country mired in some of the worst human rights abuses. Nothing in Symons' description of her proposed trip indicates even any awareness of the state of intellectual and civil rights in Turkey, much less any plans to take the opportunity to meet with human rights supporters, or to establish relations with those who struggle against a repressive political regime.
GARLIC, VODKA, AND THE POLITICS OF GENDER:
Anti-intellectualism in American Librarianship
These will certainly not be the last controversial issues debated within ALA. If ALA members, officers, staff and divisions are truly committed to a world free of fear and want, one characterized by commitment to intellectual freedom and human equality, then we must not be afraid to support those beliefs in word and deed - consistently. We must ally ourselves with others who share those beliefs, and we must not let self-interest, political expediency or economic pressures provide excuses to restrain the expression of views that seek to put into practice our profession's highest values.
By Michael Winter
Elaine Harger
T
he topic may seem surprising, because librarians are so obviously intellectual, or at least bookish, athough they have been called, perhaps unfairly, enemies of books (Adams 1937). They are, to use Seymour Martin Lipset's nice neutral phrase, culture distributors (Lipset 1981: 333). But as Richard Hofstadter pointed out in his famous 1963 book, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, intellectuals sometimes show a fundamental hostility to the life of the mind, even though it is allegedly more common in people of action. No one is startled when executives denounce the study of history as a waste of time, or when politicians ridicule the efforts of scholars to understand human behavior (Shaffer 1977). Nonetheless, intellectuals occasionally do this too, and sometimes writers duke it out in publishers' offices. Indeed, it may be one of the favorite occupations of the intellectual classes to show occasionally their anti-intellectualism as a kind of badge of authenticity to the gatekeepers of mass culture. Recently David Bromwich (1996), has suggested that part of the heritage of McCarthyism - a favorite subject of Hofstadter's also - is the internalization of this hostility (see also Woolf 1964). Hofstadter's discussion, however, has a broader sweep. He is concerned with the recurrent cycles of anti-intellectualism that pervade American life, and documents the trend in four basic fields: religion, politics, business, and education. It is, in some periods, much more prevalent than in others (for example, the Ages of Jackson, Harding, Nixon, and Reagan, as opposed to the Ages of Jefferson, 'Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy). And while it may
Progressive Librarian #14
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Progressive Librarian #14
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