The discussions about the issues of censorship, book banning, and freedom reminded me of a presentation that the late Father Dr. Timothy S. Healy gave at the 1990 Annual Conference of the New York Library Association. His keynote speech was titled: "Libraries in Service to Democracy" and he devoted a major portion of this discourse to the word "freedom," its meaning, and its power in reference to All segments of society. The freedom to read being an essential element in building a democratic society. I am providing a copy of that speech for those who wish to read it. I believe that Dr. Healy's speech certainly is as relevant today as it was when he gave it and we were dealing with censorship issues at that time as well.
LIBRARIES IN SERVICE TO DEMOCRACY
By Dr. Timothy S. Healy, President, The New York Public Library
Keynote Address
New York Library Association Centennial Conference
Rochester, New York, October 11, 1990
Libraries, like universities, exist to serve the societies that support them. All of us, thus, are engaged in what modern terminology calls a "service industry." In a democracy, however, the simple word "service" has another dimension to it. In any republic, knowledge and understanding are an absolute need for citizens as voters, and so the service rendered by libraries is as necessary as that of the press, the colleges or the schools. In less political and more philosophical terms, we exist to serve freedom.
Let me first of all give a quick and dirty definition of The New York Public Library. It is public only in the old Roman sense, that it exists for the people, is open to all the people, and has disposed itself across the landscape to make that openness a geographic reality. In every other aspect it is private. It is governed by a self-perpetuating Board not appointed or approved by any public or political authority. The heart of its being, its great research collections, are supported only by private dollars, in the form of endowment, gifts, and what small revenue The Library can itself engender.
The full corporate title identifies it as The Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, a potent combination of two wealthy collectors and one able politician. The Library has three great central collections, the comprehensive one at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, a research collection in the performing arts located at Lincoln Center, and the Schomburg Center for Black Culture in the middle of Harlem. All of these are private, and except for the upkeep of their buildings, privately funded. In addition, The Library has 82 branches spread throughout the boroughs of Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island all run under contract with the City.
One further short paragraph in defining my turf. The Library has some 9 million volumes in its central collections and another 5 in its circulating collections. The total number of objects and artifacts (not strictly defined as books) is over 60 million. It subscribes to 169,000 periodicals. It is the only great Library in the United States to have a branch system reaching out to its City, and the only one to lack either a special clientele (like The Library of Congress), or an arbitrarily limited one (like Harvard and other university libraries).
The entire enterprise is a service industry, and I want to talk now about that aspect of our being. I will use The New York Public Library as the base of my remarks, but I am really talking about all libraries, large and small. We serve in three ways. First, we serve through great collections in an enormous variety of subjects and some 3,000 languages and dialects. Secondly, we serve by each day's work; we answer questions, we follow up inquiries, we give aid to scholars and undergrads, to commercial researchers and poets, to everyone who asks. Finally, and in a republic this service is the most important, we serve by our very being.
The service of research collections is fairly obvious. They provide information for immediate use, they buttress the longer reach of scholarship, and experience, not an a priori, tells us that we are of enormous use to novelists, playwrights, essayists, and poets. As always in New York things are also complicated. So I should add one further service, our labor to remake the American imagination by integrating into it the Black experience of the United States. We do that most specifically at the Schomburg Center, but the very existence of such a center with its several million items influences the rest of the system and the City.
When it comes to the direct service of the citizens of the City, we are really as multiplex as we are in research. We put together the only complete book, in both English and Spanish, of all the services, both public and private, available to citizens of the City. But most of this direct service is personal, answering questions, enabling research, helping readers through bibliographies. We respond to over 5 million inquiries in person or by telephone every year, and our people are more responsible for what little organization many American Ph.D. theses have than anyone is prepared to credit. In addition, we answer readers' puzzlements, sacred and profane, earth-shattering and trivial. There are no written languages that are not available to our readers, and we are the nation's premier provider of bibliographies for children, pre-literate, literate, and teenaged.
Our final and most important service we share with all free public libraries everywhere. In some ways that service is clearly obvious. In parts of the City that speak to their inhabitants of nothing more clearly than danger, squalor, and despair our branches, with their ordered ranks of books and helpful people, speak of safety, of cleanliness and decency, and above all of hope. In the most unlikely places on the earth, some of the toughest parts of a very touch city indeed, we mount little Acropolises that in a quiet way are shining glories on the landscape. A further condition needs to be understood. The service of our being is for free. Nobody pays to come to us, nobody pays to question us, nobody pays to borrow our books, unless they are dilatory in returning them. Our open doors, our free service, and the generosity of our people all teach one thing by themselves, and that thing is freedom.
