The Questioning Librarian

Last week, I finished the newest work by David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation, considered the final volume in his trilogy about the history of slavery. While the entire work was interesting, from his discussion about the complicated process of abolishing slavery, to the colonization movement in the United States, and the status of free blacks as a window into how slaves were viewed, his thoughts on the larger question of moral progress and human history in the conclusion were most interesting to me. While it is hard, he writes, to look at the blood-soaked history of the 20th Century and imagine that we are making moral progress, the abolition of chattel slavery in the West stands as a shining example of this very idea, that within roughly two hundred years we ended a practice that had been accepted for thousands of years. The question of race in the United States is, however, another matter entirely. Davis begins with a discussion about the an...

An ISIS militant destroys a statue in Nimrud Last month, the civilized world was horrified at the sack of yet another site of historical significance, as ISIS vandals bulldozed the city of Nimrud in Iraq, once a center of power in the Assyrian Empire. It was hardly the first time they had acted in their quest to destroy "idols," nor are they the only group to have taken similar measures. The Taliban in Afghanistan took dynamite to the great Buddhas of Bamiyan, reducing the 1,700-year old statues to rubble. These groups may cloak their destruction in the guise of following their religion, but this contempt for the past is a hallmark of many totalitarian ideologies. The Chinese government denies the massacre at Tienanmen Square, where an unknown number of Chinese citizens, possibly thousands, were killed, and actively blocks Internet content referencing the incident.  Even more shameful are the historical whitewashings of supposedly non-totalitarian governments an...

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-...

My first job as a librarian was in the city of Uniontown, the birthplace of George C. Marshall. Reminders of the general's presence were everywhere, from the plaza dedicated to his memory to the portraits that rested in the library, including one hanging directly across from my desk. Two full shelves were dedicated to various biographies of Marshall, all of them laudatory, including one whose very title declared Marshall "A Hero for Our Time." It was then with great interest that I came across a new biography by historians Debi and Irwin Unger, which promised to paint a more balanced picture of the general's life and achievements. While not denying his successes, the authors are quick to point out Marshall's many flaws. While he deserves acclaim for overseeing the military buildup in the war, the training of American soldiers was grotesquely inadequate. Lauded as an exceptional judge of character, the Ungers assert that the real record speaks otherwise. His...

When I began my tenure as a library director, one of the things that caused me the most trepidation was the thought of putting together a budget. When the time came, I did the best I could with no financial training and as much knowledge about the finances of the library as I could gather. I made sure to check the budget with anyone who might know enough to give constructive comment. Remarkably, it held up rather well in the following year, and it was far less stressful to put together the next budget. But it should never have been this way. This experience, and subsequent work with others in the field of library and information science, revealed a glaring oversight in how librarians are trained. I cannot speak for graduate programs other than my own, but the lack of training in basic finance is not only a surprising lapse but a disservice to the field as a whole. How can we be expected to effectively lead our organizations if we don't have the training we need to thrive? How ...

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...

I realized this week that I've given up on my early stories. I've been writing since I was in fifth grade, but I hit my stride in high school, churning out story after story, some short but with several longer works each clocking in at around two hundred pages typed. While I knew that the writing itself was not the best, I cared deeply about some of the characters I created, and the stories mattered to me. They matter still. I always thought that I would go back and take up the storylines again, re-write them to be worthy of being published. Slowly that thought has eroded away, and now I no longer want to revisit them. Writing them was practice. Even if I were to become a wildly-successful novelist, those early stories should never see the light of day. I wouldn't want them to, for that matter, as they do not represent my best efforts. These stories are alive only to me, and just barely at that. I wonder how many other stories share the same fate--to have their author spen...