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A year ago I wrote Why I'm Not in Church for Lent. This year, I'll have another go at it.

I've been through a lot of changes in the seven months, much less a year. Family members in transition: my younger son finished a graduate degree at Yale; my spouse gently retired from active pastorates after 40 years. My own transitions: I retired in August, and moved to another state in December. I'm both figuratively and literally not in the same place I was a year ago.

While our lives change, sometimes rapidly, the church year placidly sails on,. Like a prism, each year presents a different angle, a different constellation of light and its refractions.

In 2022 I was coming to terms with the reality that I basically have been done with Anglo-Catholicism, as it's been called. It's not a bitter parting at all -- I've just moved on. Granted I was never part of the mainstream of that movement, however defined: I was always on the left fringe, and resonated most strongly with Anglo-Catholic socialists (whether Capital-S or lower case) such as F. D. Maurice, Conrad Noel, R. H. Tawney, or Vida Scudder. These are all generations ago, of course; the political and informally religious perspective of Pete Buttigieg is more current. I was very much influenced by folk at St. Luke in the Fields, New York City, three decades ago —and how that neighborhood of the West Village has changed since the 1990s! I was never part of the creakily conservative mainstream Anglo-Catholic or Ritualist movement typified by the Robert Duncan, a bishop who left the Episcopal Church to found his own sect in Pittsburgh over the issues of gay ordination and bishops.

In the pandemic, the Ritualist enterprise began to seem a bit more sketchy to me. I witnessed my own parish, Christ Church in New Haven, suddenly pulling back after insisting down the decades that the sacrament was essential to Sunday worship. In defense of Christ Church, its leadership was following the directions given by the Diocese of Connecticut, a discourse wholly captured by particularly zealous public-health experts at Yale, amongst other places. (Christ Church is immediately adjacent to Yale and is in many ways a university church.) Yale has lagged other Ivy League institutions when discontinuing pandemic restrictions, without much explanation. Why were restrictions more swiftly dismantled at Brown or Columbia? "Discourse capture" is a good expression of what has happened in Connecticut, wherever the leadership may have found it.

The unavoidable conclusion, however, was the contradiction: is the sacrament so essential? Or can that be set aside in times of pandemic? In addition, the whole vocabulary of 1928-style Rite I in the 1979 Prayer Book began to grate --so much angry-father-god language. In 2020 and 2021, in particular, given everything else happening in the world and in our daily lives, that traditionalist language felt more and more orthogonal --at right angles to the real issues at hand.

Now in Philadelphia, I have yet to find a church home, although a couple of communities seem promising. In particular, I feel addressed by the experience of worship at Old St. Peter's on Pine Street in Philadelphia's Society Hill. Worship there is certainly different (in a positive sense): the church retained its old pew-boxes, and the first portion of Sunday worship, the service of the Word, is from the west end, at the reading desk under a wine-glass pulpit. The Service of the Sacrament is led from the altar area at the east end, so the congregation literally turns around and sits on benches or pews facing the opposite direction to their orientation in the first part of the service. The building itself is both historic and evocative: built in 1761 and designed by Robert Smith, who also designed Princeton University's Nassau Hall, and is surrounded by the very old church yard (well, old for North America) --truly the ancestors are present, in a generalized sense.

Lent at St. Peter's is much lower-key than in my previous parish in New Haven, as is the ceremonial used in the church. Worship is based on relatively new supplementary prayers that use far more inclusive language, and far less father-talk. Major Lenten themes are present physically and symbolically: dust to dust (the church yard), the patterns of the ancestors, the physical structure that links present generations with the past, and the context of Philadelphia. Gun violence in certain sections of Philadelphia is endemic. Regardless of individual congregants' "sins lite," as I have heard it called, the social divisions and divisiveness of Philadelphia and the whole country cannot be avoided. Lent at St. Peter's is adults acknowledging to adults that we have all erred, as a society, and that a better way has been promised and lies open to us, whether present or proleptic.

I have made my peace with Lent in 2023. At least so far.

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This weeks news about the recent mass shooting at Michigan State University has prompted me to feel more positive emotion about the place than I have felt in decades. I attended MSU from 1971-1974 and after a fair-to-middle career there transferred to a small private college in Michigan . . . which I have named before and shall not name now. (It has its own deep wrinkles several and strengths.)

Image Courtesy of Yahoo

The moment that grabbed me was a video clip in the news, showing MSU students laying flowers in from of "Party," the statue of a Spartan that greets those who cross the Red Cedar River from the north side to the athletic kingdom portion of the south side. I remembered that Sparty was often the tagline of cringey jokes about when he'll drop the helmet he's carrying in his right hand. ("When a MSU grad gets a Rhodes Scholarship" --turns out there have been 20, most recently in 2019--or "when a virgin graduates from MSU" and who knows when that first happened?) Sparty was the victim of a great deal of vandalism over the years, mostly from fans from the other place before the annual football game that brings the state to a halt. He was renovated in 1988, recast and relocated in 2005, and still stands, a testament both to Leonard Jungwirth, sculptor, and John Hannah, legendary MSU president 1941-1969.

I remember the saying, "the concrete never sets on Hannah's empire," because John Hannah transformed a modest State College to a major institution, now with 50,000 students over something like 5,000 acres (2,00+ hectares). The sheer size of the place has its own quality: an academic city with its own transit system.

My fair-to-middle experience encompassed a year in the Music Department, a failure partly of my own making, and two years in Justin Morrill College, a liberal-arts "alternative" residential college that ultimately failed largely because it was never adequately funded or supported to succeed. MSU is an intensely practical place, and real liberal arts education has always been an awkward fit there. JMC was intended to be a complement to James Madison (public affairs) and Lyman Briggs residential colleges, which have endured. JMC was revived in a sense in 2007 with a generically-named Residential College in the Arts and Humanities (RCAH) in the self-same Snyder-Phillips residence halls --what goes around comes around, I guess.

In 1971-1974 the baby boom crop was nearly at its peak, moving through higher education, and undergraduate students were surplus. The Music Department employed a number of rigid and only modestly competent faculty whose job was to get reduce enrollment. (They succeeded—there were other far better faculty there, but freshman were not permitted contact with them.) Given the realities of the draft in 1972, the easiest path was to transfer across campus. I learned a lot at MSU about self-discipline and inner motivation, a several remarkable faculty were immensely patient with my confusions, in particular Donald Weinshank and R. Glenn Wright. I eventually settled on Classical Languages as a concentration—how totally out of mainstream MSU!—and when an immensely dedicated and talent professor suddenly died (Carolyn Matzke, some of whose books I still possess), I began to look elsewhere, and transferred out.

So my undergraduate years were bifurcated between two almost entirely different worlds, that of a gigantic Big-10 campus and that of a small church-originated liberal arts college. I wound up, somehow, with an excellent education that combined intensive work in languages with a sense of the world vastly larger than the cloistered life of Dutch West Michigan.

