Posts Tagged ‘research’
“Our research universities are the best in the world. But a leadership position is easy to lose and difficult to regain.”…
Revisiting a key topic that we’ve touched before…
The modern U.S. research universities arose in the late 19th century. Their work has laid the foundation for major advances in health and medicine, technology, communications, agriculture/food, economics, energy, and national security at the same time that they have educated students to be scientific, technical, commerical, and cultural leaders and innovators.
Today, as a product of what historians have called a “virtuous circle of incentives and resources,” American academic research institutions are top of the pops… and not at all coincidentally, so is the U.S economy:
… But that dominance is under attack, both by the Trump Administration and by state governments around the country actively undermining the work of their state universities.
It’s worth remembering that, into the early twentieth century, German Universities– the original models for the American approach— dominated the list.
As the U.S. increasingly models the behavior of German authorities in the 1930s, the vital contributions of research univerisities are at risk.
When Hitler rose to power in the 1930s, the leaders of America’s most august universities didn’t all comport themselves as one might have wished. We can only hope that this time– as the threat is aimed directly at them– they will respond more strongly and directly.
Meantime, we can all add our voices to the defense of academic freedom and support for vital research.
* Research Universities and the Future of America, a report from The National Research Council, 2012 (Page 68)
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As we cease self-sabotage, we might spare a thought for a professorial paragon of the virtues of the institutions in question (in his case, on the cultural as opposed to the scientific/technical front), George Lyman Kittredge, a professor at Harvard; he died on this date in 1941. Kittredge’s edition of Shakespeare’s work was the scholarly standard in the early 20th century; he promoted the study of folklore and folk songs (encouraging students like John A. Lomax, and thus Lomax’s son, Alan); and he was instrumental in the formation and management of the Harvard University Press.
“I didn’t study theology out of piety. I studied it because I wanted to know.”*…
Beatrice Marovich on a discipline declining…
People often assume that theology is only for true believers: those who want to defend the existence of God against the skepticism of secular outsiders. But there’s an old open secret in the field: theologians often have a complicated relationship with belief, and some theologians are even non-believers. I’ve always been a secular—or non-religious—person. That’s the “tradition” I was raised in. But I’m also a theologian.
I knew that it was a risk, going into the field of theology. There are conversations I’ve been shut out of because I’m not religious enough. And I’m often marked as a troubling outsider by scholars who see themselves taking a purely secular approach to the interdisciplinary study of religion. But as a graduate student, and even early in my career as a faculty member at a small liberal arts college, I believed the field of theology was opening up, and becoming more complex. It felt, to me, as if there were a creative disintegration happening that might make more room for scholars like me. But after more than a decade in the field, I’ve come to feel that something else is happening instead. It feels like the field is dying.
People are still doing theology in public (if, by doing theology we mean talking about gods, spirits, and other divine powers). But the field I was trained in as a scholar—academic theology—feels like it’s dying. It’s a field that’s often philosophical, but always theoretical. Because of this, theology can verge quickly into the abstract, and the speculative. Theologians might make use of anthropological, sociological, and historical studies of religion. But they tend not to feel beholden to any of those disciplines. Indeed, theologians are often wading into explicitly interdisciplinary conversations about science, politics, gender, and race (among other things). In its lack of clear focus, theology might be the most undisciplined discipline in the American academy today. And that undisciplined discipline feels like it’s dying. At least to me.
But is theology really dying? Or is this just the feeling I have, as I’m being squeezed out of the field? Or, perhaps I’m I fixated on the mortality of this collective project because I’ve been writing, thinking, and teaching about death. When I looked at enrollment numbers at seminaries and theological schools, the numbers aren’t necessarily damning. At least not yet. They don’t necessarily confirm my feeling, or my mood. Neither did Sean Larsen’s 2020 State of Theology study, funded by the Templeton Religion Trust. There were people, in that study, who remained optimistic about the discipline’s prospects. And while Ted Smith’s 2023 book The End of Theological Education does acknowledge that the institutions that built theology in America are collapsing, he remains optimistic about what the church can do for the future of theology.
