(rejoinder to It’s Time to Stop Worshipping the Liberal Arts)

In today’s evolving political landscape, ‘liberal arts institutions’ (which in a UK and European context we may understand as the humanities departments of our universities) must confront a hard reality: reverence for liberal education as a public good does not justify resistance to private sector greed (It’s Time to Stop Worshipping the Liberal Arts).

For too long, humanities departments have clung to the notion that being human means cultivating closeness with our shared cultural heritage. For too long, they have assumed that training future citizens to be critically engaged members of a democratic community would be recognized forever as a public good.

A particularly stubborn myth is that the humanities and liberal arts stand somehow in opposition to STEM. While this belief often undergirds successful calls to defund humanities education, it is hopelessly muddled. To begin with, the ‘M’ in STEM, mathematics, is itself a hallowed member of the liberal arts. Geometry was a must for the ancient Greek philosopher Plato when processing admissions to his academy, and both geometry and arithmetic have been core members of the seven traditional liberal arts since at least the fifth century AD. Far from being a natural law of the universe, the belief in a sharp divide between ‘liberal arts’ and ‘hard sciences’ arguably has a much less impressive pedigree. It dates to the infamous “Two Cultures” debate instigated by the forgotten novelist C. P. Snow in a lecture of that name which he gave in 1959. In it, he painted a picture of a community of navel-gazing literary scholars who looked down on the technical sciences. This picture was derived from Snow’s own unpleasant (but sadly not uncommon) experience of being snubbed by Oxbridge dons, a highly exclusive group representative of little outside of their own bubble.  Snow contrasted their elitist culture with the supposedly more enlightened one of contemporary industrial science (the very same science, let it be noted, which 7 years prior had tested the first hydrogen bomb). The present letter thus gently suggests that we finally let go of the dichotomy between arts and sciences, rooted as it is in the deeply limited and rather sad culture wars of the 1950s.

Critics of a supposed (and untrue) economic exceptionalism enjoyed by liberal arts institutions often also attack the humanities for claiming a monopoly on critical thinking. Yet, once again, this is not so. Of course the natural sciences cultivate critical attitudes. Without a searching, questioning attitude towards the mysteries of the material universe there would have been no Galileo, no Newton, no Darwin, no Einstein. If the humanities claim anything at all, it is far humbler, though perhaps also closer to home: the responsibility to cultivate critical attitudes towards the phenomena of our social world (smaller by far than the kingdom of nature). Thus if there is a meaningful divide between the humanities on the one hand and the natural and technical sciences on the other, it is limited to their methods and focus: source criticism of human-made artefacts in the humanities, and the empirical analysis of natural phenomena in the sciences. And of course, as soon as we recall that humans and their works are indeed always already part of nature, even this flimsy division is threatened. In short, the humanities and the sciences are two horns on a single goat named Critical Thinking.

Ironically, a recent attack on the monopolization of “critical thinking” by the humanities (see linked article above) is itself a shining example of the deep need for critical awareness when writing and reading. At just a cursory glance, that letter contains numerous and rather serious faults of argumentation, including false dichotomies (liberal arts vs. STEM, but also social values vs. market forces) and a host of straw men (the myth of the liberal arts’ monopoly on critical thinking, the myth of a noble and economically insulated humanities, etc.). The letter’s thesis statement manage to combine a false dichotomy, a straw man, hyperbole, and a non sequitur all into the space of just over twenty words: “While liberal arts institutions do have intrinsic value, that doesn’t mean they are entitled to be socially favoured or economically exceptional for ever.” The two topics in the two clauses are not logically related, and in any case, surely intrinsic value would indeed justify some sort of protection? This is not nitpicking; it is diagnostic of a fundamental state of confusion deep in the heart of thought and speech.

The letter this essay responds to called on us to stop worshipping the liberal arts, yet all it offers in their place is the worship of big business, the further cultivation of a “market-oriented mindset”. Rather than worry our heads about what the academic humanities do or don’t do, we should all beware lazy conformism to a market-oriented mindset. Calls to be businesslike may sound like common sense, but mask a greedy desire to lay the institutions which structure our society open to strip-mining by private interests.  As long as our only conception of profit is monetary, as long as we continue to equate the success of the stock market with our success as society, and as long as we persist in a fantasy vision of a “real world” limited to the tiny world of finance, we will forever be trapped in a spiraling surrender of values, rights and duties to the altar of “market needs”. As a late liberal artist, David Foster Wallace, once said, in the day-to-day trenches of adult life there is no such thing as not worshipping: the only choice we get, is what to worship. Liberty and art – or “market needs”? The choice is ours.

