Academic Librarian

LIS News led me to this blog post from Conservative Librarian, written by an academic librarian at Purdue. I'm all for librarians participating in popular political discourse, but I think this post trying to make "An Economic Case Against Homosexuality" has some rhetorical and logical problems.

The author opens by saying that "as a Christian," he agrees "with the biblical condemnation of the homosexual lifestyle." He realizes that making such a claim based on his interpretation of his holy book means nothing to any but the choir. It's as if I said, "as a Christian, I agree with the biblical imperative to love your neighbor as yourself." Who cares? John Rawls argued that to make political arguments in a pluralist society, we need to use public reason, that is, common reason available to us all, not partial reasons available only to those who share a particular prejudice. It's also the standard by which academic discourse is generally judged. The author apparently recognizes this problem, and thus tries to make the "economic case" against homosexuality.

Unfortunately, the claim of his provocative title falls apart almost immediately, as he's forced to consider "other aberrant forms of sexual expression." Otherwise, the argument, such that it is, makes little sense. For example, one of the "economic cases" against homosexuality is the amount of money the U.S. has spent on AIDS treatment and research in the past few decades. There are no sources cited, and a couple of uses of "probably" rather than hard numbers, but if we consider what the U.S. has spent worldwide on AIDS it is probably a lot. I agree. However, the biggest AIDS epidemic for a long time has been in Africa, and has nothing to do with homosexuality. Hence, the resort to "other aberrant forms of sexual expression," which in the AIDS argument seems equal to "heterosexual promiscuity in Africa and elsewhere." All this money being spent on AIDS, even if it has nothing to do with homosexuality, could have been spent on other diseases. I suppose there's a point there. It's not a point against homosexuality, though. Note some of the money has been spent on needle exchanges. The needles have nothing to do with sex--homo, hetero, or otherwise.

Then comes this claim: "Our ongoing U.S. political debate over health care reform also needs to factor in the economic costs of  homosexual and other sexually deviant behaviors on our health care system in terms of pharmaceutical drugs, tainted blood supplies, and requiring doctors and nurses to treat sexually transmitted diseases which would be less likely to occur if people practiced chastity outside of heterosexual marriage and monogamy within such marriage." We could wonder what those costs might be, but the motivation to consider them in the way phrased has stepped outside the boundary of public reason. Sex outside of marriage is much more likely a norm of sexual behavior, which would make abstinence the "deviation," unless one's assumptions come from a religious base rather than the evidence of what people actually do. STDs are apparently widespread in the U.S. It might be the case they're from deviant sexual practices, but there's no reason to assume that doctors not treating them would have been busy treating other things. We could easily reverse this and argue that it's a good thing we have all these STDs that need treatment; otherwise all those doctors and nurses wouldn't have as much employment.

The next paragraph is the one that really threw me, though. Here it is in full:

Anyone who studies prison conditions knows that AIDS is a reality in many correctional facilities due to the occurrence of rape. I'm not sure how systematically the Justice Dept's Bureau of Justice Statistics keeps track of prison rape statistics or other instances of same sex sexual assault, but that also has economic implications not to mention the psychological trauma experienced by all rape victims.  I have seen one Bureau of Justice Statistics study indicating that 90% of prison rapes are from male on male sexual activity.  This particular problem was serious enough to cause Congress to pass legislation in 2003 creating a Prison Rape Elimination Commission which issued its report earlier this year.  The presence of sex offender registries, which require significant law enforcement staff time and expense to update and maintain, is another demonstration of the high economic costs of sexually deviant behavior.

Now we've moved well beyond any economic argument against homosexuality. "Sexual deviance" as defined by the author now includes homosexual sex, extramarital sex, prison rape, and the broad range of behaviors known as sexual offenses. Collapsing all these into the same category is conceptually problematic unless one has left public reason behind once more. To say that a stable and long-cohabiting but unmarried heterosexual couple are the equivalent of prison rapists or child molesters doesn't make much sense morally or philosophically. Regardless of the conceptual problems trying to relate all these disparate behaviors, what "economic implications" are there about prison rape? There's a claim, but no evidence or argument whatsoever. And even if there was, why would we need to make an economic argument against prison rape or child molestation? Surely most of us could agree that prison rape or child molestation is bad regardless of our stances on economics. This guilt by association is a poor excuse for an argument.

The author then gets slightly back on track by discussing same-sex partner benefits. This at least has some relation to homosexuality and possibly to economics. He claims that providing same-sex partner benefits "drives up insurance costs for these companies" and "requires these companies to pass on the costs of their goods and services beyond normal inflationary trends." Maybe. I don't know. There's no evidence cited. "Additionally, it also probably makes it more difficult for them to expand their businesses and create additional jobs in an economy coping with near double digit unemployment rates." There's that probably again. Maybe it would. Wouldn't all benefits do this, though? Why not eliminate all health care benefits, if economic efficiency is all that matters?

The oddest thing for a blog post from an academic librarian is a questionable citation to an alleged study--"Corporate Resource Center's study Do Domestic Partner Benefits Make Good Economic Sense? (available at their website)"--only there's no link and I could find no evidence that such a center or study exists. Why not just link to it? The question is irrelevant, anyway, but having a citation one could actually track down is a minimal academic requirement.

The post ends talking about further problems with the "homosexual lifestyle," despite the fact that many of the claims about "economic consequences" haven't been based on homosexuality at all. The only economic issue specifically regarding homosexuality in the entire post is the claim that businesses expanding coverage makes it difficult for them. That's the case for any benefits at all, though. If companies dropped all their health benefits, they'd be more profitable. Tens of millions of people would suffer horribly, but economic arguments don't address that.

Besides the red herrings, the real problem with the argument is that, while pretending to rely on public reasoning, it relies on the wrong type of public reasoning. It's making an economic argument when a political or moral one is appropriate.

One could make an "economic case" against all sorts of rights. For example, one could have argued during the civil rights debates in the fifties and sixties that ending Jim Crow would have economic costs. Ending Jim Crow and spending money to enforce equal rights cost money. So what?

Males under 25 are the most dangerous drivers on the road and cause the most accidents. Should we forbid them to drive? People who eat red meat have a higher chance of getting heart disease, which is a tax on our health system. Should we ban meat? The divorce rate for evangelical Christians is higher than for any other religious group and for agnostics and atheists? Think of the economic costs in terms of divorce lawyers, property loss, increased chances of impoverishment for single mothers with children, not to mention the costs of dealing with the psychological problems divorce can cause in children. Should we ban evangelical Christians from marrying and having children?

Despite the apparent attempt to use public arguments not based on the Bible, the exercise in this blog post is misguided. Using economic arguments in a political debate only makes sense if the persons in the debate share common values, because there's no value in economics besides efficiency. There's a persistent belief among many Americans that economic arguments trump political or moral arguments, but that logic isn't carried through consistently. It's only applied when the supposed economic argument benefits their political side.

This attempt at public reasoning ultimately fails. Economic arguments are about the most efficient means to an end, but they're pointless unless we agree on the end. Besides, questions of rights aren't about economics; they're about justice, whichever side you're on.

Most of you might already have heard about the creationist edition of The Origin of Species that an evangelical Christian ministry will be passing out on college campuses in November. I first read about it here. U.S. News has a pair of dueling blog posts from the creationist introduction writer Ray Comfort and the director for the National Center for Science Education.

I'll have to reserve judgment completely until I actually see a copy, but based on Comfort's blog post and the Kirk Cameron video promoting this, the creationist introduction by Ray Comfort sounds like it's going to be a whirlwind of fallacious reasoning.

Supposedly it claims that Charles Darwin was a racist and didn't like women. That's a standard ad hominem attack that's a fallacy if it is used to try to discredit the person's views on other things. Darwin's personal views aren't relevant to the theory of evolution.  If a Christian minister has sex with children or murders someone in cold blood, does that mean God doesn't exist?

Or there's the Hitler connection. Every muddled thinker likes to bring Hitler into an argument if they can. Far from clinching an argument, it usually just shows the irrationality of the person making it. From Comfort's blog post: "It also has quotes from Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf showing Hitler's undeniable links to evolution. Of course, Hitler also used Christianity to further his political agenda, but my point is that...." There's no need to go on. His point is that he'll use the evidence to support his criticism but ignore that it also undermines his own position, a very convenient double standard. Confirmation bias or suppressed evidence might be the fallacy.

There's further suppression of evidence. This one was spotted by the Salon article. "[Cameron] then narrows in for the killer point: 'A recent study revealed that in the top 50 universities in our country, in the fields of psychology and biology, 61 percent of the professors described themselves as atheist or agnostic.”\' True, though he fails to point out that the same study found only 23.4 percent of college professors overall declare themselves atheist or agnostic. College: still pretty damn godly!" I wish I'd written that.

One major fallacy is the false dichotomy of this creationist's claims. "An entire generation is being brainwashed by atheistic evolution without even hearing the alternative," Cameron intones in the video, as if there were only these two options, and in exactly the form he proposes [my italics]. Since this is a church that apparently believes that Catholics aren't Christians, astounding ignorance about the world's possibilities shouldn't surprise me. One very likely possibility is that the students have in fact heard "the" alternative and found it wanting.

Resting on this false dichotomy, the whole project is based on the belief that debunking The Origin of Species somehow proves that creationism is true. This fallacy is known as argumentum ad ignorantiam, the argument that because some proposition hasn't been proven, then some other contradictory proposition is therefore true. But Darwin and the creationists could both be wrong. Some creationists act as if The Origin of Species is the "Bible" of evolutionists, but that's projecting the way fundamentalists think onto the way scientists think.

I'm not at all surprised by this lack of reasoning ability. I took a look at the Living Waters Ministry site. They produce something called the Evidence Bible that seems to be devoid of any actual evidence. Fundamentalists of any religion are always guilty of the begging the question. They assume as true what needs to be proven for their argument to proceed. Begging the question is the essential fundamentalist fallacy.  A standard example of question begging offered in classes is this circular argument: "The Bible is true because God says it is. God exists because the Bible says He does."

Living Waters directly addresses this charge: "The 'circular reasoning' argument is absurd. That’s like saying you can’t prove that the President lives in the White House by looking into  the White House. It is looking into the White House that will provide the necessary proof." Actually, it's not at all like saying that. There is plenty of observable evidence that the President lives in the White House, evidence open to public inspection and verification. Merely looking into the White House wouldn't prove that the person in there was the President or was actually living there. Trying to rebut the charge of question begging with another fallacy--the false analogy--doesn't get very far. (The answers regarding Bible versions are downright dissembling. If you get that far, pay attention to the weasel word versions

Cameron seems very concerned that students come to college as creationists and leave as "atheists." I doubt that most students who come to college as theists of some sort leave as atheists. Is there any proof of this? This is like those claims that the students carefully indoctrinated into right-wing doctrines by their parents are then indoctrinated into left-wing doctrines by their leftist professors. That one is merely assumed but not proven as well. The creationist one in particular is guilty of the fallacy of persuasive definition, that is, of defining something in a way that seems neutral but is in fact very loaded. Anyone who doesn't subscribe to this particular intellectually limited version of Christianity is somehow not a Christian. Belief in the Nicene Creed isn't sufficient for the this particular cult.

