Book Club: What do you call a library with no librarians?

The Leslie F. Malpass Library at Western Illinois University. (Photo courtesy of Western Illinois University; photo illustration by Ron Charles/Washington Post)

Last year, Vermont State University proposed saving money by getting rid of all the books in its library.

Administrators at Western Illinois University have come up with a different solution: They’ve decided to get rid of all the librarians.

According to Inside Higher Ed, WIU plans to eliminate the nine remaining members of its library faculty by May 2025. The cuts are part of a larger “ongoing effort to achieve fiscal sustainability.”

This sounds more like a koan than a budget. I hate to break it to the bean counters, but a university library without academic librarians is called a storage room.

William Thompson, who retired from the WIU library last year, tells me, “This is, to my knowledge, a first-of-its-kind decapitation of a library at an institution that awards doctorates and masters — not to mention the BAs."

WIU didn’t respond to my requests for comment, but a spokesperson for the university told Insider Higher Ed that the university “will continue to have adequate coverage in the library. . . . To say that we do not have librarians continuing on the staff is inaccurate.” The library dean will stay, the spokesperson said, and several of the library’s remaining civil service staff have relevant advanced degrees and expertise.

Hunter Dunlap, a tenured librarian at WIU, takes great exception to those claims. He filed a Freedom of Information Act request — he’s a real librarian, after all — and documented that none of the civil service employees working in the WIU library system holds an MLS degree, which is the standard qualification for a professional librarian.

The library maintains a collection of about 1 million volumes. In 2013, it had 16 academic librarians. Those remaining are now considering their options.

Keep in mind, these scholars aren’t manning the check-out desk and telling kids to stop making out in the book nook. They play crucial roles in the academic work of the university. In addition to building the library’s collections, they help students — from freshmen to doctoral candidates — access the breadth of available scholarship. They teach people how to find information in scores of complex online databases. And they help members of the public track down federal and state documents.

“One other important aspect of professional librarians, which is often lost,” Dunlap says, “is that we’re the ones who teach — in library classroom sessions — how to analyze and evaluate authoritative, valuable, current information.”

In an age awash with misinformation, losing these scholars seems like an astonishingly shortsighted cut.

“It is . . . kind of unbelievable,” Dunlap tells me. “After May the 14th, there will be no professional library services at this regional university. It’s a catastrophe not only for the civil service workers who are going to be asked to do more, but for students who aren’t getting what they paid for.”

“Hopefully, as the public and as our students learn what’s happening, they will come to understand that this is the wrong course for Western Illinois University, the wrong course for our students.”

The rest of us need to keep an eye on the creative ways politicians and administrators would try to degrade our intellectual and literary culture.

Books to screens:

• “The Perfect Couple,” starring Nicole Kidman, Liev Schreiber and Eve Hewson, starts streaming Sept. 5 on Netflix. The series is based on a 2018 mystery novel by Elin Hilderbrand about a lavish wedding on Nantucket that’s scrambled by the discovery of a body.
• The fourth season of “Slow Horses,” based on Mick Herron’s Slough House novels, begins streaming Sept. 4 on Apple TV Plus. (For those of you reading along, this season draws on “Spook Street” from 2017.) Gary Oldman is still outrageously grimy and sardonic as Jackson Lamb, the director of a group of rejected MI5 spies. James Callis (from “Battlestar Galactica”) joins the cast as the new First Desk and a hilarious confirmation of the Peter Principle. Sir Jonathan Pryce, playing River Cartwright’s grandfather, takes center stage this season in a plot that involves old crimes that must never see the light of day (trailer).
• “Odysseus Returns” debuted Wednesday on PBS. This curious documentary examines amateur historian Makis Metaxas’s claim that he found the tomb of Odysseus in 1991 on the island of Kefalonia. Morgan Freeman provides readings from Homer’s epic (trailer).
• Speaking of mythology — or ancient history? — “Kaos,” starring Jeff Goldblum as Zeus, began streaming last night on Netflix. This divinely dark comedy involves troubles on Mount Olympus and modern-day mortals (trailer).

The political situation in Washington is even hairier than you thought. Theodore Pappas has just published a quirky cultural history of America called “Combing Through the White House: Hair and Its Shocking Impact on the Politics, Private Lives, and Legacies of the Presidents.”

