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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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(See previous post.)

A month after moving to Philadelphia, I can devote sufficient mental bandwidth to the matter of unpacking my books. Physically moving a library, or any extensive set of books, not only offers new juxtapositions, new combinations, new shelving arrangements, even when the bookcases themselves have been moved —but also a chance for reflection upon what this particular collection of books can mean.

In September 2021 Mary Beard posted a short essay about weeding her books (paywall) in preparation for retirement from Cambridge University after many years. She asked: does anyone have any advice? and I responded. I indicated what kind of criteria we employed in my library when we undertook a massive weeding project in 2015 (in which we shed tens of thousands of redundant volumes).

Then I wrote to Mary more personally: a personal library is a personal expression of loyalties, history, hopes, even disappointments. I asked her:

  • Does this particular book remind me of a significant individual? (colleague, mentor, friend, family)
  • Is this a book that I've always had (since childhood or adolescence)?—and I just can't bear to send it away because it reminds me of where I came from;
  • Is this a book that I have a realistic chance of reading in the coming years? --both in my professional field, and in other subjects that I find interesting;
  • Is this a book I wish to retain because of a future project I seriously intend to undertake? (not just "someday" but a time more specific).

Using these criterion I weeded my book form approximately 1,000 to just under 500. I packed them well, in smaller boxes to avoid back-breaking lifts—and the movers looked at me with some dismay anyway.

When I unpacked and shelved these books in Philadelphia, I was reminded, of course, "Oh, I really want to read that" even if it's several years old and by now thoroughly reviewed. I could also resolve quirks: why were volumes of fiction shelved in different bookcases? I could now put the fiction together, as well as biographical books, and books by a few particularly beloved authors, whether famous (Tolkien) or less well-known (the late Frederick Buechner, RIP).

I can't report finding any particular surprises, or sudden amazing insights. I affirm several long-standing interests (Old English language and literature; classical writers; Karl Barth; seafaring and sea travelers)—and that feels good. Since I'm in a new community where I know a few people, but not many, these authors, living and dead, provide partners for imagined dialogue.

Beyond all that, I can affirm the power of learning well-grounded in life, an integration and differentiation of points of view. What might Kierkegaard have to say to Colson Whitehead? Virginia Woolf to P.D. James? This is the inherited power of formative education in the liberal arts —an idea or ideal (or set of ideals) now passing out of practice or respect. These voices (living and dead) do not sort themselves neatly according to contemporary ideological commitments or political tribes—and thank God for that!

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I haven't posted since May --during which time a member of my family received his graduate degree from Yale, and my spouse and I travelled to Scotland for three weeks, including ten days on a small boat in the Outer Hebrides. I retired from my position as a librarian. I have been preparing our house for sale and moving to Philadelphia.

This blog began in 2010 with my views about books, e-books, and readers. Then it was on the Typepad platform. Since then I have posted sometimes regularly and other times hardly at all, migrated to WordPress, and expanded my comments beyond my concerns as a librarian. I've had hardly any readers, nor sought them. I wrote this for my own thinking, my pleasure as a writer, and modest contribution for whomever might read it. I am from the generation which does not post deeply personal remarks on a public platform of any kind, so this is neither a diary nor an intellectual autobiographical sketch. It's merely a set of remarks.

Bust of an Old Man, attributed to Gerrit Dou, ca. 1640-1645; The Leiden Collection

So where do I go with this now? Retirement has freed me from having to be more diplomatic about the retrograde views of the administrative leadership of my previous academic employer. I certainly don't miss the commute and the daily experience of feeling insulted and devalued by a University leadership that could find no serious money to put into a library, nor will nor imagination to do so. I don't want to settle scores, though; that's old news.

Extensible might come to mean librarianship extended and transformed in my life into something not originally intended—observations on becoming more of a writer and less of a leader. The disciplines of a librarian: thoughtfulness, order, consistency, intelligibility, might serve me well with a new focus.

Recently I read Steven Petrow's hilarious and provocative Stupid Things I Won't Do When I Get Old. As the subtitle promises, it is highly judgmental, unapologetically honest, and sometimes very funny By the end Petrow turns much more empathetic than one might have predicted. It's a take-down, but not just a take-down. It's a mind-the-gap notice, but an entertaining one.