Persuasive definitions are a fondness of Comfort's, it seems. His U.S. News post says "The Introduction also defines an atheist as someone who believes that nothing created everything—which is a scientific impossibility." That's a very peculiar definition of atheist, but then again people incapable of meeting rational arguments on their own ground must resort to this kind of move. Does anyone believe nothing created everything?

What a college education should do is knock the fallacious reasoning out of someone and instill a capacity for critical thinking. These creationists demonstrate that they are incapable of sound argument or scientific reasoning, which puts them at a disadvantage when coming onto college campuses. The enterprise is loaded against them from the start because they are trying to use  the tools of science and reason against their main practitioners without understanding how they work.

What I find either amusing or sad (depending on my mood) is that these creationists think there is actually a debate and they're just not being heard, if indeed they do think this and are not merely being disingenuous. Obviously there isn't any debate. To have a debate, one must share some premises, and there aren't any shared premises. One must also demonstrate a willingness to be persuaded, rather than confining one's mind inside an unfalsifiable ideology. At the very least one must have shared standards of evidence, and this is completely lacking.

They think there is a scientific debate between creationism and evolution, but the debate is whether the Bible is the inspired, inerrant, and literally true Word of God. That's a religious debate, though, not a scientific one, and it's been tried and found wanting by the vast majority of educated and intelligent people open to an examination of the evidence for a few centuries now. There's no battle between science and religion. In this case, there's just a battle between fundamentalists and modernity.

It's ironic that creationists try to dispute evolution because it supposedly has no evidence to support it (which the evolutionary biologists deny, but then again they would, wouldn't they!) when the creationist position not only has absolutely no evidence to support it outside of the Bible but has to ignore what scientific evidence there is. This is only a problem for creationists if they attempt to persuade people for whom science, reason, and evidence are important. Begging the question works on people who can't think clearly.

I wonder what will happen if Cameron and the LIving Waters visit my campus. As far as I can tell, Princeton is a remarkably tolerant place for people of reasonable views. Perhaps they'll encounter prominent Catholic, conservative professor Robert George and tell him he'll burn in hell because he's not a Christian. Given his ability and his willingness to engage adversaries calmly and critically, that might be an interesting discussion, indeed.

There's no use arguing with fundamentalists. That's a lesson I learned the hard way. In my home state of Louisiana, I used to be accosted by fundamentalist Christians asking if I was "born again" before they began selectively quoting the Bible at me. Back in the day when I had more time on my hands, I would engage them in discussion, to no end. Usually they couldn't even defend the Bible well, much less their other claims. (Seven years of Southern Baptist private school--don't try to trade Bible quotes with me, buddy.)

I'm not trying to argue with Comfort or against this edition of Darwin. He sensibly asks why angry atheists would want to suppress this book or rip out the introduction. I'm not an angry atheist, so I have no such desire. If one of the books somehow ends up in my hands, I will, in my capacity as religion bibliographer, definitely add it to the collection. it will make a nice curio someday for a religion scholar studying quirky manifestations of fundamentalism in America.

Selecting titles for off-site storage in a large library is sometimes a trip through the history of fads and passions. Years ago, I sent off a number of titles on atheism from the 1960s, thinking that subject probably wouldn't be a craze again. Less than a decade later came Dawkins et al., so I'm definitely no seer.

However, I do have a proposal for the shortest-lived genre in book history: A Guide to [Whatever Subject] on the Internet. Ten or fifteen years ago this was a hot genre, and now the notion of using a book as a guide to websites just seems archaic.

We're discussing some of our journal packages from large publishers, so I've been thinking a lot about them lately. Those who work in or have paid much attention to collection development for the past couple of decades are aware of the impact serial price increases have had on library budgets. I think this has been one of the most pressing issue in academic libraries for a long time. In general, I believe libraries should pull out of most package deals with publishers and go back to managing subscriptions on a title by title basis, as well as have the willingness to cut those titles with exorbitant price raises. This provides libraries their only bargaining power with publishers.

I've heard a number of librarians over the years claim that Elsevier or Wiley or Springer or whomever were "evil," and I can't say I've always been more generous in my appraisals. It doesn't help us to bemoan our fate or ask why the publishers act like they do. They do things for the same reason all corporations do anything: to maximize profit. Why this big increase? To maximize profit. Why that pricing model? To maximize profit. That's all the "evil" publishers like Elsevier do, and they do it well. As long as they're not being fraudulent (like publishing advertising as medical scholarship), they're no more evil than any corporation. Publishers aren't there to be information providers. Providing information is just the way they make money. I think scholarly information is a public good and should be kept out of commercial hands for the most part, but that's certainly not going to happen. Blaming commercial publishers for maximizing profits is like blaming fish for swimming.

We're never operating in an equal bargaining position, partly because journals aren't commodities. Each journal is a monopoly. We can't unsubscribe from Brain and choose Mind instead just to save $10,000. Publishers know how unlikely we are to sacrifice key titles. Many years ago they tried to maximize their profit by raising journal prices at four times the rate of inflation. When libraries finally cracked and started cutting subscriptions, they got us to give up all control and agree to multi-year packages where they would raise the prices each year by only twice the rate of inflation, and we agreed to ease our pain. Then they threw in a lot of stuff we neither want not need and pretended they were doing us a favor, while in reality they were just trying to get us hooked so we'd do anything they asked later just to keep getting our fix. Plus, now we're charged for "access," and don't even own anything that we can preserve in some cases. They were performing as rational agents in the marketplace. The question is, can we?

It doesn't do any good to try to bargain with publishers if we have nothing to bargain with. They've seen for 20 years how willing we are to make deals which benefit them more than they benefit us. The only way to have any bargaining power is to get out of the packages and resume control title by title. Someone might ask,  what if they go back their old ways and start raising journal prices exorbitantly? The only answer is that we have to cancel the journals they do this for, and with hindsight know that moving into multi-year packages won't solve our problems, either. If we're not willing to go back to title by title control, and we're also not willing to cancel subscriptions even to high profile journals if they start raising prices exorbitantly, then we have NO bargaining power whatsoever, and probably never will. Unless we do this, there's certainly no use in trying to fix the blame on the publishers; we'll have only ourselves to blame.

There has probably never been a better time for libraries to start acting more aggressively in the marketplace. Librarians have been putting the case against commercial STM journal publishers for years, and the faculty don't like it when publishers do this stuff any more than we do. But now libraries have an even better reason to act. Libraries and universities are under enormous financial strain, and this is the perfect time to try to regain our bargaining power. This is the time to stop paying for packages containing a lot of titles we don't want, don't need, and don't use, and to take back what control we can. It's no use damning the Pusher Man. The only way to deal with the Pusher Man is to push back.

 

Last time I wrote about librarian-instructor collaboration, and that got me thinking about why those collaborations don't always work out. In this context, I'm thinking more about collaborations on first year writing classes, where there's often a library instruction component offered.

Some instructors are resistant to having librarians in their classes, or giving any time to the librarians. Librarians sometimes don't understand this. The attitude is, "but I could help so much. Why won't they let me in?" The librarians really want to help the students, and most of them probably would. But I can also see this from the other side of the desk, or of the classroom, or whatever is between the librarian and the instructor. Some instructors are reluctant to let librarians in because they have been the victims of library instruction.

I speak from experience, because I myself was a victim of library instruction. I'm offering a cautionary tale. When I was a wee writing instructor at Big State U., it was part of the routine to take the class to the library for some instruction in preparation for the research essay. For a couple of semesters, I dutifully followed orders. Before that, I'd had almost no contact with any librarians either in college or grad school, and had always managed to find my way on my own. English and philosophy majors don't do a lot of research in general, so I'm not saying it was any great feat to get through without help. But I did. However, I was glad at first to have the experts talk to the students.

The experts didn't talk to the students. I think the people delivering the instruction were graduate assistants who were in library school at the time. This might or might not be relevant, because GAs differ so much in their backgrounds. And I know that many GAs there were fantastic, such as myself and all my friends when I was in library school there. But I got a clunker, two semesters in a row.

We showed up at the library, and went to the well appointed instruction room, consisting of 2-3 tables, 25 or so chairs, and an overhead projector. This was 1992, and the library had a telnet catalog and Infotrac and some other databases. But the students saw none of that in action. I'm not sure if they saw much of anything. The library instructor dimmed the lights, and began putting transparencies on the overhead projector explaining Boolean logic in great detail, showing what the catalog would look like if we were in fact searching it, etc. And all this in a monotone for 50 minutes. To lend the library person authority, I tried to stay awake, but it wasn't always possible. Dozing off was the only way to escape the excruciatingly boring presentation we were all subjected to.

The students naturally complained. This is especially significant, since I myself at the time was a novice teacher and embarrassingly bad according to my own standards. I later grew a beard and began wearing big hats so that my students from that year wouldn't recognize me later and throw rocks at me. I was bad, but the library person was much worse. After a couple of semesters I said "to hell with this" and taught the library portion myself. There was no way I would have let someone from the library into my classroom.

Obviously much has changed since then. More classrooms have computers in them and are set up for hands-on learning. More librarians actually get the students searching for and evaluating materials right there in the library session. There's more active learning in general going on.

But how many librarians out there still do the equivalent of what I described? PowerPoint presentations to unengaged students? Monotonous lectures about Boolean logic to students updating their Facebook status? (Jane Smith "is lulled into a peaceful sleep by the librarian.") How many of us think library instruction consists of conveying information about using the library? Library instruction should convey information about using the library, but this is not the only, or possibly even the most important thing about it. It's not about conveying information, but about engaging an audience. It's not us teaching, but them learning that matters.  In short, how many of us are just plain boring and don't make an effort to engage the students?

Also, despite how good you might be, and all your colleagues might be, how many instructors have been the victims of library instruction in the past? Some resistance has nothing to do with the way things are now. It might not be completely rational to dismiss library help because of a few bad sessions, but it's not completely irrational from the instructor's perspective, either. A few bad sessions are enough to turn a new instructor off the library for good, and bad experiences from the distant past still inform the thinking of instructors in the present.

Anyway, it's something to think about.

We're doing some experimenting this year with our library instruction for the Princeton Writing Program which is making me wonder who should be the agent of library instruction. As part of our current experimentation, some of the burden for the most basic parts of the library instruction will fall on the experienced writing instructors, all of whom are experienced researchers in their own areas and all of whom have seen their assigned librarians go through the basic library research drill at least twice. They would also be given training and support by the librarians. The idea is that the simplest skills--the basics of searching the OPAC and an article database--would be taught by the writing instructor in an early library "discovery session," and the librarian would collaborate in a later "research clinic" and possibly meet individually with students for the most advanced portions of their research once they really got going on their projects.

I'm trying to think through the benefits and burdens of this approach, and also put the question out to my readers, many of whom do some sort of library instruction and have worthwhile perspectives to add on this.

There are certainly some possible downsides, depending on how the experiment works. Some writing instructors will probably not want to change a library relationship which has worked well in the past (though I'm sure there are other instructors who have been less than satisfied in the past). Some librarians might not want to change what they think works, either, but for this situation I think the satisfaction of the students and instructors should weigh more than our own, but I could be mistaken. About some things I tend to be a philosophical conservative; if things are going well, I think it's better not to mess with them. But it's not clear what's going well, or what is going well uniformly. Regardless, the dislike of changing the familiar and satisfactory is a psychological cost worth considering.