I needed to know if others shared my feeling, or mood. So, I decided to have a conversation with my colleagues. I reached out to people in my network, to see who felt compelled to weigh in. I had three questions for them: Is academic theology really dying? If so, how do you feel about this death? And, finally, If you could save one thing from the sinking ship that is academic theology, what would it be? This essay is a kind of report: it’s what my colleagues told me.
What you’ll read here does reflect a bias: these are voices from within my network. Nevertheless, I think their words are worth sharing. Whether or not academic theology is really dying, it may still be worth thinking about its mortality. If I’ve learned any lesson from writing and thinking about death, it’s that when we acknowledge that it’s there, when we remember that we’re always living in death’s shadows, we take what’s in front of us much more seriously. We can see the full fragility of things, and we can try—against the odds—to resist entropy and protect what we think is worth saving, inheriting, or carrying on into the future. And we can think about what we’re ready to let go of. Because all things, in time, do die. It’s only a question of when…
[Marovich examines the state of the field v ia a recounting of highlights from her conversations with colleagues…]
… I conducted these interviews in the spring of 2024, in what feels to me (now) like a different world. What David Kline so succinctly described as the “institutional frameworks for intellectual life” seem more fragile and threatened than ever, as the Trump administration rapidly defunds education and research, and attacks media outlets. And we can’t forget, of course, about the many threats that Artificial Intelligence—in the form of Large Language Models like ChatGPT—poses to these fragile frameworks for intellectual life. I’m aware that it may seem small-minded and naïve to worry about my own obscure little academic discipline, when the whole structure is falling apart. So, it does seem important for me to clarify that I have spent (and will continue to spend) many hours grieving, as if in anticipation, what feels like the evaporation of intellectual possibilities—intellectual life itself!—in America. I am torn up about all of this. And yet, simultaneously, I do remain concerned about the strange little ecosystem that comprises my corner of the world.
As I think over these conversations with my colleagues, I find myself torn between letting go and holding on—or, perhaps better said, trying to hold space. I agree with Hanna Reichel when they suggest that letting go of the growth mindset is painful and difficult for Americans, perhaps more than anyone else. And this contributes to so much of the damage that American life does to the planet we share with others. I recognize that this is a problem. And I am compelled by Colby Dickinson’s suggestion that perhaps learning to die—learning an ars moriendi—might be the best thing that theology could do right now. So much of what is good about theology is probably already in diaspora, as Amaryah Armstrong has suggested. I do have a certain kind of faith that much of the power of theology will live on, in some shape and form, wherever it goes.
And yet Sameer Yadav’s point about academic theology existing as a kind of “nowhere” space strikes me as so deeply true. That nowhere space has given me so much room to explore, it’s opened dimensions of life to me that I would never have seen, and it’s introduced me to so many incredible people—living and dead. I am grateful for this community, and I feel like I owe it something. I feel compelled to somehow preserve that generative and undisciplined nowhere space for others. Like Meg Mercury, I would like to see this nowhere space open up and expand, for those people who don’t feel as if they belong in traditional religious structures. And yet, I also recognize that the cash value of this sort of space—for the church and for the academy—is more or less zero. The odds that it will survive, even if (as David Congdon noted) there is some educational New Deal that revives higher education, are slim. But perhaps this is one of the reasons why I felt compelled to speak with my colleagues, and write this piece, in the first place. Perhaps it was a gesture at letting go. Or perhaps it was a little leap of faith—a little gesture towards expanding space and time for this nowhere community to find new forms of shelter in which to gather…
On doing hospice care for an academic discipline: “Is Theology Dying?” from @beamarovich.bsky.social in The Other Journal.
