Author Archives: Wayne Bivens-Tatum

The Future in the Past

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I finally got around to reading Robert Darnton’s essay on the Library in the New Age in the New York Review of Books, and was pleased with the conclusion both reaffirming the traditional importance of the research library and expressing some enthusiasm for the abilities of digitization projects such as Google Books to further scholarly research. He notes in the essay that words printed on paper is the best known long term storage medium, and that’s something for us to consider for the future as well as the past.

A month ago I read a post at Gypsy Librarian summarizing an article speculating about how much would be lost for libraries if some sort of disaster wiped out our electricity. (The article is also discussed at Logical Operator.) Given a sufficient enough world energy crisis and I suppose that future is plausible even if improbable, though if we enter some sort of Mad Max post-apocalyptic world we’ll probably all be too busy defending our desert fortresses against roving bands of toughs to worry much about research. Still, the point is an interesting one. The pre-microfilm research library was impervious to this sort of disaster. Books printed on non-acidic paper last a long time, and that fact has been proven with time. They don’t even need the exquisite care they sometimes get now. When weeding the philosophy collection in the open stacks, I several times came across sound copies of two and even three hundred year old books just sitting there.

While I’m a big supporter of digitization projects and like the ease of use and power of search that digital texts give us, I still worry about the future. Sometimes those of us who like printed books and are skeptical of some technological claims for future information bliss are accused of being too traditional, too rooted in the past. We must look to the future. See what the exciting tools are doing for us! I can see what the exciting tools are doing for us, and in many cases I heartily approve. However, it seems to me that some techno-thrill is centered merely on the present, not on the future. Traditional research libraries have always shown a concern for the future. The collections we have now that allow historical research are there because someone in the past collected them for future use. Darnton’s example of the Folger collection is an excellent example of this.

I found his discussion of the multiple Folios had some personal relevance because of a discussion I once had with someone from Project Gutenberg. I was working in a used bookstore at the time and during a slow period we were arguing about the future of books. He was convinced that the future of books was electronic, while I was making the self-serving case that print books would be around for a long time to come. Though he was in fact haunting a used bookstore, he said he could read any book he wanted on his Newton (this will date the conversation somewhat). Anyway, the discussion got on to scholarly editions of Shakespeare, a topic I have a bit of knowledge about. He informed me that scholarly editions were irrelevant, and that any old text could be put online and everyone would be happy with it. In other words, he was assuming that the works of Shakespeare were stable texts, that there’s just, for example, an unproblematic text of King Lear. For the sake of argument, I’d be willing to admit that the general reader of Shakespeare probably doesn’t care about the details, but that unconcern is built on the foundation of texts created by scholars working with multiple texts of Shakespeare to try to create a best text for the general reader. It’s just not true that there is a single, stable Shakespeare just as it isn’t true there’s a single stable text of the Bible, to name another book that the general reader often assumes is unproblematic. Editions matter to the scholar, and they should matter to everyone. Do all digitization projects consider this?

A concern for the future is a concern that what is being collected will be available for future use. Unfortunately, in many respects libraries are thinking less of the future and more of the present. Consider the example of scholarly journals. Until relatively recently, journals were purchased and that was that. The publisher could fold. The journal could dissolve. It didn’t matter. The journal issues that had been purchased were still there in perpetuity. Now, however, libraries routinely aren’t purchasing journals, they’re purchasing access to journals, which is very different. Though all would be lost if we lost electricity, less dire circumstances could still lead to the loss of said access. If libraries stop subscribing, sometimes they might lose access to back issues that they had once been able to get. The stability of online collections differs, of course. JSTOR seems to me about as stable as can be, though I don’t think research libraries should discard all their old copies of JSTOR journals. A research library would be quite foolish to start canceling subscriptions to necessary journals because they’re now in ProQuest, though, as good as ProQuest is at providing a lot of content.

All is subject to uncertainty, and no individual library of the past could be sure that their collections wouldn’t be destroyed by fire or natural disaster (though rarely has this occurred on a grand scale). Had that happened, though, the results would be disastrous for the individual institution and its scholars, but less so for everyone else unless the collection was very unique, because there are so many research libraries. Could we be so sanguine about the future? If publishers of the future started collapsing in some economic meltdown and their online offerings disappeared, would we still have what we had at one time purchased, or would then be reliant once more upon the pre-electronic collections?

I’m not trying to paint some gloomy picture of the future of research libraries or attempting to manufacture a crisis, because I don’t feel gloomy about that future and I don’t think a crisis exists. I don’t think libraries are dying. But I find it odd that most of the time I see projections and prophesies about the future of libraries, they all concern the way some technological contrivance is going to affect the way we deliver content and services, but rarely on what that content will actually be. We’re told, for example, that mobile devices are ever more common and that we will have to adapt to them. That’s fine for some things. I have a mobile device of my own and use it all the time, but I think they’re only useful in their place. I don’t think people will be reading scholarly monographs on their smartphone. With DRM and copyright being what it is, I can’t even see much of a future for reading scholarly monographs from libraries on dedicated ebook readers, which is too bad because that’s a future I’d like to see. However, a concern for the future is a concern for preserving the past. The future of a research collection is its past, in what it has preserved and made available. If we abandon the known, stable good of print, can we be sure that what we collect now will still be available 100 years from now?

I don’t know the answer to that question, and I’m not especially alarmed, but it’s a question well worth addressing. If the collections of the future are just the things we managed to digitize, then they might be relatively more impoverished than our print collections are compared to all that has been printed. If the digital versions don’t survive, we will have lost a lot. Right now we can’t address the problem because we are too concerned with the flux of the present to think much of the future and because there’s no way we can answer the problem of longevity and preservation without a lot of time passing by to prove the point one way or another. We take our multiple leaps of faith and hope for the best, because that’s the best we can do right now. Regardless, we must always be concerned not just with present flux, but with future stability. The research library always shows concern for the past and hope for the future.