In my forties I once heard a wise older person say, "Be careful who you are when you're middle aged, because you only become more so when you're old." Anyone can find examples of people whose characters, as they age, tilt towards their negative traits and away from their previous more positive. That's a well-taken warning.

I do worry a bit about living away from younger people, since I spent my career on university campuses. I have already heard older people dismiss the very real mental health images of young, post-pandemic adults as mere whinging "snowflakes." I don't want to lose emotional sensitivity, flexibility, and empathy. I watched those qualities ebb in my mother as she lived with chronic pain in her later years —and pain can eat away at you. Still, plenty of people experience chronic daily pain and resist becoming judgmental. Working with young people took me out of myself, and I want to find a way to continue that appropriately.

Now that our house is on the market, and prepared for the market, I have a moment to pause and to feel retired, perhaps for the first time since August, when I officially left my post. Freedom, uprooting, moving, the space to write can be threatening, and I need to give myself some time for this transition. (And I've hardly had that time.)

Quo ibis? Quo vadis? I'm only now finding out, and I look forward to the journey through the later years of my life.

Shout-out to Mary Beard, whose blog has paralleled my own transition to retirement. (It is, unfortunately, pay-walled by TLS.) In her case it was pretty much forced by English law and academic custom. I had the relative freedom to chose my time after my spouse qualified for Medicare. I worked several years later than Mary has done, and I'm glad for it, and was ready to go all the same. Thanks, Mary!

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Published on 1 Comment on Reweaving the Atlantic’s Edge

David Gange's The Frayed Atlantic Edge is subtitled A Historian's Journey from Shetland to the Channel. Both title and subtitle bear plain-language meanings and metaphor.

The Atlantic edge orients the reader not to the edge of the British and Irish archipelago from the land, but from the point of view of the ocean.

Frayed carries both the sense of "things come apart," but unraveling of societies and misconceptions, and suggests Gange's desire: to re-conceptualize, to knit up the liminal littoral —in a sense to extend the ancient intention to repair the world (תיקון עולם)(tikkun olam) to repair the coast (תיקון חוֹף)(tikkun khofe) and all who live there, both human and other.

The journey is not only the ten voyages by kayak and one mountain hike (no "only" there!), but also Gange's evolving understanding of history and memory, of understanding interwoven (or frayed) interactions of environment, social history, ecological devastation, and historical ideologies.

Above all, Gange is a highly effective narrator and interlocutor, with a certain audacious charm that makes me want to join him for month of evenings in a quiet pub with pint, and just listen to him. From this American's perspective, he is one of those extraordinary British characters who accomplish something truly remarkable (in this case, a lot of kayaking under very challenging conditions) with equally remarkable equanimity, even nonchalance. All this from a Ph.D. in History from Cambridge, so no slouch.

"The significance of coasts is consistently underestimated," Gange writes, and "this book sets out to put some of that imbalance right." (p. ix) Structured by region and course of 13 months, Gange's narrates both the consistent factors in the regions from Shetland to Land's End in wind, waves, and rocks, and divergence, how differently the various island and coastal cultures that have adapted to these consistent factors. The first half of the book focuses upon kayaking, and the physicality of coasts and waves, smells, sounds, sights.

Gange is distant intellectual heir to G. M. Trevelyan, who believed strongly in history informed by muddy boots, and who composed an essay Walking and called his legs his two "doctors" (meaning physicians or teachers or both?). After Trevelyan, Gange traces a line of thinking through Archibald Haldane (The Drove Roads of Scotland, etc.), although both his and Trevelyan's brands of romanticism were implicated in varying degrees in the imperialism and centralizing cultural mindset of the Anglo-Scottish aristocracy (and which sponsored the devastating enclosures across Scotland). A different set of forebears, a generation or three removed, are Alastair and Ninian Dunnett, who wrote the kayaking classic The Canoe Boys in 1934, sending serial reports to The Daily Record (newspaper) of their progress and discoveries—among which were that the vigorous communities on western coast of Scotland were not so remote and backward as the imperializing rhetoric of progress had claimed. A later, similar, intellectual and athletic example is Brian Wilson's Blazing Paddles (1988). Make no mistake: what the Dunnetts, Wilson, and Gange (and others) have done qualifies as an athletic feat: one has to be in superb physical shape to withstand the rigors of the maritime conditions. (The galleries of photographs in the book's related website bear abundant witness to the challenges.)

