Bard College, a pricey and exclusive liberal-arts college in Annandale-on-the- Hudson, would almost certainly be ridden with wokeness: the priors are its location in the Northeast U.S. Bard is at the top of the wokeness scale with Reed College, Middlebury College, and all of the New England Ivies. Bard has started an initiative to decolonize the library. The report was in my newsletter, but not on the site yet. It was included in a news summary.
A new high has been reached by pecksniffery.
Bard is the college featured in Steely Dan's son "My old school."
Below you can see the exposition that Nellie has. Emily Yoffe is a writer I admire and she gave her tip.
To begin the process of Decanonization.
>
It is always fun to check out what is happening in academia. The Bard College library newsletter contained an announcement about Bard tuition.
>
The Stevenson Library is conducting a diversity audit of the entire print collection in order to begin the process of decanonizing the stacks. Three students who are funded through the Office of Inclusive excellence have begun the process which is expected to take at least a year to complete. The students will be looking at the books for their representations of race/ethnicity, gender, religion, and ability.
>
The Office of Inclusive excellence pays three Bard students to review every book in the Bard library to see how well it meshes with their moral standards. Bard re-written the announcement and said that the audit was more high-level analysis of each book and author.
>
I like to imagine these students walking through the stacks, pulling every spine, reading every page to see if there are any representations of race, gender, religion, and ability. Does Charles Dickens dehumanize people? I think he does. There is some nasty ableism in Beowulf. Was it a feminist? This could take a while. I would like to be on this committee.
>
The term decanonize means exclusion from a list. The church decanonizes to demote a saint who is on the outs.
>
There is a new intellectual underpinning for this. There is a library that offers trainings and workshops on critical race theory.
>
In her essay, Whiteness as Collections, she asks her readers to think about how white men ideas take up all the space in the library stacks. She spoke about the existence of white supremacy in libraries at the University of Michigan.
>
The announcement about decanonization came in a library update. The top item was not it. It is between an alumni to be honored and a local effort to clean up. Decanonization is a casual, business-as-usual sort of activity.
>
Bard officials explained to me that the announcement was a big misunderstanding. They told me that the library newsletter had nothing to do with this effort.
When you say an unpalatable truth, just claim it was a metaphor. Bowles continues.
Betsy Cawley, the director of Bard libraries wrote that it will help them understand and answer questions about representation in their collections. Nothing is being removed, recategorized, or replaced.
>
Decanonization is not a thing. Judging each book is not the same as judging each book. It's just a fact-finding mission to learn more.
>
They changed the whole thing in a panic in upstate New York. The school tells me that the entry has been removed.
>
If you would like to read books that three Bard students find offensive, please turn yourself in to the police station.
>
Thanks to Emily Yoffe, we got word of this. Thank you. nellie.writing@gmail.com is open to tips from TGIF.
If this is not about censorship, what is it? If you don't pick and choose books for the library based on how inclusive they are, how can you build a more inclusive collection? There are 400,000 books to sniff through, so I don't believe their denial.
Traditionally, librarians have opposed this kind of Pecksniffery, pushing back against people's wish to keep this and that book out of the library. In the past librarians were the most vigorous defenders of free speech, blocking the doorway between the censors and the books. That doesn't hold anymore.
There is no mention of the position of librarian at Bard College, nor is there any mention of it in her CV. The email address of the head librarian is here. I will be writing to both of them because Bard's president has an email address here.
The Wall Street Journal has a new article about the diversity audit, which is questionable about the motives of Bard.
The point of the audit was to pick books to remove. The project was described in the library's newsletter as the first step in the process of decanonizing the stacks. A follow-up from the staff seemed to suggest that the ultimate goal is to get rid of books.
>
A representative of the library later told me that the project was designed to increase our understanding of our collection, not to remove books.
>
The librarian waved away the students funded by the Office of Inclusive excellence, stating that actual librarians will decide about the library's collections, not student workers.
>
The audit may be a sop to activist students. It seems like a surrender to the idea that content is determined by the author's extraliterary characteristics. Even if the audit does not include content, the result could be a simple index of banned books.
Even if people are awake, this kind of implied censorship is what should anger them. It's just as bad to remove books from libraries as it is to burn them.
Let Bard know if you think this is an egregious violation of free speech and academic freedom.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