I'm quite deliberately picking the tough Anglo-Saxon word with its suggestive suffix rather than the more abstract and slippery Latin-French concept which English transliterates into the word "Liberty." In doing that I am paying honor to the genius of the language which remains blessedly Anglo-Saxon. I also want to hold on to the three classic meanings of that suffix "dom." Thus when I speak of freedom, I am speaking of a domain, a kingdom into which free entrance is granted. I am also speaking of a state of being, a gift of person that anyone can claim. Finally, following the dictionary's order, I mean the collective world of all who share that gift and are citizens of that domain. Let us look for a minute at some of the implications of the word "freedom" and how we teach it.
Libraries begin their work with children, and it is appropriate to start our reflections on freedom with a child's definition. That is what the Latins would call "freedom from" or, in perhaps more mature terms, freedom as escape. I have already mentioned the escape from danger, squalor, and despair which a library by its very being offers. But we offer something deeper. The first freedom reading grants is freedom from ignorance. Knowing has been acknowledged as a human good ever since Aristotle and the Book of Genesis. Remember that the serpent when he talked to Eve promised, "You will know God," and that knowledge is a claim to quality. In great cities, probably the greatest escape we can provide is escape from prejudice, racism, and slavery to slogans. If one can slip the bonds of space and time and thus enter a world that is neither immediate nor local, one has a fair start of understanding difference and accepting it.
It is hard for all of us to stop and realize how savage is the pressure upon American citizens created by the media's focus on immediacy. Its strident accents, its pretended breathlessness, its pressure on the passing moment are all quite literally mind-boggling. The first gift libraries offer readers is escape from immediacy, into the past, or into the future, but escape nonetheless. Think of how far a good book can transport you from the city streets, how small a knowledge of history it takes to make one stand up and yell at the talking head of a pundit on a screen, "hold on a minute," how very little poetry one must read in order to approach grief with respect rather than titillation, to understand that anger, in individuals or in mobs, is more totally destructive of those who bear it than of those upon whom it bears. The child's definition of freedom as escape from limitation may be a naïve and simple one, but it is one much needed in the great cities of the western world.
There is, of course, another side to this freedom and that is empowerment. A library invites the mind of teenager or adult to spread out, to follow bypaths and hidden lanes, to yield with a grace to temptation, above all to delve into complexity and ambiguity, the hallmarks of any mature mind. Historical and topical richness leads any young mind (and any old one for that matter) to understand that knowledge is only deep if it is integrated and thus to search out the hooks on every bit of lore that tie it to so many other bits of lore. Of course, one can lose the motive of action in this, but no philosopher has ever claimed that the mind can guarantee either will or work, only that it should inform, structure, and guide them.
A further empowerment that all good liberal arts colleges give, and that libraries reinforce and deepen is the rooted intellectual habit of questioning assumptions. This questioning is essential for a working democracy. Our bland politics, couched in sound bytes, and chary of even the surface of "issues," shy away from probing assumptions like a fractious child from spinach. The United States is thick with think tanks, many of them spawned by what General Eisenhower called the "military industrial complex." Their business in life is to grab hold of one or another set of assumptions and ride them hard across the intellectual landscape. It was a fine poet who asked, "You use the snaffle and the bit, but where's the bloody horse," without realizing that in the late 20th century, with many of the artifacts of governmental logic (at times as much an oxymoron as military music), he was asking a question of deep pitch and moment.
Behind freedom as empowerment lies something more settled and less tied to immediacy than politics or strategy. Libraries offer to those who take them seriously a way of being, and the way of contemplation. Here again we can go back to Aristotle, or for that matter Thomas Aquinas, for whom contemplation is the only act of man that will begin in time and fill eternity. Alexander's tutor strove to teach his charge that the happiest activity of man is the fullest use of his highest faculties upon their worthiest objects. The freedom of empowerment that any gathering of learning and wisdom offers sets the stage, provides the raw materials, does everything but write the script for the contemplative mind at its thoughtful best.
The final freedom of which I spoke is freedom of possession, the freedom we mean when we offer someone the "freedom of the city." Here, too, libraries have a major role to play, perhaps their most important. All civilizations are essentially age long and unbroken, although often interrupted, conversations. I am struck again and again as I grow older by one such conversation that takes up so large a part of American history, the endless chatter between James Madison and Alexander Hamilton on one side and Thomas Jefferson on the other. Every succeeding Supreme Court and Congress has echoed them, particularly men with the intelligence of William Brennan or, to bow to the other side, Antonin Scalia. America needs its young to enter into the company of such free men and women, to understand what they said and what they meant, to learn how precious their words were and are, and to resolve, each one for him or herself, that this conversation shall not cease.