Photo by David Gange; linked only (not reproduced) from his website The Frayed Atlantic Edge

Gange writes more immediately in the aftermath of Barry Cunliffe's Facing the ocean : the Atlantic and its peoples, 8000 BC-AD 1500 (2001 and later). Cunliffe's book occasioned some debate among historians (earning an appraisal as "outlined more in romantic phrases . . . rather than in the measured language of science reporting the rigorous testing of hypotheses" from Malcolm Wagstaff, EHR 117:301). Cunliffe's work remains a "clear exposition" of the continuities in ancient seacoast cultures, as well as their differences, and Gange does him one better: rather than facing the ocean, Gange is on it, facing the shore.

Gange's book is neither under- nor over-theorized, and as he promises on page x, the balance shifts from kayaking, and the smells, sounds, waves, and winds of the coast to "historical research, literary criticism, and argument." Never tendentious, Gange bravely and critically reads poetry, feminist and post-imperialist theory, and socio-political argument in a fashion that might be called post-modern were it not so readable (unlike so much post-modern writing). He writes a personal journey as a historian, neglecting neither his discipline nor the personal memories and hopes, and hospitality of those he meets. (Arriving in a small community on a kayak is a great way to spark conversation at a far deeper level than any ordinary tourist or visiting scholar.)

This book's combination of history, literature, theory, environmental sciences, and physical achievement may not earn kudos from those historians focused exclusively upon documents and the "rigorous testing of hypotheses," nor those administrators and politicians who bludgeon creative academics with required impact evaluation in the Research Excellence Framework. (One might take all those ratings and throw them overboard, along with their administrators and politicians, somewhere north of the Shetlands.) Gange's graceful combination, nevertheless, achieves an uncommon synthesis and evokes in this reader a strong desire to learn more.

There is too much in Gange's book to summarize easily, and his chapters bear re-reading (or an experiment: reading the chapters in reverse order). His epilogue, "The View from the Sea," both looks forward to further study, and expresses how this journey changed him personally after a year of writing and teaching back in Birmingham.

"What I missed most was immersion in constant movement: the world view from the low of the wave. I missed the sense of being part of a vast, coherent dynamism. Indoors I was sometimes unsettled (a condition I could only refer to as 'the bends,' since it was caused by coming up from the sea) and sometimes resort to a sleeping bag in the garden among the foxes and green woodpeckers. Never before had I so welcome rain: a good cold soaking was the best medicine of all." (339)
. . . . "I wondered how much the journey had changed me otherwise and thought again of the ragged map of Britain whose every western indentation now conjured a story, an emotion or a physical sensation. I realised that immersion in these worlds had not, as I'd expected, cured me of my romanticism. . . . It isn't romanticism that needs to be cleared from perspectives on these places, but the assumption that these communities somehow below to the past, not the future, and are merely hazy places to escape to."
. . . "The journey had shown me that a romanticism which delves into the natures of humans and their fellow species, finding wonder while rooted in the real, might not be so naive after all." (346-347)

I look forward to reading Gange's future work.

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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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(This post continues thoughts prompted by Prof. Mary Beard; see my previous post for context.

Up close and personal, card catalogs were less loved by those who created and maintained them than by some (or many) of those used them. Nicholson Baker's celebrated articles sought intentionally to denigrate librarians who were well aware of the shortcomings. Less expert users asked for—and often received—a lot of help using card catalogs. They were subject to all kinds of degradation, including a few obnoxious professors or other users who simply ripped out cards rather than write notes about which books to search for in the shelves. By far most card catalog users were respectful, but some weren't and they caused other users and librarians hours of trouble. Somehow Nicholson Baker and others just don't want to remember what working daily with a card catalog was really like --the bad with the good.

