It began as a case of mild obsession about two decades ago, but the virus has spread rapidly across the globe. Nowhere has the impact of the virus been as severe as the United States, especially on college campuses.
No, no...we are not talking about the coronavirus; we are talking about the rapidly accelerating destruction of books in academic libraries, justified by myopic administrators by pointing to their digital daydreams. As the mounting pile of discarded books grows to Everest proportions, these digitally-addled deans continue to raise up the chimera of “digital humanities” to justify the slaughter, all while actual teaching faculty members continue to search for print venues to publish their work. History, literature, and philosophy scholars fully realize (even if the Information Scientists do not) that tenure committees are uninterested in blog citations, choosing instead to count a candidate’s actual publications. Selling the idea that a few posted scans and a scattering of web traffic statistics will be the future of academic work, Biblioposers perform a combination of medicine show theatrics with affected reverence for the academy to distract from their real agenda: the destruction of the codex.
