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Part of my work since 2009 has been teaching topics in American religion to undergraduates. Since my scholarly training focused on Christianity, most of the class concerned Protestants and Catholics in American history and culture. Most of the students lacked any real working knowledge of any religious community, even if they were graduates of Catholic schools (a small minority). The course will meet a distribution requirement, and with vanishingly few religion majors, I kept a broad focus. Given my students' effective religious illiteracy things went reasonably well.  (I do not intend to exclude any American religion, but I do want to stick to my competencies.)

In teaching about evangelicalism, I hit a concrete wall. My students have assumed that Evangelicals by definition have been always and only conservative Republicans. They might feel some sympathy, I have learned, with a few conservative Evangelical viewpoints, especially amongst the males (immigration; economics; and the racial subtexts). But for the vast majority of my New England small-c and Capital-C c/Catholic students, Evangelicals are a strange tribe: inexplicable in all their ways, potentially hostile to Catholics and Northeasterners in general, and motivated by ineluctable commitments. Neither conservative Republicans nor high-profile Evangelicals are highly visible on the regional Tri-State, southern New England cultural spectrum. As one student wrote, "Evangelicalism: not for me." I am hardly trying to turn them into Evangelicals (I made that abundantly clear, and they heard me), but I had hoped to shed a little light on Evangelical history and culture in hopes of building some respect for this particular "other." I needed help.

I ran across John Fea's blog The Way of Improvement Leads Home after reading several chapters of his book by the same title; Fea's blog is genuine assistance to those few who would like to understand Evangelicals better, but have no interest in becoming Evangelicals ourselves. His new book Believe Me: The Evangelicals Road To Donald Trump (please order from Eerdmans, not Amazon) tells a story from inside Evangelicalism to those Evangelicals who did not vote for Trump, and to the rest of us.  Fea attended Trinity International University and teaches at Messiah College (Pa.); he earned his Ph.D. from SUNY/Stony Brook, so he also has commitments to scholarship off the Evangelical academic reservation. Thanks to John, I also began to read Frances Fitzgerald's The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America (a Pulitzer Prize winner) and Robert Jones' The End of White Christian America. I returned to Mark Noll's landmark The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (1994) as well as George Marsden's landmark Fundamentalism and American Culture (2nd edition, 2006).

In 2017 Mathew Mayhew (Education, Ohio State) et al. wrote "Expanding Perspectives on Evangelicalism: How Non-evangelical Students Appreciate Evangelical Christianity," (Rev Relig Res (2017) 59:207–230 DOI 10.1007/s13644-017-0283-8), a survey-based social science project. The investigation revealed distinct differences in students' attitudes towards their evangelical peers related to demographics, institution type, and academic major. Students who self-identified as having religious experience (or identity) were apt to be somewhat more sympathetic to Evangelical students, who might well feel ostracized or devalued in more secular academia. "How do we encourage appreciation of a worldview as polarizing as the one the evangelical narrative represents?" (p. 225) When does a challenging or provocative Evangelical viewpoint become perceived as divisive or hostile? This is an eye of a needle hard to pass through.

This challenge is particularly trying where no Evangelical students are present. I have found an analogy when trying to teach about the fervor of 19th-century Prohibitionists: most students will recognize the problems of alcohol abuse and alcoholism but advocates for Prohibition simply no longer exist. Students might well respond to the challenges (or provocations) of "hot-button" issues such as abortion rights, LGBTQ rights (and cake-bakers, florists, et al.), and immigrants with or without documents --but lack any awareness of Evangelical resonance. I have had one earnest student say, "I don't believe in evolution because I'm Catholic," and had to point out to her that she may have unawares absorbed an oft-held Evangelical viewpoint, but that her refusal cannot be based upon specifically Catholic bases, at least according to the Pope (then Benedict XVI). I must also reflect that my African American and Hispanic students often will reveal greater awareness of Evangelicalism than whites.

I return to the question: how does one teach about those who regard their faith as primary to those who are unaware of why any faith might be primary? (Granted the former category can include a great deal of wishful thinking, rationalization, and even fear and hypocrisy when things go wrong: read Believe Me.) Years ago I encountered a similar wall when trying to teach about Dietrich Bonhoeffer and why he chose to participate, however tangentially, in the July 1944 plot against Hitler. One Muhlenberg College student candidly observed, "We don't understand anything about sacrifice because we have never been asked to sacrifice anything." The gulf is more imagination than thinking, or the ability to think. (I am by no means assuming that Bonhoeffer was or would be Evangelical in contemporary North American usages of the word; Eric Metaxas' book has been justly condemned as poorly sourced and even more poorly written, and I decline to link to it.)

In response, I have to cast back to my own limited experience of something bordering Evangelical America both at Princeton Theological Seminary and at Hope College (in my next post.) Personal experience may be a last resort --I am at my last resort.