Nicholson Baker's celebrated take-down of newspaper digitization was even more precious. Librarians who had to work with old printed newspapers day in and day out often hated them for good reasons. Printed on cheap, acid-based paper, most newspapers quickly deteriorated. As they deteriorated, they gave off motes of dust that included nearly microscopic bits of acidified paper that bore inks with ingredients such as lead, arsenic, cadmium, and titanium. A large room full of old newspapers (often located at a basement level) was a mildly toxic environment, toxicity intensified by paper mold. Digitization of content undoubtedly obliterated or obscured some content, but was the only practical alternative to substantial structural, conservation, and labor costs. Baker has apparently preserved many newspapers in his home. I wish him well; I wouldn't set foot in the place, no matter how gracious (or hostile) he might be.

Back to card catalogs: what was lost in the transition to digital catalogs? (—with a pit stop for microfiches.)

In a word, contexts.

A reasonably current academic library collection in a given subject, in the card catalog era, could offer a fair (though not exhaustive) representation of monographic publications. (Journals, manuscripts, archives, and special collections far more variously.) When a user found a run of cards by an author, or particular work, or subject, the size of the run (sometimes helpfully marked by separator cards) could given an impression of amount and range of scholarship. For students, this could be instructive, such as "I've never heard of Plotinus, but here's a large run of cards by or about him." A run of author's works (collected or in summary) was visible in a way not apparent by citations on a screen.

Individual cards could also communicate meanings in an almost tactile manner. Was a card well-thumbed? (—smudged by frequent contact with fingers.) Where cards were filed under an author's last name, did that last name change? (—because of marriage, divorce, immigration, honorary or aristocratic titles, etc.) Were some cards much more thumbed than others? Did that suggest books that were popular, or ignored? Were corrections typed or inked in, death dates added, and what about the see: and see also: references? Did the same work show differences in British and American editions? (—beyond spelling)

Online searching leads easily to the "keyhole" result: I found one thing that I'm looking for online, and remain unaware of a considerable number of resources (some potentially very helpful) which did not come to the surface because of the vagaries or keywords. Discovery services and AI-aided searches (Yewno) haven't yet overcome this. A user confronted with a three-inch set of cards by or about Iris Murdoch is less apt to settle for just one text or resource, and hardly merely the first five cards (equivalent to the first five Google search results).

Librarians, and occasionally users, added handwritten notes, some officially and others much less so. Some were in "library hand" (the official standard for handwritten information), others were less legible in various comments, sometimes underlines: "2nd ed." --! or: "Vol. 3 never published." Occasionally: "Ask librarian." Readers might introduce editorial comments, which while discouraged were impossible to prevent. I remember seeing the author card for William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale marked with red pencil: "Bullshit." At Firestone Library, a few cards author cards for F. Scott Fitzgerald were noted, "University Cottage Club." At Speer Library (Princeton Theological Seminary, home of many students of John Calvin), the wonderful cross-reference card "See, Holy. See: Holy See." was marked in early 20th-century pen, "That seeing they may see, and not perceive." (—a reference to Mark 4:12 in the Authorized Version.)

These notes could have a down side: hostile remarks about racism, integration, and Martin Luther King, Jr., or Franklin Delano Roosevelt, or Joseph McCarthy. In the U.K., I suspect that Margaret Thatcher might have received similar treatment had not the rise of digital catalogs prevented it.

In a card catalog, a user could more readily get a sense of the run of centuries-old scholarship on some subjects: the successive translations of Augustine's Confessions, or Dante, or Petrarch, for example. One might also glean insights into local scholarship: famous scholars who served their universities on committees, or as Deans, Rectors, or Wardens, or who even participated in local politics. This was particularly true in the mental interaction of the catalog with the shelves (stacks): physical co-locations that were enhanced or obscured by cataloging.

Card catalogs also encouraged library serendipity: the user seeking one thing but finding another, as well as surprises for the uninitiated: the undergraduate who discovered that the editor and author G. E. M. Anscombe was female, or that Jack Lewis was also C.S. Lewis. As indirect teaching devices, card catalogs ensured a slower pace of searches and research that had the effect of leavening the learning processes, as well as sometimes frustrating the learner. As a librarian, I could not count the number of times I was interrupted (while filing cards) by users who needed help, and those encounters frequently led to various kinds of both library and subject instruction. In my experience, users frustrated by online searches (searching has always been frustrating!) are far less apt to seek help, but just live with partial or unhelpful results.

