Libraries, Books, and Academic Freedom

Can academic freedom survive the death of the book?

By S. David Mash

The fictional Pulcifer attended school in the 1980s. Pulcifer's nonfiction cousins are now enrolled at Eastern Michigan University, where, according to the July 12, 2002, issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, half the book collection has been put in a vault to make room for "group study areas, computer banks, and a television studio." Morrell D. Boone, dean of learning resources and technology at Eastern Michigan, admits he has "no idea" how this arrangement has affected book circulation. But, he told the Chronicle, "I don't care [because] undergraduates do all their research online now." According to Susan Moldow, a publisher of electronic books, the final stage of this process is perhaps only five or ten years away. She told Newsweek magazine in June 2000 that the children of today's undergraduates "are maybe never going to see a book."

Death of the Book . . . Again

Now, another decade later, the undergraduates at Eastern Michigan University are finally living the vision: they do all their research online. There is only one problem. In an August 2002 letter to the editor of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Mark Higbee of the history department at Eastern Michigan wrote that "Morrell D. Boone claims that undergraduate students at Eastern Michigan University 'do all of their research online now.' This is absurd and untrue." Higbee versus Boone might pass as a parochial academic spat were it not so emblematic of the broader confusion in American higher education over the place of the classic library. This confusion is no parochial matter, for it blurs our minds to its erosive effect on the scope of educational quality in our colleges and universities.

Why does this confusion over the place of the classic library persist? Because influential and tenacious advocates for a book-free future continue to cast visions, even in the face of decades of failed "death-of-the-book" prophecies. In August 1999, for example, Microsoft's vice president of technology development predicted in Wired News that "twenty years from now paper will be a thing of the past . . . almost all printed material—books, newspapers, and periodicals—will be published electronically." Just two months later, a press release from Microsoft reported that "today at the Frankfurt Book Fair, Microsoft Corp. announced its founding sponsorship of the Frankfurt eBook Awards, the first awards designed to honor literary achievements in the emerging eBook industry." Seven awards totaling $160,000 were announced. A prospective annual event would include a grand prize of $100,000 "for the best work published originally in electronic form each year."

But something unexpected happened on the way to the future. A July 2001 article in PC Magazine bluntly stated that "we're being brainwashed to believe that books will disappear, thanks to e-book technology"; the following month, the New York Times reported that "the main advantage of electronic books appears to be that they gather no dust. Almost no one is buying." In early 2002, less than three years after it founded the ambitious Frankfurt eBook Awards, Microsoft withdrew financing and discontinued the related annual event. A glimpse at other recent "megadigitopian" initiatives, such as the deceased iPublish project and the stunted Questia e-library, provide similar case studies.

Adding insult to injury, in September 2002 the Chronicle of Higher Education reported the results of an e-book study conducted with students at Ball State University. The study, supported by a $20 million grant from the Eli Lilly and Company Foundation, found that college students are not yet willing to replace textbooks with e-books. In fact, "several students said that they thought e-books adversely affected the amount of information that they absorbed." During the same period of time, 2002 sales of paper books reached the highest level in history.

The Web to the Rescue?

Yet it's not that simple. The Internet is a free-for-all haystack requiring no editorial oversight, no quality control, no integrity checks, and no mooring to reality. Consequently, wrote University of South Carolina librarian Ellen Chamberlain in 2002 in Evaluating Website Content, the "shelves" of the Web are as likely to hold political tracts, advertising, conversations, cheap tabloids, pornography, hoaxes, and deliberate frauds as they are to have rational and serious works from reputable sources. All of its holdings are mixed together in no apparent order [and] the page you cite today may be altered or revised tomorrow, or it might disappear completely. The page owner may or may not acknowledge any changes to the text and, if he relocates the page, he may or may not leave a forwarding address.

Anne Mintz, an award-winning information industry author, admitted in 2002 in Web of Deception: Misinformation on the Internet (essential reading for all researchers) that "Web hoaxes, counterfeit sites, and other spurious information on the Internet can give even the most discriminating of searchers a hard time." Barbara Quint, editor of Searcher magazine, warned in Find It Online: The Complete Guide to Online Research, published in 2002, that, too often, saying, "I got it from the Internet" is no better than saying, "I got it from the telephone."

Even with educationally credible sites, a phenomenon known as "link rot" complicates matters. The June 2002 issue of the Journal of Science Education and Technology reported research supported by the National Science Foundation describing the rate at which 515 educational Web sites achieved extinction.

The link rot rate in this study was expressed in terms of a half-life of only fifty-five months. Imagine a library of useful materials mysteriously halving in size in just fifty-five months.

It's no wonder that former Wired contributing writer Paulina Borsook commented in Cyberselfish, published in 2000, that "[i]t's spooky to think of a generation of kids who are deluded into thinking that if something (an article, an idea, an author, a publication) isn't available on the Web then it doesn't exist or doesn't have value." It's even spookier to think of a generation of college and university leaders whose decisions reveal that they think the same thing.

