A wake for scholarship

An emeritus professor has a small office across the hall, but declining health has kept him from using it very often these past couple of years, so he was asked to pack it in so that a new faculty member could have a more convenient office location for their teaching and research.  My colleague was never a favorite of mine, but he was a true scholar who read, read, and read.  Like all scholarly people he accumulated a quite a library of books and journals, and now no one wants them especially the journals (which in case you don't know weigh a ton).  If you can't find a repository for your library and you have no room for it at home, your only choice is to simply discard/recycle a career's worth of scholarly materials.  This is actually extremely sad to watch.  In our bygone era, the mark of a scholar, the evidence that you were a serious intellectual was the size of your personal library.  As my colleague put it, "I feel like I'm conducting a wake for scholarship."  You see these days journals are published electronically and your credentials are pdfs and ebooks, so your "library" is probably measured in kilobytes or gigabytes.  In the old days you would tell your department how many linear feet of book shelves you needed in your office.  Yes, it was meant to impress, but it was so you could unpack your boxes and have access to reference materials and all you need to teach and write.  One of the reasons for my sadness is that my time for such a down-sizing is not so far off.  TPP's library occupies more than 150 linear feet of shelf space and several large filing cabinets of scientific papers.  OK, half of this could be discarded without feeling much loss, but things then get tough.  Many useful books could be moved to the herbarium where a small reference collection is kept.  Some colleagues and students would like some of my books especially the classics like the 8 books by Darwin that are over 100 years old, no rare editions, but something about their age and look feels so Victorian it puts you in the right frame of mind.  The journals are really sad in come cases a over 50 volumes.  My younger colleagues think it quite quaint that someone still has journals, but what will go missing from their scholarly lives?  Curiosity always drove TPP to thumb through every one page by page reading the titles, abstracts and results, and you never knew what you would find interesting among the diverse research papers, and especially looking at the figures where you learn so much so quickly.  This is how you got new ideas.  My younger colleagues are more specialized with a narrower research focus, although we had narrow people too, but you never see all the other papers because you never see the whole issue.  You put a series of keywords into a search engine that then delivers just those items that fit.  The long term effect of narrower scholarship is hard to predict, and at times it is hard to express or document the value of knowing a little about a lot other than when an off-the-wall-crazy question or query about plants comes to our department, you know who gets the call.  Time now to get another dumpster for my colleague as they are too heavy for him to move.  Appropriately enough, the dumpsters are black. 

Academic prestige in jeopardy

Circumstances well beyond the control of the Phactor have placed the academic prestige of our institution in jeopardy.  Yes, we have suffered fiscal cuts at so many levels, and at a certain level, the academic prestige of the entire USA's higher education system is in jeopardy.  You cannot withdraw support from higher education for three decades and it not have some negative impact.  Yes, yes, fiscal matters are important, but what looms larger, a matter of much greater significance, is that our institution has no ice cream available in the student union!  Sorry, but no institution of higher learning without ice cream amounts to a damn thing.  Naturally the Phactor brought this matter to the attention of our President who opined that Ben & Jerry's would be just the thing.  Now if some significant action isn't taken, then he's become part of the problem rather than being part of the solution.  A previous attempt to placate the Phactor involved a substance called "frozen yogurt", and having sampled it, pronounced it non-ice cream.  As predicted not enough of this substance was sold to make the enterprise successful, and the people of little imagination who manage our student center have determined that such tenants are not viable.  Another way of looking at this is that they charge too bloody much rent for a small business whose customers inexplicably disappear at the end of every semester.  So now just before new students and family show up for orientation, there is no ice cream and what are they to think?  What kind of institution have we selected?  If your are a trustee of an institution of higher education, ask yourself, "Do you know whether there is ice cream in the student center?"  Well?  Do your job.  Do something important.  Get Ben.  Get Jerry.  Get Berry Garcia.