More than a month ago, Joshua Kim asked eleven questions of his colleagues at the Association of College and Research Libraries Conference 2017 (Baltimore, March 22-25). I don't have answers -- but at an embarrassing long delay, here are my responses to his eleven questions.
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More than a month ago, Joshua Kim asked eleven questions of his colleagues at ACRL 2017 (Association of College and Research Libraries, Baltimore, March 22-25).  I simply cannot keep up the pace of writing and work that apparently characterizes Dr. Kim (I ask, as does Barbara Fister: "how does he do it?").  I don't have answers -- but at an embarrassing long delay, here are my responses to his eleven questions:

Question 1: What is keeping academic librarians up at night?

Allergy to book mold?  Seriously: the mis-match between 1) the transformations of libraries and librarians now in process, 2) unrealistic expectations, both within and outside academe, about the transformation of higher education by digital technology, and 3) available financial resources.  There is barely enough money to fund our members' needs day-to-day, much less the future needs of members who will bring very high, very different expectations to their education and research.  Training and re-training librarians, even younger, newer ones, will also be not only a significant expense, but an unavoidable one if they are to remain relevant and aligned with their institutional mission.

Question 2: What will the academic library look like in 2025?

Libraries will still living in a both-and world: some members will continue to want printed books, but will use them differently than the recent past (2015).  Some printed books will explicitly engage digital resources as supplements and complements.  Some members will never want to see or open a printed book.  Some members will be working far more with data sets and non-textual (or ostensibly non-textual) information visualizations.  Libraries will have fewer printed books on site, more workspaces (and more different kinds), less reader or member privacy, and more commercialization by monetized information organizations.  Members will still want a physical library space to be a place to get and stay "on task."  Some members will never interact physically with a library, or personally with librarians, but will use library services every day through the information configurations that librarians will tend and troubleshoot.

Question 3: How is the academic librarian profession changing?

Already there is far more emphasis upon communication, instructional, and design skills than ten years ago (even than five years ago).   Technical, back-office skills are rapidly changing from the provision and editing of information to aligning interactive and interoperable information systems.  Library leadership is especially challenged to visualize what could be, might be, or will be, to our stakeholders, and figure out how to achieve all that, and yet negotiate present-day campus political, financial, and legal arrangements that often reflect patterns and processes that are already obsolete.

Question 4: What is the role of the academic library in leading institutional transformation?

Preface: If universities are like the proverbial elephant as regarded by the visually impaired, libraries are very well-positioned (almost uniquely) to see a great deal of the elephant. The daily life of a library interacts with faculty who are teaching and doing research right now, academic leadership, policy and planning, campus operations of all kinds, public safety and security, university financial offices, alumni/ae relationships, enrollment retention, student recruitment, faculty recruitment, information technology, instructional design, construction and facilities management, and sometimes even the food service.  As a library director, I have almost all of those people on speed-dial.

To answer this question: libraries are almost uniquely well-positioned to act as change agents by partnering with a wide variety of interests to achieve a cumulative social, educational, intellectual impact on campus beyond the abilities or purview of any one campus organization.  This requires vision, street smarts, and an ability to listen.  It requires seeing that library priorities are not always the institution's priorities, but when different they need to come into some kind of symbiosis.

Question 5: How do academic librarians think about learning innovation?

It's a broad term.  Librarians would love to collaborate with instructional designers, faculty members, and others to create pathways for learning that transcend previous classroom, lab, and practice settings.   Organizations, consultants, and academic specialists will all be part of that --but many academic librarians I know are increasingly suspicious of the corporate interests in the phrase "learning innovation."  The innovations to learning in higher education that will be most productive are those that will not be packaged and sold by corporate interests, but will be far more local, ad-hoc, and malleable by teachers and learners themselves.  When I view a video purporting to be about Learning Innovation, and the head of Thomas Friedman talks, then I begin to wonder whose interests are really going to be served.

Question 6:  What is the role of the academic library in leading institutional efforts [that will] drive progress in the iron triangle of costs, access, and quality?

Academic librarians have a lot of experience with the trade-offs of costs, access limitations, and quality (both of information per se, and of presentation and interface).  Part of my daily life is putting budget numbers and academic ways-and-means together.  I believe the academic library's role can be incubator, initiator, and assessor of costs for access and quality of outcomes but that role is not guaranteed.  I believe that academic librarians will also want to challenge the oft-encountered (perhaps dominant) idea that instructional quality is simply a cost that limits institutional net income.  The recent ACE paper Instructional Quality, Student Outcomes, and Institutional Finances (.pdf) points at research that needs to be done, and assumptions that should be interrogated.

Question 7: What does the academic library leadership pipeline look like?

