Roger Truelove starts his rounds at midnight, checking student IDs on all floors to make sure only students, faculty and staff are in the library.
Dec. 8, 2009
By Edward Stratton
A young man with a backpack hanging off of one shoulder approaches the small desk one the edge of the cavernous lobby but has no identification to show Roger Truelove, the night guard at the Knight Library, that he is a student at the University of Oregon.
The library closes at midnight to all people who cannot prove they are students, faculty or staff, so he might be out of luck.
Instead of trekking home to pick the card up, the student writes down his memorized number on a sheet of white printer paper before being allowed in. “My personal opinion,” Truelove says shortly after waving the student by, “is that turning students away means lost study time.”
Truelove is employed as part of the Hours Extension Pilot Project, started in 2008 by the Associated Students of the University of Oregon (ASUO) to keep the library open for students, faculty and staff continuously from 11 a.m. Sunday through 7 p.m. on Friday.
They originally secured $54,000 in leftover funds from the student government’s budget, $37,768.66 of which funded the pilot year. That money allowed them to hire three guards to monitor entrances and exits, count people, check IDs and contact the Department of Public Safety if any problems occur.
While excess ASUO funds started the program in fall 2008 and funded it through the rest of this school year with an additional $27,000, the future stability of the program is dependent on the ASUO’s ability to secure administrative funding for next year and beyond.
For now, President Emma Kallaway and the ASUO are seeking further funding for the program through various administrative departments of the university. Meanwhile, Truelove said that he plans to be a guard at the library as long as the program stays alive.
Starting at 11:45 p.m., he and his partner on the night watch, Bill Lee, each take two floors of the library and spend 15 minutes counting all the students in the building. They switch between one hour patrols through all four floors checking IDs and one hour stints at the check-in desk in the lobby between midnight to 7 a.m., while always keeping a running total of the number of people using the library.
Truelove said that almost all of the students are laid-back and compliant with the patrols and check-ins. Neither he nor his partner carries any protection devices. When a situation arises, they give to warnings to the involved parties before calling the Department of Public Safety to escort a person out.
“I don’t need to act a heavy, because they don’t give me anything to protect myself,” Truelove said. “I really wouldn’t want to here, because as soon as you start getting tough with one, you’ve got a whole bunch of basketball guys and track stars, and I’m 56 years old. I’m not a match for them. The other guy (Lee), he’s even older.”
Truelove monitors the entry and exit of every student in order to create usage statistics that will help decide funding for program.
Truelove’s authority extends out to the entrances of the library, where he makes sure people are not letting smoke from their cigarettes waft in through the doors. If the other guard is at the check-in desk in the lobby, he might even act as an escort to patrons walking to their cars.
Although he has the authority to deny library access to a student who does not have the proper identification, Truelove would rather give students the benefit of the doubt. He keeps a laptop in front of him on the check-in desk, so that he can pass students through and verify their status as members of the university at a later time. His main mission is to keep a safe environment for students, faculty and staff.
“Logic tells me that they can do that because a student association is funding this,” he said. “In other words, they’ve purchased this block of time. Between midnight and 7:30 (a.m.), they don’t expect to be hassled by anybody who’s coming in off of the street.”
Before he had even graduated from Oakridge High School in 1972, Truelove had already started in the lumber industry, his original career track. He worked at Pope and Talbot, a lumber company, for 14 years. From there, he went to International Paper’s sawmill in Gardner, Ore. for two years, before its closure moved him on to his second long-term career: security.
Truelove worked at Burns International Security Services in Gardner, Eugene and Springfield until 1994. In February 1995, he began a nearly 13-year stint with Monaco Coach, a luxury RV company. That lasted until November 2007, after which he started working for Northwest Security Services in May 2008.
It was in 2008 that he was introduced to DePaul Security and the Knight Library’s extended hours program. Due to shoulder and knee problems stemming from an overhead door pinning him to the ground while working for Monaco, Truelove received first crack at the more comfortable library position.
The pilot year of the current extended hours program started with an over-realized request form filled out by former ASUO President Sam Dotters-Katz on May 8, 2008, which used the student government’s budget surplus to increase the library’s operating hours between the first and ninth weeks of the term. The library used $37,768.66 and gave the rest back to the student government.
“We chose to open during week three instead of week one this year based on stats,” said Shirien Chappell, the head of access services at the library. “ASUO chose to continue funding based on them.”
A student pops out of a private study room to show Truelove an ID card.
The stats recorded for fall 2008 show that week five, often close to mid-terms for many students, is when usage maxes out, with an average of more than 450 visitors per night. In weeks nine and ten, the average hovers at approximately 300 visitors per night.
Kallaway identified the extended hours program as one of the most important offered by the ASUO. She and Vice President Getachew Kassa said that there are promising signs that there might be money available for the program through various administrative departments.
“This is one of the most important things to my administration, making sure this has a long-term place here at the university, because it is really important to students,” Kallaway said.
There are several extended hour program options available based on the amount of funding the library might receive. There is the 24/7 program during finals and dead week, an 24/7 option for every week of fall, winter and spring terms, an option to continue the current program and an option to begin a 24/5 program in the first instead of third week.
Budget meetings are in January. The ASUO will have a better grasp on the issue by March or April 2010. Kallaway said that they will most likely have a final decision on funding by July 1, 2010. Regardless of which option is chosen, the president is confident that the program will keep running.
