like lots of things you’ve heard about, and redneckers they get us pissed
http://www.boston.com/news/education/hig…
For nearly a century, the ornate library with the chandelier, fireplace, and wood-paneled walls has drawn students to its prized collection of classics, thousands of dust-covered tomes from Cicero to Twain.
The students who have long cherished the small library inside Dunster House, Harvard’s oldest dormitory, discovered a new feature there this week: two brass bars stretching across nearly every shelf, making the books impossible to peruse.
Hey, that’s pretty uncool. Books are just for ornament now?
Dunster officials have since apologized to concerned students and have explained that the bars were needed as a temporary way to protect the books – some of them highly valuable volumes or irreplaceable first editions signed by authors – after it appeared that several works had been stolen.
Government professor Roger Porter, master of Dunster House for eight years, declined to identify the missing books and would only describe them as having “considerable value.’’ He said about 250 bars were installed because they presented an inexpensive option to protect the books while the college catalogs them and considers its options.
Oh. OK. That makes perfect sense.
If someone is ripping off multiple $500 signed first editions, you have to act.
“Something of the same effect, creating less drama and insult, would have been to put glass doors on the [book] cases,” said Sarah Jessica Johnson, a junior majoring in history, literature, and French who called the decision to use the bars “rash.” “These then could be opened with a key at the discretion of a librarian, leaving the books available to students.”
Yes, if there were glass doors, then a thief would have to – you know – open the doors.
Maybe Harvard could install glass doors and then bill Sarah Jessica Johnson for any rare books lost? I’m sure she’d be cool with that, because it wouldn’t be as insulting.
Richard Menchaca, a senior majoring in English who works in the university’s library system, called the bars a “totalitarian approach” to security
Someone give this man boy a dictionary so that he can look up “totalitarian”.
(subject line hattip) (yeah, I’ve used it before)
September 30th, 2009 at 7:27 am
Well there goes the beer fund.
September 30th, 2009 at 8:25 am
“Something of the same effect, creating less drama and insult, would have been to put glass doors on the [book] cases. These then could be opened with a key at the discretion of a librarian, leaving the books available to students.”
Well good golly, Sarah Jessica. That would sure keep your sensibilities from being outraged.
Expense for the doors aside, I assume that there is not currently a librarian. Before they can put this system in place they need to fund the position, open a req, hire someone. Just guessing that we’re talking a minimum of 70k annually for one full-time librarian.
Man: preserving the sensibilities of students at Harvard is expensive.
September 30th, 2009 at 8:56 am
$500 signed first editions
Heh. The Lowell House library has lots of 17c and 18c editions in superb shape — there are matched sets that were easily in the low five-figure range, in every bookcase, and 19c art books that probably range higher. Dunster is about the same, though I recall they had more math books (probably an artifact of Master Bott’s long tenure there).
House library staffer is a work-study job; it’s manned 24/7, or at least it was in the 1980s, and there is a supervising faculty member who lives in-house and is a full-time librarian and curator for the collection in addition to ordinary duties as a house tutor. The valuable volumes mostly don’t circulate, but it’s a negotiable privilege if you are friendly with the librarian.
Ms. Johnson has accurately read the subtext here, and is voicing a legitimate concern: the Corporation is snubbing her and her classmates, and her House master is declining to exercise his prerogative to soften the blow. Harvard is alumni-run, and access to “our” libraries is a sacred cow — no alumnus needs more than proof of identity to walk into the closed stacks or to check out books within reason, throughout the 100+ libraries of the university system. Undergraduates have the effective status of minor family members, with full access subject to in loco parentis discipline. The students of Dunster are being loudly told, by the master, that they may not have the run of their own house until discipline is restored and this nonsense is confessed or otherwise stopped.
The “beer fund” comment pretty clearly illustrates the sociological disconnect here. The House master hosts a weekly sherry.
Man: preserving the sensibilities of students at Harvard is expensive.
It’s a long-term investment that pays off well. My class gave a per capita average donation this year that was above the median US income.
September 30th, 2009 at 9:44 am
[quote comment="223847"]
The “beer fund” comment pretty clearly illustrates the sociological disconnect here. The House master hosts a weekly sherry.
[/quote]
Ouch. I guess we were just told, as the kids at Tufts say…
September 30th, 2009 at 9:57 am
Huh. Bott’s adviser was Duffin; I think maybe I took Diff Eq from Duffin at CMU.
September 30th, 2009 at 10:48 am
Hmmm, if these are valuable works just hanging around unmolested by librarians since the 19th century, maybe the shelves are valuable too. Might not he a good idea to drill into them willey nilly.
September 30th, 2009 at 12:35 pm
[quote comment="223859"][quote comment="223847"]
The “beer fund” comment pretty clearly illustrates the sociological disconnect here. The House master hosts a weekly sherry.
[/quote]
Ouch. I guess we were just told, as the kids at Tufts say…[/quote]
Shit I thought I was one of them. But with a sense of humor. Like Al Franken minus the nutjob politics.
September 30th, 2009 at 1:40 pm
But with a sense of humor.
Like the sherry, it’s better when it’s dry.
And the class sneer was just a nice flourish; the substantive point was that Harvard houses are places where grownups trust college students with nice things like sherry glasses and rare books, and where the students feel much more “at home” — that is, supervised, connected, and ultimately proprietary — about the community and its chattels than would be typical in an American university dorm. The tutorial experience which centers House life could never work in the sort of “us and them” student/faculty culture that locks up the books. There are private beer parties, but nobody’s rolling kegs down the stairwells.