I heard some real concerns at ACRL about how the field will mentor future leaders who will need the financial, political, academic, and social skills necessary to lead a complicated organization on a complicated campus (physical or digital).  The relative slow-down in professional movement, promotion, and retirements in the years after 2009, coupled with either outright downsizing or less (immediately) drastic holds on hiring, have produced a situation where there is not a sufficient number of opportunities for rising leaders to learn their craft.  The profession is greying, and I cannot blame recent college graduates who bypass library and information science programs in favor of fields in which they will be able to pay off their substantial student debts more readily.  Yet we really need those people, and we need creative, competent new professionals of every age who will contribute their perspectives and learn how business actually gets done in many institutions.

Question 8:  How is the academic library addressing challenges around diversity and inclusion?

This was also a major theme of the ACRL conference, and built up to the simply fabulous closing keynote by Carla Hayden, Librarian of Congress.  These challenges play differently in contexts: large academic library systems can pursue strategies and mentorships that may not be practical for much smaller libraries --where challenges and real needs for diversity of perspectives, persons, and inclusions of all kinds of persons are still very much present and felt.  I think this is a real opportunity for ACRL: to lead a multi-sided approach with library and information schools, foundations and grantors, large and small academic libraries, national, state, and regional library associations (in particular with library technology, and leadership & management divisions), and academic administrative organizations (AAC&U, ACAD, and HERC), for a cumulative impact on the profession, the libraries, and the universities.  I think that the professional leadership education offered by the Harvard Graduate School of Education is also a vital and viable venue to put together the efforts of many organizations.

Question 9:  What are the big arguments and debates within the academic library discipline?

I find so many that I will inevitably leave some out of even a very long list.  But here's my short list:

  • Privacy, user security, and trust: maintaining the academic library digital and physical space as a non-commercial zone of exception, as much as possible; and the way that user's searches and downloads can become monetized data points for commercial services that offer a false equivalent to a real library--and whether librarians can really do anything about that, or respond to it usefully;
  • Evolving understandings or interpretations of the Information Literacy Framework: what it brings in, leaves out, interrogates, and strengthens, and the sometimes yawning gap between the aspirations of the Framework and the sometimes frightening realities of many young students' lack of curiosity and joy;
  • The persistent tensions between "resilience" as a good term for a kind of creative flexibility in the face of adversity, and "resilience" as a substitution of a personal response for a solution to a structural problem.  I heard one speaker use the work and then immediately apologize for it after a standing-room-only presentation called Resilience, Grit and Other Lies: Academic Libraries and the Myth of Risiliency (.pdf)

Other attendees are welcome to point out all the good fights I missed.

Question 10:  How is the relationship between academic libraries and centers for teaching and learning (CTLs) evolving?

I'm not sure there is a consensus, since there are so many variables in academic contexts. I know of one case where a beautifully renovated CTL in fact combined about 10 other services formerly located elsewhere in a large university.  That set of new partnerships has required so much team-building and re-negotiation that librarians in the same building have not had as much contact as they previously anticipated (this may be changing recently).  Where the CTL and librarian partners have sufficient contact and are not completely frustrated by funding limitations (or non-existence), I have heard that enormously fruitful partnerships evolving.  Open Educational Resources, Open Textbooks, and so many other hot topics really call for multi-sided collaborations.  My favorite anecdote is of an information technologist with a strong secondary background in instructional design who exclaimed, "Wow, there's a lot of information technology in the library!"  I believe that many libraries, especially on undergraduate-oriented campuses, were attempting to be centers for teaching and learning before the phrase was invented, and in those places where turf is not a source of conflict, creative partnerships are forming.

The recent Ithaka S+R survey of library directors found that "while [many] library directors agreed that librarians at their institutions contribute significantly to student learning in a variety of ways, only about half of the faculty members for the Ithaka S+R Faculty Survey 2015 recognized these contributions." (pages 3-4) I suspect that both Centers for Teaching and Learning and academic libraries face a common challenge to communicate what they can (and do) contribute to faculty who are genuinely skeptical or worried about maintaining their turf.

Question 11:  What questions should I be asking about the changing academic library?

The fact that you are asking any questions is remarkable for many academic librarians, who have so often felt marginalized (for reasons good and bad) by campus technology and technologists in the past couple of decades.  You don't take anything for granted.

I can only really respond by suggesting the question that I'm asking as I lead my organization through a process of listening, thinking and planning together: what is our core mission in plain language?  What is our value proposition for our institution?  How do we show that we are doing that?  How does our mission and value proposition align with our institution's proclaimed commitments and priorities?

In this process I have spoken with many people on my campus, and (following advice from a mentor) I asked each of them simply:  "What is your job?  What difference does your office make here?  What's your biggest challenge?"  Their responses were amazing, and almost all of them pointed in one direction: "how do we communicate to a skeptical world what an amazing difference real learning can make in a student's life?"  To the extent that our library can respond to that question with grace and authenticity, we can also state our value proposition and our mission, and our alignment with our university.

Even with all the challenges, controversies, and constraints, this is the best time ever to be an academic librarian.

