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COLUMBIA COLLEGE TODAY
This article was first published in June for “Still Life,” a series of New
York Times articles in which Times writers sketched their favorite
summer images.
The heat comes quickly in the summer. By early June,
working at home with no air-conditioning, I have no
concentration. Everything feels close and impolite
and loud.
So I go to Butler Library, on the southern end of
Columbia’s campus in Morningside Heights. What began as a diversion
has become a self-preserving summer thing: not just Butler,
but the Butler stacks, the stillness capital of my imagination.
My job as a music critic depends on listening in crowds and
writing in solitude. It also involves gathering facts and context,
Ben Ratliff ’90 finds sanctuary inside the stacks at Butler Library.
PHOTO: DANIEL PORTALATIN PHOTOGRAPHY
of which there is exponentially more every day. I think by writing,
and I write on a computer; the computer also contains the
Internet, which manufactures express-service context as well as
overstatement, sociopathy and lameness. In my hot office I was
starting to look at it abstractly, as a hot thing blowing exhaust.
I needed to renegotiate my relationship with space and sound
and information.
Butler is a 1930s neo-Classical hulk. At the front, above 14 columns,
runs a list of writers and thinkers; the last is Vergil, and I
like that someone long ago took a stand and chose to spell it in
the Anglicization closer to his real name, not the more common
“Virgil.” It announces: nonsense not spoken here.
In the late ’80s, I’d been there a lot, studying and working as a
A l u m n i C o r n e r
Butler Stacks Offer a World Apart
B y Ben Rat l i f f ’90
summer employee. When I turned up at the Library Information
office last year, there was much clucking about how I’d graduated
so very long ago that they needed a whole other database
to find my information. But that’s cool: I am from another time.
Pre-air-conditioning.
I had come to work but also to tune myself up. So I split the
day. Some for my bosses, some for me. After I met my deadline,
writing in the reference room, I walked behind the main desk into
the stacks. The Columbia library system owns over 10 million
volumes; 1.5 million, humanities and history, live here. I moved
around for a few hours in the stillness, looking things up, standing
up or crouching the whole time, purely and almost dopily happy.
I’d forgotten. The Butler stacks are in a different sensory category,
starting from the threshold: If you’re tall, you bow your
head as you pass through the low door
frame. They form an enclosed rectangular
prism at the center of Butler — no
windows, a bit cooler than the rest of the
building. Two or three levels of the inner
stacks can correspond to one floor of the
outer library. All this reinforces the feeling
that the stacks are something special:
a separate province or a vital inner organ.
Inside there is the deep quiet of protection
and near-abandonment. You hear the
hum of the lights, turned on as needed;
that’s it. There’s a phone to make outgoing
calls on the fifth floor. To me the stacks
are the most sacred space in the library,
yet here nobody’s telling you not to talk.
You’re on your own. It’s a situation for
adults.
Unlike the stacks at some other university
libraries, Butler’s were not built
for public consumption. They opened to
patrons gradually, much later; originally,
Butler had a call desk, where you’d
put in your requests and wait for your
numbers to come up.
“That’s why they’re not pretty stacks,” said Karen Green, Butler’s
librarian for ancient and medieval history and for religion and
graphic novels. She said it with empathy. Both she and I know that
they are very beautiful.
I spent a few weeks there in the worst of last June and July,
grazing around, letting the shelves make the connections for me,
writing down notes for a book whose thesis grew obscure and finally
implausible: I was looking up works on plague, fire and the
Egyptian desert fathers. I learned well, but I felt even better. I took
in great amounts of information without ever becoming fried or
irritable. All that organization and nobody around — it seemed
like trespassing in the history of Western learning, with no fear of
(Continued on page 103)
So You Think You Know
Your Former Deans?
With the recent naming of James J. Valentini as Dean of the College,
we thought this would be an opportune time to test your
familiarity with some of the people who have held that office.
1. Which Dean of the College (hint: he was a mathematician) served
longer than any other?
2. How many deans has Columbia College had?
3. Which dean, who once described himself as “a good dirt farmer
who never should have left Saratoga County,” is the only one to
have a campus building named after him?
4. Which dean, who now teaches as the Brander Matthews Professor
of Dramatic Literature, has a campus theatre named after him?
5. Who was the first Dean of the College?
6. True or False: A majority of the College’s deans graduated from
Columbia College.
7. What is the street address of Hamilton Hall, where the Office of
the Dean is located?
8. What dean argued Brown v. Board of Education, the case that
declared “separate but equal” unconstitutional, before the Supreme
Court in 1954, and co-authored the cookbook Dean Cuisine?
9. Which dean, who later became president of Mount Holyoke
College, recounted the “nightmarish experience of witnessing,
of experiencing, what can properly be described as the
disintegration of a great university” in his book Reflections
on the Columbia Disorders of 1968?
10. Which dean became president of Amherst College and authored
the novel Rules for Old Men Waiting, which won the McKitterick
Prize in 2006?
Bonus: Which dean is the founder and director of the Center for the
Study of Science and Religion at Columbia?
PHOTO: DANIELLA ZALCMAN ’09
Answers on page 103.
FALL 2012
104