There's also the argument that this takes away some of the little time librarians get to work with students. If their instructors are teaching some of these skills, often not in the presence of the librarian, then that's one less place where the librarian is needed. This is met by the counter-argument that the librarians will be seen as more valuable because they will be entering the process when the research gets more difficult, and thus be able to show their expertise to the students and win them over.

A related concern is about division of labor. Library research is within the domain of librarian expertise, and the instructors should stick to their area of expertise, which theoretically is the teaching of writing. This could be seen as a loss of professionalism, I suppose. If the instructors are successful, why do we need librarians? That sort of thing. There's also the consideration that the instructors very well might not be able to do this as effectively as the librarians, for whatever reason.

An instructor I've worked with for years said that as an experienced researcher and teacher, she felt comfortable teaching the basics and knew much of the advanced stuff quite well, but nevertheless each time I've taught a session for her class she's learned something she didn't know about before. The issue here is possibly one of keeping up. Things change in the world of information technology in general, and in the organization of resources and services in our library in particular, and it's the job of the librarian to keep up with everything, to know what's changed and how best to navigate the available resources. As she put it, sometimes the things people don't know aren't the esoteric things, but the simple things. I have a feeling this would all be dealt with in the second session, but it's certainly a concern.

I can understand the concern on the part of some librarians, but I see things from a slightly different perspective, since I teach one of these writing seminars and act as my own librarian. Undoubtedly, this is the ideal. In my own seminar the distinction between instructor and librarian disappears, and I can teach the research process much more seamlessly than most instructors. We don't have our regular classes and then these classes where the alien librarian comes in and does "library stuff." I know what the students need at the time they need it. I can help them with whatever question might arise at any time.

In the version of the "research clinic" that I have already held for years with other seminars, the questions always vary. Sometimes the students need to talk to the instructor about the shape and possibility of their topic, and sometimes about finding stuff, supposedly the area of librarian expertise. Ideally, these things could be dealt with by the same person. Someone who knows the subject area of the assignment and also the library resources appropriate for research in that area equally well would be the ideal. (It's a pity that training the trainer can't go both ways, because I also find that my experience teaching both writing and research so extensively helps me immensely with my other research consultations.)

This symbiosis doesn't occur in the normal classroom where the librarian is this person who comes in to work with the class in a limited role. Then again, the instructors themselves just aren't as knowledgeable about the library portion of the research, and, depending on their areas, they might not be as knowledgeable about other aspects of academic research either, especially in any systematic way. For the process to work best, part of the class must be team taught, with the instructor and librarian each contributing. This does happen sometimes, and I've worked collaboratively with many instructors in limited ways, but how often does it or can it happen? The librarian can't just show up to every class during research essay time and chime in occasionally when research advice is called for. A train-the-trainer model at least gives the students easier access to both writing and research help.

At this point I'm not sure what I think, and am conducting the experiment in a spirit of inquiry and just waiting to see how it turns out.

Sometime soon I'm hoping to review the book Reinventing Knowledge, which I read recently and think academic librarians might find engaging, plus I want to offer a critique of this blog post from a new blog at Inside Higher Education written my my friend and colleague Mary George. But in a few days I start teaching my writing seminar on justice, and I can't shake the concern with political rhetoric and, for that matter, justice itself.

I guess my post on the Counter-Enlightenment had no effect, since the reactionary Yahoos left their town meetings and stormed Washington, holding up signs comparing President Obama to Hitler and other fun things. I read in one news account that someone had a sign offering Obama a "free ticket back to Kenya." One of Lincoln's desires before the Civil War was to free the slaves and send them to Africa, and it's interesting to see that things remain the same with some members of the party of Lincoln. From what I could tell of the news accounts, that crowd in DC was very white and male.

The white male reactionaries out there interest me, but for my purposes here I'm disregarding all the loonies and the birthers (including those in Congress) and other conspiracy theorists, since those types make up an extreme portion of any movement. From the left we have David Icke claiming that President Bush (along with Queen Elizabeth and others) is actually a shape-shifting alien reptile who is working secretly to lead us to a New World Order dominated by the reptile aliens. Some very similar theories are now being spun by the right. I guess the only difference is that David Icke propagates his theories in books and videos almost no one pays attention to, whereas Glenn Beck gets a national television show and seems to have his finger firmly on the pulse of irrational populism. But rhetorically, conceptually, and intellectually, they're quite similar.

From a rhetorical perspective, the events of the past few months have been fascinating. The Yelling Yahoos (and admittedly some of the right who are not Yelling Yahoos) claim that their recent protests are motivated by a concern with the cost of government, the size and scope of government, freedom, and lying Presidents, at least if I'm understanding the claims correctly. These are serious issues that deserve consideration by any concerned citizen. What's odd is how the same folks showed no such concern when a previous President lied to the American people about Iraq, led the country into an unjustified multi-trillion dollar war, increased the national debt by combining outrageous war expenses with tax cuts for the rich, and increased the scope of government though such things as nationalizing the TSA and the Patriot Act.

My counter-Enlightenment post drew an earnest (and probably non-librarian) reader who tried to persuade me that yelling mobs weren't really yelling mobs, or that they were yelling mobs but that they were yelling for good reasons, such as their concern with the scope of government and their freedom. But it should be extremely clear to anyone with eyes to see that people who claim to be motivated by principle but who only protest when that principle is compromised by someone of an opposing political party, then they're not really motivated by principle so much as by partisan politics. Be motivated by partisan politics if you wish, choose your beliefs based on party rather than reason or justice if you must, but please don't try to persuade others that you're somehow principled. For some people, freedom's just another word for not giving a damn about anyone else.

What I find bizarre isn't that Republicans and reactionaries and others are coming out in force in opposition to President Obama. Democrats and progressives and such came out in some force against President Bush, and sometimes in just as inane and bizarre a fashion as the birthers are attacking Obama. Leftist frothing and hyperventilation at the mention of President Bush was never a pretty sight. I don't even find it bizarre that they try to appeal to such principles as freedom or honesty or limited government. What I find bizarre is that considering the stances of many of these same people about the War in Iraq or the Patriot Act and other shenanigans of the Bush administration that they expect anyone to take their principled stand seriously, as my earnest commenter expected me to do to his position.

One cannot support the War in Iraq and plausibly claim to be against increasing the size and cost of government or offended by lying politicians. One cannot support the Patriot Act and plausibly claim to be concerned with the scope of government. One can't cut taxes for the rich and plausibly claim to be concerned with national debt. It doesn't seem to me that anyone is really opposed to the bogeyman of Big Government, but only what that Big Government might do. Fight a dubious war and disregard the Constitution and human rights in the name of security? Sure, that sounds like fun!. Help poor sick people get health care? Fascist dictatorship! How seriously can we possibly take some of these people?

Democratic politics provide for a turbulent and sometimes violent atmosphere. Such has always been the case. As citizens we should argue and fight, sometimes even protest and shout, for our political beliefs. And I at least can certainly see much to criticize about President Obama's handling of health care reform (though my criticisms would be different from the reactionaries). But it should be obvious that whatever is motivating the criticisms of the protesters, it is almost certainly not the principles that some of them claim. Appealing to principles only when they support your side doesn't make one principled, but merely an opportunist, or perhaps what the great conservative Edmund Burke called sophisters and calculators.

There's no hope for reasoned discussion until the true principles of the disagreement are laid bare, and until the public dialog is no longer driven by Yahoos. Somehow I don't think that's going to happen.

I think I have finally arrived. No, I don't have my own Wikipedia entry, but I do have my own Mahalo page. Mahalo bills itself as "human-powered search," though this page seems to have been auto-generated.  But that doesn't distract from the glowing pride I now feel about being famous, or at least famouser than I was. After all, I bet you don't have your own Mahalo page, now do you? Considering what an Internet phenomenon all Bivens-Tatums are, you might want to "claim" that page and make yourself up to $50 a month!

What's great is all the things I get to learn about myself. I knew all the stuff in the links. I have a blog and a couple of articles in the U. of Nebraska digital commons. After seeing the link, I remember that at some point in the past I joined Linkedin. And I still work at Princeton. Three of the images are even of me, and one of the other images bears a striking resemblance to a former colleague, who is also a male academic librarian with glasses and a beard. There aren't many of those around, so that's probably close enough.

However, I was somewhat surprised to see that my "products and merchandise" included two calculus books by Howard Anton. Considering how expensive they are, I should be getting some profit on those, and you can be sure I'll be contacting Wiley just as soon as I finish this post.

I was even more surprised to find the "Mahalo Answers for wayne bivens tatum." "What do you think of Jacob Wayne Peacocks art?" This must really be a Mahalo question for me, and my answer would have to be, I don't think about it at all, since I have no idea who he is. I don't feel too bad, because he probably has no idea who I am, either. There are three questions about someone or something called Lil Wayne, including, "What do you think about Lil Wayne making a rock record?" When I hear Little Wayne, the first mental association is with Little Elvis (def. 1), and I really don't want to think about Little Wayne making a rock record, or performing at the Grammys for that matter.

The Google ads seems spot-on, too. Elderly home care near Fort Wayne, IN is definitely something I might be interested in one day if I'm ever elderly and living in Fort Wayne. And if I were in Wayne, MI, a back specialist might be just the thing. I do suffer from a touch of lumbago occasionally, and being in Wayne, MI might set it off, especially if I had to drive all the way there. The 8-hour calculus dvd tutor would probably do me good, since I know bugger all about calculus, which no doubt surprises you given my relationship to the two calculus books I mentioned earlier.

This year I've been doing workshops on emerging search technologies, and Mahalo has figured in them all. I'm happy that now I'll have a page to show the audience as an example of all that Mahalo is capable of. All in all, I have to say I'm as impressed by Mahalo as I've ever been.

I've been vacationing for a couple of weeks on a Great Lake, swimming, sailing, hitting the local tourist attractions, and reading books on the Enlightenment . On vacation I deliberately try to avoid the news (so I don't spoil it playing tiny violins after reading sad tales like this one), but somehow I ended up reading a summary account of rabble-rousers and their roused rabble at town hall meetings about health care reform, and the contrast between that and my reading left me feeling depressed.

It was Voltaire, I think, (or perhaps Diderot) who wrote that violent resistance to arguments just meant you were too stupid to form arguments. We have seen this playing out around the country, with right-wing professional idiots (leaders?) encouraging their followers to shout, disrupt proceedings, deliberately avoid debate, and all the other tactics of the stupid and inarticulate in the face of calm reason. The irony is that these leaders and their followers seem to think of themselves as "conservatives" of some kind, but it's not at all clear what they want to conserve other than the wealth and power of private insurance companies. They certainly don't seek the ordered liberty so beloved of some who deem themselves conservatives. I've long speculated that there aren't really any conservatives in America anyway. There are only variations of reactionary against the Enlightenment ideals of the founding.