Some librarians are criticized for resisting “change.” I put the term in quotes because it’s used so often in the library literature but is an almost contentless word. Change has no concrete meaning; everything depends on the specific change. Is it a change for the better or worse? Can we tell? What are the reasons for change? Are they good ones? A concern for “change” is usually poised as a concern for the future, but there doesn’t seem to be much agreement on what that future might be. This makes perfect sense, and I’d be very skeptical indeed of librarians who claimed with certainty to know exactly what libraries and library users would be like in twenty years. What bothers me about so much change rhetoric is its reactive nature, though. Instead, I prefer those librarians who change because they want to create a certain type of future, not because they think if a contemporary fad isn’t exploited that libraries will become irrelevant. For research libraries, that future seems clear. We want to create a future where the human record of the past will be widely and indefinitely accessible. The future of research is in the past and its preservation (and by past, I include the very recent past as well, so in a sense almost anything is the past, including those statistics from last year you’re using to make arguments about the present). How we go about preserving this past will determine the possibilities of future research, and for now the best bet might be to take the piecemeal approach suggested by Darnton. Digitize, but don’t forget to buy the books. Print isn’t dead, and it lives a long time. Insisting on buying print books isn’t a reactionary resistance to change, but instead a cautious consideration of future needs in a time of uncertainty.

A Book I’d Like to Write

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I’m always on the lookout for a good textbook on rhetoric and research for my writing seminar, and I’ve never found the perfect one. Bedford offers the best selection, but still I’ve never found anything completely suitable. Thus, I don’t use a textbook, and am forced to create my own handouts and guides in addition to the academic readings for the class. Ideally, the students in the seminar should learn how to write academic essays based upon sources which they often find through library research. They should learn how to discover, evaluate, analyze, and synthesize sources into their own argumentative essays. My class is based upon classical rhetoric, and that also plays a role. Many rhetoric textbooks that I’ve seen aren’t based on classical or even contemporary rhetoric, but instead upon some bastardized simplification suitable for the remedial student unprepared for college work.

When I first started teaching as a grad student, I remember all too well the mediocre textbooks I was forced to use. In addition to some hurried advice on research, there were assignments asking students to write two letters–one to their parents and one to their friends back home–describing the same party. Oooh, look how an awareness of audience changes your writing! Yawn. We’re also usually told that essays can be categorized by genre: exposition, narration, description, or persuasion, and we have to write all four separately, as if one could narrate well without description or persuade without exposition. “Tell us a story about something you did that you’ll never forget.” “Describe this aubergine.” “Explain (or expositate) for us how to make a pizza. Include every step!” Or better yet, there are invented forms, such as the problem-solving essay, a variation, I suppose, of the expository essay.

I still vividly recall one of these from about fifteen years ago. There was a pizza place in town that had incredibly cheap pizzas, which always tempted students to buy them. However, the pizzas weren’t very good and used cheap ingredients so that they tasted like rubbery cardboard. However, the student argued, this “problem” could be solved if the pizza place would just use slightly better and more expensive ingredients, thus making the pizzas better. QED.

It’s like the textbooks were designed deliberately to bore students and make them hate writing, or perhaps under the assumption that writing itself is boring and students are lazy idiots, so if we just break everything down for them into simplistic, unrealistic tasks we can all get through this together. If we just Taylorize the teaching of writing, everything will be easier. There are some notably good contemporary rhetorics out there that avoid this oversimplification, but none that I’ve found do things quite like I want them to.

The ideal for me would be a combination of two such books: Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, by Edward Corbett, and The Modern Researcher, by Jacques Barzun and Henry Graff, both of which I highly recommend if you’re unfamiliar with them. Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student sounds like it would be a good introductory text, but in fact the 4th edition is a 550+ page, detailed introduction to classical rhetoric. Classical Rhetoric for the Modern (Upper-level to Graduate) Student would be a better title. The Modern Researcher, now in its 6th edition, seems to grow slimmer with each edition, but it’s still a 300+ page introduction to academic research. One can’t assign close to 900 pages of preparatory reading for a 12-week course and have any time left over for the other readings.

What I would love to see is a 150 page combination of these two works appropriate for the well prepared college freshman. The ideal book would cover the appeals and canons of classical rhetoric as well as the separate parts of classical arrangement and useful rhetorical concepts, plus provide concise sections on finding, evaluating, and analyzing sources through library research.

I’d like to write such a book myself, but I imagine the audience would be small. In spite of the fact that there are undoubtedly many people more qualified to write both the classical rhetoric and the library research portions, I think I’m in a good position to write this particular book. Classical Rhetoric and Modern Research has a nice sound to it. Unfortunately, I think the only audience might be my class, and no writer or publisher would take on a book likely to sell twelve copies a year. So I suppose for next Fall I’ll rely once more upon the mishmash of my own handouts and links out to other people. At least the students won’t have to buy any textbooks.

Conferences and Contribution

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Last post I asked some questions and put forward some tentative conclusions about speaking and conference participation. I probably seemed surer than I actually am about the topic, but by the end I was thinking more about what a conference should be. I do think librarians should be better funded by their libraries to participate in professional conferences, especially if they’re required to for tenure, but I’m still not sure what I think about compensation, or even waiving conference registration, and that’s because of what I think a conference should be. Should a conference be outsiders lecturing to insiders, or insiders conferring amongst themselves? If a conference should be professionals conferring amongst themselves, then compensating speakers isn’t a good idea.

Not all occasions of librarians speaking to librarians are conferences, of course. In a workshop, for example, an expert of some kind is paid to come in and train or educate people on a particular topic. The workshop participants acknowledge they need some sort of outside expert and pay extra to get this person. However, this might not be a good model for a conference, because the idea of a conference isn’t to have experts come in and train us, but to provide an opportunity for us to talk amongst ourselves. Anything that encourages the expert/star model devalues the possible contributions of the group.

What constitutes the group is dependent on context, of course, and it might not work for every conference. ALA as a whole might be too big to classify, but even there I don’t see the reason ALA pays for all of the celebrity speakers. Is that really an attraction for the librarians? Do librarians considering going to ALA ever make their decision based on who is giving the keynote speech? Maybe they do, but that would seem weird to me.