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There remains an experience of incomparable value. We have for once learnt to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the reviled – in short, from the perspective of those who suffer. The important thing is neither that bitterness nor envy should have gnawed at the heart during this time, that we should have come to look with new eyes at matters great and small, sorrow and joy, strength and weakness, that our perception of generosity, humanity, justice and mercy should have become clearer, freer, less corruptible. We have to learn that personal suffering is a more effective key, a more rewarding principle for exploring the world in thought and action than personal good fortune. This perspective from below must not become the partisan possession of those who are eternally dissatisfied; rather, we must do justice to life in all its dimensions from a higher satisfaction, whose foundation is beyond any talk of ‘from below’ or ‘from above’. This is the way in which we may affirm it.

 

Es bleibt ein Erlebnis von unvergleichlichem Wert, da wir die großen Ereignisse der Weltgeschichte einmal von unten, aus der Perspektive der Ausgeschalteten, Beargwöhnten, Schlechtbehandelten, Machtlosen, Unterdrückten und Verhöhnten, kurz der Leidenden, sehen gelernt haben. Wenn nur in dieser Zeit nicht Bitterkeit oder Neid das Herz zerfressen hat, daß wir Großes und Kleines, Glück und Unglück, Stärke und Schwäche mit neuen Augen ansehen, daß unser Blick für Größe, Menschlichkeit, Recht und Barmherzigkeit klarer, freier, unbestechlicher geworden ist, ja, daß das persönliche Leiden ein tauglicherer Schlüssel, ein fruchtbareres Prinzip zur betrachtenden und tätigen Erschließung der Welt ist als persönliches Glück. Es kommt nur darauf an, daß diese Perspektive von unten nicht zur Parteinahme für die ewig Un-zufriedenen wird, sondern daß wir aus einer höheren Zufriedenheit, die eigentlich jenseits von unten und oben begründet ist, dem Leben in allen seinen Dimensionen gerecht werden, und es so bejahen. 

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After more than forty years, Janik's and Toulmin's demanding Wittgenstein's Vienna (1972) holds up remarkably well. Their argument situates Wittgenstein's first major thoughts in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in the milieu of the generalized crisis of communication, and the problem of the limits of language and expression that was felt across many disciplines, from architecture, design, music, literature, and drama (including opera).  

They move from the broad (a description and analysis of culture and politics in Hapsburg [or Habsburg] Vienna) to very fine-grained analyses of philosophical positions and projects undertaken by inheritors of Kant, Schopenhauer, and Kierkegaard --especially Ernst Mach, Heinrich Hertz, Ludwig Boltzman, and Fritz Mauthner.  Janik and Toulmin see the Tractatus as fundamentally an ethical deed. The famous aphorisms found late in the text (especially Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen = Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent) were significantly misinterpreted by the positivists in the subsequent Vienna Circle (1920s) as meaning that such statements or expressions cannot be important: they "had equated the "important" with the the "verifiable" and dismissed all unverifiable propositionas "unimportant because unsayable" whereas the concluding section of the Tractatus insisted "though to deaf ears--that the unsayable alone has genuine value." (p. 220, the authors' emphases).

Janik and Toulmin then move outward from these fine-grained considerations back to the wider cultural impact --and in some cases mis-appropriation-- of Wittgenstein's first and second thoughts.  (His second thoughts being his return to philosophy from the late 1920s to his posthumously published Philosophical Investigations.)  Throughout his work, Wittgenstein maintained a strong ethical interest in mapping what can be said, and what can be considered truthful under which circumstances.  His fundamentally polemical tone and strong ethical interest --highly individualistic, and tending to disregard historical change and development-- were quite possibly his only effective way to communicate.  The professionalization of culture, which Viennese cultural originators (such as Wittgenstein, Loos, and Schoenberg) ironically and inadvertently set loose, created a new "orthodoxy" which in turn was susceptible of overthrow by cultural movements and developments which remain --despite discord-- also the legitimate heirs of fin de siècle revisionist critiques.

The conditions of Austria "illustrate the ways in which famiiar processes of communal life manifest themselves, so to say, under conditions of abnormal pressure and temperature," and those conditions were provided --and amped up-- by the reactionary assumptions and policies of the Hapsburgs from Francis I, Metternich, and Francis Joseph (Franz Josef).  The double-talk, avoidance, and utter fallacies of Austro-Hungarian politics and culture have an eerie ring in the contemporary world, especially in America, and the rising of a strong man to sweep all that aside is uncomfortably close to the Austrian politics of the 1920s and 1930s.  Janik and Toulman write,

If the experience of our own times gives us a new feeling for the Habsburg situation, so too --conversely-- a greater familiarity with the life and times of men like [Karl] Kraus and Wittgenstein can help us see our own situation more clearly.  Nowadays as much as in the years before 1914, political dishonesty and deviousness quickly find expression in debased language, which blunts the sensitivity of the political agent himself [sic] to the character of his own actions and politics.  So the intention to deceive others ends by generating self-deceit. (p. 269)