Historians of conservatism--e.g., Russell Kirk, Robert Nisbet, Jerry Muller--often trace the beginnings of conservatism in the English-speaking world to Edmund Burke and his Reflections on the Revolution in France (though Anthony Quinton goes further back to Bolingbroke, if I remember correctly). Burke himself, though, was a beacon of tolerance and reason compared to aggressive soldiers of the Counter-Enlightenment like Joseph de Maistre. A clubbable man and friend of Adam Smith and a supporter of the American War of Independence such as Burke couldn't have been otherwise. As the title and movement of conservatism were born and spreading through Europe, it made some sense. The conservatives were trying to conserve, or at least to resurrect, an older regime of authoritarian political and religious order that was actively under assault from Enlightenment values such as liberty, equality, toleration, reason, education, and individual rights against the state.

In America, such a tradition makes little sense, despite Kirk's heroic efforts to give American reactionaries an historical tradition. America was the first country founded upon Enlightenment values. Granted, Americans themselves have rarely in the mass lived up to those values, and the history of America is to some extent the development of these enlightened  values over the darker forces of our nature for two hundred years. No one with eyes to see could say that America is a perfectly enlightened or tolerant country, but without a doubt the enlightened values of the founding have slowly found favor with a greater percentage of the population. Those Americans resisting the ideals of reasoned discussion and debate, toleration for the Other, individual rights, liberty, equality, and education are thus not conservatives, but reactionaries. They don't wish to conserve or even resurrect a fallen order, but to impose darkness on the land.

To give some substance to these musings, let's briefly examine two figures of the Enlightenment who are in stark contrast to the shouting rabble and their beloved leaders in the recent meetings: Immanuel Kant and Adam Smith.

Kant wrote a late essay called "What is Enlightenment?" that summarized some of his views. For Kant, enlightenment meant throwing off the self-imposed shackles of leaders and having the courage to use your own reason to make decisions. The motto is sapere aude, or "dare to know." Enlightened people educate themselves, use their reason, and challenge irrational authority. They are not looking to be lead. The unenlightened desire to be led. They want people to tell them what to believe about important issues--about God, religion, ethics, politics. The unenlightened take on faith, for example, the literal truths of religious texts because they have been told to do so and have rarely had more faith in their own capacity for reason than in the word of another. This is not to say the unenlightened are stupid, though sometimes they are. This is merely to say they are unreasonable. Many of them wouldn't object to this at all. Recall Tertullian's famous defense of his Christian belief: Credo quia absurdum est--I believe because it is absurd. De Maistre and other figures of counter-Enlightenment were no different. For them, reason is not a primary value.

In the current debates, as in so many others in the country, we see this playing out. We see people who want to be led, who take their marching orders from radio and television entertainers like Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh, or from others hidden inside various advocacy groups. They don't reason, they don't dare to know. They certainly don't balk at the irrational and foolish. They're encouraged to become part of a mob and they do it in an attempt to forestall any rational debate by any side in the discussion. I heard one woman interviewed on the radio who claimed that she opposed a public health plan because she didn't want her health care decisions made by "some bureaucrat." Regardless of one's position in this debate, this response--no doubt fed to her by someone leading her on--is absurd. If she has health insurance now, who does she think is making decisions about her coverage but some bureaucrat, and, what's more, a bureaucrat with an eye on the profit margin of her insurance company rather than the needs of her health. An enlightened person would say, oppose or defend whatever you wish, but at least have intelligent reasons for doing so.

It's a more curious contrast with Adam Smith, a mainstay of the Scottish Enlightenment and one of the most misunderstood writers of contemporary times. In this country, Adam Smith has the reputation of being an absolutely laissez-faire economist, totally dedicated to the "invisible hand," opposed to government, a friend of the capitalist class and an implied enemy of those who find themselves losers in a perfectly free market. Both right and left have this illusion of Smith. Rich financiers in the Reagan years supposedly sported ties with Adam Smith's image, thinking he was one of their kind. Leftists are seldom any better. I once had a strange interaction with a fellow library school student, a socialist of sorts with an M.A. in history, who saw me reading The Wealth of Nations. The student refused to read Smith "because he was a capitalist," thus demonstrating his own lack of enlightenment. He'd been told all he needed to know by some professor or pundit, and relinquished faith in his own power to educate himself and make reasonable judgments based on his own knowledge.

Adam Smith was a defender of what he called the "system of natural liberty," and he did indeed describe and defend the division of labor and free trade that undeniably builds wealth in nations. However, he was not necessarily a friend of the capitalist or an opponent of government, as anyone who has ever bothered to read Smith would know. Does this quote from the Wealth of Nations surprise you?

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary.

Does this sound like a friend of the rapacious capitalist? What else are lobbyists and business interest groups but conspiracies against the public? Cabals dedicated to their own interest at the expense of the common good? Or this argument against mercantilism:

Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer. The maxim is so perfectly self-evident that it would be absurd to attempt to prove it. But in the mercantile system the interest of the consumer is almost constantly sacrificed to that of the producer; and it seems to consider production, and not consumption, as the ultimate end and object of all industry and commerce.

How many of our laws, regulations, and subsidies are truly dedicated to protection of the individual and unorganized consumers, and how many to the protection of organized business interests, i.e., the producers? Whose interests are at stake in the current debate, and whose interests are getting the most attention in the media--the consumers of health care or the producers of it? What would Adam Smith the consumer advocate have to say about the shenanigans of the insurance industry?

Despite my commentary on the health care debate here, it's not health care or the debate as such that interests me so much as the mob tactics associated with it. We have right wing pundits and entertainers calling President Obama a Nazi while encouraging the sort of mob politics the Nazis themselves used to such great effect. In this case, the end of enlightenment is the rise of the ochlocracy, or "rule of the mob." We've had people who might otherwise be intelligent and productive citizens showing up at meetings shouting so that others might not be heard. They've been acting like Yahoos, another creation of an eighteenth-century writer. In Gulliver's travel to the land of the Houyhnhnms he encounters creatures he takes to be humans by their appearance, but finds after watching them they're little more than bestial savages. Watching roused rabble scream and shout affirms Jonathan Swift's belief that humans aren't rational animals, but only animals capable of reason.

This disturbs me as a human and as a citizen, but also professionally. American reactionaries, wherever they have power, try to defund education and any other public good. They would rather send a harmless pot-smoker to prison than a smart poor person to college. With no responsible voices on the political right speaking out against the disruptive mobs, does this mean they support the rise of ochlocracy?

There are mobs of every political stripe, as history has shown, but I'm more concerned professionally by right-wing than left-wing mobs. Left-wing mobs have a tendency to destroy commercial property (as in the WTO protests in Seattle a decade ago) or else just appropriate it (as with most left-wing revolutions). I don't have any commercial property, and am unlikely to acquire any, so that doesn't affect me as directly. Right-wing mobs have a tendency to attack institutions of education rather than of commerce. They don't like book-learning, but they do like book-burning.

The Right has been working hard for a couple of decades to reduce the funding of higher education, and thus make it more difficult for poor, or even the middle class, to afford college. This is insidious destruction of a society of educated and thus often critical citizens. With the active encouragement of people to join mobs and shout down opponents, and the lack of right-winge opposition to demagogic voices, how big a leap is it to imagine mobs being encouraged not just to shout down politicians they don't like, but to start burning books and such at public rallies? If the reactionary leaders don't like reasoned debate, how long before they direct the mobs against the the institutions most dedicated to reason and debate--our colleges and universities?

Does this seem far-fetched? Perhaps. On the other hand, one right-wing entertainer with millions of followers is ignorant or stupid enough to compare those who believe in equal rights with women to Nazis. It's not like we aren't living amidst millions of loud, ignorant bigots. I see no difference in principle in demagogues encouraging their followers to disrupt peaceful meetings and encouraging them to besiege libraries or disrupt the activities of teaching and learning at institutions of higher education. Both involve resistance to enlightenment, the denial of reason, and the embrace of dark, unruly passions.

At the risk of having Walt Crawford never link to one of my blog posts again, I'm going to talk about some things that have been bothering me about the Library Leadership Network. No, that's not quite right. I'm going to talk about some things that bother me about some of the things the LLN links to, so maybe this is more participating in the conversation than criticizing the LLN, and thus Walt might link to me again one day. I'm not uncomfortable with talk of leadership, but there's something about the idea of "leaders," and especially their concomitant "followers," that sometimes rubs me the wrong way.

At other points I've criticized people who conflate leader and manager, thus designating anyone who happens to be in a supervisory role a "leader." This is a category mistake that should be easy to spot, since I'm sure most of us have known supervisors who were neither leaders nor managers, but instead uninspired and incompetent mediocrities. Or maybe I'm the only one who's known anyone like that. So I contend it's a mistake to confuse leaders and managers. To judge by the "leadership literature" LLN sometimes links to, this sort of sloppy thinking is endemic to the field. I'm not sure who's a "leader" and who isn't, but anyone incapable of disambiguating the various terms that allow even remotely intelligent discussion of the issue isn't going to get me as a "follower."

But the literature displays more than just a tendency to insufficiently parse terminology. Tonight I've been going through some entries in another LLN category: Leaders and Followers, linked from the latest LLN Highlights. One entry I found especially irksome: "What every leader needs to know about followers." (It's down a way on the page; the link to the original article is broken.) The LLN summary reads: "This article identifies five types of followers--followers being those who 'are low in the hierarchy and have less power, authority, and influence than their superiors.'" It took me a couple of minutes just to get past that. This sentence, especially the spurious definition of "follower," implies that everyone who is a "superior" in some sort of hierarchy is thus a "leader" (since leaders have followers, while superiors have inferiors), and that anyone below this "superior" "follows." The sloppy language is made more bizarre by the very obvious fact that some of the types discussed don't "follow" at all. Just read the description of Isolates, Bystanders, Participants, Activists, and Diehards.

This is another example of using language sloppily and conflating terms, but the writers of this leadership literature have surpassed sloppy categorization and moved on to just making words mean whatever they want them to mean. I don't see what the purpose could be except to aggrandize anyone in any supervisory position and turn everyone who isn't into some sort of inferior "follower" who waits breathlessly for words of wisdom to fall from Der Fuhrer's lips. (The unpleasant connotation explains why, as i understand it, the Germans don't write much about "leadership.") It also makes nonsense of the very obvious truth that if you don't have any followers, then you're just not a leader, despite whatever authority and power you might have to energize people or make them miserable at work.

Let's back away for the moment from the sloppy thinking of some leadership literature and consider another blog post I read today on professionalization at Rory Litwin's Library Juice. (Perhaps the confluence of events inspired my own thinking.) In that post, Litwin cites an article listing some of the characteristics of a profession, which includes "Autonomy and control of one’s work and how one’s work is performed." Litwin opines that " it is endemic of the period of deprofessionalization that we are in that library managers have begun to say that 'professionalism' means performance of ones tasks according to high standards of quality (as judged by them)."

Though I don't know if he would agree with this, in the context of my discussion, this would mean that "professionalism" is being redefined to mean whatever The Leader says is good, and the good professional is the Good Follower who does what The Leader says. If this is the case--if all "managers" are "leaders" and everyone else is a "follower" kowtowing to the leader--then it does either lead to deprofessionalization or merely indicate that no professionalism is present anyway.