Smaller conferences and divisional groups within ALA are more the kind of thing I’m talking about. At a LOEX conference, the idea is that instruction librarians get together to discuss instruction. Unless a speaker is a non-librarian bring a useful non-library perspective to a subject, the speaker is one of the group contributing to the well being of the group. One of the proposals I submitted recently was for the Reference Renaissance conference coming up in Denver in August (actually, I submitted two proposals, but only one was accepted). It’s partly a RUSA-sponsored reference conference, and I’m a reference librarian who’s also in RUSA. I’m one of the group, not an outside expert coming in.

Under this model of a conference, state library associations, for example, wouldn’t pay people from out of state to come in to speak; instead, they would rely upon the expertise of their own, which is probably there but unnoticed. I know conferences want recognizable names to bring in more librarians, but in my experience rarely is the librarian with the recognizable name an expert in something so esoteric that many other people couldn’t do the same thing, especially for some generic keynote speech. Presenting research might be a different story, but that’s not what happens at a lot of conferences.

Wouldn’t it be better for all of us to come together as related professionals and share our knowledge than to rely upon some great-(wo)man, banking-model, speaker process? I think it would, but this requires at least two things.

First, it requires adequate institutional funding. In both of my professional library jobs, funding has been linked to participation. The more one participates in a conference (presenter, committee chair or member, etc), the better the funding. This is a good model because it encourages active participation. It should be the institutions, and not the conferences, that supply the funding, though. If some don’t pay or even get paid, the rest usually have to pay more.

Second, librarians need to have a sense of obligation to participate and share their knowledge. This might be even trickier than funding, because some conferences seem to have trouble even finding good presenters. I’m conflicted on this issue, because I do think professional librarians have some obligation to contribute to conferences if they can, and yet I’m always reluctant to put myself forward as a speaker. Until recently, I’ve never submitted a proposal to speak anywhere, and what few speaking gigs I’ve done have been thrust upon me. I don’t think I have anything particularly earth-shattering to offer, but I’m a pretty good speaker and I’m very good at leading discussions so I could probably contribute more. Heck, I haven’t even written much. Until I started this blog, I rarely wrote about library issues for any public audience.

I’m not sure why I haven’t tried to speak more so far, but it’s probably because the only motivation would be a sense of obligation. Though I have a quasi-tenured job, speaking wasn’t necessary, I don’t have any special desire to be famous, and I don’t especially like to travel. As is probably clear from this blog, I also don’t focus much on the practical issues that attract a lot of librarians to conference presentations. Other librarians have different issues, I’m sure. Perhaps it’s a lack of confidence that keeps people from participating more, or just a lack of interest. Perhaps associations don’t always do enough to develop a culture of contribution or look hard enough within their own ranks for speakers.

My position on this still isn’t clear even to myself, but for some reason I think that instead of a star-circuit, a culture of contribution and an idea of a conference as a gathering together of related professionals would be better for us all. Of course, maybe I’m just saying that because nobody’s offering to pay me to deliver their keynote speech.

Speaking of Speaking

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For the first time ever, I have submitted proposals to speak at conferences. Obviously I’m not exactly itching to be famous. Over the past month, I sent in two. As I was preparing my most recent one, I read the recent posts at Information Wants to Be Free complaining about librarians having to pay their own way to speak at conferences, and the disproportionately negative effect this has on newer librarians and librarians with poor institutional funding.

I feel most badly for those librarians on the tenure track who are more or less required to speak and yet also don’t receive adequate funding, and who also most likely aren’t particularly well paid as newish librarians at poorly funded libraries, but it’s not clear that we as a profession suffer because they can’t afford to speak at a particular conference or that it’s a problem for anyone but them specifically. Just being a good speaker or saying well what any number of librarians could say equally well isn’t necessarily a reason to feel bad that people can’t afford to speak. I also would want to know why the person wants to speak. If it’s required for the job, that’s one thing, but there are plenty of motivations for speaking that don’t particularly deserve any special sympathy.

There’s the professional advancement argument, for example. There’s the possibility that being a popular speaker might lead to better jobs. But how necessary is this? It’s not necessary for career development or getting good jobs, at least in my limited experience. I have a great job, and I’ve spoken and published very little. Is it the case that “famous” librarians get better jobs? I don’t know, but I do know it’s possible to get good jobs without being particularly well known, and I also know I can’t think of any librarians on the conference speaking circuit that I’d willingly trade jobs with.

Then there’s speaking just to speak more, to be “famous” for its own sake. I find this the least sympathetic motivation. Many people understandably thrive on widespread recognition and speaking offers. They want to be well known and desired, and I see nothing discreditable about that, but I also don’t see how it’s of any benefit either to anyone else or to the profession as a whole. For one thing, it leads to a saturation of the same old librarians and a limitation on new voices. Librarian celebrity perpetuates itself, so prominent speakers get asked to speak because people have heard of them, not necessarily because they have anything particularly relevant or fresh to say in the context of a particular program or conference. This is no insult to popular speakers. Speakers tend to be popular because they’re good at it. But there are other good library speakers who are never considered because they’re less prominent.

We’re getting closer to a reason for concern here, but I see no reason to sympathize with librarians who just want to become more prominent and might not have anything to say that isn’t already being said. After all, conferences seem to get speakers, and there are plenty of librarians motivated to speak because they just want to speak or because they have to for tenure and are funded adequately. And if we’re honest, do we really think there are that many librarians who have such novel contributions to make that we’d benefit from hearing them speak? Would they really be saying anything that isn’t already being said by other speakers and better funded librarians?

We just don’t know. That’s one reason why this would be a problem at all. Systematic exclusion of new library voices could very well be limiting useful contributions and interesting professional discussions, and newer librarians who haven’t yet been fully indoctrinated into traditional ideologies of librarianship might have a lot to offer. Without some change, we’ll never know.