In the 21st century it is difficult to distinguish innovation from extraction. The people at the helm of their organisations are strip mining them for parts. Developers breakdown communities. Publishers hoard and enclose data. Mining has reached its end and now the structure can only collapse if we continue forward.

Is collapse inevitable? No. We have learned a thing or two in the last fifty years. But the main lesson is this: there is enough for everyone.

We waste nearly half the food we produce, yet people go hungry. Beaches are lined with never used clothing, yet people go cold. Every main street has more empty buildings than occupied ones, yet people sleep on the curb outside of them.

We hold up artificial scarcity for what? So we can feel like we have accomplished something in being able to find a room or buy another jacket? The emptiness we would feel if it was revealed it was all for nothing. That we haven’t achieved anything because the only acheivment for our time is emancipation and we are further from that goal by the day.

Freedom from the known, freedom by means of knowledge as true knowledge can only produce peace and love, freedom from what we think are our only choices.

“A.I. Is on Its Way to Something Even More Remarkable Than Intelligence New York Times Online, Nov. 8, 2025”

www.nytimes.com/2025/11/0…

By Barbara Gail Montero. Dr. Montero is a philosophy professor who writes on mind, body and consciousness.

We should not allow ourselves to be unduly stunned by the sensationalist claim that: “Not long ago, A.I. became intelligent.” By the standards of Alan Turing’s theoretical test, computers became intelligent long ago - back in 1966, to be precise. This was the year computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum created ELIZA, a chatbot programmed according to a script derived from Rogerian psychotherapy - a method in which the therapist repeats the patient’s comments back to them - as an ironic display of the limits of what Weizenbaum termed ‘computer power’ in contrast to ‘human judgement.’ Yet when Weizenbaum asked his secretary to test ELIZA by engaging with it in conversation, he was bemused when after a couple of exchanges the secretary asked him to leave the room and give her and ELIZA privacy. Soon, psychiatrists were clamoring for ELIZAs to be installed in hospitals across the USA, leaving a now worried Weizenbaum to ponder what exactly these mental health professionals thought they were doing if they felt their work could be carried out as effectively by a pre-programmed script.

What the ELIZA experiment unexpectedly revealed was how incredibly low the Turing Test bar really is. We humans were already more than willing to credit machines with intelligence in 1966; the only difference between ELIZA and ChatGPT 4.5 is the amount of computer power behind them. To paraphrase Professor Montero, as far as we can tell, there is no direct implication from the claim that a computer has greater power to the conclusion that it deserves to be called intelligent.

“Consider the atom.” Yes, let’s. As Professor Montero accurately summarizes, the history of atomic thought can be thematized as one of ever greater complexity of conception: from the solid little spheres of Democritus to the quantum clouds of uncertainty of Heisenberg, Schrodinger and Bohr. Sadly for Montero, this is actually a disanalogy for her argument about our evolving understanding of intelligence. By her account - that intelligence today is whatever the average American thinks it is (vox populi, vox dei - good grief) - our idea of intelligence has grown not more but less complicated. We are, according to Montero, placated by the appearance of intelligence in response to our “prompt,” and this is considered sufficient. This is a shocking claim to come from an educational professional. Anyone who has ever been in a teaching role knows that the real spark of intelligent engagement on the part of a student comes not in the form of a brilliant response to the teacher’s question, but in the form of a brilliant question - and above all an unprompted one.

The question of what intelligence is, is fundamental. But Montero confidently asserts that instead of defining intelligence and then seeing if AI meets those standards “we do something more dynamic: We interact with increasingly sophisticated A.I., and we see how our understanding of what counts as intelligence changes.” Firstly, what is this “understanding of what counts as intelligence” if not a definition, or at least a premise? Indeed, Montero is clearly aware that postulating a definition and then gradually adjusting it through experience is the fundamental dynamic of epistemology - how we come to have knowledge of the world. Thus by opposing a definition of intelligence as a starting point in favour of interacting with AI, Montero is setting up what’s called a straw man argument: no one ever said we should have a fixed and immutable definition of what intelligence is. But having some kind of definition to begin with is essential.