Tim Alberta wrote a beautiful piece Requiem for the Spartans for the Atlantic (February 15, 2023). He remembered MSU in a very positive light, moving past the negativity of the sexual abuse scandal centered on women's gymnastics and Dr. Larry Nasser, the cover-up of which brought down two university presidents and forever soiled MSU's reputation. (See Maria Vinci's opinion piece in the Detroit Free Press, 2018.)

Alberta centered his Atlantic piece on "Spartans Will," what he calls a deft motto, "a defiant mentality that makes the school exceptional." Whatever truth the motto may hold (video) measures how far MSU has come since the early 1970s, when it was still very definitely second fiddle to … the other place in Ann Arbor. Some would say it still is; the comparison is not apt, because the two institutions are so different. In many states, MSU would be the flagship university. Its stature, combined with the other place, illustrates how Michigan (the actual state) has changed over the decades, where two such universities would now be an unattainable luxury and achievement if they did not already exist.

I long pre-dated "Spartans will," but I do recognize the chin-out assertive persistence that it highlights. I remember how differently class dynamics then played out: many of my fellow students were the children of industrial workers who really wanted something better for their kids. The place in Ann Arbor was out of their league, but they still wanted that experience rather than study at one of the smaller regional universities (Eastern, Western, Central, Northern, Wayne State, or Oakland, then growing out of "Michigan State University at Oakland"). Striving was the order of the day, even in the early 1970s. It was accompanied by something else: a strong libertarian streak that contradicted the expensive vision of social justice for farmers that originally underwrote Michigan Agricultural College. (There is still a M.A.C. Avenue!) Also: a dawning environmental awareness of the fragility and beauty of Michigan's environment that was not already degraded by chemical and automobile companies. At MSU I encountered Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac, Garrett Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons (later substantially modified by Elinor Ostrom and others), and Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.

The northern part of MSU's campus, with substantial plantings in and beyond Beal Botanical Gardens, cannot be lightly dismissed. Berkey Hall, the center of the latest tragedy (with the neighboring Student Union) is square in the middle of that sea of tranquillity. Tim Alberta's description is apt: "‌the stately buildings and the sprawling green spaces, the roaring football stadium and the whispering river, the camaraderie and the conviviality and the bottomless school spirit." (The southern part of the campus is much more institutional modern.) The tragedy of the mass shooting was how preventable it was, and how such events are never prevented --that we as a society have settled for mass killing as the price of certain warped ideas of political liberty. Much since D.C. v. Heller, 2008--and I curse the life or memories of Antonin Scalia, John Roberts, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas (that fraud!) and Samuel "the arrogant" Alito.

I didn't experience the trust the Tim Alberta experienced at MSU. I do know about its social cohesion: "Go Green" response to "Go White" (!--only in the context of Green!) is a reality, a response to the other place's Go Blue (or Go Blow, as MSU alumni/ae like to repeat). I did grow in ways salutary and painful, and in the end I left, because my life was going elsewhere and my thinking led me out more than it ever led me in. (I went to MSU originally almost by mistake.) I do recognize the resilience, the sheer grit at MSU, and I do take solace that despite the serious and irrevocable losses, the shooting will not prevent their victories at MSU. (An allusion to the fight song.)

I despair for MSU, for Michigan, for America. We are unable to stop the slaughter. Of course it will happen again at other universities like MSU: what will stop it? The generation of students (some enrolled at MSU) who survived Sandy Hook, Oxford High School (Michigan), and countless other tragedies, will take with them an awareness: the political and social orders have failed them. I don't see an available alternative. When one arises, it will sweep away much that is good as well as, I hope, much that is evil. Government for the smug by the smug may yet fall, and with it the dangers of chaos. Would that chaos really be worse than what we have now?

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(Source: The New Republic, October 21, 1940)

Virginia Woolf sitting at Monk's house, before 1942.
Source: Wikimedia Commons, from Harvard University Library

There is another way of fighting for freedom without arms;

we can fight with the mind. We can make ideas that will help the

young Englishman who is fighting up in the sky to defeat the enemy.

The Germans were over this house last night and the night before
that. Here they are again. It is a queer experience, lying in the dark
and listening to the zoom of a hornet which may at any moment
sting you to death. It is a sound that interrupts cool and consecutive
thinking about peace. Yet it is a sound—far more than prayers and
anthems—that should compel one to think about peace. Unless we
can think peace into existence we—not this one body in this one bed
but millions of bodies yet to be born—will lie in the same darkness
and hear the same death rattle overhead. Let us think what we can
do to create the only efficient air-raid shelter while the guns on the
hill go pop pop pop and the searchlights finger the clouds and now
and then, sometimes close at hand, sometimes far away a bomb
drops.

Up there in the sky young Englishmen and young German men are
fighting each other. The defenders are men, the attackers are men.
Arms are not given to Englishwomen either to fight the enemy or to
defend herself. She must lie weaponless tonight. Yet if she believes
that the fight going on up in the sky is a fight by the English to
protect freedom, by the Germans to destroy freedom, she must
fight, so far as she can, on the side of the English. How far can she
fight for freedom without firearms? By making arms, or clothes or
food. But there is another way of fighting for freedom without arms;
we can fight with the mind. We can make ideas that will help the
young Englishman who is fighting up in the sky to defeat the enemy.

But to make ideas effective, we must be able to fire them off. We
must put them into action. And the hornet in the sky rouses another
hornet in the mind. There was one zooming in The Times this
morning—a woman’s voice saying, “Women have not a word to say
in politics.” There is no woman in the Cabinet; nor in any
responsible post. All the idea makers who are in a position to make
ideas effective are men. That is a thought that damps thinking, and
encourages irresponsibility. Why not bury the head in the pillow,
plug the ears, and cease this futile activity of idea making? Because
there are other tables besides officer tables and conference tables.
Are we not leaving the young Englishman without a weapon that
might be of value to him if we give up private thinking, tea-table
thinking, because it seems useless? Are we not stressing our
disability because our ability exposes us perhaps to abuse, perhaps
to contempt? “I will not cease from mental fight,” Blake wrote.
Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it.

The current flows fast and furious. It issues in a spate of words from
the loudspeakers and the politicians. Every day they tell us that we
are a free people, fighting to defend freedom. That is the current
that has whirled the young airman up into the sky and keeps him
circling there among the clouds. Down here, with a roof to cover us
and a gas mask handy, it is our business to puncture gas bags and
discover seeds of truth. It is not true that we are free. We are both
prisoners tonight—he boxed up in his machine with a gun handy; we
lying in the dark with a gas mask handy. If we were free we should be
out in the open, dancing, at the play, or sitting at the window talking
together. What is it that prevents us? “Hitler!” the loudspeakers cry
with one voice. Who is Hitler? What is he? Aggressiveness, tyranny,
the insane love of power made manifest, they reply. Destroy that,
and you will be free.


