the feminist librarian reads

Colleges are, and always have been, bureaucracies and concentrators of labor. The life of the mind, at least within the academy, requires a large workforce of support staff and a significant physical plant. Being interested in ideas does not remove a scholar from the world; being in and of the world does not empty a student’s mind of ideas. The “life of the mind” is an industry with gatekeepers, arbiters, salaries, and benefits. That doesn’t cheapen ideas, it is their material reality.