Despite these unruly realities, the Internet is an indispensable research tool. But the notion that it is sufficient as the tool of choice, or, worse, the only really necessary tool, for all or even most research tasks, is both completely up to date and thoroughly out of touch. How has this quixotic notion obtained such wide acceptance?

The cardinal mantra of today's book-free advocates is that the current generation of students simply does not learn through books. Take, for example, the Des Moines Area Community College West Campus. The August 6, 2002, issue of Wired News reported that, instead of a library, "the school has a resource center equipped with computer workstations that can access the Web, e-books, and online journals." The resource center houses no books. Anthony Paustian, executive dean of West Campus, explained to National Public Radio in 2002: "We have a whole generation of gamers coming up now . . . kids who are sitting there doing nothing but staring at little tiny screens all day long."

Entertainment Economy

Apparently, books and other paper media just aren't "arresting" enough for all these gamers-turned-college-students. And even though a substantial body of literature indicates that the kind of learning proclaimed by the pundits is not what many students coming to our colleges and universities associate with the Internet, that is not the point because, as Brown University professor George Landow wrote in 1997 in Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology, "The linear habits of thought associated with print technology often force us to think in particular ways that require narrowness, decontextualization, and intellectual attenuation, if not downright impoverishment." Perhaps then, Sarah Feldman wrote in 2001 in the International Journal of Instructional Media, "linearity may no longer be viable, or even preferable" for twenty-first-century students.

But can we cast aside linear habits of thought without consequence? Advocates on both sides of this question agree with New York University media professor Neil Postman, who wrote in 1985 in Amusing Ourselves to Death, that "[a] major new medium changes the structure of discourse; it does so by encouraging certain uses of the intellect." Phillip Devin, an analyst with the Rand Corporation who specializes in the integration of information technology into teaching and learning, told United Press International in August 2002 that information technology "has an important impact on how people develop intellectually and perceive the world." But Postman also observed in 1995 in The End of Education that "different technologies have different intellectual and emotional biases. . . . Because of their technical and economic structure, different technologies have different content biases." Feldman wrote in the International Journal of Instructional Media that "the tools we use to represent information influence the thoughts we think."

The Internet is championed as a nonlinear medium. But is nonlinear thinking all we need? Is nonlinear thinking the best mode for every intellectual task? David Rothenberg, a professor of philosophy, told the Chronicle of Higher Education in August 1997 that "the Web leads to an ethereal randomness of thought. Gone are the pathways of logic and passion, the sense of progress and of argument. Chance holds sway. . . . I'm seeing my students' attention spans wane and their ability to reason for themselves decline." Historian Gertrude Himmelfarb noted in the spring 1997 issue of the American Scholar that the Internet "is too fluid, too mobile and volatile, to encourage any sustained effort of thought. . . . We become habituated to a fast pace. . . . We become incapacitated for the longer, less feverish tempo of the book. We also become incapacitated for thinking seriously about ideas rather than amassing facts."

David Gelernter, a computer science professor at Yale University, has been using the Internet "or its precursor" since 1982. He admitted in the November 4, 1996, issue of the Weekly Standard that he would be "hard pressed without it." But Gelernter has some questions about the Web: "Everyone knows what you do with the Web: You surf, sliding from site to site at the click of a mouse button. Exactly which problem will Web-surfing attack? . . . [I]nsufficient shallowness? Excessive attention spans? Unhealthy fixation on in-depth analysis? Stubborn unwillingness to push on to the next topic until they have mastered the last?" These anecdotal observations corroborate studies, reported in 1999 in Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy, that have shown that "most Web users will read only about two screens of material before they click off."

Sometimes "nonlinear thinking" is just newspeak for mental incoherence. But although nonlinear or lateral thinking is occasionally beneficial and even preferable, the devaluation of linear modes through the de-emphasis of print media is educationally regressive. As so aptly put by Thomas Mann of the Library of Congress in the July 2001 issue of the Journal of Academic Librarianship, "To say that kids today are growing up comfortable with computers is simply not the same thing as saying kids today are comfortable reading and absorbing long narrative or expository works in screen display formats. What is happening is that young people are being accustomed to screen displays that require shorter rather than longer attention spans and that require less rather than more verbal understanding articulated in words."

Social critic David Shenk cautioned in The End of Patience in 1999 that "[i]n our restless technological optimism, we tend to look down on old technologies as inferior. But we need to resist this. Some of the boring old linear technologies . . . still ride on the cutting edge of human intelligence. The works of George Orwell, E. B. White, and Joan Didion read from beginning to end not just because of the primitive tools these writers used. Traditional narrative offers the reader a journey with a built-in purpose; the progression of thought is specifically designed so that the reader may learn something not just from parts of the story, but also from the story as a whole."

