropology library however the arithmetic and physics libraries as effectively, and reducing hours and companies at others.

“We’re conscious of the protest and are monitoring the state of affairs,” the college mentioned in an announcement. “Concerning the anthropology library’s closure, we, too, want the library may stay open, however that isn’t an choice at this level.”

At 93, Laura Nader stays a prolific scholar and trainer a long time after she turned the anthropology division’s first girl to realize a tenure-track place, in 1960. “However I couldn’t have performed it with out the library,” Dr. Nader, Mr. Nader’s sister, mentioned. She worries that college students focused on anthropology will as a substitute desire different universities with devoted anthropology libraries.

Dr. Nader views the deliberate closure of the library as one other step within the decline of humanities and social sciences typically — and anthropology particularly.

“So rapidly it turns into a job query,” she mentioned. “You don’t want anthropology.”

Underneath the administration’s plan, a number of the supplies within the library, based in 1956 and later named for George and Mary Foster, two outstanding Berkeley anthropologists, will probably be moved to a storage middle in close by Richmond, Calif. Different components of the gathering will probably be dispersed all through the college’s essential library.

Alexander Parra, who’s majoring in pc science and Chicano research and who has been occupying the library, mentioned that one of many issues that may be misplaced if the library closed was the potential for serendipity — of discovering a e book you didn’t know you have been in search of. When college students staged an occupation earlier this 12 months, after the college introduced the closure plans in February, Mr. Parra by likelihood seen a title about Mexican American youth organizations, a topic he was researching.

“That’s me,” he mentioned. “That’s me in that e book.”

Some college students and professors additionally see the battle as an fairness challenge. Amongst these majoring in anthropology, 43 % of scholars are from underrepresented minority teams, in contrast with 5 % for pc science. The library additionally serves these majoring in Chicano research and African American research, disciplines that likewise have a better share of unrepresented minority college students.

Mr. Brown, who as soon as taught a course in Berkeley’s anthropology division, has reached out to members of the College of California Board of Regents, urging it to spare the library.

“Nice and capacious minds have graced that constructing,” he wrote in an e-mail to the board chairman. “To exchange it now, even partially, by a mere warehouse in Richmond is past the pale.”

Charles Hirschkind, the chair of the anthropology division, mentioned that the college had diminished the variety of graduate college students it accepts into the anthropology since 2004 by a bit greater than half, reflecting, he mentioned, the division’s “weaker monetary state of affairs” and the rise in prices to assist graduate college students.

“Once we’re speaking about budgetary restraints, we’re additionally speaking about priorities and the place one decides to speculate,” he mentioned. “And I feel the college feels little incentive to put money into the social sciences and humanities.”

Dr. Hirschkind mentioned some college members had been pleasantly shocked to see the youthful technology preventing for the library after assuming college students that grew up within the digital age may need much less appreciation for bodily books or the pleasures of a library. And the occupation of the library, to some, is harking back to an earlier activist period at Berkeley.

“There’s a sturdy sense of communitas within the air — it isn’t in any respect like identification politics — we’d like a brand new phrase for it,” Nancy Scheper-Hughes, an anthropology professor, wrote in an e-mail to Mr. Brown. “They wish to learn. They wish to be with open communities of individuals of very completely different concepts.”

The scholars, in the meantime, have been residing within the library for greater than every week, learning for finals, taking part in board video games and consuming breakfasts of croissants and granola. Frightened that the college is making an attempt to expire the clock till summer season break after which dismantle the library, the scholars say they may keep so long as it takes.

“They may give us the library tomorrow,” Mr. Molloy mentioned, “and we’ll all be blissful to go residence.”