 "Photo: Rachael Herndon")
The public library hosted two high profile guests last Thursday.
Librarian of Congress James H. Billington and his older brother, David P. Billington, Princeton University engineering professor, spoke at the Kansas City Public Library Central Library.
The two discussed the degrading humanities in upper education in a forum guided by Library Director Crosby Kemper III.
While the brothers do entirely different things, their passions remain in humanities and they attribute much of that to their father.
While talking about their father, who loved literature, they remember him saying he measured his wealth by books.
"In terms of happiness and satisfaction and just a good life, generally, it wasn't economic status, it wasn't ethnic origin, or any of these things," David said. " ... It was whether or not you were brought up in the proximity of books."
While the Billington brothers were affected by their father, Kemper seemed to be affected by the brothers and their work, quoting their speeches and books many times.
"Talking about these ideas about engineering, in your book 'The Innovators,' you say that 'Finally, bridge design, and this is from the world's great expert on bridges, results not from scientific facts or social factors, but also from symbolic ideas. These ideas come from individual designers. The image of the bridge transcends all formulas.'"
David is working to tie engineering to other disciplines at Princeton by teaching a class about the history of engineering. He taught a mini class at the library.
David has written many books on the humanity of engineering and bringing the story back to history.
"Everyone in this globalized age, so-called, wants to have something in their story," David said.
He continued explaining the greatness of 20th Century engineering.
"Starting with the industrial revolution and going up to, more or less, the end of the 20th Century, just about every major innovation that the world has seen was done American. And I didn't do this for chauvinist reasons. It just turned out that way."
While David is bringing humanity back to the history of engineering, James believes education is losing its humanity.
James explained he disliked how departmentalized education has become, when it should be interdisciplinary for the sake of humanities.
"In universities today, you have so many departments and so many subdivisions and so many subdivisions of departments and so many methodological parts of these things that rarely [education] holds together," James said. "But there's something about the human nature that individuals can pull things together, and [David has] shown that the history of engineering is the history of people who pulled a lot of things together, kind of experimentally and really did something that spoke to and served people."
Since beginning his job as librarian of Congress in 1987, James has established the new National Digital Library.
James praised his predecessor, Dan Boorstin, a historian, as saying: "You know, you can get all the information you want from computers, but only if you eventually get back to books will you be able to ask the unimaginable question and accept the unwelcome answer."
The brothers both emphasized the need for humanities in education today and the importance of books not only in their lives, but in everyone's lives.
rherndon@unews.com