I’ve argued that a problem of excluding these librarians from conference speaking and participation is that there’s at least the possibility they have novel and worthwhile contributions to make to the profession and that their voices won’t be heard, but we know that’s not exactly accurate. These librarians aren’t being silenced in any way. The biggest hole in my argument is that it’s easier than ever to put your ideas before librarians. Once upon a time one either wrote for the limited library press or one spoke at conferences, but times have changed. Any librarian with something to contribute can start a blog and put forth their ideas. So if these librarians have so much to contribute, why not just start a blog?

There are several reasons why not. For one, it’s not like one starts writing a blog and the world sits up and takes notice. Trust me on that one! Blogs also require some sort of sustainability. There’s a huge difference between having good ideas and sharing them at a few conferences and writing about those same ideas week after week. How many blogs have you seen that start up with a “Hello, World!” post about how excited the librarian is to be blogging and sharing professional ideas with the world, but then end six months later after a sporadic few posts that as often as not apologize for not blogging for a while?

Then there’s the difference between speaking and writing. Speaking and interacting with live human beings in a discussion of trends or ideas is very different from sitting alone with the laptop. Good writing takes effort, even if one has a sustainable blog, and a lot of librarians who might very well have good ideas and want to speak out might not write well. Also, blogs and conference presentations reach different audiences. There are a lot of librarians, perhaps the majority, who read no blogs at all, but who go to conferences and workshops. Thus, because of the difficulty of getting noticed, sustainability, writing ability, and audience, a blog will only be a useful approach to entering the professional conversation for certain types of librarians.

We’re still left with the question of whether excluding poorly funded library voices from conference participation excludes worthwhile and novel contributions that we otherwise would benefit from, and we still don’t know. I think the fact that librarians are required to speak at conferences but aren’t funded by their libraries is much more regrettable than that any specific library conference won’t compensate their speakers. Partly this is because of my conception of what a conference should be. I’d much rather conferences be considered places where professionals come together to confer with each other than gather to listen to the same group of “famous” librarians time after time, but this is more difficult to achieve when many librarians don’t have adequate funding in the first place. This is more a problem of insufficient institutional support for professional development, though, rather than a problem of conferences not paying for people. Paying people to speak at conferences goes against the idea that conferences are places for professionals to come together to confer with one another.

So not compensating some speakers means that some librarians who may have novel or useful contributions to make to the profession are not heard, but compensating speakers goes against the conception of a conference as a place where professionals come together to confer with one another. For me at least, I think it’s more important to address the issue of inadequate institutional funding than to expect to be compensated for speaking to your fellow professionals during an ordinary library conference.

True Enough

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I don’t normally discuss books on the blog, mainly because I rarely read books with any relationship to libraries. Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws or Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars (to name two books I’m currently reading) seem to be of little relevance to librarianship, though I suppose the same could be said of Aristotle’s ethical theory and Rawls’ political philosophy and I’ve managed to draw connections between them and reference service and collection development.

This week I did read a book of some library interest, or at least I think it might be: True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society by Farhad Manjoo. (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2008). I ran across it because someone mentioned it in a comment on this blog (thanks, John!).

It’s a quick read, though perhaps a bit depressing. Mostly it’s about the way that the Web and other modern communication technology and trends are exacerbating a problem inherent in the human psyche. We have a tendency to see what we want to see or believe things that reinforce what we already believe rather than challenging ourselves or seeing another’s point of view. We tend to believe what we want to be true. The book mentions several psychological experiments that seem to confirm this. With what the author calls the splitting of reality, it’s easier than ever to get just the news and views we want, which tend to be the ones that confirm what we already think it true. Of necessity, we act as if what we believe is true, which implies that we all think people who disagree with us are wrong. With the Internet and niche television, we can now insulate ourselves from the Other. A mission of higher education should be to challenge our own thinking and make us more able to empathize with others. In the last post I wrote that if we can’t understand why people would hold political views very different from our own, then the problem is our own lack of knowledge and imagination. True Enough is in one sense an examination of willful ignorance and an absence of empathetic imagination. There are chapters on the swift-boating of John Kerry, 9/11 conspiracies, and the “stolen” presidential election of 2004 that investigate why people seem to believe things that have by any reasonable standard been unproven. Some people just want to believe that John Kerry was a bad soldier or that he really won the 2004 election or that the US government blew up the World Trade Center, despite the lack of real evidence.

The chapter on 9/11 conspiracies resonated the most with me because I’ve watched a lot of the conspiracy videos (such as Loose Change, which Manjoo discusses) and seen a lot of the websites in my exploration of this bizarre shadow world. In my writing seminar I use a 9/11 conspiracy website and the 9/11 Commission Report in an exercise on evaluating sources. How does one debunk conspiracy theories, since the people holding them are apparently incapable of seeing any evidence that doesn’t affirm what they already believe? If True Enough is true enough, then one doesn’t debunk them for the true believers.

There was even a Princeton connection, which I’m sure will be fascinating for the three of my readers at Princeton. The author describes different perspectives on a 1951 Princeton-Dartmouth football game that Princeton won despite what some Princetonians claimed was Dartmouth’s dirty playing. Princetonians watched the game and saw Dartmouth playing dirty. Dartmouthians (is that the right word? probably not) watched the game and just saw a rough game. The point is that everyone sees the same thing going on, but processes it according to their own biased perspective. We see what we want to see, and perhaps more importantly don’t see what we don’t want to believe. We all witnessed the news in the months leading up to war in Iraq. Some of us saw a compelling case for going to war with an evil dictator who had attacked the US on 9/11 and who had weapons of mass destruction he was just itching to use on America, while others of us waited in vain for any substantial case for war and wondered why other people were gullible enough to believe the unjustified lies daily emanating from the White House. Reality is what we want it to be.

We’re in the business of information, and how information is manipulated and propagated is probably of interest to a lot of us. I’d recommend True Enough as a good quick read about some ways information is now disseminated in society. I’ll conclude with a quote from the book:

“Propagandists have become experts at mining the vulnerabilities of the many-media world . . . . They’ve adopted a range of methods to exploit the current conditions–some are as benign as the covert placement of products in films and TV shows, but others are more questionable, such as planting VNRs on the news, or buying up pundits, or spreading their messages anonymously and “virally” through blogs, videos, and photos on the Web.

