Mar 02, 2018 From Stubborn and Sassy Faith to Proud Defiance: The Academic Library in a Post-truth World

Written by Rick Anderson, Associate Dean of Collections & Scholarly Communication

We are here to celebrate the 50^th anniversary of an unusually fine library building, and of a visionary gift made to the University of Utah by a family that has been a friend and sponsor of higher education in this state for decades. In so doing, it might be worth looking back on the history of modern libraries and library buildings, and reflecting on both what has changed and what has remained the same, as well as on the challenges that we face today—and particularly at this quite unusual moment in American history.

Throughout modern history, library buildings have been, traditionally, massive—even monumental. They have more often been built of brick and granite than of wood; they have been more often large than small. These tendencies have changed somewhat over time, but for most of us, the image that springs to mind when we hear the word “library” has not.

In the old days, library buildings were sometimes also extravagantly, gloriously, inefficient. A few years ago I stood in the marvelous Rose Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library with my children, and I pointed out to them how that room—with its 50-foot ceiling, its elaborate engravings and murals, and its breathtakingly, even scandalously low book-to-available-space ratio—was not mainly about giving people access to information. That goal could have been accomplished just as well in a much more modest and cost-effective manner. Instead, the New York Public Library’s reading room sends its visitors and the world a message about how we, as a people, think about books, and therefore about knowledge. That room is a temple of the book. I invited my kids to gaze and to wonder, to luxuriate in the beauty of that room and to recognize that nothing quite like it is likely ever to be built again at public expense, for reasons both good and bad.

The twenty-first-century research library is, we must acknowledge, no longer a temple of the book in the way that its nineteenth- and twentieth-century precursors were. I would suggest, however, that it remains, and must remain, a temple to knowledge—and therefore, necessarily, to the idea that truth exists, that it is objectively discernible from falsehood, and that it is worth curating and defending. For that reason alone, the monumental dimensions and the striking physical beauty of the J. Willard Marriott Library remain both symbolically and practically appropriate, regardless of the evolving physical characteristics of the documents we collect and preserve.

Now today is a day of celebration, as it should be, and I do not want to cast any kind of a shadow on that. At the same time, I cannot help but feel that this is also a day of reckoning for us, and therefore a time for sober reflection as well as celebration. It is a day for each of us to ask ourselves searching and possibly difficult questions about where we stand in relationship to truth and knowledge.

Wallace Stegner—one of the sharpest thinkers and most gifted rhetoricians ever to graduate from the University of Utah—gave a speech at the time of this library’s dedication in 1968. In that address he famously observed that his era was one in which the cultural capital of books was on the decline, and he therefore characterized the construction of a library as the expression of a “stubborn and sassy faith,” akin to that of the philosopher who says “if I knew the world would end tomorrow, I would plant a tree.” I propose that our time calls for a new stubbornness, and for a stance stronger than sassiness. Today, I think, the time has come for us to graduate from sassiness to defiance. The decline of the book that Wallace Stegner saw in the late 1960s was alarming; I would suggest that the eclipse of truth in the twenty-first-century is immeasurably more so.

As a librarian at a public institution of research and education, I feel as if my colleagues and I have been charged, by our fellow citizens, with building and tending a fire in the darkness. Librarians are not the only ones so charged, and ours are not the only fires. But the ones we build and tend are used by many others to kindle theirs. What is the darkness in which we tend and feed our fires? It is the denial of truth: either the active denial that truth exists and can be known, or the rejection of truth by those for whom it is ideologically inconvenient. And truth is regularly inconvenient—it is so for all of us. Whoever we are, whatever our political and social views, we will on a regular basis encounter inconvenient truths. I am becoming increasingly convinced that of all the questions determining our future as a society, one of the most fundamentally important is: when we encounter an inconvenient truth, what will we do? Will we follow facts wherever they may lead, rather than sifting and selecting from them according to our preferences? If, in the still recesses of our minds and consciences, we cannot answer that question in the affirmative, then the fire of truth we tend begins to dim.

The library—and this library in particular—stands as a monument to the stubbornness of facts and as a bulwark against those who would attack and diminish the reality and importance of truth. It stands in defense of the proposition that there exist realities that exist independently of us, the contours of which cannot be shaped by our preferences and are not susceptible to social negotiation, and the assertive recognition of which may set us at odds with power—whether it be the power of our surrounding society, or of friends and colleagues in our smaller academic culture, or of tyrannical leaders. Sometimes we are called upon to speak difficult truth in the face of power. But you cannot speak truth to power unless you accept that such a thing as truth exists and that its properties are not a function of either power or the lack thereof. And you cannot coherently appeal to truth unless you accept that it is discernible and comprehensible by human minds.

The reality of objective truth, and the proposition that we owe allegiance to it, is always threatening to those for whom truth is inconvenient, and for this reason the library is, and has always been, at constant risk. Some would prefer that people simply not have access to information; these are the library’s most obvious enemies, and the ones about whom we find it most comfortable to speak. But some would prefer that the library be something other than a temple of knowledge—that it be, instead a temple of ideology. Ideology is not particularly concerned with truth, or at least not with truth in the abstract. It is concerned with advancing those truths that are convenient, and with suppressing or distracting from, or finessing those truths that are less congenial. Some today, even within the library profession, argue that this is, in fact, the real or at least the higher purpose of the library. Those who wish the library to provide access only to convenient truths may be found, at any given time, across the spectrum of political persuasion and social or religious belief.

The speech that Wallace Stegner delivered at the time of this building’s dedication was a tour de force of vivid imagery, careful reflection, and sharp exhortation. Stegner spoke out unambiguously against many trends in intellectual fashion that were regnant at the time. Reading his speech today, it may not be obvious how remarkable that was. Stegner explicitly criticized what he saw as a growing tendency to prefer the quick and easy over the difficult and challenging, and to prefer images over words. He spoke carefully but strongly about rebellion and iconoclasm, and also about tradition and fidelity, pointing out the necessity of all of them to a healthy society. Appealing to the value of tradition and the reality of objective truth, and warning against the blandishments of mass communication, comforting relativism, and reflexive iconoclasm took real courage in 1968. Power is contextual, and in saying these things on a college campus at that time Stegner was genuinely and courageously speaking truth to power.

Today, and in this place, within the stone walls of a building constructed as a bulwark of truth against the tide of anti-truth that has always and will always break against its walls, and on the occasion of its 50^th birthday, I feel that to do other than to speak truth to power myself would dishonor Wallace Stegner’s courage.

Here is the truth that I am prepared to speak in the face of power today: there exist realities that are not socially constructed, but that stand independent of our perception and that sternly resist our attempts to talk or negotiate them away. Some of these realities are politically convenient to us, (whatever our political and social views may be), and others are not. But all of them matter, because truth matters. If we really are what I think all of us claim to be—genuine seekers after truth; courageous defenders of truth against its attackers; respecters of fact in a world that seems increasingly willing to elide the difference between fact and fiction in the name of expediency—then we belong here, today, inside this building, lending our hearts and minds to the struggle and our kindling and watchcare to the fire.

I have long admired Wallace Stegner and I regret that I never got to meet him. It is deeply humbling to have my name connected to his on this occasion. But as a librarian, I am also proud. I am proud to stand on this bulwark, shoulder to shoulder with my colleagues, and to help them tend the small fire which we’ve been entrusted with feeding in the face of deepening darkness. We who work in the J. Willard Marriott Library do so not only to pay our bills, but also because the work of a library is work we believe in. None of us will get rich doing this work, but we will enjoy the constant warmth of the fires we tend, and the satisfaction of watching light push back the darkness.