This brings together much of what bothers me about the intellectually sloppy literature on leadership that I've read. It's not that there aren't organizations that it might apply to (though this might be the case); it's more that it doesn't seem to apply to the sort of organization I work for or the sort of work I do, either practically in my case or ideally in anyone's case. There are jobs in which pleasing the boss is the job, but librarianship shouldn't be one of those jobs.

Professional academic librarians should look upon such thinking with disdain, just as professional academics should. The key is the concept of "professional." Here are a couple more entries in the definition of profession:

• Motivation focusing on intrinsic rewards and on the interests of clients – which take precedence over the professional’s self-interests
• Commitment to the profession as a career and to the service objectives of the organization for which one works
• Sense of community and feelings of collegiality with others in the profession, and accountability to those colleagues
• Self-monitoring and regulation by the profession of ethical and professional standards in keeping with a detailed code of ethics

I interpret all this to mean there is a sense of obligation by each professional to shared standards that determine the appropriateness or quality of conduct, rather than the words of wisdom spoken by Der Fuhrer.

We're told by the leadership gurus that "Good followers actively support good (effective) leaders and oppose bad (ineffective, immoral) leaders." But in an atmosphere of professionalism, good "leaders" may be entirely absent, yet good work may still be done.

This leadership literature all seems to be written for commercial rather than academic organizations. Thus, in addition to the nonprofessional assumptions that people are "followers" there's the lack of rigor and intellectual standards that makes so much of this writing no different than the typically execrable self-help literature for the ignorant masses. In fact, part of what bothers me about so much of this is the demonstrated inability to think carefully. In academia, thinking carefully and developing articulate arguments are minimal criteria for being taken seriously. To the masses one may be a leader, while to the educated one is merely a demagogue.

Other organizations and academia are perhaps analogous to dictatorships and republics. Dictatorships operate under the Rule of (One Person's) Will, but republics under the Rule of Law. A standard definition of a republic is that it is governed by laws, not people. We are professionals precisely because the word of Der Fuhrer doesn't decide what is right or wrong in our profession. Professionals have shared standards--the rule of law--to which they appeal. Individual supervisors or managers may violate those standards. They may even insist that we violate those standards in order to keep our jobs (or get raises or whatever). But that doesn't make us wrong for defying them. That makes them unprofessional in their behavior. That's because, ideally, our profession is one governed by principles and standards and not by the will of The Leader.

Actual leaders rise and attract followers not because they are in a certain place in a hierarchy. They  do worthwhile things and inspire or encourage others to do worthwhile things. Only demagogues are obsessed with whether or not they are leaders. The best leaders in librarianship don't prattle on about leadership or insist to us that they are "leaders."  They don't seek followers or the acclaim of shallow praise. Instead, they inspire us to meet the challenges of our own professional principles and standards. They don't lead by telling people what to do or writing performance evaluations. They lead by making us want to do great things not to please the boss/fuhrer, but to meet shared standards that transcend us all, not to follow their orders, but to do or do better what we should already be doing even if they weren't around. When those people come along, they don't need to talk about leadership. We know them for what they are.

According to the Harvard Business blog (discovered via the LLN Leader's Digest), Gen Xers are the "leaders we need today and tomorrow" because of our accelerated contact with the real world, our distrust of institutions, our looking outward, our acceptance of diversity, our rich humor and incisive perspective, our work-life balance, and our pragmatism. Obviously I'm a Gen Xer myself, and these traits might apply to me. You won't find anyone who distrusts institutions more than I, except maybe anarchists, and I look outward and accept diversity and all that. My humor is also incredibly rich, and my perspective so incisive some people find it painful. And I was a pragmatic, resilient latch-key child back before that was all the rage. "Contending with a world of finite limits, no easy answers, and the sobering realization that we are facing significant, seemingly intractable problems on multiple fronts"? That's the sort of thing I do two or three times a day before breakfast.

The description sounds like a more positive spin of the same traits I've been hearing about Gen Xers for years. Did my latchkey childhood make me resilient and hardworking? Or did it make me distrustful of figures who claimed authority but never could do anything to benefit me in any way? Did the self-reliant independence just make me comfortable with innovation and technology? Or did it also mean I don't really need much from others, or that I'm uncomfortable with people who don't adapt as quickly as I do? And that work-life balance thing, does it mean that I want to be a good parent, or that I'm not going to work myself to death for an institution, and thus am some sort of slacker? Does my rich humor and incisive perspective isolate practical truths, redefine issues, and question reality, or does it mean that I'm really good at mocking incompetence and muddled thinking and have no tolerance for humorless stupidity?

In short, do the traits listed in this article mean that Gen Xers would make the "leaders we need," or does it mean that they're distrustful of people who claim to be leaders and don't need much "leadership" themselves? After all, if I'm resilient, hard-working, resourceful, self-reliant, independent, innovative, incisive, humorous, adaptable, then how likely is it that I need leaders for much? And how likely is it that I would want to lead anyone who wasn't as independent, self-reliant, innovative, incisive, hard-working, resilient, and resourceful as I am? If we're going to make generational generalizations (which I really don't like to do), why wouldn't I tell my boomer elders they just need to suck it up and deal with a rapidly changing world, or my millennial colleagues that I'm too busy being innovative and self-reliant to give them the constant reassurance and feedback the media claims they need to succeed?

Alas, I fear that this generational generalization may be lacking. I've known plenty of Gen Xers who are helpless, dependent, authoritarian, timorous, dogmatic, humorless, or some combination of those traits. Maybe those Gen Xers weren't latchkey children, though. Or maybe this is all spot on, and I'm just being too skeptical and incisive, and thus just the leader you need for today and tomorrow.

Probably for the first time since starting this blog, I received an email from a publicity person touting a blog post that I actually thought worth reading. Others of you may have received this entry from the Oxford University Press blog: Amazon Fail 2.0: Bookseller’s Big Brother removes Orwell’s Big Brother from Kindles everywhere, by Dennis Baron. In full disclosure, I don't really know Professor Baron, but I did take a seminar from him my first semester of graduate school - introduction to the teaching of rhetoric. I recall writing an essay arguing that the concept of plagiarism arose during 18th century intellectual property disputes and was inherently capitalist, and thus all the Marxist rhetoric instructors out there shouldn't be bothered by the practice of plagiarism. But all this is irrelevant prelude.

Baron argues that we should beware giants such as Amazon and Google because even though they do much to promote literacy, they do so at the price of privacy and control of our information. I completely agree. The essay was inspired by the recent Kindle mini-scandal, where some Kindle users found bootleg copies of 1984 removed from their Kindles and their $.99 refunded. Probably no literate person has missed at least one headline in the past week or so linking Amazon to Big Brother. It seemed at least an irony too good to pass up.

As I've written before, I'm no fan of the digital rights management or intellectual property restrictions on the Kindle. Ebooks are great in many ways, and I read them regularly on various devices, but for library purposes Kindles are too controlled by the company to be reliable, and for personal use I still refuse to buy (perhaps "buy" would be better) a book that I can nether lend nor give nor sell to another person. Kindles have their uses, but they go against the grain of readership since the beginning of writing - if I may make so bold a statement - in that they deliberately and effectively deter the possibility of multiple readers of the same item. Besides which, it's obvious that DRM is a finger in the dike preventing the free flow of digital information and will always be thwarted somehow.

However, despite my reservations about the Kindle and DRM in general, I can't jump on the Big Brother bandwagon (nor am I accusing Professor Baron of doing so). The actions of the federal government seem to have more and more Big Brother characteristics these days, but it's inappropriate to apply this description to something like Amazon.

First of all, we all have to be citizens of our state unless we opt out somehow and immigrate. However, we do not have to use Amazon or the Kindle. I am unaware of any situation in which someone was coerced into using the Kindle or giving up the history of their reading habits to Amazon. Amazon knows so much about us because we let it know so much about us. We willingly let Amazon see what we buy so that it can recommend yet more entertainment for us. This is much closer to the hedonistic and shallow Brave New World than it is to the dark dystopia 1984. Regardless of the contracts saying they'll own a digital copy, Kindle users know how much control over the Kindle content Amazon has, and if they didn't before they do now.

Contrast this with the music digital downloads from Amazon, freed by the music companies from the extremely restrictive DRM of the ebooks. I'm sure there's some information embedded in the digital files saying I purchased specific songs from Amazon and that could be used against me if suddenly everything I purchased ended up on some file sharing site. Below that point, though, the files are mine, and Amazon can't take them away from me. I can copy and back them up as many times as I like. I can give them to other people if I wanted, and they could play them without unlocking. Theoretically, I could even charge other people for these files, if I could find someone stupid enough to buy them from me. (Note to the Amazonian Big Brother: I would never do anything like this. Really.)

Despite the apparent irony of 1984 disappearing, there's nothing Big Brothery about any of this. When it comes to Amazon, we are the victims of our own desire for easy shopping and entertainment. There are undoubtedly times when corporate malfeasance completely out of control damages our lives. Actually, that pretty much happens everyday somewhere. But this is not one of those cases. We willingly comply with Amazon, as we do with Google itself, handing over our privacy for the opportunity fondling their shiny baubles. Situations like this might erode our trust in Amazon, and thus we might be less willing to shop there, but that would still be our choice.

People who do anything on the Internet should know there is no guaranteed privacy anymore. The Internet is filled not with Big Brother, but with millions of little brothers gathering random details of our online life and using them for their own advantage. When this practice is ubiquitous, to pretend as some people have been doing that Amazon is in any way specially or specially evil is just duplicitous or naive. Or maybe it just makes a good headline.

According to IHE, Elsevier was offering people $25 gift cards for Amazon or Barnes and Noble if they would leave positive reviews of one of their textbooks on those sites. After the fake medical journal scandal, one doesn't even have to ask. Clearly they have no shame. They only fake it when they're found out. I wanted to write more on this, but it's just so obviously disreputable there's not much to say.  Of course they disavow responsibility. It's always an overzealous employee. But overzealous employees are created by the corporate culture. I could probably retire on what the top two or three research libraries pay Elsevier each year, and I'm not that old.

Fortunately that time of the year isn't here yet, but I'm still thinking already about teaching of all kinds in the fall, including library instruction. Though there are busy times, even busy seasons, when I coast on my experience and skills, I try to be a reflective instructor when I can. A conversation with a friend the other day centered around library instruction. We were arguing about (discussing?) a couple of different schools of instruction, which I might call Kitchen Sink and Minimalist.

The names both explain themselves and hint at my own preferences. The Kitchen Sink approach wants to turn students into little librarians, though the Kitchen Sinkers would say "independent scholars." As a long term goal I have some sympathy to this approach. Within certain parameters, we should want students to become independent scholars, or maybe independent "scholars." The problem comes in the practice, and in the definition of scholar.

For example, I have seen good librarians spend 45-50 minutes explaining the intricacies of the OPAC to freshman in a composition course preparing to research a 10-page essay. I'm not sure if you've ever read a 10-page research essay by a freshman, but I can tell you from experience there's just not that much an essay like that can cover. To do the research for an essay like that, freshman don't need to know every nuance of the OPAC, or even every nuance of searching. Spending that much time on any one activity is a mistake, but I've seen it happen over and over.

Just at the technical level, I've seen the similar activities with online indexes and databases. Some librarians go through several in a session, as if there was any great difference in technique among them. For the purposes of search, a database is a database is a database.