Smoke rises over Lviv, Ukraine, March 18, 2022
Photo: linked from AP / New York Times

The drone of the planes is now like the sawing of a branch overhead.
Round and round it goes, sawing and sawing at a branch directly
above the house. Another sound begins sawing its way into the
brain. “Women of ability”—it was Lady Astor speaking in The Times
this morning—“are held down because of a subconscious Hitlerism
in the hearts of men.” Certainly we are held down. We are equally
prisoners tonight—the Englishmen in their planes, the
Englishwomen in their beds. But if he stops to think he may be
killed; and we too. So let us think for him. Let us try to drag up into
consciousness the subconscious Hitlerism that holds us down. It is
the desire for aggression; the desire to dominate and enslave. Even
in the darkness we can see that made visible. We can see shop
windows blazing; and women gazing; painted women; dressed-up
women; women with crimson lips and crimson fingernails. They are
slaves who are trying to enslave. If we could free ourselves from
slavery we should free men from tyranny. Hitlers are bred by slaves.

A bomb drops. All the windows rattle. The anti-aircraft guns are
getting active. Up there on the hill under a net tagged with strips of
green and brown stuff to imitate the hues of autumn leaves guns are
concealed. Now they all fire at once. On the nine o’clock radio we
shall be told “Forty-four enemy planes were shot down during the
night, ten of them by anti-aircraft fire.” And one of the terms of
peace, the loudspeakers say, is to be disarmament. There are to be
no more guns, no army, no navy, no air force in the future. No more
young men will be trained to fight with arms. That rouses another
mind-hornet in the chambers of the brain—another quotation. “To
fight against a real enemy, to earn undying honor and glory by
shooting total strangers, and to come home with my breast covered
with medals and decorations, that was the summit of my hope…. It
was for this that my whole life so far had been dedicated, my
education, training, everything….”

Those were the words of a young Englishman who fought in the last
war. In the face of them, do the current thinkers honestly believe
that by writing “Disarmament” on a sheet of paper at a conference
table they will have done all that is needful? Othello’s occupation will
be gone; but he will remain Othello. The young airman up in the sky
is driven not only by the voices of loudspeakers; he is driven by
voices in himself—ancient instincts, instincts fostered and cherished
by education and tradition. Is he to be blamed for those instincts?
Could we switch off the maternal instinct at the command of a table
full of politicians? Suppose that imperative among the peace terms
was: “Childbearing is to be restricted to a very small class of
specially selected women,” would we submit? Should we not say,
“The maternal instinct is a woman’s glory, It was for this that my
whole life has been dedicated, my education, training, everything.”
…But if it were necessary for the sake of humanity, for the peace of
the world, that childbearing should be restricted, the maternal
instinct subdued, women would attempt it. Men would help them.
They would honor them for their refusal to bear children. They
would give them other openings for their creative power. That too
must make part of our fight for freedom. We must help the young
Englishmen to root out from themselves the love of medals and
decorations. We must create more honorable activities for those
who try to conquer in themselves their fighting instinct, their
subconscious Hitlerism. We must compensate the man for the loss
of his gun.

The sound of sawing overhead has increased. All the searchlights
are erect. They point at a spot exactly above this roof. At any
moment a bomb may fall on this very room. One, two, three, four,
five, six … the seconds pass. The bomb did not fall. But during those
seconds of suspense all thinking stopped. All feeling, save one dull
dread, ceased. A nail fixed the whole being to one hard board. The
emotion of fear and of hate is therefore sterile, unfertile. Directly
that fear passes, the mind reaches out and instinctively revives itself
by trying to create. Since the room is dark it can create only from
memory. It reaches out to the memory of other Augusts—in
Bayreuth, listening to Wagner; in Rome, walking over the
Campagna; in London. Friends’ voices come back. Scraps of poetry
return. Each of those thoughts, even in memory, was far more
positive, reviving, healing and creative than the dull dread made of
fear and hate. Therefore if we are to compensate the young man for
the loss of his glory and of his gun, we must give him access to the
creative feelings. We must make happiness. We must free him from
the machine. We must bring him out of his prison into the open air.
But what is the use of freeing the young Englishman if the young
German and the young Italian remain slaves?

The searchlights, wavering across the flat, have picked up the plane
now. From this window one can see a little silver insect turning and
twisting in the light. The guns go pop pop pop. Then they cease.
Probably the raider was brought down behind the hill. One of the
pilots landed safe in a field near here the other day. He said to his
captors, speaking fairly good English, “How glad I am that the fight
is over!” Then an Englishman gave him a cigarette, and an English
woman made him a cup of tea. That would seem to show that if you
can free the man from the machine, the seed does not fall upon
altogether stony ground. The seed may be fertile.

At last all the guns have stopped firing. All the searchlights have
been extinguished. The natural darkness of a summer’s night
returns. The innocent sounds of the country are heard again. An
apple thuds to the ground. An owl hoots, winging its way from tree
to tree. And some half-forgotten words of an old English writer
come to mind: “The huntsmen are up in America….” Let us send
these fragmentary notes to the huntsmen who are up in America, to
the men and women whose sleep has not yet been broken by
machine-gun fire, in the belief that they will rethink them
generously and charitably, perhaps shape them into something
serviceable. And now, in the shadowed half of the world, to sleep.

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Photo by Best Video Performance Space, 2021

"A funny thing happened on our way to digital utopia: we find ourselves increasingly missing reality." David Sax's 2016 book The Revenge of the Analog acknowledged that humans need to work, sell, and live in the real world—not on a screen.

One of the best aspects of living in Hamden, Connecticut, USA is Best Video --more precisely, Best Video Film & Cultural Center. Hank Paper founded Best Video as a video rental store in 1985, and organized it around his extraordinary archive of films and programs on DVD and VHS. After 30 years and the demise of the video rental business elsewhere, Paper sold Best Video to a newly-formed nonprofit local cultural center. With over 30,000 titles, and a special wealth of classic, foreign, and independent titles, Best Video had become a cultural asset that the community could not let go. It now boasts curated screenings, a local performance space welcoming local musicians including high school students, readings and literary events, and a coffee bar that has become a local favorite (in addition to providing high-quality sipping while browsing).

Hank Hoffman (l) and Hank Paper (r) in Best Video

Walking into Best Video is an experience akin to entering a good public library --friendly, unhurried atmosphere, excellent help and advice, and a wealth of interesting finds that you probably did not realize you were looking for, or missing. Although the archive supports life on a screen —once the silver screen, now the flat digital kind— that screen time is firmly anchored to the sensory life of reality.

With Best Video, your selection is not guided by what a streaming service wants to show you (often disguised as "recommendation"), or what it pays that streaming service to curate. A streaming service could never support the number and variety of independent films archived on DVD. How Best Video's films are organized is both a little confusing and delightfully idiosyncratic --categories such as "Oscar losers," films organized by directors living and dead, film noir, musical events, and of course the staff picks. If you can't find it, the staff can locate it in minutes.

