A Well-Read Woman by Kate Stewart

Author:Kate Stewart [Stewart, Kate]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography, History, War
ISBN: 9781503904156
Google: JX7FugEACAAJ
Amazon: 1503904148
Barnesnoble: 1503904148
Goodreads: 41574609
Publisher: Little A
Published: 2019-04-30T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 23

The person deciding Ruth’s fate concerning her admission to library school was J. Periam Danton, known as Perry, the chair of Berkeley’s School of Librarianship. The son of two American German teachers, Danton had grown up in China. Michael Buckland wrote in his introduction to Danton’s oral history at the University of California Archives, “His undergraduate experience was also highly untypical because he accepted an invitation to join his father in Leipzig for the academic year 1925–26 . . . Leipzig was still in the twilight of its greatness, not yet undermined by Nazism and by the devastation of the Second World War . . . To spend a year in Leipzig was, predictably, a powerful experience. German and Austrian scholarship and librarianship became central to his interests.”1 If he indeed read Ruth’s admissions essay, perhaps her opening paragraph would have sparked an interest in her. Whether they ever knew about each other’s backgrounds in Leipzig remains a speculation.

Danton had earned his undergraduate degree in librarianship at Columbia University and his PhD in library science at the University of Chicago. With experience at the New York Public Library, the University of Chicago Library, the Colby College Library, and the Temple University Library, he was recruited as dean of Berkeley’s School of Librarianship in 1946. His ambitions were to take charge of a small and quasi-professional program with only three professors (including himself) and develop it into a much bigger school that would include a rigorous master’s degree and a PhD program.2

In 1954 Danton laid out his plans for the program in an article in California Libraries. He noted the school was not a place for future librarians to learn the lower-level tasks often delegated to technicians or assistants, a pedagogy he described as akin to teaching doctors how to empty bedpans. He revealed his frustration with library schools’ second-class status:

A school of the kind we are describing is not a refuge for the individual who has been patently unsuccessful elsewhere—since, in general, the attributes of success have a certain commonness—for the person who seeks escape from the maddening [sic] crowd, for those with “difficult” personalities (you know the kind: “Of course, he hasn’t the qualities to make a good teacher but I think he’d be a fine librarian.”) or for those whose intellectual ability or what you will, is sub-normal.3

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