This American conversation is really two voices. On one side is the cool rational analysis of James Madison, who could translate the ancient Christian and Jewish concept of original sin into a subtle "balance of power" so that the republic might shake and teeter but would not topple. On the other side, sharper, more demanding, more violent, is the voice of Jefferson's Declaration of Independence. Declaration and Constitution establish for us the two poles of a dialogue which has held together and divided the nation ever since its founding. On at least one occasion the poles crossed and dialogue turned to war, as North and South tore at each other's vitals. More recently we have been more Jeffersonian, although the Virginia slave owner in him would probably not have sympathized with the slogans or responded to the deep religious thrusts of the civil rights movement. It is, however, his savage stress on the dignity of the individual that lies behind those who shout in the darkness as well as the wise men who try to answer them.
I am personally most comfortable in discussing freedom in terms of theology. It is so easy for the churches when they look to exercise an honest leadership to settle for only one-half of what was promised as "the image and likeness of God," human understanding. It is not popular theology these days to follow a different vision that leans on the other half, freedom, with at least equal stress. Such tensions do not necessarily imply battle, although now they do. Both sides really yearn for an impossible and ideal union. If in this republic we could ever truly tie human freedom and intelligence together, we would be fair candidates for what the serpent promised Eve, the knowledge of God.
There is still another way that freedom as possession can be seen. It is the lover's freedom, structured by commitment, articulated by time and joy and pain, promising infinity. To revert again to the theological reading of that same statement, it is what devout Christians have meant for two millennia when they talked of the beatific vision. Freedom of possession is all we can ask of God and, rather more strikingly, all he ever promised us.
In everything I have said so far I may be revealing the bias of my own classical formation and my years of teaching literature in undergraduate colleges. Despite that, I do not feel that trying to lead a great library is exactly the same thing as trying to lead a college or university. As a matter of fact, without libraries, college and university mean very little, and their leadership is likely to be shrewdly unproductive. Where do I find the differences?
There are so many it's hard to know where to start. First of all, the college breaks its knowledge into tiny segments, bound by time and limited by faculty consciousness of turf. The classroom can seldom offer more than skeleton and nerve, a few poems, a few scenes of a play, one or two chapters of a novel, a tiny moment in a long history, one central vision of a philosopher or a theologian. A library has no such limitations. It can summon up the rich complement of flesh, until our startled eyes see the fullness of beauty. A library's promise is wholeness, a rather more satisfactory word than either "spread" or "integration." In addition, a library honors autonomy far more than any college or university can afford to. The stimulation which leads one to read may initially come from outside, but ultimately learning has to do with curiosity, with interest, with insight, and all these are self-stimulated.
Libraries don't lend themselves to prepping for examinations, except in the most superficial way, and this they add another element of respect for autonomy because the pace of learning, its progress, its slow climb are all determined by the self. Finally, and perhaps, richest of all, at least for those who have a clear memory of what it was like to be a doctoral student, a library never imposes the humiliation of exams or grades. It is ultimately the self that has to make the judgment, "I have read enough" or the even tougher judgment, "I now know what I'm reading." There is to this a kind of fierce affirmation of autonomy. I remember the evening when I posed a question to my mentor at Oxford (one of the finest scholars I ever have or ever will know), and she turned to me with a slow smile and said, "You tell me. You know more about it than I do." That passing remark was the most terrifying single statement made to me in three long years in the toils of grace that Oxford weaves so skillfully around its pupils. It also gave me a great leap of pride, deeply conditioned by my absolute distrust of it and of myself.
There is one terrain on which college and library work together, where it is difficult to separate on strand from another, where we ought really to take them, good liberal arts college and rich library, as a continuum. Many years ago I sat in an excellent classical library swotting up Euripides' Medea, not for an examination but because I wanted to read it. I had finished digging in the dictionary, and I was trying to put the play together in my mind. Suddenly in the late winter afternoon quite marvelously I was transported eastward in space and backward in time. I could hear the flute and the little drum, could feel the warmth of the stone under my legs and of the sun on my back, and for one brief moment was not reading the play but hearing and seeing it, not on the shores of the chill Hudson, but on a stony hill that faced the wine dark Aegean. I have been too busy most of my life often to touch such highs of contemplation, but that afternoon I did. There have been a few other such moments of "intersection of the timeless with time" in a lifetime of poking at great literature. I have always found it interesting that most of the contemplative moments that paid off for me were in a library, not a lecture hall.
Every detail of the palatial beaux-arts building at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street was planned by the architects. Carrère and Hastings. Obviously, they designed the massive lions in front of the building, but they also designed the tables and chairs, the doorknobs, and every bit of interior decoration. Over the mantelpiece in the Trustees Room they hung a replica of the cornerstone that says a few words about the building itself but then defines it as "for the free use of all the people." At its simplest that means that we can't (and we don't) charge admission. I want to read the word "free" proleptically, as a challenge not a description. The dream of the Library, mine too now that I've grown enough in knowledge to share it, is that it can, indeed, in time, make a people free.