The Kitchen Sinkers approach more theoretical applications in the same way. They want every student to come out of every one-shot with a mastery of the ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education. I guess the thinking is, I've only got this one hour, I'm going to make it count!

Needless to say, I'm not a Kitchen Sinker; I'm a Minimalist.  A former colleague (who hated most things about me professionally and personally, I should note) said that I should go into a BI, hand out my business card to students, and suggest they take notes on that. She meant this as a rebuke, no doubt, but it was an accurate enough description of my library instruction then and now. There's only so much one can do in an hour (or 80 minutes, which is our typical freshman instruction session length). Even with 80 minutes, I might spend only half an hour on formal demonstration. The rest of the class I let the students start researching and I wander around consulting.

And in that half hour, I still try to minimize what I do. I certainly don't cover every nuance of the OPAC, and typically I might demo one other database. Instead I emphasize what I call the geography of information. If you want this kind of thing, you look in this kind of place. It's all abstract, but similar to some reference training. After all, if I know there's such a thing as an historical atlas, I know all I really need to know about that topic to answer reference questions.

Search technique is easily enough dispensed with. I usually mention five things to do with a database:

1. Search by Keyword
2. Search by Subject
3. Limit by date, language, etc.
4. Mark the records you want to save
5. Email citations/articles to yourself

How much more do students need to get started? I also discuss approaches summarized from Thomas Mann's Library Research Methods:

1. Keyword searches in online and print sources.
2. Subject searches in online and print sources. 
3. Citation searches in printed sources. 
4. Searches through published bibliographies (including sets of footnotes in relevant subject documents). 
5. Searches through people sources (whether by verbal contact, e-mail, electronic bulletin board, letters, etc.).
6. Systematic browsing, especially of full-text sources arranged in predictable subject groupings.

Again, if students master the basic theory, do they need to be completely "information literate"?

There are a couple of possible objections to my approach. First, one might say I really am trying to get the students to be little librarians. Thomas Mann? He's the reference librarian's reference librarian! There's some truth to that. But what I give students in a very brief time are guidelines. I don't attempt to reinforce them all with extensive searching in a joint demonstration. Another possible criticism is that the students don't leave with much. It's true. They don't. And they don't leave with much in other classes, either. That's because there's only so much students can absorb in one class. They leave with enough to get started, to solve some problems, and to build from there.

The Kitchen Sinkers are motivated (I suspect) by the crisis of time. Unlike professors in a class, librarians don't have much time with students. (I suppose there are those semester long information literacy courses, but those aren't very common, which might not be a bad thing.) One doesn't learn how to research quickly or abstractly, though. It takes not only time, but practice. This is the difficulty we all face. We can try to pack everything into one session, thus ensuring not only that the students won't learn much but that they'll be bored in the process. Or we can hint at the complexities of research in the class and get them started, with the hope that if they need more skills later on they'll develop them through practice. Maybe we'll be there; maybe we won't. But there's nothing we can do about it in a one shot class.

Research skills are learned over time with practice, even for librarians. Would we consider a new graduate student equal to a senior professor in research knowledge in a field? No. Nor would we consider a new library school graduate equal to a very experienced reference librarian, especially one who had also done her own research.

The good news is that most students will never need to be little librarians, or even big professors. Most students will need the sort of minimal research skills necessary to navigate their way through life, which outside academia rarely requires long research projects. Most students won't ever be real scholars, nor do they need to be. The bad news is that in a lot of schools, there's no guarantee that as the students progress, the librarian's help will be consistently offered or sought when needed.

Normally I don't write about techie hack sort of issues on the blog. It's not because I don't play around with stuff. It's just that there are so many blogs--library and otherwise--devoted to this stuff that it seems beside the point.

However, I've been playing around with some Firefox hacks I thought people might be interested in, and I haven't been satisfied with any of the other fixes I've found online.

Firefox is my default browser, mostly for the add-ons. For the curious, add-ons I can't live without: Flashblock, Adblock Plus, IE Tab, Webmail Notifier. and Zotero (for Zotero get the 2.0 Beta version and try out the syncing function) The main problem with Firefox is that it takes up a lot of real estate on the screen. With a desktop computer and a large monitor, it doesn't make much difference. But I have a small laptop I do a lot of work on, and about a week ago I got a new netbook with a 10" screen, so I went on a mission to reduce the amount of space Firefox uses. I should also say I'm using the new Firefox 3.5, so some of the older themes and addons don't work yet. Here goes.

First, get the Stratini theme and the Tiny menu addon. Stratini is sleek and takes up as little room as possible. Tiny menu takes the normal menu and shrinks it to the word "menu," and also reduces the size of the Menu toolbar.

Second, right click on the Menu or Navigation bar, select "Customize," then check "Use Small Icons."

Third, while you're in "Customize, go ahead and move all your buttons and boxes from the Navigation Bar to the Menu Bar. Get out of Customize.

Fourth, right click one of the toolbars, and deselect everything but the Menu Bar. Ignoring the added buttons I use, the result should look something like this:

 So far, that's about as small as I can shrink the geography of Firefox without pressing F11.

As for the other buttons, such as Stumbleupon or the IMDb, those were all created with the Google Toolbar, which of course isn't shown. For those that don't know, if you're using the Google Toolbar, you can right click on any search box on any website, choose "Generate Custom Search," and the search button will show up on the Google Toolbar, which you can then move wherever you like in the Customize view. I also have the Google Toolbar buttons for Gmail and Google Bookmarks, all now very tiny.

The three matching black and orange buttons are my workaround because the Princeton University Library toolbar I created won't work with Firefox 3.5, so those link to our library home page, the main catalog, and the databases page. As much as I love my personalized toolbar, I won't be going back to it for the netbook.

And thus I betray the fact that I can geek out as much as the next librarian.

I listened to some of President Obama's Cairo speech this morning, and based on the snippets I heard and the summary and analysis I've read so far it maintains his reputation as the most rhetorically effective President since Reagan, and probably since Kennedy. In fact, it reminded me a lot of Kennedy's Commencement Address at American University in June 1963. Kennedy's speech wasn't addressed to his university audience so much as to the Soviet Union, and Obama's approach today was similar, to build bridges to the potentially hostile audience through emphasis on mutual values and goals while not denigrating American values. I recommend listening to or reading Kennedy's address if you're unfamiliar with it, but this is my favorite bit:

So, let us not be blind to our differences--but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.

I submit that it would be difficult to find a more rhetorically effective paragraph in the annals of Presidential speeches. It acknowledges differences without threat, urges common goals while recognizing that not all of them will be met, and summarizes in brief but compelling fashion the underlying joint humanity even of political enemies. President Obama's speech today tried to make the same points.

One difference between the speeches is in the specificity of proposals. Kennedy, for example, announced that he and Krushchev would soon begin discussing a test ban treaty, and that the US wouldn't conduct nuclear tests in the atmosphere if other states also refrained from such testing. Some commentators and pundits have already begun criticizing Obama's speech for not articulating more concrete proposals. He didn't do this, he didn't do that. He said he was opposed to this, but didn't say what he would really do. Depending on the perspective, the list of things left out is long: he didn't denounce Muslim terrorists or dictators, he didn't articulate a clear solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he didn't talk about civilian casualties in Pakistan. (Of course, there's a raft of more inarticulate criticism. If you want to descend into the morass of what passes for common opinion in America, you might sample the comments here.)

The criticism that he didn't address everything in one speech is a ridiculous one, and one that has been plaguing Obama since the beginning of his Presidential campaign. For one thing, it's an example of what I recently saw referred to as the "but what about" fallacy. (I thought I'd read this in philosopher Jonathan Wolff's Guardian blog, but I can't find it there. If anyone knows the source, I'll be happy to link to it.) The idea of the fallacy is that whatever claims, arguments, or assertions someone makes, instead of addressing them, it's easier to evade them and just say, "but what about X topic you didn't talk about?" That response appears to point out a flaw in the opponent's position but is really just a variation of the red herring fallacy. "But we're not talking about X; we're talking about W," might be the best response.

The other major criticism that has dogged him from the beginning is that his speeches are "mere rhetoric," as if a speech is ever anything but rhetoric. Criticism of this sort is different from the "but what about" fallacy, but it's still usually a nonsensical criticism mouthed by people who don't understand how language works. Language is symbolic action. Rhetoric is the art of persuasion, often through argumentation, and according to Chaim Perelman the “aim of argumentation is not to deduce consequences from given premises; it is rather to elicit or increase the adherence of the members of an audience to theses that are presented for their consent." The goal of "mere" rhetoric is to persuade, to win people to our positions, to eliminate barriers of distrust and dissent, to reduce threat because, as the psychologist Carl Rogers argued, threat hinders communication. 

Rhetoric is more than just argument, the logical appeal. There are also the emotional and ethical appeals, and Obama is a master of the ethical appeal, the appeal based on character. The character manifest in this speech, and in many of his other speeches, is of a person who understands the world is a complicated place, who recognizes difference and reaches out to the "other," who presents positive values while not dismissing those he doesn't agree with as evil or stupid, who is so strong in his own convictions that he doesn't need to demonize the opposition through divisive rhetoric and inane catch phrases, so balanced and calm that he doesn't feel compelled to rise to the challenge of blowhards. It's this rhetorical appeal in particular that so many politically motivated people in America neither have nor understand. The demonstration of hatred, the obvious unwillingness to consider the positions of others, the inability to even understand difference, the incapacity for empathy or sympathy, the unrelenting hermeneutic of suspicion, the utterly obvious willingness to say or do anything to win regardless of truth or principle - all of these traits undermine the ethical appeal and yet are rife in our political culture and manifest in many of the critics of this President and his speeches.

The problem for these critics is that they just don't know what to do with such a politician. If you're an overweight, multiply divorced, substance abuser, it's hard to attack the character of a healthy man in a lengthy stable marriage with two loving children. If you're a blowhard who knows only how to manipulate social divisions and is so rhetorically challenged that you're considered merely an evil joke by your opponents, it's hard to smear the character of a man who quite obviously shares none of your cynicism or passion for the complete destruction of people of good will with whom you happen to disagree. Regardless of any specific problems of Obama's policies that could be articulated, so many of his critics just seem like spoiled, screaming youngsters compared to him. A glimmer of hope for America - seen fleetingly in some Republican reactions to the nomination of Sotomayor - is that the nuanced worldview and the balanced, measured rhetoric of President Obama may by some miracle elevate the level of political discourse in the country. It's never been particularly elevated before, but there's always that hope.

Today I read a lot of Dilevko and Gottlieb's Reading and the Reference Librarian: the Importance to Library Service of Staff Reading Habits (which I'd never heard of but found out about here). It shares some perspectives (as well as the LCSH "Librarians -- Books and Reading") with Peter Briscoe's excellent Reading the Map of Knowledge: the Art of Being a Librarian, though the former analyzes survey results while the latter is more a personal manifesto on being a librarian. Both advocate wide reading as a goal to become a better librarian. Dilevko and Gottlieb focus, in my opinion, too narrowly upon the reference librarian and on the specific effect of reading habits upon library reference service, but then again they do what they do well, and it's unfair to criticize a book for not doing something its authors never intended to do just because I would have liked to see them tackle other areas of librarianship.

