manuscripts don't burn

My sabbatical is officially over. In a few days I will leave Harvard and its colossal Widener library, and return to San Diego, to my own books with my own handwriting in their margins, and to UCSD's Geisel library, a building named after Dr. Suess and made famous by Steven Spielberg, who inventively cast it as an alien spaceship in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind". UCSD's Slavic holdings are decent, and inter-UC loans are relatively fast, but they have nothing on Widener's Slavic collection, including the largest Ukrainian holdings outside Kyiv.

Happily, I get to take a lot of Harvard's library with me. And a lot of Stanford's, Michigan's and New York's libraries with me. And I can search their contents. In multiple languages. My greatest use of Google's digital library project over the past several months, as I have prepared my own manuscript for publication, has been checking page numbers and citations in older editions. A year or two ago this would have involved several trips to different libraries. Books that once would have taken weeks to arrive through interlibrary loan I can now download through "Полный просмотр". I have also used Google Books for hours of browsing (which inevitably leads to buying).

Some of my colleagues would question my optimism about Google, a company that, doomsayers warn us, threatens to track our whereabouts and digitize our daydreams. But Google's aspiration toward omniscience and creative experimentation with organizational algorithms promises to make literary texts accessible to a vast population of readers in the United States and abroad.

In a few weeks a "fairness hearing" will assess the settlement Google Books has reached to ensure publishers and authors adequate compensation. I will be relieved when this date has passed and I am assured continued access to Google's digitized treasures. In the mean time, I will return to my office in San Diego and unpack my own library. And in the process I will unearth the old xeroxed copy of Walter Benjamin's 1931 "Unpacking my Library" I once absentmindedly stuck between a couple of volumes while in college, and which has remained a kind of inside joke with Benjamin as I have packed and unpacked it with my books ever since. "I am unpacking my library. Yes, I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order." (Benjamin, "Selected Writings, V. 2," Cambridge, MA: 1999, 486)

(I am not yet home with my boxes and shelves, and therefore have yet to unpack my old copy of this essay; I looked this passage up on Google Books.)

Update: For a collective discussion of this issue, see my and others' notes to the editor in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

thoughts on the eve of a new school year

This summer I had the weird sensation of watching debates about University budget cuts and furlough plans from the other side of a looking-glass. In Petersburg, conversations about my state (California) and its economy (bankrupt) with Russian colleagues left me with a mixture of sheepishness and foreboding. Who am I to complain about an 8% salary cut when I still travel, have benefits, food and clothing without taking a second or third job? On the other hand, the measly resources allocated to a once thriving Russian academy might serve as a cautionary tale. The collapse of the Soviet Union two decades ago held enormous potential for new forms of intellectual engagement. But education has been lost in the shuffle of a tumultuous market. Academics have seen travel and research budgets disappear. A Petersburg mathematician remarked to me, “Neighbors used to respect teachers and scholars. They were curious about what we did, what books we had. Now that they make ten times our salary they pity us and we envy them.” While no self-respecting academic would expect the deference of their neighbors, the fact that educators are now viewed not only as idiosyncratic, but even as foolish, reflects a changing cultural priority. Many Russian professors conduct their research at home, traveling to campus only to give lectures because public universities cannot afford office space or staff. Their most famous colleagues have gone overseas and their brightest students are tempted away by far more profitable, far less thoughtful or intellectual, careers. A growing number of college students did not score in the top percentile of the applicant pool but were accepted based on their ability to pay higher tuition.

Education is not a luxury. It is our right to live in a literate state among citizens who adapt easily to new technology and are inspired to enter medical and research fields. It is our right to live among people who think critically and creatively. It is our right to be curious about world history, politics and culture. Today each UC student, parent and employee might be prepared to absorb what has been called a “shared sacrifice”, but the entire state will feel the total loss of educational resources. We don't need a sharing of sacrifices but a readjustment of priorities. California must do everything it can to raise its educational standards. It is too easy to grow accustomed to lowering them.