Best Video enables and enhances that a rare contemporary experience --true serendipity. Films you did not know existed, or forgot about, or never heard of, or supply an interest that you're just beginning to develop. The joys of collocation are very similar to the shelves of a good public library—items both famous and obscure, sometimes right next to each other. I have become aware of how the offerings of the streaming services are channeled, guided, and limited, as well as how dreadful their search interfaces are. How arbitrary their assignments of genre or interest are.

The streaming services are an excellent example of the problem highlighted in Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. The shallow offerings on Netflix, Hulu, or any of the others serve the corporate interests that finance them —so that amazing material is simply omitted and by omission a viewer cannot even think to look for it. Where Carr was concerned with our withering abilities to think and read deeply, visiting Best Video shows how by analogy we are also losing the ability to view and imagine deeply. Ukrainian film such as Bitter Harvest (2017—about the profound famine of 1932 called in Ukrainian the Holodomor, in which millions died) form a sense of national reality so often lacking in superficial popular recommendations.

The film collections of larger public libraries can partially fill the void left by the death of independent video rental stores (as well as the bland chains). The best part of Best Video is sheer unpredictability —not a quality that streams to your home easily. A funny thing happened on the way to ubiquity —it turns out that place is important. Best Video is a vital third place for viewing, talking, and finding —some of the qualities that make us human.

Best Video Coffee Bar, photo courtesy of Best Video, 2020

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In The New York Times recently (December 24, 2021), Julie Lasky (real estate beat) wrote about Reid Byers of Princeton. Reid wrote The Private Library . . . : The History of the Architecture and Furnishing of the Domestic Bookroom, because he found no other books specifically about private libraries about experiences of creating and using private, domestic libraries and why some people continue to build, curate, and preserve them. (See also The Times' slideshow.)

Byers' term "book-wrapt" extends the meanings and connotations both of the homophone rapt (as in enraptured) and wrapped as in surrounded-by or encased-in. A well-curated library "should feel like easing into a hot tub, strolling into a magic store, emerging into the orchestra pit . . . it is a setting forth, and it is a coming back to center." In contrast to a living room without people (a room without the living), a library without people casts a spell. "I like to be in a room where I've read half the books, and I'd like there to be enough books that I cannot possibly read them in my remaining years," Byers says in The Times. (Think of the Japanese term tsundoku --books that remain unread.)

David Atlas (The Atlas of New Librarianship) writes, "I have long contended that a room full of books is simply a closet but that an empty room with a librarian in it is a library." (p. 16) While I have long appreciated Lankes' reminder that librarians are the key to libraries' purpose, I have also long felt that Lankes is gliding over something important in a bid to re-assert librarianship in the face of digital complacency. (The sense that "everything is going digital" and "software is eating the world," so why bother with anything else? —a sense especially promoted by anyone selling anything digital.) What is Lankes' missing? The center of libraries' fundamental identity: libri -- books. From scrolls to codices to streaming text, books have been the distinguished feature of libraries for millennia. (I cannot restrict "book" to mean "binding.")

Book-wrapt captures the setting out and re-centering or entering-in that a good library provides for its humans. Librarians are, above all, library people. Were books suddenly magically and mysteriously removed from human habitations, librarians would lack their primary referent—one wonders even whether the term or function would any longer be intelligible.

Academic librarians have become aware of a paradox: students do not particularly like library spaces where there are no books. The bookless library of Applied Engineering and Technology at the University of Texas (2010) remains an outlier (though most engineering and technology libraries have drastically weeded print collections). In 2009 the Cushing Academy in Ashburnham, MA intended to remove all its printed materials to become an all-digital library for the 21st century, but after a change in leadership (!) a librarian was engaged in 2014 to re-balance the library's collections and restore print resources. Surveys and studies of user experience have shown that students do want books, at least in the background.

On the other hand, print circulation everywhere is far less than 2002 or 2012. Students seem to want books in libraries, but don't particularly read them. Younger Americans do seem to use libraries and know about them, as much as do older Americans, but follow typologies similar to those of other ages, from distant admirers to library lovers. (Those Pew studies were published before the rise of marked anti-intellectual distrust in some sectors of the American population.) I have not yet seen anyone solve the apparent contradiction: if younger Americans use libraries at rates exceeding or similar to their elders, why is academic library circulation of printed books down? I believe it may be because of different kinds of uses of different genres of books: academic books are rarely meant to be read cover-to-cover, unlike popular or literary fiction (whether textual or graphic).

I suspect that the term "book-wrapt" might give a hint about why students want books in libraries, but don't actually use them (whether internally or circulating).

When students enter a space with many books, they are seeking a space to get and keep themselves on task: they manage technology carefully, especially at crunch time. In a built environment wrapped in books, these students can become enrapt in their work. I suspect students like the backdrop of books because it reminds them of possible personal journeys. As Reid Byers says, masses of books represent "delights that we hold in possibility." Books represent explored worlds, roads not yet taken. (—or never to be taken?) Students want the company of books because in their spell they become re-centered: they are both setting out on tasks and and coming back to a sense of themselves as students and not just consumers or customers.

My insight might strike some as simple-minded romanticism. On the contrary, I have seen students remain remarkably on task in libraries. For at least some students, the books physically represent the learning they would like to achieve (whether achieving simply for a grade, a career, or genuine learning for the sake of growing up and coming home in the world). The books are somehow talismanic of their better selves.

The books represent relationships with the outside world, with history, with what many students would like to become. Those who see students as merely "revenue units" will never understand this. The symbolic power of books and libraries is easily underestimated but nonetheless potent, as every aspiring authoritarian and dictator knows. The enduring portent of book-burnings and the novel Fahrenheit 451 are a mirror image of book-wrapt. A library without books would turn its users into academic refugees—and maybe that is the intent of reductive and disruptive digital capitalism. As ever, books somehow slip the net, and with them their readers.

Disclosure: I have known Reid Byers although I doubt he would remember me. I knew his father, Arthur Byers, who for many years was Secretary of Princeton Theological Seminary. Reid was educated there as a Presbyterian minister several classes before me.

Image: Theodor-Heuss-Haus, Feuerbacher Weg, Stuttgart-Nord Arbeitszimmer von Theodor Heuss (mit einer Auswahl seiner Bücher) Public domain in wikimedia

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A few weeks ago I read Joshua Kim’s blog entry The Great Remain, and thought of several responses.  Joshua wonders about “some [large] number of people who work in higher education who remain in their jobs, even though they have saved enough money to stop working.”  His guess is that this number considerably exceeds those who have left in the widely-proclaimed Great Resignation of 2021 (and likely 2022).

My first observation focuses on “even though they have saved enough money” —this is a condition that is hard to specify further.  I’m over my officially designated “retirement age” (66) and in talking with my trusty TIAA representative, “enough” is a moving target. 

