As I look at the campus newsletter, one part of my mind says, so what? No matter whether or not there are paper copies left in my mailbox, electronic copies left in my e-box, or someone is simply telling me in passing about events on campus, I’m usually a week late on the uptake. More and more of my life is subject to the “delete” button, and my “block mail from sender” list gets longer and longer, because I want my actual life—the activities, including work, I invest my mind in—to be meaningful. This becomes more imperative as I get older, and time gets shorter.
With regards to the word “diversity”, I remember giving a continuing education workshop on diversity for department alumni in 1989—around the time of Time magazine’s “Mosaic or Melting Pot?” cover, and before Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education (1991) heralded the right wing backlash against the gospel of what we then called “multicultural diversity.” A participant at the workshop was Jane Moore, one of our LIS program’s first African American graduates, then on the staff of the N. C. State Library. After I finished my admittedly gawky efforts at an introduction to the topic, Jane said, “You know, we’ve been hearing all this diversity stuff for years and years, and it’s more talk than anything. Why, what white people really want to know is how I use the hair products I use, and do I get sunburn? That's something we need to discuss person-to-person, not in a forum.” Jane and others of us of a certain age, especially those from the southern states where racial segregation was legalized, don’t really take diversity lightly, but we do want it to be more than a bureaucratic bookmark. The Presidency of Barak Obama is a watershed for many reasons, the most important of which is the fact that he was elected; likewise, the Greensboro Civil Rights Museum is much more than a Chamber of Commerce ploy.
Perhaps instead of So What? The title of this blog should be, So Why? Of course, we know why: open and civil communication is the only way to learn the point of view and experience The Other, whether that Other is differently pigmented, worships differently than I do, has different ideas than I do about what a spouse is, or identifies with a differently gendered body than the one they were born with. While the Library Diversity Committee overtly eschews politics as a raison d’être, it does so in order that politics and power, inevitably a part of any human discussion about almost anything, does not silence voices that ought to be heard. How can library employees, of which I am not really one, discuss ideas openly and not feel constrained by corporate culture? It grieves me to realize just how conservative we all are, or as someone mentioned yesterday, how passive aggressive. In the final analysis, whatever librarians say they believe, the reality of job security is close at hand. The question is, would that job security really be threatened if one disagreed with the majority, and said so--or if, for once, one did not adhere to a nineteenth century norm of "niceness?"
So many publications, the ones I delete and the ones I trash (electronic publication is still not ubiquitous on campus, even in 2010), contain what look like are reminders to faculty for their promotion and tenure files: there are their portraits from university publications, and there are necrotic paragraphs about their appointment to blah blah blah, or their grant award of sixty zillion dollars, as if they were a Ford dealership instead of teaching faculty. At times I feel I should leave campus in disgrace, for not keeping the pure faith in the credo that we do all that we do so that those who follow us will have to suffer at least as much as we did.
What I would hope that So What? could contribute is an ever expanding discussion of the many aspects of our lives that seem to alienate us from one another—technology is just one example—and what we can do to overcome those differences, as always with good faith, sincerity, and respect for one another’s feelings. I am recommending as supplemental reading in one of my classes Jarod Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (2010), an excerpt from which appeared in the current Harper's magazine. I just ordered a copy for the library. It offers refreshing reflections on "social networking" a la Web 2.0 that I wish everyone had time to read. Take a look at the Harper's excerpt, at the beginning of their "Readings" section, if you have time.
1 year ago
Just as religion is a conspiracy to drain life of spirituality and reduce it to dogma and ritual, the university seems to be a way to institutionalize meritocracy (not THIS university, of course, or the UNC system, but others). Some parts may be an organized hazing, but I've always been blessed by having teachers and mentors who were genuinely helpful and seemed to care about me--Fred Chappell, Jim Clark, Lee Zacharias, and Dr. Langenfeld--who has advised me many times on my quixotic publishing endeavors--and Stu Dybek, Judith Minty, Eric Torgerson, and the late George Zorn at Western Michigan and Central Michigan universities. Since the internet has appeared, and after a bitter introductory period when everyone on the 'net seemed to be engaged in a perpetual flame war, I've been able to mentor others with varying degrees of success including prisoners and elderly people, some mentally ill folks and high school dropouts who struggle with basic lucidity or simple spelling, people who may never even set foot on a university campus. It's a rewarding thing to serve as a conduit for hard-won knowledge and wisdom from the giants on whose shoulders I perch (not like a falcon, perhaps, but more like a half-alert, recently fed, squint-eyed Maine coon cat) to a larger circle of humanity--a circle of people who might be giants--facing the same troubling obstacles writers have faced since Homer.
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