July 3, 1997
Jane Alexander
The National Endowment for the Arts
1100 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, DC 20506Dear Jane Alexander,
I just spoke with a young man from your office, who informed me that I had been chosen to be one of twelve recipients of the National Medal for the Arts at a ceremony at the White House in the fall. I told him at once that I could not accept such an award from President Clinton or this White House because the very meaning of art, as I understand it, is incompatible with the cynical politics of this administration. I want to clarify to you what I meant by my refusal.
Anyone familiar with my work from the early Sixties on knows that I believe in art’s social presence—as breaker of official silences, as voice for those whose voices are disregarded, and as a human birthright.
In my lifetime I have seen the space for the arts opened by movements for social justice, the power of art to break despair. Over the past two decades I have witnessed the increasingly brutal impact of racial and economic injustice in our country.
There is no simple formula for the relationship of art to justice. But I do know that art—in my own case the art of poetry—means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage. The radical disparities of wealth and power in America are widening at a devastating rate. A President cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.
I know you have been engaged in a serious and disheartening struggle to save government funding for the arts, against those whose fear and suspicion of art is nakedly repressive. In the end, I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope. My concern for my country is inextricable from my concerns as an artist. I could not participate in a ritual which would feel so hypocritical to me.
Sincerely,
Adrienne Rich
cc: President Clinton**
Adrienne Rich’s “Final Notations” is included in The Open Door: One Hundred Poems, One Hundred Years of Poetry Magazine, forthcoming this fall.
Adrienne Rich’s history-making 1974 National Book Award acceptance speech
“We, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Alice Walker, together accept this award in the name of all the women whose voices have gone and still go unheard in a patriarchal world, and in the name of those who, like us, have been tolerated as token women in this culture, often at great cost and in great pain.”
The single most significant thing we can do is have the best educated population in the world. It literally is the thing, the key that leads to everything else from our economic security to our physical security.
- Vice President Joe Biden • Speaking at Florida State University about America’s education. Biden said in his speech that he wants to make education in America more affordable, citing his own experience with higher education, in which his father was initially denied for a loan. Biden ended up going anyway, eventually getting a bachelor’s degree from the University of Delaware, a law degree from Syracuse and a spot in the White House. Biden says the Obama administration won’t waver from its goal of providing better education, while at the same time making it more affordable for more parts of society. Biden’s a bit up against it, though: His visit to Florida comes as the state legislature plans to vote on statewide tuition hikes. source (via • follow)
(Source: shortformblog)
It’s students’ voices like this that makes my work even more important. All students should feel supported!
Concise and moving piece from a first gen student attending an exclusive college.
…No one told me about the anger I’d feel when 90% of my class raises their hand when the professor asks who has visited country x, y, and z when I’ve never left the country. Or how frustrating it feels to have to check my bank account before every purchase while my classmates receive money week after week from parents’ seemingly bottomless bank accounts. The anger that springs up when I’m searching for a summer internship because they’re all unpaid and I don’t have enough experience for the paid ones because I spend my summers working…
“Realizing that people object so strongly to throwing out books, I began to save a few of the most egregious examples to show people who got upset. The library owned a book entitled Careers for Women that included secretary, piano teacher and flight attendant, but strangely enough, not public school teacher, let alone financial analyst specializing in mergers and acquisitions. An anthropology book called The Races of Man explained, scientifically of course, why some races were more evolved than others. A book originally published in the 19th century and gamely reprinted in the 1920s, defended the early European settlers of North America, downplaying their casual brutality towards the Indians by recasting their actions in light of their Christian intentions. Most of the discards were old, but some weren’t: I’d put aside two books from the late 1990s elucidating the scourge of satanic ritual abuse and how students could protect themselves and their communities against it. These were the thin hardcovers you probably remember from your own middle-school library, the ones designed for student reports, with lots of pictures and quotations from experts. While well-researched and decently written, these books had the rather serious drawback of shedding light on a crime that has since been proven not to exist, although not before a number of innocent people were thrown into prison for committing it.
…
Student bibliophiles have lost interest and given up by this point, but teachers persist. “You shouldn’t throw them out, though! There are schools that don’t have any books in their libraries! Libraries whose budgets have been cut! Can’t you donate them to Paterson?” Poor Paterson. This argument, to me, smacks of a patronizing classism, though kindly meant. We’ve already established that these books could do more harm than good and do not merit inclusion in the collection of our very well-off school’s library. But give them to those poor Paterson kids, for whom the books would be that much worse for not having anything more recent on the shelf to compare them to.”
(I’m having a difficult time not quoting this whole article. Read the whole thing, really. Every word. h/t American Library Association Twitter)
Aha… I was that kid pulling library discards from the trash bin. (I threw in more than I took out, though.) And my “burn the books*” phase was later, so they are all still safe and sound in my room. I even read a few of them. One turned out to be in the top 5 of my favorite books.