Secondly, the alternative Montero proposes sounds an awful lot like saying: instead of coming up with our own definition of what intelligence is, let’s just have AI tell us. But “AI” is not a thing with thoughts and opinions. It is a chatbot, an ingenious device designed to respond engagingly and effectively to prompts. It draws on the sum of human knowledge available as text on the internet (so, really just a sliver of human knowledge, all things considered), and can never do more than combine and recombine the parts of that corpus: in other words, reflect our human achievements back to us time and time again. “AI” is not a mind, it is a discourse chameleon. And while chameleons fuel their adaptations to their environment with no more than their fair share of flies, “AI” turns its tricks at the cost of vast amounts of energy, water, money, jobs, etc. “AI” is as Montero states certainly on its way to something even more remarkable than intelligence, wondrous to tell: the wholesale abandonment of intelligence in favour of madness, against a backdrop of amazed gasps and applause.

We cannot, in good conscience, pass over Professor Montero’s comments about consciousness in silence. They deserve to be quoted in full, for the way the professor proudly manifests a total disregard for the moral implications of consciousness:

“Some worry that if A.I. becomes conscious, it will deserve our moral consideration — that it will have rights, that we will no longer be able to use it however we like, that we might need to guard against enslaving it. Yet as far as I can tell, there is no direct implication from the claim that a creature is conscious to the conclusion that it deserves our moral consideration. Or if there is one, a vast majority of Americans, at least, seem unaware of it. Only a small percentage of Americans are vegetarians. Just as A.I. has prompted us to see certain features of human intelligence as less valuable than we thought (like rote information retrieval and raw speed), so too will A.I. consciousness prompt us to conclude that not all forms of consciousness warrant moral consideration. Or rather, it will reinforce the view that many already seem to hold: that not all forms of consciousness are as morally valuable as our own.”

In the words of Lin Zexu, a Qing dynasty political philosopher, in his 1839 letter to Queen Victoria over the British Empire’s aggressive introduction of opium into the Chinese economy: “let us ask, where is your conscience?” Firstly, it is logically absurd to say, “there is no direct implication from the claim that a creature is conscious to the conclusion that it deserves our moral consideration,” and then contradict this with an admission that there may after all be a link between consciousness and moral responsibility. Secondly, it is philosophically absurd to claim that, because most Americans still express support for animal cruelty through their eating habits, such a link must surely be unimportant.

And for an American above all, at this point in our global history, to speak so glibly of slavery, of the potential enslavement of an entity which she has just publicly announced is on the road to consciousness, is such an enormity as to defy adequate response. That a university professor of philosophy could be complicit in such wanton cheapening of ideas, of discourse, of argumentation, of journalism, speaks volumes about the fascism gripping the USA. Sadly, the shelf space for such volumes is already full to bursting.

The academic assessment of generative artificial intelligence is intrinsically a matter of source criticism deeply embedded in historic approaches So is the technical functioning of generative AI and LLMs. AI as we have it today is fundamentally a history machine that scrutinizes vast quantities of historical sources (or data) and interprets them statistically in order to output predictions with a high degree of certainty. Any success it enjoys, however, is due not to the immensity of the data it is able to process, but rather the opposite. Its quantitative data sets can never hope to grasp the fullness of reality in all its profound mystery. But, by delineating the field, by excising the qualitative, “AI” creates the very world it is able to predict. Our society is being radically reduced to a matrix of quantitative data points, the bare one dimension presciently described by Herbert Marcuse over 60 years ago.

(Prompt taken from this recent job posting)

There is a shift in the language of higher education from the word “academic” to the word “researcher”. As the following note will attempt to make clear, this shift reflects yet another expression of a growing intolerance for ambiguity - the organic ambiguity which characterizes culture as a healthy expression of human activity.

“Academic” is a useful term for anyone engaged by a university faculty in ways which bring them into close contact with the core faculty activities of research and teaching. Academics come in many different shapes and sizes, and being an academic may best be described as a professional profile.

Direct employment by a faculty is not in itself a necessary criterion. At Oxford and Cambridge, for example, much of the actual teaching is done in small groups outside of the faculty. The tutors or supervisors who deliver this teaching are not necessarily affiliated with any faculty, and are paid for by the colleges (administrative units which together with the faculties form the university as a corporate entity). University library professionals often also share an academic profile, depending on how closely their work brings them to the fundamental work of teaching and research which form the raison d’être of the faculty.