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As we ponder the preservation of perspicacity, we might send controversial birthday greetings to a man whose experience illustrates (one episode in) the long history of theology’s peril, Bernard Lamy; he was born on this date in 1640. A French Oratorian and mathematician, he was was also an important theologian… whose teachings were judged alternately either controversial or irrelevent at the series of institutions to which he was forced continually to move throughout his career.
“The pencil is mightier than the pen”*…
Carson Monetti on an industrial rivalry that yielded the finest pencils in the world…
It was the summer of 1952, and the executives of Tombow Pencil were about to revolutionize the Japanese pencil industry—or, possibly, fall flat on their faces. Hachiro Ogawa, the son of founder Harunosuke Ogawa, was Tombow’s managing director, and he had just finished a years-long project, at enormous cost, to make the best pencil Japan had ever seen.
It was called “HOMO,” because in comparison with other Japanese pencils of its day, Tombow’s new model had a much more homogenous core. Pencil cores are a mixture of graphite and clay (thanks to Nicolas-Jacques Conté’s invention of the modern pencil in the late eighteenth century), and the components in early cores were not always evenly mixed. This was particularly true in Japan, where pencils had only been made since the turn of the century and advanced industrial equipment was just starting to become available.
Hachiro’s team at Tombow was determined to do whatever it took to produce more consistent cores. They struck up a working relationship with scientists at the University of Tokyo, a visionary move that yielded crucial technical research in 1948. Then, to implement the research findings, Tombow had to import more advanced industrial mills from the United States.
It was a gamble, but it worked, and suddenly Tombow could make much finer particles of graphite and clay than any other Japanese manufacturer. HOMO cores were stronger, smoother, and more consistent than anything else on the domestic market. They came in 17 grades, from 9H to 9B, a wide and finely graduated range that hadn’t been possible with Tombow’s old process.
They were also incredibly beautiful. Another import that had become available in the wake of World War II was incense cedar, the material of choice for high-quality pencils. Most of the pencil industry’s incense cedar comes from California, and Tombow quickly restarted its imports of the aromatic red wood. HOMO’s design takes full advantage of the material upgrade, with a subtle transparent lacquer that highlights the cedar’s color and grain.
For Hachiro Ogawa and his father Harunosuke, the completion of the HOMO project was the culmination of a dream, and it was undoubtedly a pioneering moment in Japanese industry. But as the company prepared to introduce HOMO at the grand Tokyo Kaikan meeting hall, the skeptics must have been hard to ignore. In the early 1950s, a Japanese pencil cost five or ten yen (about 25-50 cents in 2022 dollars.) Tombow’s technical leap forward had produced a model far superior to those inexpensive pencils, but they would also be pioneers in price. HOMO would cost 30 yen (about $1.50 today) for a single pencil, with boxes of twelve priced at 360 yen (about $19 today.)
Japanese consumers weren’t used to spending that kind of money on a pencil. But if Hachiro, Harunosuke, and their colleagues were nervous, their fears were surely resolved at the first-ever Tombow New Product Presentation. Tokyo Kaikan was the esteemed meeting place of foreign dignitaries, corporate titans, even heads of state—and now it was absolutely bustling with stationery wholesalers, curious people from other companies, and the press. Tombow took orders for 720,000 HOMO pencils on launch day alone.
Tombow’s surprising success with Japan’s first premium pencil, along with the ambition and competitive spirit of midcentury manufacturers, led to the most intense period of development the global pencil industry has ever seen.
We call it the Golden Age of Japanese Pencils.
The Golden Age began and ended with two Tombow launches: Hachiro’s pioneering HOMO launch in 1952 and the MONO 100 launch in 1967, fifteen years later. During this period, Tombow and its crosstown rival Mitsubishi Pencil created many of the greatest pencils of all time, including the two best-regarded models offered today…
[Monetti tells the story of that fertile period…]
… although Mitsubishi and Tombow didn’t know in advance that the Japanese pencil industry would reach its peak in 1966, both companies clearly saw it coming, and they had already prepared themselves for a future beyond pencils. One wonders why both companies continued to expend research and development resources on high-end pencils in the late 1960s, but they did—and on a personal note, this sometimes inexplicable tendency of Japanese manufacturers to perfect what doesn’t need to be perfected is a major reason why we’re so passionate about our Japanese imports…
[More detail…]
… In this pencil merchant’s opinion, there’s simply no need for a pencil more perfect than the best of Japan’s Golden Age. We can admire the heady moment and the strong personalities who created these pencils, and we can be forgiven for daydreaming about the even-more-perfect pencil, the one that would make our handwriting beautiful and our drawings perfectly proportional.
