The Questioning Librarian

Over the weekend, I had the opportunity to attend a conference on Social Thought here in State College. The event began on Friday evening with a keynote address by noted sociologist Frances Fox Piven, a fitting choice for a conference with a focus on inequality given her work on poverty in the United States. Just as interesting as her address were a number of papers presented by current grad students and faculty the next day, on topics as diverse as the "Sunflower" Movement in Taiwan, the rhetoric of the C.I.A.'s kill list, and Sojourner Truth's conception of equality. It was incredibly heartening to see so much bright young talent, but what was less heartening was Piven's statement the night before that no matter how brilliant a grad student may be, the likely future of most will be the serfdom of permanent adjunct status. Piven lamented the attack on universities, pointing out the role of states in gutting financial support, in administrators creating ever-...

There have always been anti-intellectual elements in our public life; both Richard Hofstadter and Susan Jacoby have chronicled the waxing and waning of anti-intellectualism in the United States in the past two centuries. What is disturbing is to see that, for all our knowledge, our technology, and the progress we have made, anti-intellectualism is on the rise again. While we have always seen sniping at the edges in the ongoing battles over teaching evolution, and climate change, many of the recent battles have been attacks on education itself, and the very idea that education has value for its own sake. The attacks on education have come largely from the Republican Party, often in the form of deep cuts to both K-12 education and higher education. Sacrifices must be made, the governors and legislators solemnly declare, but those sacrifices never seem to come from those who can afford to make them, nor are they equally distributed. Pennsylvania's now-former Republican gove...

A poster for the 1966 film version of Bradbury's novel I miss Ray Bradbury. Even having lived for 91 years and authored over three hundred short stories, it seems still too short a time to have graced our society with his presence, still too few works for someone of his talent. I don't remember exactly when I first read Fahrenheit 451 , sometime in junior high, followed quickly by the haunting stories in The Martian Chronicles , but I know that like many of the classics I read in 7th and 8th grade I didn't understand it nearly as well as I should have. Fahrenheit 451  strikes me much more now than it did then, perhaps because we are much closer to Bradbury's dystopian future than when I first read it. I recently finished re-reading the book in advance of a book discussion at the library this week, and it is remarkable how prescient Bradbury was, writing in the early fifties during a time of increased paranoia about the advance of communism and censorship of oppos...