September 30th, 2009 at 1:52 pm
[quote comment="223885"]
And the class sneer was just a nice flourish; the substantive point was that Harvard houses are places where… [/quote]
Agreed (except, perhaps, for the adjective on the noun “flourish”…)
Have you been following the recent Tufts “scandal”?
Apparently the administration has issued guidelines that students are not to have sex when their roommates are in the room.
I’m appalled that rules like this need to be written; I thought that civilized people knew such things. My dismay is not over the administration – it’s that the barbarian like behavior of some
young adultschildren has put the administration in the position of actually having to explain civilized norms.September 30th, 2009 at 1:54 pm
. . . and then bill Sarah Jessica Johnson for any rare books lost?
Travis nails it right here. Obviously the class of 2011 is, in the long run, going to pay its share of the cost of maintaining the House library. It’s not clear how that is best to be done — do the brass bars save as much in pilferage as they cost in brand loyalty?
Harvard installs slate roofs, because the maintenance savings amortizes the initial outlay in 75 years or less, and as a side benefit they remain very beautiful for a century or two after that. The Corporation tries to think the same way about most stewardship issues, and that’s what this ultimately is. Why are the books there, if not for the pleasure of Sarah Jessica Johnson ’11?
September 30th, 2009 at 2:09 pm
. . . has put the administration in the position of actually having to explain civilized norms.
Good heavens, that’s their job. But college masters and deans are, or ought to be, aiming to explain a rarefied level of civilized behavior unfamiliar to most of their students, in a meritocracy where the funnel is open wide. (As the young hasid said when he was caught eavesdropping under his rebbe’s bed, “this too is Torah.”) The essential error in the Tufts story (which I had not followed) is that the administration should be issuing memos to the faculty wholesale, for open, public and controversial debate — while the faculty are quietly enforcing the tone upon each other and the students retail, through gentle but barbed exchanges like the one Feynman immortalized in his “Surely you’re joking” title.
The beautiful thing about “behavior unbecoming a [insert brand name] student” is that you can get kicked out for it while (indeed, largely because of) still plaintively denying that you know what it is.
September 30th, 2009 at 3:03 pm
I swear I can hear the voice of Frasier Crane ’62 whenever I read Joshua’s comments on this thread.
September 30th, 2009 at 3:07 pm
[quote comment="223890"]. . . has put the administration in the position of actually having to explain civilized norms.
Good heavens, that’s their job. [/quote]
Odd. I thought that most students had parents…
September 30th, 2009 at 3:51 pm
Odd. I thought that most students had parents…
My sister and I didn’t.
September 30th, 2009 at 4:21 pm
“Harvard installs slate roofs, because the maintenance savings amortizes the initial outlay in 75 years or less, and as a side benefit they remain very beautiful for a century or two after that.”
I think that is probably last of the real reasons. If 4 thickness of tar paper were demonstrated to last 80 years and cost less, I doubt that Harvard would convert. Its just like the Salon homeschooling comments- people were desperately fishing around for reasons (“we need to eliminate homeschooling so all kids can learn advanced physics and then they can solve the energy problem”) to justify their reasoning.
“Why are the books there, if not for the pleasure of Sarah Jessica Johnson ‘11?”
How about for BobbyEgg ’17?
Although I am persuaded that the action seems too restrictive. There are 10K books. Seems like a couple of librarians could do a quick cull over 2 weeks and pull anything that obviously needed to be move to rare books. The example picture has Kafka and Friedrich Durrenmatt both of whom are late 20th century authors. Maybe they were signed in the author’s own blood but that could await a full inventory.
September 30th, 2009 at 4:46 pm
Sadly I’d bet Cambridge zoning dictates the slate roofs. For all the Cambridge haters of Harvard they sure have opinions on how the place is supposed to look.
October 1st, 2009 at 6:49 am
Correction: Frasier Crane, ’72. He wasn’t that precocious.
October 1st, 2009 at 8:20 am
[quote comment="223901"]“Harvard installs slate roofs, because the maintenance savings amortizes the initial outlay in 75 years or less, and as a side benefit they remain very beautiful for a century or two after that.”
I think that is probably last of the real reasons. If 4 thickness of tar paper were demonstrated to last 80 years and cost less, I doubt that Harvard would convert. Its just like the Salon homeschooling comments- people were desperately fishing around for reasons (“we need to eliminate homeschooling so all kids can learn advanced physics and then they can solve the energy problem”) to justify their reasoning.[/quote]
Zing!
October 3rd, 2009 at 8:40 am
[quote comment="223898"]Odd. I thought that most students had parents…
My sister and I didn’t.[/quote]
If only all orphans could be so blessed as to have Harvard teach them to not have sex when strangers are in the room, to use cutlery, to defecate in toilets and not in the center of rooms, etc.
[quote comment="223890"]. . . has put the administration in the position of actually having to explain civilized norms.
Good heavens, that’s their job. But college masters and deans are, or ought to be, aiming to explain a rarefied level of civilized behavior unfamiliar to most of their students, in a meritocracy where the funnel is open wide…
The beautiful thing about “behavior unbecoming a [insert brand name] student” is that you can get kicked out for it while (indeed, largely because of) still plaintively denying that you know what it is.[/quote]
It seems that you’re trying to have it both ways: it is the college’s job to teach civilized norms, and yet students can be kicked out for not already knowing civilized norms.
January 31st, 2010 at 9:56 am
Putting on my Anton Sherwood hat and commenting on a four month old thread:
Government professor Roger Porter, master of Dunster House for eight years, declined to identify the missing books and would only describe them as having “considerable value.’’
It seems that there is nothing new under the sun:
I suppose it’s fitting that they call it the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.