As social centers for both librarians and users, card catalogs encouraged interaction in the web of library support that was so crucial for young scholars. Invariably three users and a librarian would converge on one drawer, or set of drawers, at a time, leading not only to patient negotiation and cooperation, but acquaintance. Searching an online catalog is a much more individual, even lonely, experience.

I very much wish that 21st century academic libraries could develop better and clearer ways for young scholars to interact with each other and their mentors. I agree with Prof. Beard: the web of library interaction has suffered, because of technology, economies, and the drift of digital culture suggested by the new verb "to friend." Alas, there is no going back, but social serendipity might strike again. The readiness is all.

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Prof. Mary Beard has again spurred me to thoughts and second thoughts about librarianship (see September 3) -- this time about card catalog. (NB She spells the word in the traditional British manner; I follow the American custom of dropping the final -ue.)

In her always stimulating blog A Don's Life (paywall) she wrote a few days ago about the agonies of migrating her e-mail from a previous system (Hermes, a successor to Eudora) that worked pretty well to Microsoft Outlook. As a veteran Outlook user (both the installed app and the web version), I sympathize. "It repeatedly deletes emails in mid-composition" (—so I think she is using Outlook via Office365, but I'm not sure). Heaven knows that anything Microsoft is bound to cause trouble, probably more than it's worth. "No one ever got fired for choosing Microsoft" is undoubtedly true of campus IT departments, but its users are bound to be less happy. The law of unintended consequences holds true for Microsoft as anything else: As the system grows more complex, it grows unwieldy. (I can wax nostalgic about Sendmail that used to be part of freeBSD, but I desist.)

The same frustrations continue when Prof. Beard encounters her bank's allegedly upgraded online system: bank online systems are notoriously opaque and seem to be designed to frustrate the customer. Providing "better customer service" leads back to the law of unintended consequences.

Which brings our good don to library "catalogues."

It is all uncannily reminiscent of the demise of library card catalogues twenty-five or so years ago. For those of us fighting to preserve the old-fashioned card catalogue, or even the older-fashioned guard book, it was a losing battle. There are certainly advantages to an online catalogue (you can search it from anywhere, for a start, and you can introduce different search terms, and so on; I am not blind to these). But if you know the author and title, there is no quicker way to find a book than a card catalogue. When did any high-tech librarian ever allow that there might be some losses in the online method (just like there are losses in the voice-recognition banking system)?

Many of us have been through various iterations of this. Who remembers when we were told that microfiche library catalogues (remember them?) were state of the art? A bit of humility on the part of the cyber-planners would not go amiss. I almost hope that I am around when the energy crisis really bites, and people are scurrying around to resurrect their card catalogues. Last laugh …

Time to Upgrade? Card Catalogues to Online Banking

Much of this hits home. I have been a librarian throughout the period of digitization (1980s), first of library catalogs, then of journals and books themselves. (The latter much less far along than the former, thankfully.). There was too much ridiculous boosterism over the decades, especially in the 1980s, and a good bit of techno-cultural imperialism as well. Too many firms had too much to sell, and over-sell. To every era its excesses. Even a smidgen of humility was lacking.

"When did any high-tech librarian ever allow that there might be some losses in the online method?" I knew librarians who were haunted by the losses, and I can remember numerous personal conversations. Those confutations never reached print because of the prevailing orthodoxies both within and outside the profession.

I remember feverish rebuttals and whispered partial agreements with Nicholson Baker's celebrated and idiosyncratic "Discards" essay in The New Yorker (paywall) in 1994, expanded in his book Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, 2001. Baker's counter-assault borders on the airing of personal grudges, and in twenty-year retrospect strikes one as alternately prescient, precious, and privileged to the point whining. (I do enjoy linking to the OCLC record for Baker's book, a bit of bibliographic snark.) The contretemps up to 1998 is nicely assessed by Cox, Greenberg, and Porter in "Access Denied: The Discarding of Library History" (JSTOR); see also a bibliography of responses compiled by the Association of Research Libraries. (FWIW the Wikipedia article isn't bad.) Baker's polarizing polemic over-determined what might have been more useful discussions.