Technically, what these operatives aim to do is capture one or many of the forces I’ve discussed so far: selective exposure, in which we indulge information that pleases us and cocoon ourselves among others who think as we do; selective perception, in which we interpret documentary proof according to our long-held beliefs; peripheral processing, which produces a swarm of phony experts: and the hostile media phenomenon, which pushes the news away from objectivity and toward the sort of drivel one sees on cable.

In practice, what propagandists are doing is simpler to describe: they’ve mastered a new way to lie.”

Logos and Ethos in the Classroom

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By now some of you might have heard of this strange story. An instructor of introductory writing classes at Dartmouth threatened for a while to sue Dartmouth and several of her students because they resisted her ideas, or something like that. The story looks complicated, and based on her own statements and those of students it seemed the instructor had a number of problems that had nothing to do with unruly students. (Follow the various links in the story.) Some have interpreted this controversy as the typical result of the relativist absurdity run amok in the humanities. While there is plenty of absurdity in the humanities these days, a more mundane interpretation might be that this instructor just wasn’t a very good teacher. Specifically, it seems to me she failed in at least three ways: she tried to base her authority on her degree rather than her abilities (based on student comments); she treated her students with disrespect; and she mistakenly thought her job was to teach French theory and something called “science studies” when in fact her job was to teach them college writing. Generally, though, she was unable to establish a proper ethos in the classroom, in part because of a failure of logos. All teachers can learn lessons from this.

Ethos and logos are two of the three standard appeals in classical rhetoric, the third being pathos. Logos is the appeal to reason. Ethos is the appeal based upon the character of the speaker. Both of these are crucial for establishing authority in classrooms, at least in classrooms of intelligent college students. Both our intellectual abilities and our characters affect how students view us.

Our writing instructor blamed the students for being resistant to French theory, among other things. If she was a product of the same sort of English department I toiled in, she had probably been surrounded for years by people who were unable or unwilling to challenge the theories propounded by their professors. Once one leaves the intellectual hothouse of graduate school, one necessarily meets people for whom the phrases “Foucault says” or “according to Lacan” carry no argumentative weight whatsoever, and some graduate students aren’t prepared to respond to the normal reaction to such a statement, which is “So?” Lacan may be like a god to radical psychoanalysts, but nothing he says is likely to be accepted by critical people without a lot of argumentation. Unfortunately too many academics take a hagiographic approach to too much French theory. French theory is so alien to Anglo-American intellectual traditions that to use if effectively, one needs to start at the beginning and build the necessary base upon which one can later erect the extravagant superstructure. One cannot rely upon the claim that one’s graduate training proves one is correct. One has to be able to make arguments and overcome objections. The problem is that these so-called “theories” are hardly self-evident and rarely subject to verification or falsification, which makes them difficult to prove. Nevertheless, regardless of their validity or lack thereof, or even whether they would implicitly deny their own validity and render moot why anyone would accept them, it is still necessary and possible to provide arguments for why anyone would even find these thinkers compelling.

This is logos in the classroom. At eighteen college students may be immature in various ways, but they’re rarely stupid, at least ones at places like Dartmouth or Princeton. The students I teach are usually very intelligent and also very critical. To treat them as babes who should sit at the feet of their French masters and accept everything told to them without argument is disrespectful both of them and of the common activity of learning in which we should all be engaged. Nothing I read made it sound like the students were just rowdies, at least until their criticisms had been ignored. The students were critical and challenged ideas. That’s what college students should do, though never in a belligerent way. If teachers cannot respond effectively to legitimate criticism of their ideas, then it’s clear that either their ideas are faulty or that they have insufficient grasp of them. Either way, the fault is in the teacher.

I had little sympathy for the teacher in this situation because she seemed to place an inordinate amount of importance on her degree rather than her abilities, as if this is enough to establish intellectual authority. We’ve probably all known plenty of people with PhDs who were nevertheless intellectual lightweights. I’ve taught several writing seminars at Princeton similar to the one at Dartmouth. I didn’t go to an Ivy League university and I don’t have a PhD, but I’ve never had any trouble establishing my intellectual authority with students or responding to their criticisms. I’ve also not had any trouble with students resisting my readings, whether those readings are liberal, socialist, feminist, or conservative. Almost any reasonable arguments can be made compelling if taught properly.

I think the main reason students don’t challenge me belligerently is because I deliberately try to cultivate an ethos based both on logos and on mutual respect. First, logos. I assume that every reading in my class is up for argument, and indeed choose sources that argue with each other. They might all be wrong, but they can’t all be right. Logos in a class such as this requires taking both sides with equal rigor. The best way to appreciate any argumentative text is to read it three times. First, as sympathetically as possible, trying to get into the mindset of the writer and understand why such an argument would be appealing and making the best possible case for the reading at hand, whatever it may be. Second, as contrarily as possible, subjecting every statement to as rigorous and hostile critique as possible. Only after these two approaches is it possible to approach an argument open-mindedly, understanding both its merits and faults. The assumption is always that people make their arguments in good faith and have justifiable reasons to believe as they do, even if I think they’re absolutely mistaken. But what I think doesn’t matter. Learning to write academic essays shouldn’t be about learning to regurgitate what the instructor thinks about an issue or to parrot the party line, but instead learning to enter critically into a scholarly conversation on a particular issue.

This technique is shunned by zealots who think they’re absolutely right and everyone else is absolutely wrong. The zealots rarely engage counterarguments and surround themselves with the like-minded. Unfortunately this unwillingness to engage counterarguments makes them intellectually slack until they reach the point they cannot defend their ideas against criticism and instead try to dismiss their critics without bothering to reason with them. Hence, assumptions such as that people who don’t agree with you are just evil or stupid or ignorant or intellectually resistant whatever. That might be the case for some people, but pretty much any theoretical point of view has articulate defenders somewhere. If you can’t understand why someone would believe other than you do about an issue, then you just don’t understand the issue. For example, if you can’t understand the appeals of liberalism, conservatism, socialism, feminism, libertarianism, republicanism, communitarianism, communism or whatever ism has attracted articulate followers in the past century or so, then that usually shows an lack of knowledge and imagination on your part.