Is there any better description of American politics of the 21st century?  Janik and Toulmin go on:

In other respects, too the Krausian problems about communication have counterparts in contemporary America.  However much the United States sets out to b a melting pot in which the children of former Europeans --and, to a lesser extent Asians and Africans--would learn to live together as a single American nation, this idealistic hope has been relaized in practice only in part.  The ethnic rivalries of Central Europe . . . [and] the prejudices of the Europeans toward [others] . . . all of these have been muted rather than forgotten, and every economic setback has the power to revive ethnic bitterness and racial feeling.  So, in the United States today, we often seem to be watching, while only half understanding, a bungled remake of some political drama originally played out in the last days of the Habsburg Empire. (p. 270)

This was published in 1972! --during the political dishonesty of the Nixon years.  How little seems to have changed --and the prejudices now are not even muted.  If there are any general lessons, the first the Janik and Toulmin find is: "a culture which erects insuperable barriers to meaningful discussion and real and urgent problems becomes, in a certain sense, pathological.  The pretense that things are other than they are cannot be kept up indefinitely. . . . Wherever constitutional theory and political practice part company for long enough from the realities of an actual situation, similar pathological syndromes can be expected." (pp. 272-273)  Further comment is hardly necessary: global climate change.

Karl Marx' famous observation that "all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice . . . the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce" must be extended in 2017.  Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte assumed dictatorial powers in France in 1851, a farce of the original Napoleon, the tragic.  We might add that tragedy of Hapsburg Europe, re-enacted as tragical farce by Richard Nixon in the United States, now returns . . . as a bungled re-make.  A bungled re-make that is comprised of equal parts of stupidity, incompetence, and malevolence: in a word, pathological.  Perhaps the only way forward now --while fully conscious of the a-historical, too-individualistic tendencies of the original --is to subject language and language games to vigorous and sharp critique, so that "language games "might have genuine force and application, only to the extent that they are themselves rooted in authentic forms of life." (p. 273)

What authentic forms of life are possible now?  How can we avoid a reactive revolution that will merely install a new false consciousness? How can language games rooted in authentic forms of life avoid deception --and self-deception, the kind of self-deception at the root of the pathological American politics of the present time?

A library is probably one of the last places where one can pursue interests and information unobserved. A mere few years ago this was a sign of obsolescence rather than currency.
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In 2009 Eric Schmidt, then CEO of Google, was asked whether users should be willing to share information with Google as if it were a trusted friend --and Schmidt famously replied, "If you have something you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."  The Electronic Frontier Foundation noted that this is very close to the famous phrase, "if you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to worry about" --beloved of those who are seeking greater law-enforcement powers or processes.  It implies that people who seek to preserve privacy are doing something to worry about, not those who place them under surveillance.

That was then.  In the aftermath of Edward Snowdon's revelations --in particular those that detail the very cozy relationships between the NSA, major firms such as Google, and telecommunications giants such as Verizon-- privacy has returned as a positive right, not merely a historical left-over.

A library is probably one of the last places where one can pursue interests and information unobserved.  A mere few years ago this was a sign of obsolescence rather than currency.  Libraries made data surveillance difficult because they weren't high-tech enough.  That has changed too.  Suddenly that obsolescence has become a feature (as in, "that's not a bug, it's a feature!").

Why does it matter?  If there is one thing that Pew survey after Pew survey has found --as well as OCLC and other survey producers-- that thing surely has to be: people feel positive about the library "brand."  They want a vibrant, useful library in their academic, residential, or business community whether or not they intend to use it (or have used it).  A library is a "good thing."  People trust libraries, and trust librarians.

Trust is a huge asset, not to be thrown away or discounted casually.  Just ask General Motors, or for that matter, the NSA itself.

In general, libraries do a fairly accurate job of maintaining trust, but could do a lot better.  Circulation records of tangible items are not easily available for public discovery, depending on the laws of state and local jurisdictions.  (Connecticut has alarming little provision of the privacy of library records, for example.)  In any case, circulation records are hard to locate digitally because they are held in highly particular formats in integrated library systems, formats that don't translate readily to standards and common practices outside.  That's wasn't a bug, and now it's a feature.

Library use of external databases is a different matter.  In many systems, all traffic routed through a library proxy will be seen by parties outside the proxy as coming from one machine, one Internet Protocol address.  Separating the sessions would be far harder.  That doesn't cover all library database transactions, however, or even a large portion of them.  Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon --in French, GAFA-- can monitor a great deal of transactions on library workstations unless those are properly protected.

Eric Hellman has written persuasively (to my mind, at least) about the Library Digital Privacy Pledge here and here.  It's an interesting concept, whether or not the pledge ever receives wide adoption.  Eric's primary focus at this point is to get libraries to use the secure HTTP protocol --HTTPS-- as much as possible.  Library digital privacy has, of course, many other aspects that will need to be addressed.