The first chapter deals with the deprofessionalization of reference, especially with the rise of the reference call center of the LSSI model and the way it deliberately focuses on the simplest and most common queries and ignores the rest as a way to reduce professionally trained and educated staff and cut costs, and compares that desire to the way Amazon.com ran their organization until they outsourced everything to India. The  Amazon call centers sound harrowing, with loud buzzers and lights flashing when workers weren't answering emails fast enough, or forced overtime with managers giving out candy bars to motivate and infantilize employees. At least now when we buy from Amazon we can all be relieved that the harrowing and humiliating jobs are  done in some foreign country by people totally unlike us for a tenth of the cost, so we don't have to feel bad about them. The book was published in 2004, based on research done in 2000-01, and I wonder if that's still as much of an issue. I know LSSI is still around, but I haven't heard much of a buzz about outsourcing reference for several years. However, that could be because it's become so common as not be worth mentioning.

Divelko and Gottlieb argue that wide reading of newspapers, magazines, journals, books fiction and nonfiction improves reference service for both public and academic librarians. Some chapters focus exclusively on academic librarians and the benefits to professors and students when librarians read broadly as well as deeply in some academic discipline. A little knowledge of a lot of topics and a lot of knowledge on a few topics help in reference, instruction, collection development, and liaison activities, and the professors interviewed recommended taking classes, earning degrees, reading journals, learning languages, or at the very least reading introductory textbooks in the areas they work with so as to know something about the organization of knowledge in the discipline. In other words, professors want academic librarians to act like academics, to have academic fields of inquiry and an intellectual engagement with the world of scholarship. Go figure.

Sometimes the expectations seem unrealistic. The ideal librarian would be as knowledgeable as every professor about every subject. At some point I made a mental list of the ideal candidate for my job. That librarian at a minimum would have PhDs in philosophy, religion, and history, as well as fluency in Greek, Latin, German, French, Italian, Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese, and Chinese. When that candidate comes along, I'm doomed. Good thing I have my quasi-tenure. Nevertheless, in general, I think the point is that the more academic an academic librarian the more successful that librarian will be in several areas of librarianship, and I wholeheartedly agree.

The final chapter, "Reading as a Species of Intellectual Capital," analyzes changes in reference work through the lens of Bourdieu. "To use Bourdieu's terms, advocates of digital reference services are deploring their 'species of capital' -- their belief in the efficacy of technological innovation as represented by the call center model -- in order to render less valuable the 'species of capital' of reference librarians whom they accuse of being concerned only with '"reviewing the professional literature" and other odd tasks'...." The authors conclude that these "supposedly valueless tasks" contribute a lot to a successful library experience for the users, but that some librarians are attempting to discredit '"the form of capital upon which the force of [an] opponent rests.'" Ignoring call centers for the nonce, does this strategy seem familiar? "Techonolgical innovation has become a weapon allowing one group of individuals to exert power and influence on their own behalf while marginalizing the contributions of those who are skeptical of the ultimate value of such technological advances. It allows the first group of players to paint themselves as innovators in the profession, and it renders the second group a 'negligible quantity'" (211).

Dilevki and Gottlieb are not impressed, and clearly articulate the point of this familiar rhetorical strategy: "The terms of the debate thus permit any skeptic of technological innovation to be branded an opponent of progress and thus an impediment to the field's survival" (211-12). These accusations, though often in mild enough form befitting librarians, seem rife enough in library discourse. The advocates of constant technological innovation often look for any sign that library users are moving in their direction, while ignoring the overwhelming organization of a considerable portion of academia. In the humanities, those might be the librarians who praise and wonder at a tiny flowering of "digital humanities" while ignoring the undeniable able fact that most humanists do now and have always engaged in the study of texts without accompaniment of multimedia. Confirmation bias is rampant in this company. However, at least in the humanities, how easy might it be to turn the tables? To reply, when challenged about the latest technological innovation or sad, shallow method of connecting people, "No, I'm unfamiliar with that tool, but tell me, what's the last scholarly book or article you read, or what academic field of study do you have any mastery of?" Since it's clear that faculty and students benefit from having librarians with subject knowledge of academic fields, it's quite possible that the current terms of debate do a disservice to our users and ourselves by urging librarians to be computer support and keyword searching specialists rather than academic subject specialists.

I read John Dupuis's response to my last blog post, as well as the comments generated by his post  Someone actually suggested regarding Twitter that I should try it before I say I won't like it. Instead, I say, give it to Mikey. He'll try anything.

The "don't knock it 'til you try it response" is problematic for many reasons (not that I was knocking anything). To echo one person who commented on my blog, I haven't tried cannibalism or genital piercing either, but I don't want to. The response also smacks of an irritating paternalism, as if a grown man who's reasonably bright and educated is like a child who needs to be told to eat his vegetables. "How do you know you don't like cauliflower until you've tried it?" Not being a child, but instead a rather large man, there's a temptation to suggest the inquisitor take the cauliflower and insert it somewhere very uncomfortable, like the back seat of a Volkswagen. Mostly, though, the response is flawed because it assumes that any given social software application is somehow sui generis, when in fact they are all just variations on a theme. Twitter, for example, is analogous to all sorts of other things, and even if it weren't it's not like it's some difficult concept to understand.

There is in fact an analogous service I have tried: Facebook. I've been on for two or three years and find myself going to it less and less frequently. It's been okay, but nothing especially life-changing. I've been in contact with people I haven't seen since high school, which has been pleasant. I've played a few games of Scrabble. I know some people use Twitter and their Facebook status update the same way, and one thing I've never done is update my status. I've never told people what I was having for lunch, or posted a Youtube video of some funny antic, or tried to come up with a clever epigram or aphorism to show people how interesting I am.

Why? Mainly because I don't think anyone would care, just as I'm interested in very few of other people's postings. On a moment to moment basis, I, like most people, am just not very interesting. I'm not necessarily boring, and I do think I have my good qualities, but I really can't figure out what I could say in a few characters that would be worth reading. Writing nothing worth reading may not bother most people, but I try to keep an audience in mind and not bore you too much.

However, I'm going to give this "status updating" thing a try. Would you really like to know what I'm thinking about right now? If not, stop reading! But if so, I'll tell you.

I'm teaching another writing seminar in the fall, and I'm changing the topic to "justice" instead of "liberalism" and revamping the readings. For the past few weeks I've been trying to figure out how to present a coherent story about the extremely active philosophical discussion about justice since Rawls' Theory of Justice in the equivalent of about 8-10 essays. Keep in mind, the goal of this course isn't to teach philosophy, but academic research and writing. It's just that to write anything worth reading, students need something to write about.

As a research project, it's been an adventure. Building upon my previous knowledge, I've been using encyclopedias, anthologies, surveys, reviews, articles, bibliographies, footnotes, and even Google Scholar to develop the reading list. (I've been using the "cited by" feature in Google Scholar, not the discovery feature so much.) The goal is to give students a general overview of the subject using only primary texts while tracing a scholarly conversation over the course of four decades. I think I have a good list. The students will read excerpts or full essays by some heavy hitters, and in one unit every source we read will cite all of the previous sources we've read, in order to show how a scholarly conversation develops over time. A seminar should tell a story about the topic. This is naturally only one story among many possible ones, and I make that clear, but in the summation at the end of the semester it should be obvious that we've outlined an important and engaging dialog about the topic.

In addition, the readings have to lend themselves to the teaching of writing and research. I've also been thinking about that topic, and have formed some rough opinions. These classes are supposed to teach argumentative academic writing. Thus the best sources provoke argument. Often writing/ composition/ rhetoric is taught in English departments, and just as often the courses are focused on interpreting literature. In a course like that, the students get a novel/ poem/ play/ film to discuss and write about. There is a clear difference between primary and secondary texts, and the students are writing secondary works while studying primary works, for the most part.

It seems easier to me to teach primary sources that are themselves examples of argumentative writing, and political philosophy works very well in this regard. Philosophers are trained to argue, not interpret. And political topics tend to be engaging to a lot of people simply because they're an inescapable part of life. So in my class the students are reading the sorts of essays they're writing. There's not much of a distinction between a primary and a secondary source. If everything works well, the whole course coheres. My goal is the perfect writing seminar, in the sense that A argues in Kierkegaard's Either/Or that Don Giovanni is the perfect work of music because it best exemplifies what makes a classic work of art: an absolute correlation of form and content. Every text we read in class is both something to write about and an example of how one should write argumentative academic prose, and they're all arguing with each other.

Is this interesting to you? It's more about writing pedagogy than librarianship, but I can see where it might be. Teaching writing and research has certainly made me a better librarian. The skills I've gained carry over into research consultations and instruction sessions all the time. Thinking about the nature of scholarly exchange in an academic discipline is the sort of thing lots of academic librarians do.

This is just the merest summary of activity, though I've been considering further developing some of these rough thoughts into posts or articles. What's here says little of substance, and yet I still can't figure out how to condense it to 140 characters. To be clear yet again, I'm not knocking any of this, even if I haven't tried it. I just know what I want to read and how I want to spend my time and interact with others.  Maybe instead of macro-tweeting, I should just write:

Wayne Bivens-Tatum just dropped in to see what condition his condition was in.

Recently a couple of people have asked why I haven't joined some of the social networking services they find interesting or useful, particularly Twitter and Friendfeed, but the question could probably apply to more of them. The simple reason is, I don't see any way I would benefit from these services. Some people would consider that statement an incentive to either persuade me that I would benefit or dismiss me as a Luddite who just doesn't "get it." But I do get it. I know some of the ways people benefit from these services. It's just that I don't want those benefits. Partly, it's a personality issue. I'm not very social, and I don't have interests in common with many people. For example, I have almost no interest in: television, pop music, celebrities, fashion, food, cooking, new movies, sports, contemporary fiction, cars, gardening, crafts, diets, scandals, or the weather.

However, just in case it's true I don't get it, I'll discuss some of the things it seems to me people get out of Twitter or Friendfeed or even Facebook, and why I'm not especially interested in them. Maybe there's something I am missing, and if so, feel free to point it out.

As a caveat before I begin, I want to add that I'm not ridiculing or dismissing any of these motives. I only say that because I've noticed in many discussions that if you don't find value in something someone else does, they tend to think you're criticizing or attacking them. For example, in my life those assumptions often come up around commercial television and meat, neither of which I consume. It's amazing how many carnivores and television devotees get offended if you don't share their values. So, if I don't share your values, don't get offended. If your values are worthwhile, it shouldn't matter if other people share them. And so, some motivations for social networking.

Neophilia

Neophilia, or love of the new. I understand this desire, and am as susceptible to it as anyone, just with a different focus than many people. What "new" I track is often for professional reasons. Most days I skim a handful of news sites, especially the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the BBC, but even these very selectively. Mostly I do this because I consider it a professional obligation. A reference librarian should keep up with current events. My interest in politics and political philosophy also requires some basic understanding of what's going on in the world. However, there have been years of my life, and some of the happier years, in which I read almost no news. The pre-Internet days weren't a burden on me. Some of my happiest memories are sitting in cafes reading and deliberately not keeping up with what's going on. My sympathy was, and to a great extent still is, with Thoreau, who had little time for newspapers because so little new ever happened. If I've read of one fire or murder, will I find out anything significant reading about another one?