Despite the neglect of the zealots, it’s remarkable how effective this approach is in the classroom, both for teaching students how to think critically and challenge their own dull and often unsupported ideas and for teaching an ethic of respect that should carry on into classroom discussion. Such a discussion makes it clear to students that we are all fallible human beings who argue and disagree but that it’s possible to come together in an intellectual endeavor, even if just for the brief period of the seminar. While avoiding the easy relativism of saying there’s no right and no wrong and I’m okay and you’re okay, I still try to convey the undeniable fact that when discussing politics and rhetoric there is room for healthy and considerate disagreement. Such is the case with French theory as well. The way to handle objections from students isn’t to assert your alleged intellectual authority, but to establish that authority in their minds by meeting their objections with better counterarguments while still showing you respect them as interlocutors. Classroom discussion is a rhetorical activity. In the humanities, at least, teachers have to persuade, not just dictate, if they want to be taken seriously by serious students. It’s not that hard if you know what you’re talking about.

Reds in the Stacks?

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Yesterday’s post got something of an odd comment. The first part of the comment wasn’t so odd, but it ended thusly:

“I don’t know how serious you are with this idea, but I am not at all certain that the average person would care what a librarian tells them. Librarians are all communists, anyway.”

As for being serious, since my suggestion was to assign a research librarian to every twelve Americans, it’s probably obvious I was just having a little fun during the political season. It could be amusing to consider what this plan would really look like, but I’ll let someone else do the considering.

It’s the second sentence that struck me as odd. “Librarians are all communists, anyway.” Even if that were true, I don’t see how it would be relevant to the discussion, but I’m wondering what motivates the statement at all. Have I been surrounded by Reds in the stacks all along and just haven’t noticed? That might add some excitement to my ordinarily quiet library. Most of the intrigues where I work are quite banal and none are likely to lead to the abolition of capitalism. Of course, 160 years of communism hasn’t led to that, either, so what do I know.

Just speaking personally, I’m a librarian and I’m pretty sure I’m not a communist, which is a pity because I look good in red. I don’t think I’ve ever associated with any known communist librarians, and considering my past experience with self-professed communists (I was a literature student for several years, after all) I’d probably know if I did. Communists tend to be aggressively evangelical and eager to share the economic and political wisdom they have gained from, for example, teaching American literature. I don’t think any of my colleagues are communists, though I guess they might be. In general, I doubt Princeton would be the sort of place to attract communist librarians. I don’t think they’d feel comfortable around all those rich students. And it would be very hypocritical for my communist colleagues to contribute to TIAA-CREF.

I suppose a number of the librarians in the SRRT consider themselves communists, and I must have worked with some librarians from SRRT before, though none of them have ever tried to get me to join the CPUSA or anything. Perhaps I worked with the democratic socialists instead of the communists. Maybe this group of librarians have convinced my commenter that all librarians are communists, just because they’re so vocal, but if we assume that most communist librarians belong to the SRRT (not an outrageous assumption), and couple that with the fact that most librarians don’t belong to the SRRT, this at least suggests that most librarians are not communists.

I’m not even sure I’ve ever been in a political discussion with any librarians where anyone supported communism. I think being vocally pro-same sex marriage is probably as close as anyone’s come, and that’s not very close. Now it could be that I just don’t hang out in the right librarian circles (or the left librarian circles, as the case may be), in which case I’ll probably never get to know the communist librarians. Also, I instinctively recoil from anyone who wants to proselytize passionately on behalf of their cause, whether that cause is political, religious, or professional, so I’d probably steer clear of the communo-evangelists, just as I would from a librarian wearing one of those Adam Smith ties and crowing about the magic of the market. (Hey, it could happen.) It could also be that most of my interaction with librarians is purely professional, and a library committee meeting is hardly the place to discuss the dictatorship of the proletariat, unless it were, I suppose, a committee for the Communist Party Library, if such exists. But even among my librarian friends, I’ve never heard anyone say, “hey, wouldn’t a communist revolution be a great idea” or “that capitalism thing is pretty bad; let’s abolish it.”

It seems safe to conclude that most librarians are probably left of whatever counts as the political center at any given time in America, but one hardly has to advocate state ownership of all productive property or the abolition of capital to be left of the American center. Just thinking homosexuals shouldn’t be openly mocked or insisting that the rule of law applies to everyone, including the President, seems to be enough. This political labeling is always tricky, though. I know a number of Jewish librarians who are very pro-Israel, and such sentiments anger many on the left, though these librarians are mostly leftish. Even what is considered definitive of left or right is so simplistic at times. You could support social and economic equality, expanded social programs, universal health care, more civic participation, fewer aggressive wars, stronger international diplomatic efforts, increased environmental protections, the legalization of marijuana, and an end to capital punishment, but if it doesn’t bother you that law-abiding citizens own firearms, then you’re hopelessly reactionary in some people’s political ledgers.

Maybe it’s just the nature of libraries. Some people seem to think that libraries in general are communistic, or at least socialistic endeavors. Obviously we’re talking about public libraries here, not academic, and certainly not private academic libraries like mine. The stolid Presbyterians who founded Princeton wouldn’t have liked that idea at all. Were this the case, though, it seems unlikely that Andrew Carnegie, capitalist extraordinaire, would have supported them so much. If support for any publicly funded public goods marks one as a communist, then just about all Americans except the libertarian fringe are communists. That doesn’t seem very likely. There are all sorts of traditional liberal or republican reasons to support libraries and other public goods.

Maybe it’s that open access movement or the copyright issues. Those librarians who want open access to publicly funded research or who argue that current copyright laws are egregiously excessive do seem a bit pinkish in the right light. Or maybe they do. I don’t really know. I’m unfamiliar with the communist position on intellectual property.

This comment couldn’t be based on the the common stereotypes of librarians. No one thinks the little old woman with the bun shushes people because it’s too noisy for her to read the Grundrisse in peace. So it must be based on a librarian’s perception, and presumably a librarian who isn’t in fact a communist, possibly making this something of a paradox as well. I’m just wondering what led to that particular perception, because I just don’t see it. But then again, I’m probably a victim of false consciousness or something.

