Librarians across Cambridge University are on the look out. Their target, among the ten million-odd volumes in the main library and in the independently-run libraries of the colleges, is ‘problematic’ books.
‘We would like to hear from colleagues across Cambridge about any books you have had flagged to you as problematic,’ a memo sent to colleges by the University Library read. But surely what is most damaging is to bandy around words such as ‘harmful’ and ‘problematic’ without even defining them.
It goes without saying that a great library will contain books that some, occasionally nearly all, readers will find disturbing. It would be absurd to put together a library on modern German history and to place Mein Kampf off limits. It would be absurd to think that a student could write a serious essay about the rise of Hitler without direct experience of its screeching pages. Some years ago one of my books was issued in paperback by Pimlico, and I found that this wide-ranging and handsome collection of books included a translation of Mein Kampf as well. But it is far more important that it was accessible than that its horrific ideas were buried away, only made available to those with good enough (or one might say bad enough) German to be able to cope with Hitler’s attempts at prose.
My own encounter with the beautifully named Arcana collection of Cambridge University Library came a good many years ago when I needed to see a late nineteenth-century tome about a late medieval king of Naples, Robert the Wise. He was a cultured ruler who was the patron of the poet Petrarch – admittedly his habit of forcing his courtiers to attend his own interminable sermons on abstruse theological points did not endear them to him. But I required special permission (grudgingly granted) to see this book, because it was locked away following an action for libel that concerned just a few lines where the author departed from his generally solid, even dull, account to attack some enemy or other – the relationship between Chopin and George Sand somehow came into it. Its highly reputable publisher, Heinemann, had been forced to withdraw the book entirely. All those involved in the dispute are now long dead, but 125 years later the book is still listed as ‘Restricted’ in the library catalogue, and it presumably stands on the Arcana shelves alongside grossly obscene volumes of a very different character.
I may have grumbled at the time, but a potential libel trial, or the inclusion of genuinely dangerous material (how to make a bomb, and so on) are good reasons within the law to restrict access to a book, until the material ceases to be in any sense dangerous. The efforts of the decolonisation group at Cambridge University Library point in a different direction. They also concern books that might be deemed harmful because of the opinions they express. These books may contain views that support slavery, express racist views, or defend violent conquest, in which case they are most likely to have been written a while ago when these were attitudes of the time – an example might be Aristotle’s view that slaves were in effect talking animals. Or they may address modern dilemmas and argue that no true woman can have a penis, or that immigration is out of control, views that are more likely to be held right-of-centre and are not illegal, however much they come under attack from activists. ‘Problematic books’ may contain occasional snide references that will disconcert a sensible modern reader; T.S. Eliot’s comments about Jews are very distasteful, whereas Ezra Pound’s go to a further extreme, but an intelligent student might want to ponder the expression of anti-Semitism in inter-war poetry.
Good teachers know how to lead their students along that path of dispassionate investigation. Professors, lecturers, tutors are employed to do that. The people who are not so employed are librarians. Although they do a lot more than humping books around libraries, librarians are not paid to teach in universities, and they are not expected to read the books they handle (though it would be an odd librarian who did not enjoy reading privately).
Look at the bibliography of essential reading issued by the decolonisation working group at Cambridge University Library and you will see how little its members love debate
Librarians should no doubt be good at making lists, but lists of books that contain what are regarded as undesirable views are quite another matter. Another past experience of mine casts a relevant shadow. Many years ago, I was in correspondence with an elderly and courteous German historian who shared some of my interests. Eventually I discovered that in one of his books, an account of the genealogy (or rather Aryan purity) of the Emperor Frederick II, the bibliography contained a scattering of items marked with a star. This was not to single them out for praise, but to act as a warning that their authors were Jewish. He became active in ‘eastern research’, Ostforschung, during the war, mapping out the presence of Jews and other ethnic groups within Poland, and therefore bore some responsibility for their appalling fate.
Academics sway with the wind, by and large. Some seek to protect their career, as perhaps he did. Some bury their head in the sand. Some are convinced believers – until a new fashion takes over about which they can be equally enthusiastic, and where they will find apparently like-minded and equally virtuous friends. But I am impressed by academics well to the left of me who are willing to say how much they hate the cultural fantasies of critical theory, and how willing they are to engage in real debate. Just look at the bibliography of essential reading issued by the decolonisation group at Cambridge University Library and you will see how little its members love debate – I could only identify one book that departed from the activist line, and it is possible it was included because its author has an African surname.
If that bibliography provides a criterion for judging the acceptability of what books contain, we are truly lost, all the more so if we are denounced in the reading list as ‘white males’ (or females) or if we are in some other sense beneficiaries of ‘privilege’. The sheer arrogance of the librarians at Cambridge is breathtaking. And this is only the tip of the iceberg; the same initiatives exist across British universities. But Cambridge contains not just a university library; as a copyright deposit library it is entitled to claim a copy of every book published in the United Kingdom, making it into a national library as well, with additional obligations such as the admission of members of the wider public.
How and why Cambridge University Library has permitted its staff to potentially become arbiters of what it is safe to read is not just a mystery – it is a betrayal of the sacred role of libraries as impartial conservators of knowledge, a role that goes back to the greatest library of the ancient world, in ancient Alexandria, with its hundreds of thousands of scrolls that attempted to draw together all human knowledge.
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