I was surprised that TIAA’s actuaries suggest that I should plan for “enough” until I’m 98, or 2051.  (Social Security Administration indicates estimates 85.4 years, so I don't know what accounts for the difference.) This is a lot longer than retirement planning used to consider feasible.  Unless I put it all into a guaranteed annuity now (or soon), I have to consider how much more some of my funds might grow in that roughly 30 year period.  This is tough: my anticipations of the next 30 years fluctuate between “growth” as the world economy shifts to a more sustainable basis, disaster (we’ll never pull off that shift), or muddling through (that shift, but only sort of). What do you think will happen?

So “enough money to stop working” is really hard to quantify for most of us except those in the upper income echelon amongst academics, who will always have enough.  “Partner income” (where applicable) as a consideration is also frought: how healthy is that person?  What does the partner do, and for how long?

At any rate, I share Joshua’s perception that in fact many people in academic who could retire from their present positions and present income instead choose to remain.  Joshua suggested three large reasons for remaining: mission, identity, and “institutional rigidity.”

“Mission” is a tricky one, especially for those of us in private higher ed.  Even at a more “liberal” (read: mainstream) Catholic institution, the concept of mission has become rather dented in the past 15 years. Does higher education in fact drive increasing social and economic stratification? Do we inadvertently contribute to an increasingly technocratic “winner take all” society and hence forced into the culture wars?  Is this what I signed up for 40 years ago?  My sense is that a lot of the missions of higher education (which vary significantly) have changed since the 1970s, and my own sense of participation in that has diminished.

“Identity” can be especially tricky: Joshua points out the way that in academic job and identity become conflated.  This is especially difficult for the clan-like identities of academic disciplines: “I’m a sociologist, historian, virologist, medievalist.”  It can be less difficult for those whose professional identities run concurrent to other significant life commitments, such as family, social service, or religious commitments.  I surmise that more than a connection with a specific academic role (professor, dean, librarian, counselor), connections to specific kinds of responsibilities (teaching, research, consultation) bind identities significantly, and are expressed with reference to one’s academic clan.  I know at least two retired Provosts who describe themselves as a “historian” or a “biologist,” even though neither has published in some years. Neither would call themselves "retired Provost" (assuming anyone else even knows what that means) or even "retired administrator" or "retired VP."

The loss of identity upon resignation from academia reflects the wider loss of identity all retired persons face in a society that assigns economic and moral weight to activity: working, producing, earning.  I read one person, a significant leader in a growing industry who retired, who said “I went from being Who’s Who to who’s that? in a week.”  Ageism and the denial of worth and even (at extreme) humanity of those who are older –especially if they are not healthy in ways that show—will become a growing social issue as Baby Boomers swell the number of retired (and has already become a more contested issue than some years before).

Finally, what Joshua calls “institutional rigidity” (I prefer “inertia”) is a push-me/pull-you.  I know individuals who should retire, but whose habits and fears keep them in place, even at the cost of their own greater happiness.  I know several who hang on because they know that their institutions will discontinue their positions and maybe even their departments or disciplines, after they leave, and they value their own contribution enough to want to continue to make it. The vaunted “change of priorities” as academia is “disrupted,” or whatever the flavor-of-the-month bureaucratic language is.

Institutional inertia does indeed make stepping down feel like stepping off a cliff, rather than taking a single stair step. Academic work doesn’t have to be a binary role: you do it full time or you don’t.  But it has certainly evolved that way. Just try telling that to human resources departments and university attorneys.  For all that some individuals refuse to retire, academic organizations refuse to make it any easier.  One inertia begets the other.

I wonder how long the “great remain” will last.  Already I know of four academic library deans or directors in the small state of Connecticut that have retired in the past 18 months.  I know of many others in the various clans of academia who thus far have wanted to hang on in their jobs to see their organizations through the pandemic until “things get back to normal”—and now no one knows what that will look like.  Do we all face an endless parade of COVID-19 virus mutations?  A whole new pandemic from a different virus or some other cause?  I wonder how many will retire and leave with regret between January and June 2022, out of sheer exhaustion. The last two years have been very hard, by any measure.

I expect that most full-time positions will be filled in the future by contingent workers, whether in teaching or elsewhere, as the institutional drive for so-called efficiency, economy, and agility trumps most institution’s former academic mission.  I expect that the increasing precarity, and economic and social stratification in academia between the haves and have-nots, will intensify and come to resemble the combative polarization of the culture wars.  Whether I leave my own position or not, I can’t figure would whether the time is right, or will be permanently wrong beyond anything I can fix.

It's not a happy time to retire, but then, when would that be?

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This past week I reflected on the unexpected convergence of two very different writers, sources, and (on the surface) topics: Katherine Karkov's book, Imagining Anglo-Saxon England: Utopia, Heterotopia, Dystopia, and a blog entry by (Bishop) Nick Knisely on watching the light-weight series Ancient Aliens, and its implicit (and occasionally explicit) racism.

grazie di D. DiBartolomeo, Università Teramo

Karkov's writing is pointed. “Anglo-Saxon England has always been an imaginary place.” (p.1) A loaded term, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ has a history of very hazy meanings. Susan Oosthuizen notes the confusing early documentary evidence of “Old English” (sometimes also called “Anglo-Saxon”) from a mention of Englisc in Aethelbert’s law code of about 600 C.E., and in Bede, ca. 731. (The Emergence of the English, p.1) The nomenclature “Anglo-Saxon” was first used by Carolingian writers to distinguish those on the continent speaking Saxon or other Germanic languages from those in the island of the Angli. (Edward James, Europe’s Barbarians, p. 123). Conventionally the term has referred to those who lived in much of what is now England from 400 to 1100 C.E., a span of 700 years conventionally divided into three periods that exhibit marked differences. (Oosthuizen, p. 1)

The phrase "Anglo-Saxon" willy-nilly throws together disparate peoples who arrived on the island of Great Britain, roughly 400-600 C.E., from many places, including Southern Europe and the eastern Mediterranean. Presumed cultural cohesion is very hard to trace, as is the implied assumption that those denominated as Anglo-Saxons did not assimilate readily with the majority of the island’s residents who had already lived there a long time, whether they were of Celtic, Gallic, or other origins. Oosthuizen concludes, “The apparent clarity, cohesiveness, and implied cultural identity of the phrase “Anglo-Saxon" is a chimera that shimmers into invisibility as one approaches it.” (p. 4)

Karkov’s point is that "Anglo-Saxon" as a term denoting a people, cultural identity, or even language was a construct of the educated elite of Norman England, and then thei heirs in many succeeding generations. “Anglo-Saxon England is an ultimately empty space onto and into which identities and ideologies have been written, a floating signifier.” (p.2) The island that seemed to be on the edge of the world known to Europeans (ignoring Ireland, as usual) occupied a liminal space between the known and the unknown—a true midgard—of exceptional purity that inherited an imperial dream from Roman remnants and antecedents, culminating in the conviction that the English (or Anglo-Saxons) ought to be the rightful rulers of the earth. (Kathy Lavezzo, Angels on the Edge of the World, p. 21)

The Anglo-Saxon cultural domain continues to be re-imagined today in violent nationalist and racist ways based on a set of powerful and enduring origin legends. Those legends hold that those arrivals from the Continent and elsewhere imagined for themselves a distinctive outlook and coherent culture. Evidence of cohesion is almost impossible to find. What is found and famous, cultural works (such as Beowulf and the Franks Casket) that were originally produced for local purposes, were pressed into service generations later to justify the displacement and exile of indigenous peoples by self-referential heirs to the "Anglo-Saxons."