To me, what matters about a book is the contents.
Exactly. And the contents of a book are often valuable in the context of their use. In a public or school library, outdated and unread books are useless. In the context of an academic library or archive, historiography starts coming into play. But if a school library can’t even get them to take something, that’s appraisal at work, imo.
*I’ve never actually burned a book, although some have tempted my resolve.
(Source: twitter.com)
“…soon, introductory physics texts will have a new competitor, developed at Rice University. A free online physics book, peer-reviewed and designed to compete with major publishers’ offerings, will debut next month through the non-profit publisher OpenStax College.
Using Rice’s Connexions platform, OpenStax will offer free course materials for five common introductory classes. The textbooks are open to classes anywhere and organizers believe the programs could save students $90 million in the next five years if the books capture 10 percent of the national market. OpenStax is funded by grants from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the 20 Million Minds Foundation and the Maxfield Foundation.”
from Inside Higher Ed
“The room in which the boys were fed was a large stone hall with a copper at one end, out of which the master, dressed in an apron for the purpose and assisted by one or two women, ladled the gruel at mealtimes, of which composition each boy had one porringer, and no more—except on festive occasions…” —Oliver Twist
Here’s a festive occasion: Happy 200th Birthday Charles Dickens!
And yes, you can have some more.
Separate and unequal
Public libraries in Greenville, North Carolina before integration.
Photos from The Daily Reflector (Greenville, NC)
Digital Collections, East Carolina University
We are so test-obsessed that schools are being closed based on test scores, even when those test scores reflect that the schools have a heavy enrollment of very poor kids or heavy enrollment of children with disabilities and children with all kinds of other needs,” says Ravitch. “We don’t look at the needs. We don’t evaluate the problems that need to be solved in that school. We just say ‘These are low scores. We have to close the school.’
- Standardized Testing: The Monster That Ate American Education | Think Tank | Big Think (via infoneer-pulse)
Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck conducted the groundbreaking research showing that praise intended to raise young people’s self-esteem can seriously backfire. When we tell children, “You’re so smart,” we communicate the message that they’d better not take risks or make mistakes, lest they reveal that they’re not so smart after all. Dweck calls this cautious attitude the “fixed mindset,” and she’s found that it’s associated with greater anxiety and reduced achievement. Students with a “growth mindset,” on the other hand, believe that intelligence can be expanded with hard work and persistence, and they view challenges as invigorating and even fun. They’re more resilient in the face of setbacks, and they do better academically.
» via MindShift
On an average day:
- 15% of Facebook users update their own status.
- 22% comment on another’s post or status.
- 20% comment on another user’s photos.
- 26% “Like” another user’s content.
- 10% send another user a private message
A snapshot of sex/age distribution by social networking site platform:
43% of Facebook users are male and 58% are female.
33% of Facebook users are 23-35
Since we just launched our YouTube playlist about research methods, it seemed to appropriate to post this infographic about the research process, too. Look for a new infographic every week this spring semester.
I realize this is meant to present a simple view of the research process, but it seems problematic that it shows such a neat progression, and doesn’t include the messy back and forth between stages that usually occurs in the middle.
(Source: wwnorton.com)
One bit of library capital that hasn’t been borrowed by social media companies is our respect for privacy as a condition fundamental to intellectual freedom. We don’t want to look over your shoulder when you read. We don’t want to provide information about what you’re reading to others. This runs against prevailing ideas about how social relationships work. Even JSTOR is trying out a way of trading limited free access to articles in exchange for data that publishers can use. In the absence of any access, this seems like a good deal, but it’s not clear to me why we can’t do better. I already click through a copyright statement every time I use JSTOR because I prefer not to tie what I read to a personal account. I suppose JSTOR might say establishing personal accounts will improve our user experience, but I’m not buying it.
Research is by its nature social. We build on one another’s ideas and we share ours publicly to keep the conversation going. But it’s not social the way Facebook is. Facebook is a data-gathering machine. It’s a blank slate on which we write so that they can aggregate and monetize what we freely share. There are real problems with companies trailing you wherever your curiosity leads so that they can report to others where you’ve been. There are real problems with a database showing us what it thinks will make us happy rather than what might be out there. Privacy is one traditional library value that I wish these companies would borrow from us, but it would undermine their business model.
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I’m Not Buying It: The Importance of Privacy for Research | Inside Higher Ed (via infoneer-pulse)
Another key quote: “When I search, I don’t want what I wrote in an email or what I watched on YouTube to change what I find.”
Like the author, I have many different interests, personal and scholarly. They should only overlap when I make an explicit choice to do so.
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