But when I sit down to sharpen my pencil (usually a Hi-Uni HB or Mitsubishi 9852 “Master Writing” B), my primary feeling is gratitude. The designers and engineers who created these tools didn’t know they would be made for 70 years, but they treated their seemingly small task with intense seriousness of purpose, and that passion produced outstanding tools that have still not been surpassed. Today, in 2022, I frequently speak with artists who tell me how much these pencils inspire them and enable their best work.
So I’m not regretful about the end of the Golden Age of Pencils, because in the ways that matter most, it never ended. Mitsubishi, in particular, has loyally maintained its midcentury product line, continuing to manufacture its pencils in Japan and even adding a minor new model now and then. (There’s an antiviral-coated Mitsubishi in light blue, new for 2022.) Artists and writers still debate the merits of Hi-Uni and MONO 100.
And I can’t speak for everyone who works here [St. Louis Art Supply], but personally, I’m excited every time I ship a fresh, unsharpened dozen to a new customer. For them, the Golden Age is just getting started…
A celebration of dedicated craft: “The Golden Age of Japanese Pencils, 1952-1967,” from @monetti.bsky.social, via Spencer Wright and his wonderful newsletter, Scope of Work.
See also: The Pencil, by Henry Petrosky
* Robert Pirsig (and here)
###
As we find poetry in the prosaic, we might recall that it was on this date in 1970 that the inaugural gathering of pencil users and their fans that we now know as San Diego Comic-Con was held. Originally called “San Diego’s Golden State Comic-Minicon,” it has grown into the the largest pop and culture festival in the world.
“We need to return from the self-centered concept of sincerity to the other-centered concept of truth”*…
Research universities have been central to the accomplishments of “The American Century.” Their work has laid the foundation for major advances in health and medicine, technology, communications, agriculture/food, economics, energy, and national security at the same time that they have educated students to be scientific leaders and innovators.
Research universities originated in Prussia in the early 19th century (animated by Wilhelm von Humboldt‘s vision of Einheit von Lehre und Forschung [the unity of teaching and research]). And indeed, into the early 1930s the world’s leading research universities were in Germany.
As historian Roger L. Geiger has explained, “the model for the American research university was established by five of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution (Harvard, Yale, Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Columbia); five state universities (Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, and California); and five private institutions conceived from their inception as research universities (MIT, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and Chicago).” The American research university first emerged in the late 19th century, when these fifteen institutions began to graft graduate programs derived from the German model onto undergraduate programs derived from the British model.
By 1960, U.S. research universities had become the global model; they still dominate the top of global university rankings (see, e.g., here, here, and here).
But as Nils Gilman explains, their pivotal role is in jeaopardy…
I wrote about MAGA’s coming assault on US higher education in the first week of the new administration. Here’s a brief update.
Within two weeks of the new regime taking office, the National Institutes of Health lost its director and deputy director and the new leadership announced that NIH was axing overhead costs on research grants — the operational lifeblood of large research universities. (Like everything else Team Trump has been trying to do, this effort caught up in litigation, through who knows whether the Trumpniks will pay attention to adverse rulings.) Should it move forward, these moves will kill the golden goose of US biomedical research.