Say, for example, some new techie tool comes along. I pick it up and examine it, classify it, query it. What are you good for, I ask of it. If it does something good for me, I use it. I keep up with these things for the same reason I keep up with some current events. It behooves me as a professional librarian to know about these things, but to know isn't to champion. Recently I gave a workshop on emerging search tools, and one participant said at the end that she'd expected a "best of" list, as in, "Here are the 5 best new tools!" What she got instead was an examination of several of these new tools and a final critical discussion in which we all talked about what would be useful about them for our jobs or why we would want to know about them even if they weren't useful. There are new things I should know about, even if I don't particularly care about them. However, this is merely pragmatic professionalism, not neophilia.

The new things I am interested in are often not new, but only new to me, usually some book or article that I haven't read before but that develops something I've been thinking about. I have no interest in the new trends in pop culture or the latest celebrity scandal or happy hours near me or what people think of the new Star Trek movie or the latest Zen koan on techno issues. Often I thoroughly enjoy footnote chasing and the discovery involved, but the joy I get there doesn't translate well to most social networking tools.

Diversion

Some people approach these social networking tools seeking diversion. They seek to distract themselves from their daily routine, pop in somewhere for a chat, read a few posts by someone to kill some time. I understand this desire, and indulge it myself occasionally. In those rare moments where I want to be mindlessly diverted, I turn to Stumbleupon, for example. Less mindlessly diverted I turn to A & L Daily or Bookforum. I am on Facebook and occasionally read the feed of postings or status updates. Often I wonder why anyone would bother posting some of the things they do, and sometimes this is from people who are my actual friends, and not just my Facebook friends. On a daily basis, I really don't care what they had for lunch or if they're tired right now. The best ones are those who consider their audience and post items they think will be of interest, and occasionally the things are interesting, but it's seldom worth reading through a lot for the occasional gem. I see the value in this, and understand why people find this interesting, only I'm not one of those people. Because of other projects in my life and the sustained attention they require, constant diversions--far from being valuable--are instead a burden in my life.

Networking

"Networking" is a word that's always bothered me. I am definitely not a networker, which is probably pretty obvious to people who know me. I'm a sociable enough person, and I have friends, but making friends is different from networking. Networking involves making contacts with people whom I think might benefit me in some way, whether I like or respect or value the person at all. To me this violates the categorical imperative to treat people as ends in themselves and not merely as means to your ends. This is not to say that I have no "network," or that many librarians around the country haven't benefited me over the years, but I've never gone out of my way to cultivate any of them as members of my "network." They are people I've met through the profession and whom I happen to like, and if they benefit me, fine. If not, fine. I'll still like them. A lot of these people I've met through RUSA, and one reason I keep participating in RUSA is that I like a lot of the people there. But people I don't like or respect, I just avoid, even if cultivating them might benefit my career. And generally, I have no interest in building up a "network" merely to have people know my name. I don't have anything to sell or a brand to promote, including myself.

A colleague of mine tried to contradict this sentiment by saying this blog was an example of networking, that I was one of "those people."  However, I don't think that's what I'm doing in this blog, and frankly can't see many ways this blog has benefited me professionally or created a network of people who can help me. I started this blog both to participate in what I thought were some valuable online discussions, and also because I had views or perspectives that I didn't see represented in those discussions. I thought it might be worthwhile to put forward some of those perspectives. Lately, I've been less sure of that, but that's another story. For example, as far as I know, I'm the only library blogger who works in collection development at a large research library or who regularly teaches a non-library school course that nevertheless has something to do with libraries and library research. (And if that's not the case and I've overlooked someone, then light a candle and don't curse my darkness.) I started writing because I knew there were other people interested in some of these issues, but I wasn't seeing any discussion of them. Which brings me to....

Sharing

Some people benefit from these services because they either enjoy sharing their thoughts or what they're doing at the moment, or they are curious about what other people have to share. I'm sympathetic to this motivation, too. Considering this blog again, part of the motivation was to share. When I was in library school, I thought I wanted to do pretty much what I'm doing now. It would have been great to get inside the head of someone actually doing it, to find out what they thought about, the issues they faced, the concerns they had. In library school I was the self which I was not, in the mode of not being it, and would have loved more guidance. There were hardly any blogs back then, but now, of the library blogs that have anything to do with my job, almost all are focused on either public services or technology or some combination of the two, and those aren't necessarily the most important parts of my job. In addition, many of the most prominent ones of these are written by non-academic librarians who have a different take on many issues than academic librarians do, or at least different than this academic librarian does.

The sharing that other librarians do benefits me, and it's possible some people have benefited from my own sharing, but it's difficult to think of anything worth sharing for me that can be reduced to 140 or 160 characters. I'm not really interested in what you're doing at the moment, and can't figure out why you'd be interested in what I'm doing. What would it be? Here's what I'm reading? I spend most of my free time reading philosophy or writing in my journal. Would any of you really care that I'm currently reading Brighouse, Barry, Anderson, and Cohen on justice? What would I have to say in 140 characters that would matter for those subjects? I've searched Twitter for any tweets on topics of interest and found nothing I'm interested in. Nor am I interested in "trending topics" or "nifty queries." One reason I'm writing here less is that I'm reading so little to do with librarianship, and I hesitate to inflict upon readers some of my thoughts on topics that don't have to do with education or librarianship.

Discussion

Another worthwhile motivation, at least for some of these services. The thing is, I already have an active online life with several friends of mine scattered around the country. I don't have enough time even for them sometimes.  Most of the people I might ordinarily have virtual conversations with are librarians, but only selectively am I interested in library subjects. Gossiping about the latest trend or scandal can be fun, but it's just not something that motivates me most of the time. When I discovered that I myself was the subject of at least one librarian gossip fest in a chat room, my only thought was, what a complete waste of time. If this is the kind of thing people are discussing, I'll stick to my books, thanks. There's a great quote from Eleanor Roosevelt: "Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people." I don't know if I have a great mind, but I do know the further discussion moves from ideas and fundamentals to chit-chat and gossip the less I have to say and the less time I devote to it.

Because of the Roosevelt quote, this is probably the most judgmental of my comments here, but nevertheless it's the level of discussion that keeps me away. The discussions I find the most interesting and useful are those that develop through thoughtful pieces of writing (and occasionally thoughtful talks), some responding to each other. Sometimes these are blog posts and comments, sometimes blog posts and blog posts, sometimes books and reviews. Whatever the format, the value comes from the depth of the exchange when there's something substantive to discuss. There are a lot of these conversations in the library literature (broadly conceived), but I don't tend to get  much personally from oneliners or rapid exchanges. As for discussing problems or seeking help, I rarely have anything practical or immediate I need help or guidance with. Professionally, I benefit from discussions of fundamentals or techniques, but immediate problem-solving from someone not in my library at the moment isn't something I need.

It's very possible that I'm missing some great reward that's out there to be discovered, but after a lot of thought I just don't see it. The level and immediacy of engagement that most of these tools offer just doesn't provide much value for me. Again, I see the value for people, but what I need the most they rarely offer. The more brief and immediate the service, the less it appeals to me.

There's an interesting article in today's Inside Higher Education making the case that while business people sometimes make the case for the usefulness of a liberal arts education in business, humanities professors rarely do. It contrasts the views of management guru Peter Drucker with those of English professor Stanley Fish. Drucker values the usefulness of the liberal arts (and, though the article doesn't mention it, wrote an essay on management as a liberal art) for life and work, while Fish claims they serve no purpose and do nothing to improve people.

In a way, I can see Fish's point. The liberal arts are so designated because they are the arts appropriate to free persons, that is, persons who do not have to work for a living and have the leisure to pursue their interests in literature or philosophy. At the very least, it gives those people something to talk about. People with jobs can always talk about their work, but people without jobs need something to occupy their time and have conversations about.

However, things have been different since the Renaissance. Rhetoric and other liberal arts began to flourish anew in the republics of Renaissance Italy because they were useful. Rhetoric is necessary to persuade, and persuasion is an important component of politics and law, as well as business. People were seeking out teachers of rhetoric and other liberal arts because they were strivers who wanted to improve themselves to get ahead, not because they were layabouts who needed to find enjoyable ways to kill time before the advent of television. This model of the liberal arts has just as much relevance today as it did then.

I suspect that the main reason humanities professors don't play up the usefulness of the liberal arts for business is twofold. First, anything that smells of trade is looked down upon. We all know what shallow money-grubbers business people are. After all, we've been shown in numerous novels for the past two hundred years how awful they are, novels all written by people unsuccessful in the business world. Also, humanities professors rarely have much knowledge of what is necessary to succeed in the business world, because they've rarely spent much time outside academia. It's a rare occurrence to find a humanities professor who has spent much time working in the business world in any but the lowest positions for brief times long ago. It's hard to say if the liberal arts are useful for some profession if you've never worked in that profession.

Librarianship sometimes seems like an in-between world. It's not quite academic in the way that teaching is academic, and parts are much more administrative than most professors would like. Even in non-managerial jobs, there's a lot of paperwork and administrivia. Whereas I value the academic in academic librarianship, there are also plenty of librarians who thrill at the parallels between libraries and businesses and look to the business literature for inspiration. Regardless, what we do is more like what might be done in a business than what most professors do.

Even with that, it's hard sometimes to articulate the usefulness of a liberal arts education for some library jobs. Because my job is working with humanities faculty, students, and collections, it's obvious the knowledge and acclimatization gained through such an education is useful. Rhetoric is probably the most practical, and I get the same sense from non-academic friends. Whether you're building a case for a budget increase or trying to sell someone a widget, the ability to construct persuasive arguments is important.

I'm less sure about the immediate usefulness of having read a lot of literature or viewed a lot of art, though, because such things seem to be most useful when the literature or art provides a shared context for people and allows them to communicate more effectively because they have something in common. In a discussion with a librarian once, I said the only function of the human appendix was to serve as a memento mori, but the joke lost its point when I had to explain what a memento mori was. Because of the various backgrounds of academic librarians, I'm already careful about making certain cultural allusions in conversation or assuming the shared values a mutual liberal education might provide. Out in the world it's even harder to make such allusions or count on a shared culture created through education.

Thus it would seem that the skills, and not the content, of a liberal education that are the most valuable for business, which might be another reason it's harder for academics to make the arguments for the usefulness of the liberal arts. In the humanities the emphasis isn't so much on skills but on content. It's not, "Professor X sure is good at putting together a persuasive PowerPoint presentation," but "Professor X is a leading authority on topic Y, and she also knows a lot about topic Z as well." Mastering a subject, or many subjects, is valued for its own sake, and not just because it's good for sales. Mastering a subject is also a synecdoche for something larger as well. Mastery of a subject is also mastery of the self, of achieving or striving to achieve a kind of perfection, of overcoming the shallowness of popular culture and ignorant opinion and seeking to know and understand.

The article finds it surprising that business people are better at defending the liberal arts to business people than academics are, but this shouldn't be surprising at all. Without shared values and a shared culture, communication is difficult. For better and worse, the cultures are too far apart to communicate well.