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Jamus' mum warned him not to sit on books. 
As a child, my mother routinely warned me never to sit on books. The logic, according to her, was that books were an embodiment of knowledge. To sit on them would be to disrespect knowledge itself, an affront to the value and wisdom they carried. Till today, I still won’t sit on a book, or even to treat it carelessly.
As I’ve shared before, both my wife and I make our living through the written and spoken word. For us stout-hearted bibliophiles, we always treat books with a certain degree of reverence. So it was somewhat distressing for us to hear about how a large number of books—previously housed at the Yale-NUS Library—had been unceremoniously discarded on a sidewalk, before they would then be shredded by a recycling service.
One is naturally tempted to interpret the event as symbolic of the clinical manner by which the school, itself, was closed down. Regardless, it still seems, at the very least, like a lost opportunity. Many of the books were, reportedly, in excellent condition, and with some advanced planning and consultation (perhaps with the student body or wider faculty), the books could have found an alternative home, in another library, or even on the bookshelves of alumni. Yet, reportedly, passing students who wanted to take books were stopped from doing so, in the name of a technicality (the books still had RFID tags, although that strikes me as a surmountable problem).
You may say that books are just books; without reading them, they are just ink printed on dead trees. Yet there is something magical about a simple tome. Steve Levitt and Stephen Dubner famously described, in the book Freakonomics, how the mere presence of books is associated with a child’s success at school (more than even reading to them), and subsequent studies have corroborated the basic point about scholarly culture and adult literacy and numeracy outcomes (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2018.10.003).
More generally, the whole sorry episode strikes me as yet another instance of how top-down decisions, made without widespread consultation with diverse stakeholders, can lead to undesirable outcomes. That’s why advanced societies do best when they embrace the messiness and uncertainty of democratic processes, because the result, while still unlikely to satisfy everybody, may at least avert the most egregious missteps.
You may read more about the incident here:
https://www.straitstimes.com/.../hundreds-of-books..., or sign the petition YNC alums have set up: https://chng.it/Prc2CZ8pVB.
STRAITSTIMES.COM
Hundreds of Yale-NUS books discarded, sparking concerns among alumni over waste and loss
The incident comes after the final weeks of Yale-NUS College’s existence. Read more at straitstimes.com. Read more at straitstimes.com.
Jamus Lim
2d ·As a child, my mother routinely warned me never to sit on books. The logic, according to her, was that books were an embodiment of knowledge. To sit on them would be to disrespect knowledge itself, an affront to the value and wisdom they carried. Till today, I still won’t sit on a book, or even to treat it carelessly.
As I’ve shared before, both my wife and I make our living through the written and spoken word. For us stout-hearted bibliophiles, we always treat books with a certain degree of reverence. So it was somewhat distressing for us to hear about how a large number of books—previously housed at the Yale-NUS Library—had been unceremoniously discarded on a sidewalk, before they would then be shredded by a recycling service.
One is naturally tempted to interpret the event as symbolic of the clinical manner by which the school, itself, was closed down. Regardless, it still seems, at the very least, like a lost opportunity. Many of the books were, reportedly, in excellent condition, and with some advanced planning and consultation (perhaps with the student body or wider faculty), the books could have found an alternative home, in another library, or even on the bookshelves of alumni. Yet, reportedly, passing students who wanted to take books were stopped from doing so, in the name of a technicality (the books still had RFID tags, although that strikes me as a surmountable problem).
You may say that books are just books; without reading them, they are just ink printed on dead trees. Yet there is something magical about a simple tome. Steve Levitt and Stephen Dubner famously described, in the book Freakonomics, how the mere presence of books is associated with a child’s success at school (more than even reading to them), and subsequent studies have corroborated the basic point about scholarly culture and adult literacy and numeracy outcomes (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2018.10.003).
More generally, the whole sorry episode strikes me as yet another instance of how top-down decisions, made without widespread consultation with diverse stakeholders, can lead to undesirable outcomes. That’s why advanced societies do best when they embrace the messiness and uncertainty of democratic processes, because the result, while still unlikely to satisfy everybody, may at least avert the most egregious missteps.
You may read more about the incident here:
https://www.straitstimes.com/.../hundreds-of-books..., or sign the petition YNC alums have set up: https://chng.it/Prc2CZ8pVB.
STRAITSTIMES.COM
Hundreds of Yale-NUS books discarded, sparking concerns among alumni over waste and loss
The incident comes after the final weeks of Yale-NUS College’s existence. Read more at straitstimes.com. Read more at straitstimes.com.
