Many people find places to study outside of their homes that keep them safe from those ubiquitous at-home distractions, but for those of us who do not live in dorms, co-ops, Greek houses or any other place without a study lounge, the library fulfills our studying needs.

UT is proud of its library system, yet the irony of it all is that the structures that are supposed to foster the learning in which we engage here at a top-notch university are not compatible with the lifestyle of the average student. A library system that does not operate on a 24-hour schedule, with the exception of the PCL during finals week, cannot be tolerated in a university with such high academic standards and large commuter population.

In a situation where many students are expected to take 14 credit hours of courses (you might as well get what you pay for), keep a steady part-time job, build up a resume with plenty of extracurricular activities and keep Austin weird, it’s no wonder why there are so many of us pulling frequent all-nighters. And with the constrictive library hours, there is really no place for many of us to pull those all-nighters anywhere else but home, where it’s all too easy not to study.

Even UT-San Antonio, a school with virtually no campus life, has a 24-hour library. Granted, their main library makes the PCL look like a fortress to house the world’s population in the event of an approaching meteor, but it should not be that hard for the University that starts things that change the world to give us a place to do just that during whenever time of the day we can study.

—Joshua Avelar