The regime has also been threatening to withhold federal funding from colleges that do not kill programs at odds with the MAGA agenda, including abolishing DEI efforts and banning transgender athletes from participating in women’s sports. Two new fronts were opened last week with a direct targeting of Columbia University, ostensibly because of its coddling of Gaza protestors last year — including the demand that it place one of its academic departments in receivership. And on Friday, the regime announced investigations into 52 universities as part of its DEI crackdown. All of this entails a viewpoint-based assault on academic freedom that is unprecedented in American history, way beyond even McCarthyism — though, as my friend John Aubrey Douglas wrote a couple of years ago, it is a standard part of the modern authoritarian playbook.
Five brief observations:
- The MAGA axe is falling on all fields whose Wissenschaft is at odds with the ideological agenda of some faction of MAGA. This includes not just definitionally “woke” departments like ethnic and gender studies, but will envelop the whole of the humanities, as well as biomedical research and climate science.
- True to its nativism, the new regime seems especially keen on reining in transnational scientific collaboration. Furthermore, as MAGA closes off travel from much of the world, holding major conferences in the US will become physically impossible (not to mention intellectually indefensible, as John Quiggan says).
- As of yet, there appears to be little if any coordinated pushback against any of this, either politically or even as an industry. If you look at the websites of the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities, the International Association of University Presidents, the American Association of Colleges & Universities, or other similar organizations, you’d have no idea that anything untoward is happening. Incredibly, despite the unabashed way MAGA telegraphed its intention to do all of this, university leaderships appear to be totally unprepared. What I take this to mean is that it’s going to happen, more or less unopposed.
- I expect that the evisceration of US research universities will spell the end of the long US dominance of research publications. It will also hasten the collapse of peer review — already in trouble for several reasons, including the replicability crisis and a business model predicated on free labor from US academics — as the standard quality control mechanism for scholarship.
- It is a sign of the times that several French research organizations and universities are now beginning to offer landing spots for US academics who find they “can no longer pursue their activities in their country of origin due to wars, political persecution, or censorship.” This may save a few individual careers, but obviously it’s not going to work for more than a tiny fraction of the half million+ ladder rank faculty in the country.
These are just ongoing field notes from the front, so I don’t have any big conclusions around this, so I’ll just repeat what I’ve been saying on this topic for years:
In 1933, German research universities were by every measure the greatest in the world. This intellectual power was in turn a cornerstone of German industrial and ultimately military might. In a few short years, however, using tactics not dissimilar to the ones listed above, the Nazis destroyed them — not least because the universities themselves went along with what was being done to them (Selbst-Gleichschaltung, as it was known). And nearly a century on, German universities have still not recovered, despite many proposed efforts — and neither has Germany’s prestige or power.
Self-inflicted wounds: “The MAGA assault on US universities has begun in earnest,” and, @nilsgilman.bsky.social suggests, it appears that the universities are going passively to surrender.
A case-in-point attack, with a suggested response: “What should be Columbia University’s legal answer to the extortionate & unconstitutional demands of the Trump administration.”
See also: “First they came for Columbia” (and this different piece with the same title), “The Crumbling Foundations of American Strength,” and “The Economic Danger of Disinvesting in Education.”
(Image above: source)
* Iris Murdoch
###
As we re-educate, we might recall that it was on this date in 2003 that President George W. Bush announced the invasion of Iraq, the start of the Iraq War (AKA, the Second Gulf War). 22 days later, American (and Allied) forces took Baghdad, and on May 1, President Bush announced “Mission Accomplished.” In the event, U.S. military forces remained in Iraq until their withdrawal in 2011.
“Google will bring you back 100,000 answers. A librarian will bring you back the right one.”*…
Stephen Akey remembers the time before online search…
How do you find the life expectancy of a California condor? Google it. Or the gross national product of Morocco? Google it. Or the final resting place of Tom Paine? Google it. There was a time, however—not all that long ago—when you couldn’t Google it or ask Siri or whatever cyber equivalent comes next. You had to do it the hard way—by consulting reference books, indexes, catalogs, almanacs, statistical abstracts, and myriad other printed sources. Or you could save yourself all that time and trouble by taking the easiest available shortcut: You could call me.