Everyone Needs a Librarian

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I hear there’s a presidential campaign on, so I’m feeling a bit political. I just can’t help myself. With all the policy suggestions going around, I wanted to offer one of my own.

There’s an intellectual breakthrough that comes when one begins to understand that merely stating opinions, no matter how forcefully they are stated, doesn’t impress intelligent people. Politicians, of course, rarely go out of their way to impress intelligent people, and thus sometimes never reach this point, at least in public. College students accomplish this breakthrough when they realize that assertions need argument and evidence and that evidence needs analysis and evaluation. Librarians play a crucial role in this discovery. Along with the instructors, they help students not only find sources for an argument, but help them learn how to analyze and evaluate these sources. It is part of our mission to educate people in the intelligent discovery and use of information. As I survey the state of the republic, sometimes I think everyone in the country needs a librarian. I recommend this as a new public policy. Perhaps the candidates could add this to their stump speeches.

Yesterday afternoon I heard a Fresh Air interview with Al Gore marking the occasion of the paperback publication of The Assault on Reason, his book from last year decrying the disappearance of reason and logic from public discourse. (I didn’t read the book, since I usually don’t read popular books that I think I’ll most likely agree with, but I read the excerpt here.) He noted in the interview and in the book that, for example, at the time of the vote to authorize the war in Iraq, 75% of the American public believed that the war was a retaliation against Saddam Hussein because of his responsibility for the 9/11 attacks. These were people immune from evidence, analysis, logic, and reason. They all needed their own librarians to help them find sources and evaluate their veracity and worth. Then there are those people who believe Senator Obama is a Muslim. Yep, they need librarians, too.

Or let us take the “gas tax holiday” being touted by Senators McCain and Clinton as a way to provide relief to those of us feeling financial pain at the pump. I’m pretty sure there are some sources in the library that would point out that reducing prices (as a tax holiday would do) stimulates demand. Increasing demand for oil will only drive up prices more in the long run as well as increase rather than decrease American dependence on foreign oil. One of the senators thinks the lost government revenue would be made up by taxing oil companies. There are probably some good sources somewhere in the library that point out that businesses make profits by passing their overhead on to consumers. I think those people in Congress have their own librarians, but other devotees of the “gas tax holiday” need their own librarian, too, someone to help them find, analyze, and evaluate sources.

Al Gore talks about the problems of having political discourse governed by 30-second television ads and television newscasters spending the vast majority of their time giving us constantly updated coverage of the banal and insubstantial while not providing coverage of any political debate (I’m paraphrasing). I’ll have to take his word for it, because I quit watching television over 20 years ago. (I do sometimes watch some TV shows on DVD, but I’ve hardly watched a commercial television show or news broadcast during just about my entire adult life.) He rightly notes that the Internet, if it’s kept neutral, can be a great way to bring information to people, and much better than television because it’s an interactive and hot medium. To some extent that’s certainly true. Despite the ravings of Andrew Keen and Tara Brabazon, there is in fact a tremendous amount of thoughtful political analysis on the Internet if one ventures beyond the opinion pages of the newspapers.

However, we could get rid of television entirely, and that wouldn’t help the problem of irrational political discourse. For every thoughtful bit of policy analysis, there are thousands of stories about Britney Spears and the like. Pornography and celebrity news make up such a large and popular portion of the Internet because that’s what people like. Researching and reasoning about difficult issues that will have enormous impacts on their lives is much more difficult than looking at Britney flashing her pudenda to the paparazzi. With cringing trepidation, I just checked the Google entertainment news. The top story was something about Britney Spears, naturally. The second story was about somebody convicted of something to do with stalking Uma Thurman (okay, that one was a little more interesting because he was a U. of Chicago grad school dropout. I wonder if Regenstein drove him to it!). And the third story was on some celebrity engagement. I give the lead paragraph in full: “Following the news that Scarlett Johansson and Ryan Reynolds have gotten engaged, friends are speaking out to offer heartfelt congratulations on the pairs’ next step.” I found that sentence fascinating in a number of different ways that had little to do with its literal meaning, but still, it’s fluffy stuff, and very easy to digest mentally.

Gore argues that “the remedy for what ails our democracy is not simply better education (as important as that is) or civic education (as important as that can be), but the re-establishment of a genuine democratic discourse in which individuals can participate in a meaningful way–a conversation of democracy in which meritorious ideas and opinions from individuals do, in fact, evoke a meaningful response,” and that “the Internet has the potential to revitalize the role played by the people in our constitutional framework.” I agree, but I have a further suggestion. In addition, everyone needs a librarian to help them do research on important topics and learn how to analyze and evaluate the information they find, just like academic librarians do with students now. Some public librarians might argue that almost everyone does now in fact have a librarian, but fails to take advantage of this valuable resource. This just isn’t enough!

This should be done more the way we work with our writing program. Every class of twelve students is assigned a librarian, who teaches a bit about research and often meets individually with students. I propose everyone in the country be assigned a librarian, or perhaps every twelve persons. That’s the only way this thing’s going to work. The “Everyone Needs a Librarian” campaign assumes that what should be a prerequisite for engagement in democratic politics is in fact woefully lacking in this country, and proposes a solution to fix this problem. I think the ALA needs to get involved. The ALA has an Office of Intellectual Freedom. Perhaps they could also open an Office of Intellectual Rigor to address this issue. They could start on a committee. I’ll serve on it. Heck, I’ll even chair it.

The Personal and the Professional

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This is sort of a follow up to But What If I Don’t Want it All, except I’ve decided to bring the personal to the professional, not because I like to expose myself, so to speak, but just to show what I think about when I think about moving up to another job. I don’t know how typical I am, but we’ll see. The discussion in that post was a presentation of arguments about why bright people might not want to be library directors. Here I’m talking mostly about myself and about a good job I didn’t apply for and some of the reasons why. The deadline for applications ended last week, so I feel safe talking about it. The temptation is over.