Fast-forward to the twenty-first century. The term "Anglo-Saxon" has become an expression for what Karkov terms retrotopia.

Retrotopia "involves both a looking back to an idealized past and a metaphorical migration back to it as a means of creating particular types of modern presents." (p. 24 and following for below) (The word was coined by Zygmunt Bauman in 2017.) Specifically, retrotopia refers "to the twenty-first-century loss of hope and community and the resulting location of happiness and communal identity in an imaginary past". Such a turn emphasizes tribal loyalties and identities, texts and symbols specifically associated with heritage. More than ordinary nostalgia (itself an eighteenth and nineteenth century coinage), retrotopia "is fueled in part by the digital technologies of the twenty-first century and uncanny isolated yet overcorrected state they create." Retrotopia creates "an undead past." Karkov vividly recounts the violence a retrotopia of "Anglo-Saxon" has done and continues to do, and she is ready to burn the field down and start over. Is that even possible?—leave alone advisable?

Karkov is concerned with the rhetorical use of "Anglo-Saxon" which is (and has always been) far more loaded than simply "Old English." It is one among several, alas. In the ferment of isolated yet hyperconnected individuals and online so-called "communities," there is more than one retrotopia.

Mary Beard tangled some time ago with internet trolls who firmly believe that ancient statuary and sculpture, now often presented as white-ash marble buffed to a finish, had to have been white and could not have been painted --despite convincing evidence that the ancients painted them. Beard famously took on the trolls. Somehow the concept of painted (maybe even gaudily) statuary violates an idealized of the Romans as "white." Modern racism just does not map neatly onto the ancient world.

Donna Zuckerberg (yes, related to that Zuckerberg) devoted an entire book to the misuse and misappropriation of ancient philosophy (especially Stoicism and Marcus Aurelius) and the threat that the alt-Right poses to classical studies. A "retrotopia" of Ancient Rome or Athens presents itself as "Western Civ" but carried all kind of internal contradictions, which usually remain unacknowledged. A retrotopia of ancient Rome has to sort out its allegiances in the Teutoberg Forest (glad the Rome lost? Or sorrow?), and has to navigate around the idea that the ancient Athenians didn't want Socrates to be celebrated, they wanted him dead (or at least exiled).

Is it because the real past presents so many complexities--even for those who care not a whit for complication--that the most facile retrotopia of all imagines "ancient aliens" and recasts them as foils for the twenty-first century? This is where Nick Knisely's intuition springs to life: that the stories told on that remarkably light-weight media series are always eccentrically mis-directed, invariably privileging the big names of "western civ" (such as the Egyptians or the Babylonians, who were of course not western at all) and ignoring Meso-Americans, southern Africans, not to mention ancient Chinese or ancient Indians. (--The last despite some of Indians' so-called "Aryan" status in the eyes of some nineteenth century Germans and their racist heirs.) The best retrotopia of all is one that never has to worry about annoying questions about real people and events from the past. Imagined aliens will always outmatch the pesky realities of ancient Romans.

Closer to home:

Christians are not at all immune from the currents that point to varieties of retrotopia. It's hard not to see the Museum of the Bible (I refuse to link to it) as a paean to ancient Judea and Israel, despite the visible reminders of ancient conflicts that often resulted in nothing anyone might call "blessed." Mainline Christians might quietly sneer at the primary Evangelical audience the Museum seeks, but are not immune to retrotopian thinking and feeling as well: idealized versions of the Reformation, or idealized figures of American Christian leaders, live on in sermons and homilies Sunday after Sunday.

Vaughan's concept of Christ Church, New Haven

I am a highly ambivalent member of a parish church that describes itself as "Anglo-Catholic," a designation I really prefer to avoid. It's not hard yearning and nostalgia in an implicit appeal to a glossy, idealized vision of a distant Anglican, Anglo-Saxon past. Various Anglican identities are steeped in memory, but too often memories can be invoked as a warrant for a liturgical style that dulls the edge of many ambiguous symbols. (The Good Friday liturgy and preaching too often just ignore the tangled and tragic history of Christian anti-Semistism.) Anglo-Catholicism was built (see, Keble, Pusey, Newman, and John Mason Neale) on a highly idealized, melancholic and nostalgia vision of purity located in large part in "Anglo-Saxon Christians" in some kind of pure past. (They might be better styled: Christians in the British Isles in late ancient and early medieval times).

Linking an idealized vision of a hallowed early medieval past with markedly Reformation language is a standing contradiction. Rite I can come off as seventeenth-century English prose (Episcopal Rite I) —Milton's language— dressed up in Aethelred's robes. What exactly are are Anglo-Catholic traditions trying to evoke? 597? King Alfred of Wessex? 1545? 1559? 1612? 1662? 1928? So-called "Anglo-Catholic" liturgical commitment just do not map neatly onto any of the several medieval periods.

That said, the roots to retrotopian longing run close to ecclesial nostalgia, but not simply. Retrotopia is well beyond the dignified melancholia of the type purveyed by Henry Vaughan (1845-1917, the architect of Christ Church, New Haven, and portions of the National Cathedral). Retrotopia is a fever-dream incubated in digital toxins. But it feeds off of a cultural nostalgia that is first cousin to the ecclesiastical nostalgia all too present in many ecclesial traditions (—not just Anglo-Catholic, Episcopalian, Anglican, or whatever you want to call it).

It behooves academic scholars of Ancient Greek and Latin literatures, medieval languages and literatures, and church historian sof several eras to beware of the mis-appropriation of important Christian symbols and discourse by those who simply cannot abide defenestration from a white Christian castle of supremacy. Historical study can curdle into nostalgia, nostalgia into retrotopia, and retrotopia into fascism. It can happen here.

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On September 13, Prof. Mary Beard wrote:

I sit in my study at home, and the combination of some bargains on AbeBooks and the digital world means that I don’t spend hours biking from one library to another, waiting for books to “come up”, standing by the photocopier etc etc. The new system is convenient, cost-effective and I love it. But I do sometimes wonder about its effect on the general world of the library. My early academic career was based in the bricks-and-mortar library. It was where I got my books, but it was also where I got many of my friends and the people to talk to about my (and their) work. I didn’t need wellbeing classes (I have to confess that the phrase “wellbeing” has precisely the opposite effect on me!). I had the day-to-day support network of the library. (It wasn’t all quite so virtuous, but that is another story, for when I retire, folks.)