From 1984 to 1988, I worked in the Telephone Reference Division of the Brooklyn Public Library. My seven or eight colleagues and I spent the days (and nights) answering exactly such questions. Our callers were as various as New York City itself: copyeditors, fact checkers, game show aspirants, journalists, bill collectors, bet settlers, police detectives, students and teachers, the idly curious, the lonely and loquacious, the park bench crazies, the nervously apprehensive. (This last category comprised many anxious patients about to undergo surgery who called us for background checks on their doctors.) There were telephone reference divisions in libraries all over the country, but this being New York City, we were an unusually large one with an unusually heavy volume of calls. And if I may say so, we were one of the best. More than one caller told me that we were a legend in the world of New York magazine publishing.
“How do you people know all this stuff?” a caller once asked me. “What are you, some kind of scholars or wordsmiths or something?”
“No,” I replied. “Just us libarians.”
Actually, we didn’t know all that stuff; we just knew how to find it. I myself rarely remembered any of the facts I divulged to our callers, but I remembered the reference sources where I found the facts. Personal knowledge was inadmissible. I could reel off by heart the names of the four Dead Boys (Cheetah Chrome, Stiv Bators, Jimmy Zero, and Johnny Blitz—but didn’t everyone know that?), but unless I could track them down and—rule number one—cite the source (in this case, probably the Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock and Roll), I had no information to impart and no answer to give to anyone who might need that information for whatever reason. But we almost always found the right source.
The progenitor and enforcer of rule number one was our department head, whose managerial style recalled that of Vince Lombardi, if Vince Lombardi had had no interest in football. I do wish Milo had been a tad less heavy-handed; he tended to reduce unsatisfactory initiates to tears before driving them from the department for keeps. Nevertheless, his grinding relentlessness, which often entailed instructions barked into one ear while one’s other ear might be dealing with a difficult and demanding caller, was in the service of professionalism and competence—necessary qualities in a small, claustrophobic office where the pressure from our backlog of callers never let up.
“Are you that nice young man who always goes out of his way to find me exactly the answers I need to the questions I ask?” a caller once asked me as a prelude to her inquiry.
“Doesn’t sound like me,” I said.
There was always psychology involved. In this case, the caller thought that by flattering me she might induce me to break or bend our rule of five minutes or three questions max, which we routinely disregarded anyway. The opposite psychological ploys—bullying, intimidating, insulting, threatening—were far more common. Contrary to the popular perception of librarianship as a serene, leisurely vocation for the bookishly inclined, the Telephone Reference Division was a high-stress environment, and most staffers, myself included, burned out within a few years. Now that reference librarianship is a shadow of its former self, psychological gamesmanship rarely takes place. You look up your information in a bland, seemingly (seemingly) trustworthy source like Wikipedia, and that’s that. Librarians have other things to do, principally programming a never-ending stream of ostentatiously unlibrary-like events, but none will ever be so interesting or so much fun as the kind of thing we did in Telephone Reference before the Internet swept it all away.
Did Charon row or pole the souls of the dead across the River Styx? Can you give me the names and addresses of manufacturers of prosthetic devices in Massachusetts? Where are the manuscripts of the composer Marc Blitzstein to be found? (The person asking that question, much to the excitement of my balletomane boss Milo, identified herself as a certain Agnes de Mille.) What was the first language ever spoken? (“Anywhere? At any time?” I asked the caller. “Yes,” she replied, before I suggested that we might try to reformulate the question.) On and on it went. Of course, what we were doing, millions of others were doing on their own without the intercession of any librarian. All of us were negotiating an informational world without algorithmic search engines. Although I hang on to some battered dictionaries and reference books, I resort to Google as readily as anyone else. Undoubtedly, much more has been gained than lost in the transformation of laborious research into something immediate, accessible, and available to everyone. Still, a world that has tossed out the scholarly, comprehensive, and authoritative print edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in favor of the colorless, death-by-a-thousand-edits mediocrity of Wikipedia is not necessarily a richer one.