First, I should say that like a lot of librarians I’m somewhat geographically limited. My wife has a good and somewhat unusual job at ETS and we (sort of) own a house in New Jersey that we most likely couldn’t sell in this market. (But make me a good offer and we’ll talk!) Because of spousal and housing issues, debt, an uncertain economy, and my own risk averseness, the only way I could afford to just pick up and move out of the region would be a library job that essentially doubled my salary, an unlikely circumstance for a job one step up.

Which is why I paid particular attention to an ad for a job in the area. Very few jobs I see are even remotely tempting for me, but I came very close to applying for the job of Assistant Director of Research and Instructional Services at Penn. However, I didn’t apply. Believe me, it wasn’t them. It was me. I’m certainly not saying I would have been an ideal or even attractive candidate for this job, only that were I interested in moving up this would be the sort of job I’d apply for. Those are very different propositions.

For all I know it looks like a great job. I heard very nice things about both the department and the person this position would report to, and this from someone who actually works there. It’s also a large private research university, which is where I feel most comfortable. The job would be a natural next step in a career toward a directorship someday if that were my goal. In addition, a new job with more responsibility would bring new challenges and experiences, and that would be good for me professionally. Plus, I live two miles from a station with a train that would drop me off right in front of campus. Looking good so far.

I looked very closely at the job requirements, and thought I looked pretty good for everything except “effective supervisory experience.” I could possibly make a case that based on other experience and abilities I have the talent and capacity to be an effective supervisor, but that’s definitely missing from my resume and definitely a requirement, and possibly the most important one. The lack might have just gotten me tossed from the pile, but it’s possible that I’d have gotten a second look. Never hurts to try.

So why didn’t I apply? The possibility of getting thrown out of the pile because I haven’t supervised librarians was part of it, certainly. Nobody likes rejection, and why waste everyone’s time. In addition, there was the tally I did of the pros and cons of getting the job versus staying in my own.

I’ve listed the pros, but then I thought of the cons. First and foremost, I like my job. I like the library, I like the students, I like the departments, and I like a lot of my colleagues. I like collection development. I also like the fact that I get to teach a class each year. All this brings a variety to my work that I enjoy. I also have a lot of flexibility and autonomy in my work, which could disappear in an administrative job. And just in general I feel like my work and opinions are respected. Variety, flexibility, autonomy, respect. These are not job attributes to be dismissed lightly. I calculated how high an offer would have to be to make it worth my while to give up known goods and compensate for unknown burdens, and it seemed to me highly unlikely based on the statistics that Penn or anyplace else would pay that much for this particular position, especially for someone without “effective supervisory experience.”

About the only things I don’t like are my commute (which would actually be a bit longer to Penn) and the fact that my office has no window. When you think about it, this isn’t much to dislike, and both things are tangential to the job itself. I never dread work. I never get that Sunday evening panic some people get, though that’s possibly because I do chat reference most Sunday evenings. I won’t say it’s stress free, because it is sometimes stressful, but it’s never stress in that bad way where one sinks into a severe work-related depression and contemplates killing oneself or others.

Why am I writing about this? Because I see the questions come up. Why aren’t more people applying for what look like good jobs? Why is it so hard to find librarians for management jobs, especially AUL and director positions? Are there just too few people experienced enough? Have libraries not been grooming managers? This is probably part of the case. Or are our standards unreasonable? This could also be. I do think libraries are going to have to take chances on talent in the future, and realize that being younger than the average librarian doesn’t necessarily mean one can’t effectively supervise other librarians.

Or are people just unwilling to make certain sacrifices, as Steven’s post hinted? Though there are librarians who have a contempt for management as such or think particular jobs would be too much work, I suspect that a lot of the reasons have more to do with an inability to make sacrifices rather than an unwillingness. Sometimes it’s a work/life balance issue, but also people are entrenched for various reasons, and the longer one stays the harder it becomes to leave. Spouses have jobs. Children are in school. Parents are in retirement homes. People like their jobs. Friends of 10, 20, 30 years live in the area. Moving is disruptive and stressful. Starting a new job is stressful. For some librarians it’s probably not that they’d mind working later or taking the responsibility, it’s just that they don’t want to totally disrupt their lives and those of their families for such jobs. Or it could be that libraries in general don’t pay enough to make many librarians consider uprooting their families. How much might it take to uproot the rooted? Companies paying their salespeople $250K/year never seem to have trouble relocating those people.

Other than economics, it seems to me the other motivating factors are desperation and desire. If I hated my job or were very dissatisfied, I’d be constantly on the market and be more willing to relocate or move on. The other factor is desire. If I really, really, really wanted to move up into administration, then perhaps other issues wouldn’t have as important a place in calculation. Spouse has a job? She can find another one! Salary not that much better than my current one, all things considered? Think of the satisfactions of having more responsibility and a more exalted job title and being a step further up the ladder! Reduced flexibility and added responsibility would be a big burden on the family? Hey, what’s more important, my family or my career! But would the benefits of this overcome the burdens and offset the loss of current goods? It’s hard to say. With every change comes loss of something, and sometimes we just don’t want to lose those things.

The People Have Spoken

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The people have spoken, the results are in, and it turns out I’m both a loser and a winner in my RUSA elections. I did win my election to be the RUSA CODES Member-at-Large. Thanks RUSA CODES people! On the other hand, I got throughly stomped in my election for RUSA RSS Vice-Chair/ Chair-Elect, but thanks anyway to the people who voted for me. I’d like to congratulate my opponent on waging a clean, fair, and generous campaign, and express regret that I won’t be able to continue my fight to take RSS power away from the lobbyists and special interests and give it back to the people. Since this is the fourth year in a row I’ve lost an RSS election, I’m starting to think they don’t like me very much. I’m tempted to say, “You won’t have Bivens-Tatum to kick around anymore, because this is my last blog post!” (I hope you get that allusion.) The silliest thing about the whole situation is that I didn’t much want to run in the first place, wasn’t at all sure I wanted to win (LOTS of work), and yet I feel bad losing. Humans are such absurd creatures.