Unbraiding facts and rumors, Pappas inspects the lives of American leaders by focusing on their follicles. It’s a bizarre perspective that reveals stories that will, yes, curl your hair.

“Unbeknownst to many people, even many scholars, hair has played a surprisingly significant role for centuries in the ‘affairs of state,’” Pappas writes. “It has not only affected the personal and professional lives of the men and women who have occupied the White House, influencing how they discharged their public duties, but it has even at times impacted the political landscape and foreign policy of the country.”

Pappas is a longtime editor at Encyclopaedia Britannica, and with its big, colorfully illustrated pages, “Combing” has the look of a middle-school textbook. But the narrative is something altogether more hair-raising.

For instance, the book analyzes the way John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln — the beauty and the beast — maintained their very different appearances with an eye toward managing their personae. And Pappas offers up gory details about how their skulls were treated in the minutes and hours after each man was shot.

Given the number of samples of Lincoln’s hair that were cut away by mourners, Pappas is surprised the slain president didn’t appear bald in his open casket.

And who knew this historical comb-over from the field of numismatics? After about 100,000 Kennedy half dollars had been struck, Jackie insisted on a slight restyling of the image of Jack’s hair.

People often wanted leaders’ locks long before they were dead, too. George Washington sent off a sample of his hair during the Revolutionary War. Andrew Jackson once “allowed some two hundred schoolgirls to snip away at his head to their heart’s delight.”

Pappas notes that leaders must always appear perfectly coifed but never give any indication of caring. Bill Clinton got tangled up in Hairgate; Donald Trump allegedly skipped a military cemetery visit because rain threatened to mess up his hair; and Nancy Pelosi’s reputation got badly clipped when she made an unmasked appointment with her stylist during the covid pandemic (reflection).

Admittedly, Pappas’s thesis sometimes hangs by just a hair. (His segment on Monica Lewinsky involves a very different bodily matter.) But as a raconteur of American history, he’s always breezy and entertaining. By the end, it’s impossible to disagree with his contention that “hair is seldom simply hair.”

Harvard students take part in a demonstration in support of Palestinians on the steps of the Widener Library on Jan. 25, 2024. (Photo by Josh Reynolds for The Washington Post)

Last December, as pro-Palestinian protests spread across college campuses, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) asked Harvard president Claudine Gay, “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules on bullying and harassment?”

With breathtaking naiveté, Gay answered, “It can be, depending on the context.” A month later, she resigned.

Meanwhile, Stefanik has every right to continue spouting lies about the 2020 election and referring to the thugs arrested for attacking the Capitol as “January 6 hostages.”

I don’t mean to equate those verbal situations. I only want to note the obvious: Free speech is a very simple concept until people start speaking.

My own attitudes were set in the 1970s when the Supreme Court permitted Nazis to march past thousands of Holocaust survivors in Skokie, Ill. I started carrying an ACLU card around the same time I started carrying a driver’s license.

As our political positions have grown more divisive, arguments about free speech have grown more confusing. Liberals decry book bans while forbidding hate speech. Conservatives condemn censorship while telling teachers what they can’t say. Both sides invoke the hallowed words of the First Amendment while stepping on the necks of people they consider beyond the pale (or not pale enough).

Nowhere are these arguments more complicated than at public universities, those quasi-government institutions serving the needs of citizens on the cusp of adulthood.

In a slim new primer called “Campus Free Speech,” legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein laments the rise of restrictions on what people can say and write. But he quickly acknowledges: “The educational mission will require an assortment of restrictions on speech. You can’t run a college or university without imposing such restrictions.”

Determining what restrictions are appropriate and legal is the thorny task of Sunstein’s book, which every college administrator (and student activist) should be studying this fall.

After laying out some general principles, Sunstein presents dozens of short scenarios involving college students and professors. For lay readers, it’s a terrifically effective structure for sussing out complications in the law and testing the borders of one’s own tolerance.

Consider a campus group called Students for a Christian America that proclaims, “Non-Christians do not belong here.” Could administrators at a public university discipline these students? No, Sunstein says, because their statements “cannot easily be interpreted as intending to incite, and likely to incite, imminent lawless action.”