There is also what it does to the staff and the whole infrastructure of the library. I rather dread that the library will become the “treasure house” of some precious, rare books – while everything else is done “off-site” or “online”. And I dread that there will be whole cohorts of staff who, instead of doing the admittedly tough job (but with human contact) of fetching books for readers, and of reshelving, are in the bowels of the basements doing wall-to-wall scanning.

—Mary Beard, A Don's Life

Prof. Beard writes about "scan and deliver" services for physical books otherwise inaccessible due to restrictions necessitated by the pandemic. Such services have become ubiquitous and many will probably survive the return to "normal" (whatever that word may come to mean). She fears that "there will never again be the kind of 'library culture' that I grew up with.

I believe I understand and can sympathize with many of Prof. Beard's fears. I'm a couple of years older than she, and given different retirement rules in the U.S., I'm still on the job for another academic year as a University Librarian of a small, regional, Catholic university of no particular consequence, that specializes in pre-professional and professional programs and is only slightly similar to Cambridge. I was educated in American liberal arts colleges and graduate schools in Classics and the History of Christianity, doubtless not to the level of Oxbridge scholarship, but with just enough familiarity to have participated in a library culture similar to what Prof. Beard remembers when I was in Princeton.

I've been in librarianship since professionally since 1985. In 1981 my first library staff job was typing catalogue cards at the Institute for Advanced Study Historical Studies Library. I have witnessed the disruptions of library services and scholarship in the ensuing decades, from the first generation of computerized catalogues and integrated library services to contemporary discovery and AI services.

I'm not about to claim that the "library culture" of which Prof. Beard so capably writes was neither so supportive, nor so good as it really was. (In my case, at least.) The library and information technologies of the time really did inadvertently foster a sense of collegiality and supportive community spirit. Those technologies—printed books, card catalogues, seminar rooms near relevant collections, in-person services with library staff of all kinds—enabled me to finish papers and degrees and often enjoy the process. Although it has become fashionable to claim that such technologies were based on the reality of "print scarcity" (such as: only one reader per book per time), it can be said equally that such technologies fostered collegiality, sharing, and personal contact on a day-to-day basis. How many times did a professor recommend a book which he or she had already checked out, often sitting adjacent? —so that when I had searched for the book and learned that it was in circulation, I had to ask him or her for it? Inconvenient? certainly. Personal contact? Definitely —even when personal contact was not always pleasant.

My only point is that present and future digital library technologies could (or perhaps do) foster collegiality, personal community, and supportive community in different manners from the past.

For example, in the 1990s I was working up a dissertation on the early works of an obscure Carolingian bishop. With present digital means, I might have learned that a German in Munich, an American in Toronto, and a professor down the road (in Trenton, N.J.) were working in different ways with the same author. Given the realities of the time, I learned about the last of those through our mutual acquaintance of a professor in Princeton. I learned about the second author when his presence at the Institute for Advanced Study facilitated an official invitation that he become a member of my dissertation committee. I learned about the first (the German in Munich) only after he had published a book that challenged some of my working assumptions. Digital technologies might have facilitated significant interaction with these scholars more quickly; the participation of all of us in digital networks might have given a chance for mutual discovery.

The library culture of the latter 20th century certainly was not always "virtuous" (Prof. Beard's term). There were some very real downsides. Much of the library work of the pre-digital eras was tedious and encouraged a mentality of slavish conformity to obscure and sometimes obstructive rules (both the formal: cataloguing; and the informal: we don't ever ask University Library X to supply anything via hand-written interlibrary loan requests on paper ALA forms, because we don't like them). At times, the former library culture formed a kind of dystopia utterly opaque to scholars and readers on the outside, but very much limiting their work in a manner of which they were unaware.

Libraries as cultures will continue to evolve, and not necessarily towards a dystopian future of cohorts of basement-dwelling, low-paid staff scurrying about the bowels of the treasure house. Neither heaven nor hell is likely.

Libraries are and will remain services, spaces, and resources—and online books, journals, and digital scholarship of all kinds will never be exactly obvious for everyone to find. The nature of learning is that its trails of evidence and citation are intricate and intersect in odd ways at unpredictable moments.

The "day-to-day support network of the library" will only disappear when humans are entirely removed. Perhaps that will happen in a distant someday, but not soon (despite administrators' and funders' concerns about productivity, cost, and impact—whatever those terms might mean).

Library users (readers, patrons) will continue to seek the level of support that they desire. (Some never wanted to interact with anyone else at all under any circumstances—the social loners or sociopathic misanthropes will always be with us.).

Those who really want support will, I truly believe, be able to find it from the same sources as always: peers, unexpected companions, acquaintances in other disciplines, unanticipated friends at a distance, and intelligent, informed, libraries oriented to both service and scholarship. Library readers (users, patrons) will cultivate the same good will and good humor from those staff who retrieve off-site materials, or who manage to locate or gain access to unsought but pertinent online resources.

Is outlook too sanguine or or sunny? I hope not. Libraries have been around a long, long time. I have had to explain to Provosts and Deans given to excessively short-term thinking that the temporal horizons of librarianship is decades if not centuries, and not only the next quarter or fiscal year. Matthew Battles (Library: An Unquiet History) reminds us that libraries, as centers of culture power, prestige, and legitimacy, have been targets for destruction from organized armies, terrorist organizations, and not-so-benign neglecters —as well as scheming academic administrators. Libraries have nevertheless survived, as have their users, and while the support networks they have fostered for scholars have sometimes (and tragically) gone into eclipse in evil times, they have re-emerged when times, technologies, and powers change.

Prof. Beard anticipates retirement from active faculty service, about the same time that I anticipate retirement from library leadership. It's hard to say good-bye and Godspeed without fearing decline, both personal, academic, disciplinary, and institutional. Without those good-byes, there can be no hello to another kind of work and life. I look forward to reading what Prof. Beard will write in the coming decades, from perspectives and prospects.

Thank you to Prof. Beard for consistently informative and provocative thinking over the decades. With more to come!

Books and their readers and non-readers, occasional readers, dip-in-and-out readers are in many ways the main subjects of What We Talk About When We Talk About Books.
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Leah's Price's 2019 What We Talk About When We Talk About Books is informative and witty. It resonates differently in the pandemic's later stages than when published two years ago. Since March 2020, immersion in a world made of words (whether printed or digital) has taken on new life, sometimes sharply (Kendi's How To Be An Anti-Racist), sympathetically (Brit Bennett's The Vanishing Half) and sometimes purely escapist (The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires).

Not only does Price quash numerous assumptions about books, readers, libraries, and futurists, she unearths the work of many editors, designers, publishers, booksellers, librarians, and reviewers who mediate the business of books between author and reader. Their invisible work is usually missed only in its absence: just try reading a error-filled, typo-rich self-published e-book on Amazon to get the point. Full credit to print book interior designer Jeff Williams, cover photographer Laura Hennessey and designer Chin-Yee Lee, research assistant Maia Silber. Since the author's acknowledgements are in alphabetical order, I am not sure which person is her editor at Basic Books/Hachette.

