An ivory tower comes in handy when the academy goes under water.

Dozens of volunteers from miles away answered Toby Baker's plea for help in getting UND's good stuff off the ground before the flood. In the below-ground first floor of Chester Fritz Library Sunday, professors Ted Pedeliski, Chuck Wood and Doug Munski showed volunteers which books and journals in the first four shelves needed to be moved to second floor.

Professional journals such as "Ethnomusicology," "Lubrication Engineering," and "The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society," were loaded on library carts, rolled into the elevator and stacked on the next floor.

Some journals were left at expected water levels, though, even as the Red River inexorably moved above history, menacing the library.

But the other publications, while not exactly nighttime reading for most folks, are essential for those who toil in academia, said Pattijean Hooper, a communications instructor pushing carts Sunday. "Some are so old. I saw original maps of the Panama Canal," Hooper said. "These are just priceless."

Many of the journals cost UND thousands of dollars a year to purchase, said Wes Edens, business reference librarian. "We have lost so much in library funding, so every dollar we save means a lot," Hooper said.

Within hours of the radio request by Baker, whose husband is UND president Ken Baker, volunteers showed up ready to work, said Mark Thompson, Baker's lieutenant in the flood fighting effort.

"Hey, it's my alma mater, man," said Marv Larson, a 1969 graduate in business, who farms near Gilby, N.D. It looked like the Fritz's treasures were safe, he said, leaning against a desk and looking at orderly shelves he had helped empty and put in jumbled stacks upstairs. "But you wouldn't want to be a freshman in library science next year."