He comes to the same conclusion when considering students celebrating White pride. “Speech,” he writes, “cannot be regulated or controlled on the grounds that people might be offended, hurt, upset, saddened, angered, outraged, scared, enraged, or humiliated.”

Discipline is warranted, though, if students threaten individuals, shout down speakers, occupy buildings, disrupt classroom discussions or submit plagiarized essays.

Working through these scenarios, I was surprised to feel bouts of discomfort with some of Sunstein’s rulings. Would it really be possible, I wondered, to get an education on a campus where other students purposely made you feel “scared” and “humiliated”? Sunstein seems not to acknowledge the repressive reality that some “free” speech can create for people who are not, say, famous legal scholars.

But my misgivings only make me more eager to talk about this “pocket guide,” whose author has the courage to lay out a clear defense of free speech — not just in fancy principles but in gritty practice.

The sweetest thing I read this week was a note from Cecilia Hogan, a reader in Tacoma, Wash. While waiting to pick up a book at her local library, she saw a 5-year-old boy applying for his first library card.

“The boy swam in excitement,” Ms. Hogan tells me, “bobbing from foot to foot, gurgling over each development the librarian devised. ‘Can you sign the back of the card?’ she asked. The boy nearly exploded. ‘You don’t have to write your whole name. How about just the first letter? A ‘Z,’ right?’ The boy took the pen from her and, after carefully executing a ‘Z,’ he added an ‘N’ and an ‘A.’ The more letters, the better, right?”

Then it was time to put the card on a lanyard — his own lanyard. “The boy was ecstatic!” Ms. Hogan adds. “It was magic as old as libraries and still possible in the world we occupy today.”

Amid all the shameless assaults on librarians – like this real-life horror story – that little boy’s delight reminds us what’s at stake and why it’s worth defending everyone’s freedom to read.

Just yesterday, Penguin Random House and five other publishers filed a lawsuit challenging a Florida law – HB 1069 – that has forced school libraries to remove hundreds of titles, including “Brave New World,” “A Tale of Two Cities” and “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” along with books by Margaret Atwood, Judy Blume and many more. A Florida Education Department spokesperson said in a statement, “There are no books banned in Florida.”

Most of us can’t file lawsuits, of course, but there’s a simple, positive thing we can do to strengthen our libraries.

Sunday marks the start of Library Card Sign-up Month, a national effort to connect children with libraries and books. The annual drive started in 1987 after then Secretary of Education William Bennett said, “Let’s have a campaign. . . . Every child should obtain a library card and use it.”

If there are young people in your life, consider how you can help them get a library card and begin a transformative engagement with the world of books.

To reach kids with this year’s campaign, the American Library Association is teaming up with Transformers, those incredibly cool robots — now 40 years old! — that can change into trucks, cars, jets, beasts and more. It’s just another sign that no matter who you are — or what you transform into — you’re welcome at the public library. “Autobots, roll out!”

Last Saturday, Dawn and I were among several hundred people turned away from Erik Larson’s talk at the National Book Festival. We didn’t mind (too much) because there were so many other literary treats available — and besides, it just felt great to be among so many enthusiastic readers.

The Library of Congress didn’t release a crowd estimate, but I wouldn’t be surprised if 100,000 people were there to hear the dozens of poets, children’s authors, novelists, historians and other writers on hand. In some cases, fans waited for hours to get books signed by their favorite authors.

Bradley Graham, co-owner of Politics & Prose, the festival’s official bookseller, said attendance “far exceeded” his expectations. “Huge crowds kept pouring into the convention center,” he told me. “It was amazing and truly heartening to see so many people of all ages so excited by books and authors.” P&P had 55 staff members on hand, and every one of them was needed. The P&P pop-up store sold more than 12,600 books in less than 12 hours.

The range of presentations this year was delightfully broad. Emily Wilson read passages of the Iliad in ancient Greek and from her own English translation. Fellow translator M.A.R. Habib sang from the Qur’an. Billionaire philanthropist David Rubenstein read an aggrieved love letter to Doris Kearns Goodwin in the voice of Abraham Lincoln. Chasten Buttigieg and Max Greenfield joked about trying to entertain stuffy bigwigs at home while kids are jumping on the sofa. James Patterson acknowledged that Donald Trump is “a really good golfer.... But he cheats.”