Recently the small New Hampshire public library in West Lebanon (near Dartmouth College) was for the most part bullied away from using the secure browser system TOR by the NSA --although now they have recovered their courage.  TOR has been targeted in the past as the province of drug-dealers, pedophiles, and terrorists --what lovely company-- and who would want to be associated with them?  The topic invariably circles back to law enforcement: if you haven't done anything wrong, you've got nothing to hide (even when grammatically challenged!).

In the library no one ever used to track your reading, and no one should now: 3rd article of the American Library Association's Code of Ethics.  Trust is easily lost.  Privacy is easily lost.  A library is a great place to think, write, and read privately.  It's not a bug, it's a feature.

 

The library is part of the beating heart of the university—that contact of learners and teachers—when it truly enacts and exemplifies part of the University’s mission.
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First, on behalf of the entire library staff I wish to thank all those in the University and in the construction trades which made this day possible.  What a pleasure it was to work with Marc Izzo and Scott Rowland in particular.  I also want to extend my personal special thanks to Patrick Rose, our architect, who patiently listened to explanations of why the library needed one feature or another, and insights from our regular observation of how library users actually use the library.

I also wish to recognize the good work of Amanda Timolat, our Archivist, and Emily Underwood, her student library assistant, in creating the display behind the glass wall at the rear of the Chartwell's Starbucks Library Cafe.

As you may have read, or heard here today, this library was dedicated on September 28, 1968 and re-dedicated as the Ryan-Matura Library on September 11, 1993.  I want to take a moment to recall the first event, in 1968.  The speaker that day was Philip J. Scharper, and the guest of honor was our founder, the Most Reverend Walter Curtis, Bishop of Bridgeport. 

Mr. Scharper was a very active Catholic writer and publisher.  Trained at Woodstock Theological Seminary, a protégé of John Courtney Murray, he never entered the priesthood but instead taught briefly before he became associate editor of Commonweal magazine in 1955.  He was specially consulted by the Second Vatican Council on the Catholic Church’s role in the modern world.  From 1957 to 1970 he was editor in chief at Sheed & Ward before he co-founded Orbis Books in 1970.  Three years later, he edited and published Gustavo Gutierrez’ famous book A Theology of Liberation.  Mr. Scharper remained at Orbis until his death in 1985.

On that day in September 1968 Scharper held up in particular a phrase from the British writer Thomas Carlyle, that “the library is the beating heart of the University.” In 1968 that was a brave hope, as the young University was still coming together, but Scharper connected what this library represented then with the broad intellectual tradition of the Church and in particular the tradition of the love of learning and the desire for God lived out in the Benedictine tradition.  He concluded that the library is not only to be the beating heart of a community of learning, but of a community of love.

Scharper, following Carlyle before him, was attempting to give real life to a phrase that sometimes can become a tired academic cliché, that the library is the heart of the University.  Since 1968 many things in universities have changed, and I am so bold as to suggest that that familiar phrase needs to be re-positioned.   Many of the elements of this University –food service, athletic facilities, public safety officers, library, even the Chapel –could and do exist in other contexts without a University.  For example, the Town of Fairfield has a vibrant and thriving library.  

The real heart of the University is in the daily interaction of teachers and learners.  Without a faculty and without students, together, we don’t have a University.  Those teachers and learners –both faculty and students are teachers and learners in different ways—need a variety of contexts and settings to pursue their work: classrooms, laboratories, overseas locations, offices, clinics, field work, and even a library.

The library is part of the beating heart of the university—that contact of learners and teachers—when it truly enacts and exemplifies part of the University’s mission.  This is the truth that shines through this renovation, and how it shines through can be seen in library architecture. 

The original 19th-century modern academic library buildings were reader-oriented: books in the service of readers.  Large windows illuminated alcoves and bays with natural light for reading; the monastic tradition was strong in these buildings, whether James Gamble Roger’s Gothic Revival Sterling Memorial Library at Yale, or McKim, Mead and White’s Beaux-Arts Low Library at Columbia University.  These libraries featured large ceremonial entry spaces that usher a reader into an immediate connection with books.

But the tidal wave of publishing and new books in the 20th century required a new paradigm, the book-centered library.  Butler Library at Columbia University exemplifies this: a steel-framed structure of 18 levels of central stacks are surrounded by offices and seminar rooms with a ceremonial main reading room on the front end.  Essentially the book-oriented library is a warehouse, one hopes an elegant warehouse, and these buildings were progressively enlarged not to accommodate additional readers or services, but additional collections.

The original modular design of this library, designed by Val Carlson of Shelton, followed the book-centered paradigm of library design: a maximum of flexible space for a growing collection, designed to be expanded back into what is now the parking lot as necessary.  Over the decades, areas of this building have been re-purposed so many times that it is difficult to envision what this library was originally intended to be.  In any case, the advent of information technology began to put and end to book-centered library design by the 1990s.