Even without my nostalgia for certain antiquated and specialized reference books (Kane’s Famous First Facts, the Encyclopedia of Associations, Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable), I do think certain advantages accrued to analog ways of gathering information. The many hundreds of reference sources that we were trained to use in Telephone Reference had their biases, their blind spots, their inaccuracies. In the apprenticeship each of us endured under Milo’s exhausting tutelage before getting anywhere near a telephone, we learned not merely how to find information but how to think about finding information. Don’t take anything for granted; don’t trust your memory; look for the context; put two and three and four sources together, if necessary. Sometimes it was difficult to communicate such variables to our callers, who just wanted a quick answer rather than a disquisition on the mistaken assumption that the transmission of information was a straightforward matter. How many laundromats were owned and operated by women in California and Oregon in the 1930s? To answer that question, someone would have had to gather and compile that information at the time, and there was no reason to believe that anyone would have thought to do so. Maybe some obscure state agency did tabulate all those female laundromat owners and I simply fumbled an answerable inquiry, but if so, that agency would have been thinking like a gender-conscious individual from the 1980s rather than a government bureaucracy from the 1930s.
“Think like a librarian,” Milo used to urge us, which might sound less impressive than “Think like a philosopher,” “Think like a psychologist,” or even “Think like a lawyer,” but it did make the point that information wasn’t given, that it had to be actively sought…
…
… A certain esprit de corps facilitated the work and even diffused tensions in that pressure cooker of an office. I knew a lot about rock-and-roll and spoke Spanish. Aaron had a law degree and took all the questions about legal research that stumped us. (He also dispensed free legal advice on occasion, until Milo put a stop to it.) Milo knew theater; Paul was francophone; Kathleen knew movies and pop culture. (Our preferences skewed arty left-of-center, which was inevitable in our milieu.) Sometimes we worked backward, pooling what we already knew to find the reference sources that would confirm (and occasionally contradict) the foregone conclusion. Another rule: Don’t hide your ignorance. There was no Google to cover up the gaps in our knowledge. Sally Jessy Raphael might have been the prime minister of New Zealand or she might have been an exceedingly unctuous talk show host. Unless I asked who she was (the latter, not the former), I wouldn’t know the best sources to check to find her place of birth. As expected, the caller who asked about Ms. Raphael spent a certain amount of time insulting me for my ignorance, but she got her answer.
Many of our callers were historical novelists. Some of them identified themselves as such, but it was usually obvious even when they didn’t. They tended to ask questions like “What time was low tide in Boston Harbor on May 14, 1932?”
If today I were writing a historical novel set in the 1980s, I might ask, “How did people find information in those days?” There would no longer be any telephone reference librarians to help me, so I’d have to trust to luck—and a search engine—and answer that question myself: They used logic, inference, imagination, and a tall pile of reference books…
Dispatches from the telephone reference desk: “The Department of Everything,” in @hedgehogreview.
* Neil Gaiman
###
As we stroll down memory lane, we might send thoughtfully-retrieved birthday greetings to we might send learned birthday greetings to Daniel Boorstin; he was born on this date in 1914. As a Rhodes Scholar, Boorstin took first-class honors in jurisprudence at Oxford and was admitted as a barrister to the Inner Temple in 1937. Two years later, he returned to the US to teach history, first at Harvard, then at the University of Chicago. He left Chicago in 1969 to become the director of the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution. He’s probably best-known for his three-volume history, The Americans, the third volume of which, The Americans: The Democratic Experience, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1974.
In 1975 Boorstin became the Librarian of Congress, a post he held until 1987. The de facto national library of the United States, the LoC is the oldest federal cultural institution in the U.S. It executes its primary mission of informing legislation through researching inquiries made by members of Congress via its version of (an enhanced) reference desk, the Congressional Research Service. (The library is open to the public for research, although only members of Congress, Congressional staff, and library employees may borrow books and materials for use outside of the library.)
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