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]]]]] THE UNIVESITY LIBRARY: TOOL FOR IDEOLOGICAL CONTROL [[[[[[[
By James A. Lee (11/27/88)
From Human Events, 26 November 1988, p. 10
[Kindly uploaded by Freeman 10602PANC]
(Mr. Lee, a professor of management, has served as dean or
department chairman in universities in Africa, Asia, and the
Middle East for a total of 11 years. He has taught at the
universities of Utah and Wisconsin and, since 1969, has been at
Ohio University, where he has served as department chairman and
director of graduate programs for the College of Business.)
Over the last decade or so I have noted numerous articles in
conservative journals pointing up the Marxist-Socialist influence
on American campuses. Some authors are content to count Marxist
faculty from this poll or that by universities or by their
academic departments and this is considered alarming enough.
Others point to the Marxist-Socialist influence among those who
interfere with an open dialogue process, whether it be within the
university community or between the community and outside guest
speakers.
None of the pieces I have seen has dealt seriously with the
long-term effects of their dominating presence on future students
and the future of their institutions.
One of the major sources of ideological control in our
universities is faculty control over library acquisitions
and textbook choices.
A few years ago our student newspaper printed a letter I had
written pointing up that in our current Sociology 101 text
(Sociology by Ian Robertson), Karl Marx had 55 different pages of
reference or one for about every 10 pages of text. Next came Max
Weber with 26 citations. Adam Smith had one reference and the
average for the remaining several hundred authors was two.
In successive opposition letters from the Sociology Department
head, a sociology professor, and a local appeals court judge who
had taught law part-time for us, I was called ``half-bright,''
``imbalanced,'' and ``wooden-headed.'' Our newspaper published
the results of their interview with the text author, but edited
my rebuttals so severely that I broke off the dialogue.
Faculty control over library acquisitions is even more
serious, in my opinion. Such control will have far greater
long-term consequences than shouting Jeane Kirkpatrick off the
rostrum or taking over the microphone at a conference here and
there. It simply does not have the attention-getting value,
however, and unfortunately it is generally ignored or, more
typically, not known.
Librarians generally believe that the faculty will be
objective in their collections control and see no harm in
relinquishing to them the budget for acquisitions. Nothing
could be sillier.
Faculty simply do not request the library to add materials
whose points of view they disagree with. They do not ask for
books or periodicals to be added that are critical of their
disciplines.
Few university libraries contain many of the volumes critical
of our colleges of education or our teachers, our law colleges,
our choking litigiousness in America, or of the various
inventories of the failures of clinical psychology and
psychiatry. College of business faculties do not use their
budgetary control to spend money on books critical of business
education or of MBA degree programs, and so on.
Below are some samples of books that our (Ohio University)
library did not have (note the ideological dimensions of these
omissions):
A Matter of Honor: General William C. Westmoreland versus CBS.
Our journalism faculty did not want it in our collection. This
was likely an extra sensitive choice for a faculty that counted
CBS' Van Gordon Sauter, then president of CBS News, as an
illustrious alumnus.)
The Fall of Rome: A Reappraisal by Michael Grant. (Liberals
in the history department could see no use for it.)
How Democracies Perish by Jean-Francois Revel, Destroying
Democracy by James T. Bennet and Thomas DiLorenzo, and The Grand
Strategy of the Soviet Union by Edward Luttwak. (Our Political
Science Department chose not to spend their budget on these.)
It doesn't matter that a volume was for weeks on one of the
best-seller lists (as with How Democracies Perish) or that it was
recommended by the Library Journal. Jesse Jackson and the
Politics of Race by Thomas Landess and Richard Quinn was reviewed
by the Library Journal as ``controversial, daring ... and
recommended.'' Again, our political science faculty didn't want
it on our shelves.
Arthur Koestler's Arrow in the Blue was on our shelves and
quite naturally so. This first volume of his memoirs does not
cover his break with the Communist party. His Invisible Writing,
which does cover his break (and the Communist attacks that
inevitably followed), is nowhere to be found in our library. It
should be noted here that my status as a faculty member in the
College of Business does not allow me to spend funds allocated to
the political science, sociology, or history departments.
Most state university librarians, while endorsing the ``Bill
of Rights'' adopted by the American Library Association Council
in 1953, simply ignore provisions such as these: ``Materials
should not be excluded because of the ... views of those
contributing to their creation ....
``Libraries should provide materials and information
presenting all points of view on current and historical issues
.... Libraries should cooperate with all persons ... concerned
with resisting abridgement of free expression and free access to
ideas .... It is in the public interest for ... librarians to
make available the widest diversity of views and expressions,
including those which are unorthodox or unpopular.''
I was never able to convince our librarians that I did not
want to tell them what to collect, but that I wanted them to be
true professionals and balance our future collection.
Having given away their power to uphold the ideals
carried in their ``Bill of Rights,'' librarians have become
more inventory control and purchasing specialists than
providers of balanced collections for their present and
future readers.
They spend considerable sums on systems helping to make their
collections available to users, of course. But they care little
about the contents of their collections, although as an aside, I
suspect they generally agree with the ideological biases threaded
into their collections.
Given the tenure and promotion system, young conservative
faculty quite naturally shy away from the confrontation necessary
to moving our collections toward a better ideological balance.
And unfortunately for our future library users, conservative
senior tenured faculty feel so outnumbered that confrontation
seems to many to be fruitless. And, of course, in some
departments, there are simply no conservative members, given the
careful weeding that has taken over the last coupe of decades.
Somehow, library acquisition department heads must gain
control over a sizable portion of the acquisitions budget so they
can adopt an objective system to guide selections for their
collections. This will require that university presidents take
some initiative and do battle with the faculty over budgetary
controls. And this may be one more battle in which many of them
would rather not become engaged.
* * *
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