This renovation represents a third paradigm of library design, the learning-centered library.  These spaces have been re-designed to host and facilitate learning interactions in many ways: group interaction, individual study, interaction with digital collections far away from this building, and especially interactions with every member of the library staff.  Some people look at this library and see a building, others see a collection, but I see people: students, librarians, faculty, and how they interact.  This is a learning-centered library, and all our librarians are educators in the context of the University. 

Above all, the learner here is meant to take responsibility for her or his own learning.  There is no one moment when this happens, but it happens whenever study becomes learning: how history majors become historians, how biology majors become biologists.  This library is a set of spaces, resources, and above all people that foster effective intentional learning.  We are a teaching and learning enterprise, and we join our student and faculty colleagues here as collaborators enacting the learning mission of this University.  The goal of self-directed learning is meant to become a reality here.

Libraries do not have user aggregations: we serve students, faculty, and staff. We are necessarily and properly non-commercial in a culture where commerce rules all, and in that sense we unavoidably counter-cultural.
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Are learning environments in higher education becoming commodified?  Who is in charge here?

The article The Open Ed Tech: never mind the edupunks; or, the great Web 2.0 swindle by Brian Lam and Jim Groom (Educause Review July August 2010) remembers the palmy days of "edupunks" --those Gen-Xers who wanted open educational environments fostered by open web technology.  Away with closed, tightly-controlled proprietary systems!

What happened?  The consolidation of Blackboard.  The rise of Google whatever: docs, alerts, talk, reader, YouTube, whatever.  Above all, the consolidation of cultural industries: ContentID.  Users such as Critical Commons and Lawrence Lessig --who used snippets of copyrighted works for their presentations to demonstrate examples of Fair Use-- were effectively silenced by corporate take-down orders without respect to any Fair Use guidelines.

Advertising is the point of the Google products, its YouTube, Facebook, and all their kin.  Steve Greenberg has written, "You are not Facebook's customer.  You are the product they sell to their real customers --advertisers.  Forget that at your peril."  This is the simple commercial point all the "free" capabilities.  When Google, Facebook, YouTube, etc. control educational and cultural spaces, advertising is the point.  Facebook's long-standing and fundamentally deceptive bait-and-switch privacy policies are a running case in point.  GoogleAnalytics tracks searches, retrievals, and every click.  Is this desirable in a cultural space such as an academic library?

The implications for privacy, for academic freedom, and for creative re-use of cultural "properties" (rather than "resources") are very serious.  Lam and Groom note, ". . . We can expect the values associated with educators and the public interest to be of secondary importance at best.  Proprietary needs will prevail, even if we can trust that these companies set ouf to 'do no evil.'"

(As a reader of Reinhold Niebuhr, I have to add "Don't be evil" as a corporate slogan is reflects a very shallow, California-lite superficiality that either intentionally hypocritical or incredibly stupid.  Of course corporate entities sometimes do evil: see Moral Man and Immoral Society or The Nature and Destiny of Man.  Evil is unavoidable; the question is how to plan for it and limit its effects.  Google's slogan reflects exactly who they are: technologically incredibly sophisticated but philosophical and moral dwarves.)

This is not simply an anti-corporate screed.  Obviously corporations exist to make money, and will do what is necessary.  Obviously, libraries buy or lease many corporate products. But why should libraries advertise corporate products to their users?  Already Wolters-Kluwer's OvidSP defaults to search all journals@Ovid --and offers pay-per-view to those articles not covered by a library's database contract.  Is this advertising or for the convenience of the user?

The question here is whether libraries see our users as aggregatations of data useful for advertisers.  Libraries do not have user aggregations: we serve students, faculty, and staff.  We are necessarily and properly non-commercial in a culture where commerce rules all, and in that sense we unavoidably counter-cultural.  In Lam and Groom's phrase, we provide a green space for public-minded, convivial exchange online and on-ground.  We serve people first,and corporate interests second.  (--no wonder libraries are both incredibly expensive and often poorly funded!)

Alice Tear Copeland (1926-2010) was a wonderful boss.
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Alice on deck, photo for obit Alice Copeland was a wonderful boss.  I began to know her when I started my first professional position as a cataloging librarian at Drew University Library, 1986-1993.  She really taught me librarianship, and the art of academic leadership and strategy.

Granted I had been exceedingly fortunate to have experienced a tradition of excellence in librarianship at Columbia University 1985-1987 --Alice made all of that real in the workplace in a way I had not anticipated.  Her eye for cataloging detail was sharp and her attention was vigilant and yet she never succumbed to trivialization that occasionally has come to caricature catalogers.  She always sought the simplest, most elegant, and most clearly communicated information for the convenience of the user.