Nor can academics be simply defined in opposition to a university’s administrative or support staff, since many workers with an academic profile are also expected to fulfil administrative work divorced from either teaching or research, or to take turns serving on the boards and committees which make the faculty world go round.

Finally, being an academic is not simply a question of holding a PhD and being called “Dr.”. Many with a doctorate never set foot in a university again, and many who teach at university (especially among adjuncts, who carry the brunt of teaching at many institutions) are, with a masters degree, amply qualified to inspire and instruct.

So: being a direct employee of a faculty, holding a certain title (professor, adjunct, assistant professor, associate professor, lecturer, etc.), or even a certain degree are none of them either necessary nor sufficient criteria for being an academic. What emerges as necessary is a professional profile that unites proximity to teaching and research at a (proximately) tertiary educational level.

(the term “researcher” thus isolates just part of the meaning of the word “academic”. Part of its rhetorical appeal is that the researcher is a problem solver: the activity is inspired by and responds to “societal problems” in clearcut, empirical ways. What has been cut out/off, isolated, discarded? My contention: not simply the teacher, but the teacher as troublemaker, in opposition to the researcher as problem solver. I use the word troublemaker ironically to emphasize the necessarily troubling role of the pedagogue. True pedagogy moreover does not divide teaching and research but combines the two always - Socrates was learning at the same time as encouraging learning in others, and was executed as a troublemaker. The loss of disinterested, open-ended enquiry in a way that involves the formation of students is itself a societal problem. We must struggle not only against external capitalistic pressures, but also against internal and even personal forces of intellectual pride coupled with insecurity. Let pride and responsibility be our watchwords, perhaps. In any event, the race for funding is distracting us from the work of the academic.)

(tbc)

Some texts out of order:

Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, 1979 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1970 Neil Postman & Charles Weingartner, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, 1971 bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, 1994 bell hooks, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope, 2004 Jacques Rancière, Le maître ignorant : cinq leçons sur l’émancipation intellectuelle, 2004 C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 1943 Mary Harrington, ‘Thinking is Becoming a Luxury Good’, NY Times, July 2025

The present relationship between knowledge organisations and the US Government might be best contextualised through an understanding of Grover Norquist. The right-wing strategist, who has been instrumental in denying public money to education and research since the Regan administration, gave a particularly telling statement at the Conservative Political Action Conference at St. Louis in 2013. He said that his goal is that people within institutions “begin to look at each other a little bit more like the second to last scene in one of those life-boat movies.” He wants us to ask “who we are going to eat and who we are going to throw overboard.”

This is, I argue here, an admission of the limits of the American conservative movement’s power. Norquist is aware that he can damage the university up to a point. What he wants, instead, is to create the conditions in which a university hurts itself. And in the intervening twelve years since that statement, this strategy has been incredibly successful.

Adjunctification, the loss of secure jobs within US academia, which supports a tolerance for abuse and untenable working situations. Which in turn impacts the accord with students and undermines their trust for, and relationship to, the university. These are conditions exacerbated, but not imposed, by outside pressures. This is coming from the inside of the institution.

And as we continue to alienate more people from the project of higher education, as we sever the connections that should be the bedrock of an open and collective pursuit of science, we arrive somewhere truly troubling.

But it’s more than that - when the university sends enforcement officers upon students, knowing full well that such a decision will impact people’s lives and result in severe injury, we send the signal that we are not a community. That we as an institution no longer consider our responsibility to shelter and care for one another. And that is what people like Norquist have been waiting for.

As those cracks within the university are made plain, we can now observe the overt incursions, coming from the outside, intent on breaking the institution. Forcibly detaining university people, and subsequent attempts to assume governance control. The stifling of free speech. Withholding public funds from research at an unprecedented scale. And - as we saw last week, at the Library of Congress - removing leadership of knowledge organisations, based presumably on those leaders egalitarian values and identity.

To be clear, what I am talking about here is the infrastructure of knowledge organisations. Yes, infrastructure is the software, instruments, tools, machines, money, and buildings that make up the institution. But underlying all of that, the infrastructural foundation of a knowledge organisation and its generative function, are its people and their efforts and labor. Sometimes we refer to this as social infrastructure as opposed to things like digital or technical infrastructure, but I’m not sure such a distinction is helpful.