Educators succumb to technological determinism when they place their faith in the dictum that since our students come to us with minds habituated to visual media, then educational processes should further harden the habit. It quickly follows that attempts to expand or deepen their intellectual life beyond the tiny screen through extensive and intensive use of print media are off the mark. Such attempts, we are told, just don't adequately account for this generation's visual "way of learning." While we are at it, let's design a nutrition program based on this generation's "way of eating." And certainly the science of exercise physiology should be more attentive to the superiority of this generation's "way of exercising."

But higher education isn't "higher" if it doesn't rise above the practice of tracing pre-existing ruts. Instead, as Antonio T. de Nicolas of the State University of New York at Stony Brook noted in 1989 in Habits of Mind: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education, "We cannot allow any [habit of mind] to take over the whole range of mental operations, and still presume to impart an education. . . . It is imperative that we face the problem of education as the problem of our habits of mind. . . . The abuse of one [habit of mind] against the others creates individual and social paralysis." Furthermore, programmatic demotion of linear media (especially books) strikes at a core value of the academy: academic freedom.

The Depredation of Academic Freedom

Administrative decisions that misappropriate the role of books by marginalizing their presence deprive students of a means of inquiry and intellectual growth with attributes and effects all its own and necessary for the sustenance of a balanced and considered life of the mind. When substance is traded away for a popular perception of relevance, both substance and relevance are lost.

Moreover, since, as the late New York University philosopher Sidney Hook wrote in Academic Freedom and Academic Anarchy in 1970, "freedom to learn depends on the material possibility of learning," the exile of material resources (books) with unique content found only offline is a depredation of academic freedom, an indirect and unintentional but potent act of censorship. Any academic process or administrative disposition that fails to account for the fact that an immeasurable flood of important scholarly and educational material continues to appear only in print is at best naïve. But the effect is far from benign. As William Miller, former president of the Association of College and Research Libraries, wrote in the August 1, 1997, issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, "[I]t is dangerous to assert—or assume—that the brave new world is here, and that all information is now online. . . .

When anyone says such things . . . others hear them, believe them, and want to act on them. The result could be disastrous for higher education, robbing researchers of resources they need and impoverishing all of those who depend on future breakthroughs in scholarship." Paul Gilster, author of the best-selling books The Internet Navigator and Finding It on the Internet, agreed when he wrote in Digital Literacy in 1997: "When is a globe-spanning information network dangerous? When people make too many assumptions about what they find on it."

How ironic that the OCLC White Paper on the Information Habits of College Students, published in 2002, reveals the brutal fact that traditional library resources continue to receive heavy use on American college and university campuses, even amid some displacement of library use by reliance on the Internet in general. The research, conducted by Harris Interactive, was a blind study with U.S. college students aged eighteen to twenty-four who use the Internet for course work. The sample was drawn from a pool of 7 million individuals, representative of all U.S. regions. The statistical margin of error was at the 95 percent confidence level, plus or minus three. Findings included the following: "most college students do not exhibit a strong preference for electronic copies over paper copies"; "seven-in-ten students use the campus library website for at least some of their assignments, and one-in-five use it for most assignments"; almost two-thirds are not completely satisfied "that the range of resources on the web is adequate"; and "nearly nine out of ten students (89 percent) also use the campus library's print resources, including books, journals, articles, and encyclopedias."

In Fahrenheit 451 by science fiction author Ray Bradbury, state censorship is executed through book burning by firefighters. In the book, a Mr. Valery observes that "[t]he folly of mistaking a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths . . . is inborn in us." The "information superhighway" metaphor (referring to the Internet), carried to the masses by years of torrential verbiage from influential and tenacious advocates for a book-free future, has attained the status of a proof. Merely invoking the phrase is to express a capital truth. But in our case firefighters don't burn books; educators banish them. The state does not destroy our books; the university disjoins them. We place them in vaults or we displace them with Web stations, television studios, or other "media rich" diversions. Through these and other powerfully symbolic gestures, we say books are peripheral with less and less to offer our minds. But the scorn of books in the name of information access is Orwellian; it constricts access, constrains the mind, and cheats our students.

Neil Postman summarized the creed of technological determinism this way in The End of Education: "The technology is here or will be; we must use it because it is there; we will become the kind of people the technology requires us to be; and, whether we like it or not, we will remake our institutions to accommodate the technology. All of this must happen because it is good for us, but in any case, we have no choice." With uncanny prescience, Henry David Thoreau opined in Walden that "men have become the tools of their tools." But we do have a choice and we must exercise it. As Eric Ormsby, professor of Islamic intellectual history, wrote in the October 2001 issue of The New Criterion: "If the past twenty-five years have proved anything, it is that, for the survival of culture, we need all the help we can get, whether in words baked on ancient tablets, set in cold type, or amid the pixels of the scanner and the computer screen."

S. David Mash is a Ph.D. student in higher education administration at the University of South Carolina. A shorter version of this article was published in the January 2003 issue of Against the Grain.

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