If you missed any of this, don’t worry. You can watch the Main Stage presentations here. And recordings of all the presentations at the festival will be posted on the Library’s YouTube channel over the next week here.

One more thing: At a special reception in the Library the night before the festival, Doris Kearns Goodwin delivered a moving tribute to her late mother and the power of stories. You’ll love it.

The National Book Foundation is continuing its efforts to move beyond Manhattan and embrace the whole country. This week, the foundation announced the schedule for NBF Presents, more than a dozen events involving National Book Award-honored authors from coast to coast.

These events, building up to the 75th National Book Awards ceremony on Nov. 20, will take place in New York, Florida, Colorado, Texas and Alaska. It’s a chance to hear some of the most talented authors working today. If you’re nearby, drop by. You can find the full schedule here.

P.S. For some fun speculation about who might win the National Book Award for Fiction, listen to the latest episode of the Book Riot podcast.

Percival Everett had been winning critical praise for decades before “American Fiction” — based on his novel “Erasure” — won an Academy Award. That flashy success set the stage for “James,” his deft response to Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn.” Though it came out five months ago, “James” is still No. 3 on the bestseller list (and it’s longlisted for the Booker Prize).

Even long-term fans of Everett’s fiction may be surprised to learn that he’s also been publishing poetry for almost 20 years. His latest collection, “Sonnets for a Missing Key,” is inspired by Chopin’s “Preludes” and Art Tatum’s piano solos.

The formal constraints of the sonnet channel Everett’s voice in a way that feels wholly different from his fiction. On the first reading, his verse can feel elusive. As he says in this poem, “When I believe finally that I am grasping / it, it lets go and withdraws.” But don’t give up; read it again.

F# Major

1
Call me to some day that is yours,
that refuses to resist your counting,
as near as the bark of dogs and trees,
but again and again coming round

2
When I believe finally that I am grasping
it, it lets go and withdraws what is most yours.
I am rendered free, dismissed, where
the thought of us had once been welcomed.

3
I hold as if for both of us, waiting,
too old for what is too young, too young
for what has yet to be.

We, quiet the minutes, the day,
At last the branch and bough, the sweet
wind pushing us, as time.

Excerpted with permission from “Sonnets for a Missing Key: And Some Others.” Copyright © 2024 by Percival Everett. Published by Red Hen Press, a nonprofit publisher celebrating its 30th anniversary. You can help keep Red Hen thriving for another 30 years by sending a donation or buying a book here.

The day before the National Book Festival, James McBride was the guest of honor at the Author Series sponsored by the Hay-Adams hotel. As I’ve said before, this series, now almost 20 years old, is the most elegant book event in Washington. After a lovely lunch — roasted peach salad, seared Amish chicken and chocolate babka — McBride spoke to the assembled diners and then signed copies of his books.

Behatted, as always, McBride was both gracious and slightly dismissive of all the pomp and polished paneling. “Listen,” he joked, “this ain’t my game, you know, coming to the Hay-Adams.” What interests him is ordinary and universal and too often missed.

Speaking about the Black and Jewish characters in “The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store,” McBride said, “There are places where we have common ground, and this common ground is wide. It’s a big world. And as a writer, if you don’t take advantage of that, then you’re missing the stuff that people get out of bed for.”

His goal, he said, is “to continually evolve and look toward the goodness of people because when the good comes out — it takes a while — it just bursts and shines with the most beautiful light. . . . All of us were young at one time; we were all young once and pretty and beautiful and handsome. And you know what? We still are. We just have to relearn to see that in ourselves. So, my goal as a writer is to just find that in another way and say it in another way.”

Have a peaceful Labor Day. I’ll see you next week.

Send any questions or comments to ron.charles@washpost.com. You can read last week’s issue about writers suing another AI chatbot here. Tell your friends who might enjoy this newsletter that they can read it every week by clicking here. (No, they don’t have to subscribe to The Washington Post.) And remember, you can find all our books coverage, updated every day, here.

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