Nonetheless, let’s focus a minute on the digital side of infrastructure because the project to undermine the university has a crucial new element here. Just as IBM once provided the machinery to reduce people to data and make them easier to sort, transport, and ultimately exterminate, our present moment has its own tool to displace and harm people with efficiency and un-accountability.

But, a difference, in concordance with people like Emily Bender, is that Artificial Intelligence is not a cohesive tool - we do have significant tools bundled in here, like increasingly advanced compute. But rather than a technology, AI signifies a particular vie for power that notably incurs upon the domain of erudition, by pirating the language of intelligence and consciousness and the actions of sense making.

This is an attempt, once again, to alienate authority toward something that cannot be held to account - to create something of a higher power. This is a particular set of resource-heavy people that are covetous of the position of knowledge organisations and have long wished to supplant them.

Why? Because they see knowledge organisations as places that democratise and emancipate at a moment where they wish to consolidate and control. This is, I think, quite generous to universities, but it also points to the way forward.

Open Science and Infrastructure, and in particular human-centered Open Science and Infrastructure, could be considered the rejoinder to authoritarian control. This framework provides the counter narrative to conceptualise abundance within the university - abundance of knowledge and ideas, abundance within people - to oppose the scarcity mindset that would have us eating one another or throwing anyone overboard.

And so the moment calls us to reflect upon our understanding and articulation of Open Science and how it is not just a set of principles or practices but a system that undergirds the generation of knowledge and its application within our world. And here we come to the crux of open infrastructure, which is governance.

A common refrain among Norquist and his crowd is that the university must be governed by outside entities, like a state or federal body, because any alternative would allow ‘the inmates to run the asylum.’ But we who make up this space know better. Whether we will have our databases, publications, and agency within academia will come down to the question of our inclusion in the governance of infrastructure. Opening governance is the mechanism to repair our institutions and our relationships as a community because we have the proximity and immediacy to be both responsive and accountable.

I want to quote Kathryn Gindlesparger’s work here: “When faculty answer the calls of governance, they create openings in its ceremony for new actors, behaviors, and ideas. These openings are places where inclusion can flourish, and inclusion builds governance as a responsive and meaningful system. When people matter in governance, governance matters.”

So the question is not as much what are they going to do to us next - that we already know in some ways, it’s bad. But I hope the more important question is can we commit to one another, can we shelter and protect each other in the way we should have all along?

Are we a community?

An instrument of discovery

A garden

A place where people come to work

A place were people come not to work

A big building full of books

A bigger building full of nothing

Somewhere we never go

Somewhere we went when we were children

A place for sharing (which is lesson no. 1 at school)

A librarian is someone who knows how to find information and who believes in your right to have it.

The knowledge of how to find information is key. Where to find it is secondary. The ‘where’ might well be the institution at which the librarian works, i.e. a library, but it doesn’t have to be. When the ‘where’ of information is unknown, the librarian can tell you how to find it. Not where you will find it, and not what you will find, but the steps to follow in order to find it.

Knowledge of how to find information may in turn be compared with the knowledge of how to find data, which is the essential characteristic of the researcher. The researcher knows how to bring their attention to a certain slice of reality and sieve it for data. Data arranged according to an interpretive framework becomes information. Information assimilated by a mind becomes knowledge. Data are the raw ingredients. Information is a dish made of data. Knowledge is a full stomach.

Before we can answer the question “What is a Library?”, we have to take a look at the state of education. It’s not a popular thing to do (perhaps nobody feels wholly comfortable when looking in a mirror), but unlike most tasks which have been left for far too long, this overview should only take us a moment.

What does education look like today? What form does it take and what effect does it have? To answer the first question, let’s stick to the education of the young as required by law in much of the world, and frequently pursued by choice for several years longer. The institutions which provide this education are commonly referred to as the education system, and sometimes as the education industry. This is subdivided into various levels arranged according to what the cultures of education in different countries deem necessary for young people at various stages of their development. Broadly speaking, these divisions are primary, secondary, and tertiary. Additionally, the whole system (at least up to the tertiary stage) comes in two forms: one in which the state (or public sector) provides the various necessary infrastructures, and another where all is privately sourced and paid for. The rest of this post is going to ignore the private/state school debate, the better to draw out a dynamic which I believe is characteristic of our education system no matter who is paying for it, from first year primary all the way up to final year PhD.