The Card Catalog: Books, Cards, and Literary Treasures (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2017) is an enjoyable survey of previous practices and artifacts,, and Markus Krajewski, Paper Machines: About Cards and Catalogs, 1548-1929 (MIT Press, 2011) provides global context around pivotal points in Europe and America.

Several personal observations from that period and since:

"When did any high-tech librarian ever allow that there might be some losses . . ." introduces a straw person. Such a figure is all to easy to ridicule when a considerable majority of librarians are trying to cope with the vagaries of any kind of bibliographic technology (including cards) while responding as humans to humans and their needs. I've met almost stereotypical "high-tech" librarians in years past, but fewer rabidly enthusiastic as time goes on. The bloom has been off that rose for some time. Most librarians are by now too experienced with the vagaries of information technology to be fooled easily.

So-called "known item" searches are undeniably frustrating with almost all of the library service platforms. Librarians are the first to know those frustrations, since we spend a good deal of time searching for known items (to make sure we haven't already purchased them, for one thing). "But if you know the author and title, there is no quicker way to find a book than a card catalogue" —unless, that is, you're not sure of the spelling of the author's name, or its "authorized" form, or you get the first word of a title wrong. If you're looking in a card catalog that isn't too large, the problem isn't too large. If you have a very large card catalog (like I knew at Firestone Library, Princeton University), the desired bit of information might be drawers away. Not to mention the vagaries of conference proceedings, technical reports, and series titles.

I used to file catalog cards, knew the ALA filing rules backwards and forwards, including a few local exceptions. The placement of the "main card" (usually the "author" card) was the most important, because that had the full list of "tracings," or the other cards in the set: as necessary the title card, uniform title card (especially for translations), series title card, series corporate author card; the subject-heading cards usually went into an adjacent "subject catalog" because the authorized Library of Congress subject headings could become so complex. Any of those cards could be misfiled; student files would typically leave their file cards "above the rod" so that their work could be reviewed, and when they became expert enough they could be allow to "drop the cards" or "pull the rod." I became expert enough that at Butler Library, Columbia I was entrusted to file "New York" author and title cards, distinguishing carefully between New York State, County, City, University, New-York Historical Society (that hyphen was important), among others.

"But if you know the author and title, there is no quicker way to find a book than a card catalogue" --if the card has been correctly filed! My digression above is simply to point out some of the numerous points that could go wrong.

"Who remembers when we were told that microfiche library catalogues (remember them?) were state of the art?" Thankfully the era of microfiche catalogs is long gone. This early 20th-century technology turns out to have been a transitional format although that was not realized at the time. Microfiche catalogs were undoubtedly worse than card catalogs --the only benefit they produced was for a library, that it need sort cards only once. For users, microfiche catalogs provided all the headaches of cards and microforms in one demonic package. Microfiche catalogs were a supposed economy that undoubtedly was never achieved due to the costs of the technology and distribution—the very definition of a false economy.

It is incredible to think that library computer automation was once sold as "money-saving." In salary terms, probably this was true, because a significant number of low-level employees could be re-assigned to other tasks, or cut. Remaining professional-level employees ultimately cost more (they became even more skilled), as well as the new employees (technical support) that the new systems demanded. Online catalogs have produced results that card catalogs could not produce, but they have not saved money. That was always a false argument, especially in the long run as systems needed to be updated, migrated, and secured.

"I almost hope that I am around when the energy crisis really bites, and people are scurrying around to resurrect their card catalogues." Well, the good professor will be left in a damp, dark, and completely unventilated library (except for openable windows, not always a building feature). No card catalogs will be resurrected: academic libraries are now just too large. In the event of society-wide, massive and distributed power failure, a great deal of journal and monograph content will simply vanish, at least for almost all users. That is truly worrisome. The remaining print collections will be too large to produce another card catalog at a time when society and universities will doubtless have quite a list of far more pressing problems. There really is no going back. The apocalypse may feature books, but not catalogs.

