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Cushing goes digital… and the Headmaster is compared to Hitler?
October 27, 2009 | 9:24 am
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By Steven Lyle Jordan
Cushing Academy headmaster Jim Tracy- does this look like a Nazi to you?
This USA Today article describes the trials of a Massachusettes academy that has decided to switch to a digital library. Students will be able to use laptops or one of the 65 Kindles the school will circulate to read texts.
Unfortunately, Boston Globe commenters and bloggers latched on the announcement and have been calling headmaster Jim Tracy a snob and a “book burner,” and actually comparing him to Hitler!
All very curious when you meet Tracy, a soft-spoken, painfully polite guy who’s a bit bewildered that so few people get it: His tiny school’s collection is growing from 20,000 books to millions.
“It was really to save libraries five, 10, 15 years down the road,” he says. “What the students are telling us is: ‘We’re not using the print books. You can keep giving them to us, but they’re just going to collect dust.’ So we’re saying, ‘Let’s be honest: Let’s give them the best electronic information available.’ “
It’s such a shame that so often, when tradition meets practicality, emotionalism can blind people to the reality of the situation.
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Comments:
At the Annual Meeting of the American Library Association, Rick Anderson, Associate Director for Scholarly Resources and Collections gave a fascinating presentation. At one point he stated (paraphrased) “I have no interest in trying to get our students to adopt a format they don’t want.” Read his white paper to get an idea of the academic world for which Dr. Tracy is preparing the students of Cushing Academy:
http://www.admin.utah.edu/asenate/whitepapers/scholars_and_libraries_in_a_radically_changed_publication_environment.pdf
At the Annual Meeting of the American Library Association in July 2009, Rick Anderson, Associate Director for Scholarly Resources and Collections gave a fascinating presentation. At one point he stated (paraphrased) “I have no interest in trying to get our students to adopt a format they don’t want.” Read his white paper to get an idea of the academic world for which Dr. Tracy is preparing the students of Cushing Academy:
http://www.admin.utah.edu/asenate/whitepapers/scholars_and_libraries_in_a_radically_changed_publication_environment.pdf
(whoops. 2nd near-duplicate post is the ‘right’ one.)
Don’t the Boston Globe commenters and bloggers realize that they have conceded the fight by comparing Mr. Tracy to Hitler?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law
When I was a college student, I would rather have had things on my computer, if I could get them that way. I do love the atmosphere the stacks create, but that’s just sentimentalism.
From NEWSWEEK’s Weston Kosova, for Steve to ponder:
“But now comes a new complaint about e-books that, I must admit, had
never occurred to me before: They are the equivalent of Nazis. In the
October issue of the Evergreen Review, novelist and poet Alan Kaufman
writes that the promoters of e-books are plotting to kill paper books
the way Hitler plotted to kill Jews. He goes on to say that─wait, you
know what? I can’t do justice to the sublime lunacy of this piece by
paraphrasing. Excerpts:
The book is fast becoming the despised Jew of our culture. Der Jude is
now Der Book. Hi-tech propogandists [sic] tell us that the book is a
tree-murdering, space-devouring, inferior form of technology; that
society would simply be better-off altogether if we euthanized it even
as we begin to carry around, like good little Aryans, whole libraries
in our pockets, downloaded on the Uber-Kindle.
… As to the bookstore, it is like the synagogue under Hitler: the
house of a doomed religion. And the paper book is its Torah and
gravestone: a thing to burn, or use to pave the road to internet
heaven.
At this point one might point out that no one is arguing that paper
books should be abolished. One might also note the irony of Kaufman’s
choice of forum, using a magazine Web site to rave against the evils
of reading on a screen. But one senses Kaufman does not have much of
an ear for irony.
Instead, let us return to the text for his rousing conclusion. The
spread of e-books is, he writes, “… a catastrophe of holocaustal
proportions. And its endgame is the disappearance of not just books
but of all things human.”
Excuse me… my eyes were rolling around in my head so much that I fell over.
Comparing the transferal of literature from one format to another, to the wholesale slaughter of human beings, is about the most ludicrous, soulless and outright pathetic argument there is. (I’m talking to you, Kaufman.) Anyone who believes it should turn in their Humanity card and go find their own bonfire to jump into. Period. End of pondering.
yes, steve, Kaufman’s piece is really an ugly and stupid piece of writing, i emailed him and told him so, and of course he did not reply.
Still, i am awaiting yr reply to me on YOUR use of Hiter — incorrectly too — in your headline and post. for some reason, my comments are not getting posted, but i emailed you direcet and paul and david too. where’s the recall?
Stevee, the reason i said earlier FOR STEVE TO PONDER, if YOU used the HITLER analogy also is poorly worded and dishonest way too. SEE MY POSTS and emails, friend.
jeez, guys, where are my comments?
then read it here
http://zippy1300.blogspot.com/2009/10/steve-jordan-gets-bit-too-worked-up.html
http://zippy1300.blogspot.com/2009/10/steve-jordan-gets-bit-too-worked-up.html
must be busy there today, couldn’t be censorship.
