Dementia Bibliothecalis

Its is odd (and yet delightful) that the first comments that I receive on the pilcrow press have nothing to do with academics but rather with academia.

Will Baude takes [Andrew and] me to task, albeit quite sympathetically, for not recognizing the value of libraries as gathering places, and not realizing that "there are also plenty of disorderly students there with advanced degrees." Still he shows some solidarity with those of us afflicted with dementia bibliothecalis, and confesses to suffering from early signs of the juridical strain of the ailment.

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Phoebe Maltz was filled with awe upon reading my comment that "[t]he library is ours more than it is theirs."

¶ She says it was awful. I'm well within my semantic rights. Just barely.

She counters my assertion by insisting that it's the [parents of the] undergrads who subsidize the grad students and their book-lined hallowed halls. I should, by all accounts of my ideological migration since I arrived at Chicago, be sympathetic to her argument. After all, my melancholy pæan to faded call-numbers, cavernous stair cases, and dusty reading rooms had a tinge of (gasp!) communitarianism. Her rebuke stood squarely on good-old property rights. But as a certain public figure once said, "[m]y logic fails me when it comes to my son." In my case, it fails me when it comes to Academia.

So it's time for a few clarifications:

¶ You mean mea culpas? Don't put words in my mouth.

I know Will, I've been in class with him, I read his blog every day, and I can honestly say that I never saw him in pajamas at the Regenstein. I'm sure that he respects it. In fact, I don't think that such respect is incompatible with having a lively conversation down in Ex Libris, or meeting a group of friends over at the OED. But don't turn the whole building floor into a bazaar, for Dewey's sake. Sure, human chatter can be stimulating background noise; that's why I went to a coffeehouse to write many a paper when I was in college. But a library needs a quiet space—indeed, a lot of it—for those who are not so stimulated. Library patrons who don't respect the silence, who don't recognize the difference between the cafeteria and the reading room, don't have the proper attitude towards the place.

Now, I don't know Phoebe, but I've read her column in the Chicago Maroon and enjoy her blog. I trust that her proprietary claims were not too serious. Then again, there was more than a drop of irony in my own post, and the hoity-toity prose should have suggested.

¶ What?! Come on, you always write like that! I've read your papers, you know.

So I'll stick to her other assertions, some of which are quite right. Indeed "The dippy undergrads in pajamas who speak at full volume at the library are [...] less dominant at the U of C than at other schools." It's one of the reasons why I like this place. I've been highly impressed by the quality and dedication of the undergraduates here. I've been told that it has to do with self-selection: the school's reputation attracts only the most devoted scholars. But this makes U of C undergrads much like grad students, who have also decided to devote themselves to this long and arduous novitiate, and are thus assumed to be devoted to the principles of their institution. Indeed, Phoebe herself has noted elsewhere that "undergrads at Chicago seem more like the school's grad students, or like grad students in general, than is the case at other universities, sharing cross-listed classes and eccentricities, not to mention a tendency to wear far too much tweed".

I also tend to regard the library-work that undergrads (and some grads) do in extremely high regard. It is a priestly function, tending to the temple. And in my experience the students who do such work have a much greater appreciation for the library than those who see it as a place to make a photocopy, grab a tax-form, chug down a Mountain Dew and be on their way. Those types, Phoebe points out, "tend to stick mainly to the A-level and are thus easily avoidable." At Cornell they ended up in a brightly-lit place called "The Fishbowl" getting "facetime". We serious students looked at them and sneered; they, on the other hand, got all the cute dates.

Which brings me to my final point: I'm old. Both older than I was when in college (almost ten years older) and old fashioned enough to have given my soul to a conservative medieval institution (all of Academia, not just the U of C). I think that universities are the greatest achievement of human society, and that libraries are monuments to and temples of civilization. And it irks me when folks enter those halls as merchants in the temple. There are no distinctions of discipline or standing at work here, only of devotion, reverence, and respect. I am certain that Will and Phoebe entertain those same values, and because of this the library is theirs as much as mine. But there are others who couldn't care less. They have no claim of ownership, of belonging to this congregation.


UPDATE: Andrew responds to Will and Phoebe here, and Will continues the conversation there.

UPDATE: A trans-atlantic take on the whole mess.

UPDATE: Deva gets in on the action, complaining about "the level of fetishism that accompanies the academic profession". She asks:

our navels are no prettier than other people's why should they bear so much gazing?

It's the tweed. Tweed-lint in one's navel is so much prettier than ordinary lint.