Postulate: the primary effect of the education system today is to rob us of our intellectual autonomy (the natural ability to think for ourselves), to neg us into conformity by undermining our mental abilities. This may seem paradoxical (i.e. contrary too (para) common sense (doxa)), but paradox is not a synonym for false.

Argument: the process of schooling involves having one’s intellectual autonomy taken by the institution and handed back to you piecemeal the further you progress through the system. This process of dispossession and restitution correlates with what we might term “social mobility”, roughly in the following manner: the better one is at passing the system’s tests, the more likely it is that one will be deemed a safe bet for higher levels of educational investment, and for the socio-economic opportunities such education affords. Rather than an infrastructure for developing intelligence and knowledge, therefore, the education system may be seen as a vetting process working organically to conserve a social status quo.

The sad reality of primary and secondary schooling is that after years of low marks, failed tests, struggles with homework and clashes with teachers, many young people leave the system with the ingrained conviction that intellectual work of any kind - the purported purpose of school - is not really for them. Worse, they may feel an inherent aversion to and distrust of “cleverness” altogether. These young people are delighted and relieved to be able to escape school at 16. I suggest that this is a searing indictment of the education system in itself. The school should be a place that encourages dwelling. Nevertheless it does not, and these scarred youths for the most part go on to join the army of technicians which keeps our world lit, clean, and moving on time.

Students who demonstrate an above average success in the arbitrary intelligence tests of the education system beyond what is legally required are permitted to continue to submit themselves for further testing. They will not have to clean or scan or dig or click for poverty wages. Rather, they can now be shown socially appropriate directions in which to channel their mental energies. In the UK these directions generally take the form of careers in accountancy and civil law (as opposed to criminal law, which does not pay), medicine, (data) engineering etc.; in other words, “the professions”, such as they exist today. Thus for many who shine in school tests the natural next step is to go to university - gatekeeper, since the thirteenth century, to the professional world.

The undergraduate experience is the clearing house of society’s systemically ratified intelligence. Students are made aware that no matter how much they may have enjoyed getting an education the ride is almost over and the pressure is on to hop off and into a salaried job. And it is at this point that the bell curve plotting academic attainment against expected financial compensation in the form of salaries and career progression hits its zenith for many individual trajectories. For as soon as study risks turning into research - as soon as one sets out to make personal sense of some aspect of reality, to fully reclaim that intellectual autonomy long held hostage - here the (much touted) directly proportional relationship between educational attainment and socio-economic climbing starts to become inversely proportional.

With a BA in modern languages or history from a good university, a young graduate in the UK can get a training contract at a corporate conglomerate and cash in their years of education for a more or less guaranteed lifetime of work. In the US and in Europe, an MA may often be an added requirement for entry to the professions. In the UK, masters degrees are either a stepping stone towards very specific and often academic careers or are pursued out of passion or nostalgia by those who can afford the time out from work. As for the doctorate, while the potential return on investment is high (one might become a medical doctor, or a tenured professor), the risk of leaving the programme overqualified and unable to find work is daunting. Indeed, “overqualification” may not even be the worst of it. The true risk of continuing with higher education, of striving to bring the weight of all that is known onto a tiny point of the unknown, is the risk of seeing the world for the first time in the full light of history: a story of oppression punctuated by mad dashes for freedom.

In such a case, one may be described as having finally and fully ransomed ones intellectual autonomy back from the hegemonic culture, but at the expense of ever finding a permanent place within it. And this is one way in which a certain kind of intellectual is minted. An intellectual is thereby not one who pursues education, but rather one who has come out on the other side. Of course not every PhD holder is an intellectual, and not every intellectual holds a PhD - to be an intellectual is merely to be someone who values and cultivates the act of thinking for oneself. But this is precisely the activity which a good PhD programme enshrines and honours with a degree. Historically and globally speaking, many - maybe most? - humans have been born and lived out their lives with this intellectual autonomy. In this light, our modern West with its mandatory education system might just be the stupidest civilization to have ever existed. Paradoxes all the way down?

This is but a test. A test post for Bruder & Rudmann - an experiment in collective writing and thinking on the state of the library, university, and knoweldge. All is a test, but this is a real test.

The state of the library… But what is a library? Isn’t it at least a little like a coral reef? Built anonymously over generations, rich in vital (biblio)diversity, it sits between the shore of civil society and the ocean of the unknown: not as a barrier, but as a net.