Steve, if i was editing this, I would change tyhe hedline to:
Cushing’s school library goes digital… and the headmaster (no
UPPERCASE on headmaster, Steve, “Headmaster” is wrong) is the talk of
the blogosphere, pro and con
USA TODAY: “After reading about the plan last month in the Boston
Globe, bloggers and commenters worldwide have called *headmaster* Jim
Tracy a snob, a spendthrift and a book burner
By Steve Jordan
Cushing Academy *headmaster* LOWERCASE Jim Tracy embroiled on digital
library brouhaha
This USA Today article describes the trials of a Massachusettes (sic)
SCHOOL that has decided to switch to a digital library. Students
will be able to use laptops or one of the 65 Kindles the school will
circulate to read texts.
Boston Globe commenters and bloggers latched on the announcement, both
pro and con, and SOME PEOPLE CALLED Headmaster (sic) LOWERCASE please
Jim Tracy a snob and a ”book burner,” WITH ONE PERSON actually
CALLING HIM A BOOKBURNER AND MAKING A COMPARISON TO THE THIRD REICH
Hey, Danny, some of us work!
I used the Hitler reference because, in the article I linked to, other detractors used it against Tracy, comparing him directly to Hitler. I see nothing dishonest or poorly worded in my use of the reference.
The USA Today article clearly suggests that bloggers (plural) connected Tracy to Hitler. Perhaps you should be speaking to the writer of USA Today for giving an impression that isn’t accurate…
Edit: Interestingly enough, I just did a search on the Boston Globe’s web site for one of the lines attributed to bloggers in the article, and it is not there. It’s a shame USA Today doesn’t provide its own sources to double-check…
Hi Steve, yes, I know some of us work. I wish I had a paying job myself. At the moment, I am 24/7 alert and awake with no boss distractions. Doesn’t work for everyone, but I love it. I accept your defense of your poorly-worded headline, even though you are dead wrong and too stubborn to admit it, but that’s okay, writers need to be stubborn, so I admire your stubborn-ness, but hey, at least fix the headline to make headmaster lowercase in the headline. You wouldn’t CAP teacher to Teacher, would you? or pastor to Pastor, would you, as a stand alone word in a headline or sentence? No. Headmaster should be lowercased. And for the record, nobody in the USA article or Globe article called Tracy a “Nazi” as you infer they did in your photo caption of him. You are playing the same race card as Alan Kaufman did in his appalling oped piece. The woman who was angry at Tracy, the headmaster at Cushing Academy is Massachusetts (no “e” after the two t’s, btw), was comparing the possible disappearance of her dearly beloved paper-bound-and-printed books to the bookburnes of Hitler’s regime. She was NOT saying Tracy was comparable to Hitler. You were not being responsible there, and I do hope you change your ways, sir. A writer has a responsibility to both his or her readers and to language itself, and maybe even to history.
And by the way, Steve, all this side, I admire your work and your posts here. And your good comments, too.
Just saying….
Danny, go get a job at USA Today, and teach them how to edit their articles. You might also teach them to provide some sources that others can track down and verify; otherwise, you can criticize them for taking a single Hitler comment and raising it simply to justify a sensationalist article.
For my role, I was providing source and context to a USA Today article, and in no way did my posting misrepresent what the article itself said, or intimated. Read the article again. You’ll note that the article did not specify how many commentators made the comparison to Nazis, but its use of the plural suggests that it was more than one. You’re also aware that “Hitler” and “book-burning” are pretty much considered elements of the “Nazi” zeitgeist, so I fail to see how my using the word underneath Tracy’s caption was wrong or unethical.
And when someone says, discussing another person’s actions, “Let Hitler stay dead,” I think most of us make the connection of a direct comparison between that person and Hitler, and by extension, to Nazis. Obviously USA Today did. So did I. I haven’t heard from anyone else who did not make that connection except you, Danny.
So, no, as I see it there’s nothing wrong, unethical or sensationalist about my flagging a USA Today article reporting on a headmaster’s actions, and his being compared to Hitler (or Nazis in general) by an unspecified number of bloggers and commentators.
The point of my flagging the article was to make our readers aware of the resistance that authorities are getting when trying to modernize their libraries to digital systems, said resistance often resorting to the absolute worst kind of name-calling and accusations. Imagine being seriously compared to one of the most heinous mass-murders of human history–by even a single person–because you put some computers in your library and more than quintupled its effective book capacity! The very notion is appalling. But as this (and the Kaufman essay) demonstrate, it is happening every day, and coming from supposedly intelligent and learned people, who also have the ear of the public.
This indicates a disconnection from the point and value of e-books that obviously needs to be addressed… a significant public perception that e-books are somehow EVIL, and must be stopped before all of humanity is doomed by it.
So, instead of debating editing points, we should be discussing how this perception could even be the case, and what we should be doing about it.
Good points, Steve, and I stand corrected.
Cheers,
Danny
…but headmaster in the headline should still be lowercased, no? Screen writers should also care about grammar and punctuation and typos and what not, no?
[Headmaster is never capitalized, except at the beginning of a sentence, like here. In all other cases, it is headmaster Steve Jordan, headmaster Danny Bloom, headmaster Jim Tracy -- even in the headline.]