Books and their readers and non-readers, occasional readers, dip-in-and-out readers are in many ways the main subjects. Price has taught book history and English at Harvard and Rutgers. She has a sharp eye for the telling detail as well as the point of academic theories and critical turns.

Price overturns many assumptions both by readers and those who claim reading is becoming a non-issue. Why do both fetishize cover-to-cover reading of literary classics when that has always been a small minority of all book uses? She looks at what books can tell us about their users: which pages are thumbed, marked, dog-eared, which apparently untouched. The myth of the ideal book complements the myth of the ideal reader, and both are conveniently misleading.

The remarkable ignorance regarding book history and usage by those who first designed digital book readers led to costly and avoidable mistakes for Amazon, Barnes & Noble (the sad Nook) and Apple. The confident predictions of futurists and disruptors have time and again been left blowin' in the wind even as books have changed significantly at every turn of technology, social history, and political ideology.

The jacket image and design perfectly illustrate Price's points: red bordered page scrolling around bindings suggest the codex, the scroll, readers' uses and abuses, as well as the flames that have consumed libraries, readers, and régimes (the biblioclastic Fahrenheit 451; Winston Smith's tell-tale paperweight in 1984; Savonarola's, Trollope's, and Tom Wolfe's bonfires of vanities and Josef Goebbel's bonfires of books and their authors). As in Matthew Battles' The Library: An Unquiet History, books have as often attracted scorn and destruction as they have acclaim and conservation: books as sources of power, fear, and disruption.

Price's book is subtitled The History and Future of Reading. Universities often discount the presence of books because they are so routine. Undergraduates who seem unwilling, unable, or simply disinclined to read (as assigned, or on their own) may not be the accurate bell-weather faculty and administrators believe them to be. Sales and circulation of printed and digital books were both up during the pandemic, sometimes constrained by availability. Book sales were up 12% between June and mid-August 2020 compared with ten weeks' prior numbers.

Books have at the forefront of numerous developments in marketing: door-to-door marketing, consumer credit, self-serve retail sales, and online direct. Every time books have been proclaimed as dead (including Thomas Edison's confident predictions in 1913), they have had a way of sneaking back, whether hardbound, paperbound, or digital, print or serialized. Much hinges on whether time for reading of any kind will be available in surveillance gig-work economy. Price is confidently warns that "the experience of immersion in a world made of words will survive in and only if readers continue to carve out places and times to have words with one another."

Bryan Alexander's Academia Next: The Futures of Higher Education, and Joshua Kim's and Edward Maloney's Learning Innovation and the Future of Higher Education (both 2020 from Johns Hopkins University Press) set very different boundaries and take very different approaches to their subject.
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Bryan Alexander's Academia Next: The Futures of Higher Education, and Joshua Kim's and Edward Maloney's Learning Innovation and the Future of Higher Education (both 2020 from Johns Hopkins University Press) set very different boundaries and take very different approaches to their subject.  Yet they are also fascinating to read in imaginary dialog: the one expansive, the other organizational; the one a futurist's set of questions and the other seeking to establish a new discipline and its role in academia as well as on any particular campus.  They don't say similar things, but they do offer contrasting and useful perspectives.

Academia Next is by a futurist, and if you're allergic to futurist kinds of thinking, stop here (or skip to below).  Alexander is trying to extrapolate likely, possible, or unexpected consequences from visible trends, and ask what are possible, desirable, and aspirational scenarios by 2035.  Like other examples in the futurist genre, he might be faulted for inadequately understanding the complexities and contingencies of historical causation, which neither repeats nor hardly ever rhymes (pace Mark Twain).  In addition, historical development is hardly continuous improvement in one direction: there are lapses, losses, lacunae, and outright blunders which will be forever hard to explain. 

Nevertheless, Alexander's scenarios can be variously compelling and repellant: (1) higher education in decline; or (2) higher education as an adjunct to "health care nation;" or (3) higher education transformed by open resources, scholarship, and enrollments; or (4) the "augmented" campus or face-to-face learning with significant augmented and mixed reality; or (5) more automated learning ("Siri, tutor me") or (6) the self-consciously retro campus that carefully limits digital entanglements.  Alexander mentions the very real problems of digital security, and articulated understandings of privacy and self-ownership of data only in passing.  The potential growth of a surveillance campus that would rival China's surveillance state carries numerous moral and legal questions.  Exactly who is entrusted with all that information, and if outside vendors, then under which circumstances? Cui bono? student, administrator, parent, government official, funding lender, teacher? 

Academia Next was published on the cusp of the multiple meltdowns of 2020: pandemic, economy, anti-racism, and paranoid conspiracy-mongering.  Although these entangled crises might have disqualified Alexander's futurism, they erve to focus what is at stake in higher education: cui bono? again.  Current forecasts for what will change or remain the same in higher education post-pandemic, post-neoliberal economics, post-conspiracy are doubtless premature, and the real gains or losses are bound to be unexpected or only half-expected: things fall apart (and racism, alas, is unlikely to dissipate quickly).  Through all that he knew about in early 2020, and learned in subsequent events, Alexander calls for clarity of vision, courage, and persistence: the traditional values of higher education will not be entirely misplaced and some expensive commitments will continue to be worthwhile.

Kim's & Maloney's Learning Innovation is decidedly more modest regarding the future, and grounded regarding current practice.  They ask what are the organizational, pedagogical, and disciplinary consequences of presently developing theoretical frameworks, methodological practices, shared challenges, and goals as regards learning innovation?  K&M unpack the title words themselves (learning, innovation), and their chapters on changing understandings of learning and institutional change clarify many issues often buried in the bustle of actively producing instruction. 

K&M's chapter "Reclaiming Innovation from Disruption" alone is worth the price of the book: they show carefully how "disruptive innovation" poorly serves higher education (especially when devotees to the cult throw shade on anyone who questions it).  Higher education is a complex ecosystem; learners are not products; higher education is diverse.  The fundamental orientation towards sharing learning, ideas, and plans, right down to budgets, communications strategies, and technical know-how "would shock anyone who has spent a career in the corporate world."  It is easier to ask what is not shared than what is.  K&M's brief history of PLATO, the 40-year progenitor of all subsequent digital learning platforms clinches their case.   The oft-unexamined faith that new technologies will disrupt the future of colleges and universities almost always ignores the history of educational technologies and erases the impact of other sources of change.  (This is a pertinent rejoinder to Alexander, as above.)

Academia Next at this date is available in SHU library only in print copy; Learning Innovation is available both in print and online (with unlimited concurrent users, and printing or e-mailing unlimited pages).  Learning Innovation is easy to read as long as you can bear to read from a screen.  (A leading cause of eye strain during the pandemic.) I hear Buzz Lightyear: "To infinity and beyond!"