Over Alice's desk was a motto from Vergil Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit, (Aeneid i.203) loosely "Someday perhaps it will be pleasing to remember even this" --an apt quotation during that era of retrospective conversion of cataloging records from cards to OCLC MARC records, and eventually to Drew's first generation of an integrated library system (DRA classic).  We all worked very hard, very long days to see our database go live on a day in August 1988 --and immediately thought, "is this all there is?"  Midstream in conversion OCLC or PALINET unwittingly changed settings for diacritics --and Drew held a lot of German and French texts.  Suddenly all the learned treatises which begin with "über" began with "huber" --this required additional hours of work.  One day we all might look back on it with pleasure.  Now I do.

Alice lived with the music of J.S. Bach and often brought in Bach on the radio around the holidays.  Her love for hymnology showed in her consistent attention to the Creamer collection, given to Drew in 1868 and never hitherto really cataloged or explored.  Her amazing ability to listen and discern what's important, her love for her church (Presbyterian), her family, her friends, and her alma mater (Oberlin) were all well attested at a gathering of friends and family in her memory in Madison, New Jersey on Saturday, September 18.

I can only say how profoundly thankful I am to have been able to work with Alice and all the staff of the cataloging department then --Lessie, John, Elise, Annie, Marcia, Agnes, Cheryl, Susan, and Lucy.  It was a great start in librarianship, and real bread for the journey.  In Alice's favorite words from Hamlet, "The readiness is all."

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This post refers back to the post (below) of May 14, 2010.

In that post, I mentioned Larry Sanger (co-founder of Wikipedia) and his article Individual Knowledge and the Internet.  Sanger analyzes three common strands of current thought about education and the Internet.  "First is the idea that the instant availability of knowledge online makes memorization of facts unnecessary or less necessary."  (The other two strands will be examined more fully in later posts.) 

This view of memorization tends to substitute the Internet as a resource for individual learning and knowledge.  Sanger cites statements by Don Tapscott and David Dalrymple to the effect that in the future "we will be relying increasingly on the Internet as an extension or prosthesis of our memory."  His image of a "mental prosthesis" is very vivid.

Sanger counters that this claim belies "any profound grasp of the nature of knowledge."  How can one know anything unless one has remembered it, and does not memory at some point require memorization --the conscious act of committing to memory?  Educationalists are possibly referring to unnecessary, rote memorizing --dull repetition "often without experience or understanding."

But what counts as unnecessary, as trivial? (The history of the term "trivial" --from the trivium referring to the three ancient or medieval artes liberales: grammar, rhetoric, and logic--reveals an interesting story for another post).  This is both a slippery question and a deep one.  Knowledge is necessary to ask more questions: Sanger's example that the date 1066 for the Battle of Hastings means nothing to a child, who lacks any historical knowledge, and becomes memorable only as the impact of that Battle is absorbed.  "Actually having a knowledge of understanding about [a] topic will always require critical study. The Internet will never change that."

Absorbing new knowledge always relies upon previously absorbed knowledge.  There is a chicken-and-egg here: you need to know something in order to know more.  A regular trope of liberal education is that people should "learn how to learn."  Some then extend this trope to claim that since knowledge is changing so fast, and today's children will have to reinvent their knowledge base multiple time, memorizing facts and figures is a waste of time." (Don Tapscott)  This is an old and stale argument --that progress renders a knowledge of past fact and figures useless.

Tapscott's argument presupposes that new knowledge either replaces or renders pointless old knowledge.  This is occasionally the case, but rarely.  Have advances in genomics, nuclear physics, nanotechnology, or linguistics really replaced far more basic skills of careful attention to texts, and master of a vast body of essential facts and points of view that undergird new acquisition of new knowledge. 

The key here is Tapscott's dimissive adjective rote memorization --dull, pointless, and mechanical.  Perhaps Tapscott will someday be operated upon by a surgeon who has not bothered with the rote memorization of human anatomy, and in that event, I wish Tapscott well.  Just because some instances of primary-school memorization in the past has been dull, pointless, and mechanical does not mean that memorization as a skill is pointless, dull, and mechanical.  It might be vital.  There objection that there is so such thing as "the basics" is ridiculous.  If human anatomy is not basic for a surgeon, then what is?

Sanger's point: "the only way to being to know something is to have memorized it."  Perhaps not absolutely in every minor detail!  Memorization is gateway to internalizing knowledge, really making a part of one's walking-around mentality, stock of images, living performative skills.  And it is work.  And digital resources can assist but not replace it.  And the internet as a whole will not replace it.

This brief video (duration: 4:18) provides a convenient introduction to the way that books are digitized, and how a very creative University Press is handling the numerous production and distribution details involved with moving from printed books to e-books.
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This brief video (duration: 4:18) provides a convenient introduction to the way that books are digitized, and how a very creative University Press is handling the numerous production and distribution details involved with moving from printed books to e-books.

Sacred Heart University Library is considering a trial of Cambridge Books Online during the summer of 2010 -- please respond to this post if you have any thoughts about this!