April 2005

Books in the Mannheim Campus’s Poland Memorial Library are readied for shipment to the University of Buea in Cameroon, more than 3,000 miles away.

Mannheim Campus Library Lives on in Cameroon’s University of Buea

By Alita Byrd
Special to FYI Online

Although UMUC’s Mannheim Campus will close its doors in May 2005, the campus’s Poland Memorial Library will continue to serve students—students of the University of Buea, that is, more than 3,000 miles away in Cameroon. Most of Mannheim’s 28,000 volumes will be shipped to Cameroon to enrich Buea’s limited library resources.

Brian Price, professor of psychology and counseling for UMUC Europe, got the idea. He served as a Peace Corps volunteer for two years in the Central African Republic, which borders Cameron, knew the conditions there, and knew that the university would appreciate the collection.

He was right. In April 2005, an emissary from the embassy of the Republic of Cameroon in Germany, Brigitte Lucie Abessolo, visited the Mannheim campus. Several students gave Abessolo a tour of the campus and a small ceremony was held at the Poland Memorial Library. Abessolo thanked UMUC for the donation, and Cameroon’s minister of higher education, Jacques Fame Ndongo, wrote to UMUC to express the country’s gratitude.

“The closure of this unique and distinctive campus, after 55 years of service to U.S. military [personnel and their families stationed] overseas, is indeed difficult,” said Mary Fiedler, dean of the Mannheim Campus. “One of the bright spots of the closure is the donation of the Poland Memorial Library to Cameroon, knowing that the library will continue to serve college students. Every student who attended the campus became familiar with and fond of the library, and it is comforting to know that this tradition will continue.”

Mannheim’s library was named for Jeffrey Joseph Poland, a beloved history professor who died in a tragic automobile accident in 1960. (At the time, the University’s residential campus in Germany was located in Munich; after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it relocated to Augsburg and, ultimately, to Mannheim.) Poland was an avid book collector and, after his death, faculty and staff members donated more volumes to expand his collection, which was eventually named the Poland Memorial Library and became the mainstay of the campus’s research resources. The collection grew over the years, adding supporting materials for coursework in business, science, technology, social sciences, art, music, drama, literature, and history.

In Mannheim this year, the library only serves 59 residential students, but it will face a significant increase in demand in Cameroon, where the University of Buea, founded in 1977, serves more than 7,000 undergraduate and graduate students.

“We selected the University of Buea because it is a newer school with fewer resources and is located in one of the English-speaking provinces,” Price said. The school’s current library holdings are housed in one small room.

Already, 8,000 book, shelves and all, have been packed up and shipped to Cameroon, with help from a close friend of Price’s, Robert Bapooh-Lipot, a founding member of the nongovernmental organization Terre des Hommes, Un Monde Une Humanité (A World of Human Beings, One World One Humanity). Terres des Hommes helped arrange funding for the massive shipping project, working through the U.S. Embassy and Cameroon’s Ministry of Higher Education.

“I heard that when [the first shipment of books] arrived in Cameroon, the students who were on hand to unload the books were overwhelmed,” said Fiedler. “They immediately sat down and began reading! Apparently it took a while before they could continue the unpacking.”