I was reminded of the irrevocable character of historical change a few months ago when I visited the Lyman Allyn Art Museum in New London, Connecticut. Once New London was a major shipping and trans-shipment point with excellent natural mooring (with a draft too shallow for later times). Now the small city is dominated by a college, the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, and Electric Boat and related industries (EB across the river in Groton; it makes submarines). Lyman Allyn was a wealthy merchant and his daughter left the manor house, art collection, and substantial bequest. The Museum library now means essentially a large room for presentations (and yoga sessions), but the actual books of the library are still located on the inset shelves, including the card catalog. A real card catalog with a substantial portion of the tangible collection it represents, still intact and on site! It was a beautiful experience to work through a drawer of cards again, but with a catch: I doubt that anything has been added to this library since the 1980s. I am certain that over the intervening years some books have been lost. Nevertheless—there it was, a real card catalog that turned a room with with a lot of books into an actual library. The only thing missing, sadly, was a living librarian. Should anyone begin to work with the collection again, there will be no recourse but to verify its contents with reference to online databases (even informally, such as LibraryThing).

A second blog entry asks, "What was lost when catalogs were transitioned from cards to computers?"

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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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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!

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Can studying the liberal arts be a "cultural jig?'

Rather, was the concept of "a liberal arts education" a sort of cultural jig, and might it become one again?

I realize those questions make no sense. I write here a bit of a ramble, a set of thoughts that are almost aphorisms for a project I'm working on. This is my first attempt really to get much of it down in writing. (I might say on paper, but I'm looking at a screen.). Of course this will be disorganized.

The "jig" in question is a practice and concept advanced by Matthew Crawford in his book The World Beyond Your Head: Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (2015). In carpentry, for example, "a jig is a device or procedure that guides a repeated action by constraining the environment in such as way as to make the action go smoothly, the same each time, without [the carpenter's] having to think about it." (p. 31) Jigs usually are found in a workshop; jigs can also be made on-site from materials at hand. Hence, "when a carpenter wants to cut a half-dozen boards to the same length, he is unlikely to measure each one, market it, and then carefully guide his saw along the line he has made on the board."(ibid.) Rather, the jig (in this case, a small length of scrap lumber) will guide the saw to cut at the correct length. The carpenter has to slide the saw along the edge of the carefully positioned jig, and the boards will be cut to the correct and uniform length.

A staircase jig ; image from Wikimedia by johnalden, CC Atribution-Share Alike 3.0

The point of a jig is that it stabilizes the worker's environment, limiting a range of free movement in exchange for lightening the burden of care for each action. A worker can undertake a sequence of actions in a uniform pattern without having to think through each action each time. "Jigging is something that expert practitioners do generally, if we allow that it is possible to jib one's environment 'informationally.'"(ibid.)

All kinds of workers use jigs: bartenders, short-order cooks, carpenters, crafters of all kinds. The mental work such a person must perform is reduced an externalized in the arrangements of physical space. David Kirsch writes in The Intelligent Use of Space that experts "constantly re-arrange items to make easy to 1. Track the task; 2. Figure out, remember, or notice the properties signaling what to do next; 3. Predict the effects of actions."(Crawford, p. 32-33) Experts are freed from haltingly thinking through every repetitive action, making things easier by "partially jigging or informationally structuring the environment as they go along." (Kirsch, nos. 1-2)

The expert mentally constrains some degrees of her freedom to keep a skilled activity on track, keeping her attention properly directed in her intersection of spaces and skills. Her space becomes an inhabited space, an extension of herself, and she achieves her purposes with a minimum expenditure of scarce resources of attention. She is required to improvise her skills, tools, and spaces by changing conditions or environments (such as when orders pile up for a short-order cook). Incidental inconveniences simply add a slightly changed condition. This is expert improvisation entirely different from rote industrial production on an assembly line. "In the tension between freedom and structure, which shows itself with special clarity in skilled practices, there is something important to be learned about human agency in general."(p. 34) Jigs keep an expert's attention --the quality of skillful mind that makes an expert an expert--properly directed, focused but not over-determined.

According to some cognitive scientists (or philosophers), human beings can develop "extended" or "embedded" cognition. Andy Clark writes, "advanced condition depends crucially on our ability to dissipate reasoning: to diffuse achieved knowledge and practical wisdom through complex structures, and to reduce the loads on individual brains by locating those brains in complex webs of linguistic, social, political, and institutional constraints." (Crawford chapter 1 fn 2) Advanced (expert) cognition is embedded in an environment and suite of practices the break down complex problems into simpler pieces.

Crawford writes, "The point is that to understand human cognition, it is a mistake to focus only on what goes on inside the skull, because our abilities are highly "scaffolded" by environmental props—by technologies and cultural practices which become an integral part of our cognitive system."(p. 35) In a note, Crawford goes on to extrapolate (following Andy Clark and Michael Wheeler),

" . . . we have inherited certain genetic endowments and limitations, but these [evolutionary developments] are massively underdetermining of the resources that individuals bring to the adaptive problems they face. Culture—the particulars of our inherited linguistic, social, and material equipment—establishes the setting for childhood development and all subsequent learning. In the course of that learning our brains undergo both fine-grained and structural changes that are hugely consequential: changes that depend on our experiences. There are, then three time scales that matter for the question of how we come to be what we are: Darwinian evolution, the history of a civilization, and the life course of an individual." (Crawford, note 4, p, 260-261)

Cultural jigs are an expression for the "triple helix" of genetic, evolutionary inheritance, "the rich soil of historically well-sedimented norms and practices," (p. 39-40) and individual character, the stamp left by individual experiences and personal histories (some of which unavoidably exhibits some elements of "givens" --the particular inborn traits that are spatial, musical, kinetic, and so on. (One need not elevate these to "intelligences" to note the high degree of variability amongst individuals.). The point is that any particular "cultural jig" is not itself infinitely flexible, but can be deployed flexibly by skilled practitioners as they organize their environment, in command of their own actions. Cultural jigs are seen in individuals adapting their skills and environments; "the norms that cultural jigs express and reinforce tend to be reiterated, fractal-like, along different axes of social life; they are robust in that way." (p. 39)

Crawford's examples illustrate his interest in the management of attention. (Remember that jigs keep an expert's attention focused but not over-determined.) Protestant Republicanism, Benjamin Franklin's "be frugal and free," are actions of a socialized individual in a variety of cultural environment. By contrast in any consumer situation an individual's attention is already managed by product placement, web design, and a host of other factors. Attention is the scare resource, and who really controls it, is the question. (The administrative state? Choice architects employed by corporations? An individual or small, face-to-face community?) Individuals in an artificial lab setting, or in front of a solitary digital screen, in isolation can be very poor reasoners: a false premise for many life events, but apt in particular situations. Who is the architect of attention: the skilled practitioner, the choice architect, agents of the state, or—in a very different kind of culture—unchanging and unchallengable patterns of a rigid traditional society? The answer matters for the flourishing of many human activities and attributes.

In my view, a liberal arts education can be considered a suite of cultural jigs that individuals can learn to become skilled practitioners of self-regulation, whether as individuals, or in social contexts—society, culture, and politics in a broad sense. This suite of cultural jigs, further, made sense in previous eras of American history and life. Does it make any sense now? Are the ideas and practices of liberal arts education worth continued practice? If they can be appraised as worthwhile, but simultaneously acknowledged as thoroughly challenged by present conditions, how can they be continued in a society for which they supply a need for skilled practitioners?

Responding to these questions requires a discourse that will be by turns historical, philosophical, and practical. Liberal arts colleges are social and culture institutions in context, both reflecting and contributing to their environments.

I must quickly acknowledge that this inquiry ventures into a conceptual and definitional morass. What is meant by a liberal arts education. If such an education is determined as giving prominent (but not sole) place to the disciplines collectively called the humanities, what is meant by "the humanities?" "Education" as a term is hard enough, "liberal arts" is notoriously slippery, all the more so "humanities." As matters have progressed in the past century, one might well ask whether liberal arts educations have any particular contents at all, much less whether those contents are shared by those who are said to have been educated in liberal arts colleges. What does it mean to study the liberal arts, and what are the institutional context for any such activity, and does it even make sense in the 21st century, beset as it is by severe challenges to any kind of future human flourishing.

This post is merely an introduction to a wider kind of inquiry which I wish to pursue, towards ends I cannot yet fully comprehend. I have a difficult time stating very intelligibly what it is that I wish to pursue. But I have the sense that something important is afoot: the education and practice of creative human attention in time of incentivized and marketable distraction —and distraction from the seemingly impossible contradictions and besetting problems for any kind of recognizable global forms of life in the future. I'm not sure how to get a grip on these questions, on this content.