The Last of the Big-Time Spenders
So you thought libraries were dull? The University of Texas has spent millions stalking the globe, buying everything from the first photograph to Houdini’s magic gear, all to get one of the world’s most impressive collections—and itself in trouble.
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Emboldened by success, Ransom moved into the London book auctions with a suddenness that set the market on its collective ear and enraged many traditionalists. In June 1960 alone Texas bought half the total value of a major sale at Sotheby’s, including every item relating to T. E. Lawrence, and at a charity sale for the London Library acquired the majority of the offerings, including the manuscript of Forster’s A Passage to India. At £6500 (approximately $18,000 in those days), the price paid was nearly three times the English record for a modern manuscript, much less one by a living author. In November 1960 and again in the following May, Texas bought every item it bid for, and at sales of modern literature it bid for nearly everything. Edith Sitwell’s papers were secured for almost £18,000 and Graham Greene’s for £14,500 at charity sales. An even larger quantity was bought privately, often directly from the author: C. P. Snow, A. A. Milne, Robert Graves, and Stephen Spender. Consternation, as one might imagine with Ransom’s agents tossing around sums unheard of previously and with no seeming limit to either their appetites or their pocketbooks, ran high in Great Britain and in France, where the Bibliothèque Nationale had to step in to prevent the removal of a Proust collection Texas tried to buy from the author’s niece. As Anthony Hobson notes, the British Museum suddenly was willing to pay £5000 for the manuscript of Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway, and the Arts Council set up a fund to acquire materials from living writers, a thing never before done there.
Like Harry Ransom, Warren Roberts is a Texas anglophile of a kind they don’t hardly make anymore. His office on the third floor of the HRC resembles the study of a bookish Church of England vicar, tastefully furnished in a slightly fussy way, with dark furniture and leatherbound volumes on handsome wood shelves, the narrow windows admitting little of the dazzling Texas sunshine outside and the fluorescent lights overhead left off in favor of green-shaded brass desk lamps. Just returned from six months in England, where he is supervising a group of scholars preparing a multivolume edition of D. H. Lawrence’s letters, Roberts is uncomfortable at being asked about the process he once described in print as “cultural privateering” and too polite by far to defend it by pointing out the obvious: art follows empire, and has since long before Alexander the Great began exporting exotic artifacts and learned slaves from Persia and Egypt to bring to his Macedonian countrymen. If Texans with big bankrolls are bearing away an irreplaceable part of England’s modern literary heritage, then the process is at the very least much prettier than that country’s systematic picking clean of large parts of Asia and Africa in the two centuries preceding.
Like the auction price of other forms of art, the cost of buying rare books and manuscripts is less a measure of their intrinsic worth to anyone using them than of what the market will bring. Fashion and speculative fevers regulate the book market quite as much as they do the trading of hog-belly futures or building lots. But not all costly items are of value to humanistic scholars. The first London edition of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, for example, dated 1726, can bring as much as $600 on today’s retail market. As anything but a curio, however, it has little use. Swift complained bitterly after publication that some important parts of his manuscript had been tampered with and politically controversial passages blotted out. He made sure of corrections and added prefatory material in later editions. Scholars have long since agreed that as a guide to what Swift really meant to say, the first edition is the worst possible text to use. Those are the kinds of questions, considered in great detail, that a library trying to make judicious use of its resources needs to ask in evaluating a purchase. Among other things, Ransom’s critics on the UT faculty insisted this was not being done.
From their perspective, there is no doubt that those critics had a point. In 1969, the faculty’s standing committee on the library reported to the president that Texas, the second most richly endowed university in the United States, ranked thirty-seventh in the amount it spent on buying books for the General Libraries. In 1970 it fell to fiftieth. For a university almost compulsive in its ambitions to be of the “first class,” the General Libraries’ acquisitions budget of $230,000 in 1969 was wholly, almost laughably, inadequate. Harvard, which seems to be the institution Texans seem most determined to compare to their state university, and which is the only one in the country with a larger endowment, was spending $1.7 million for the same purpose. Michigan and Berkeley, which make a good deal more sense as competitors, spent $1.4 million and $1.5 million respectively at the same time. G. Karl Galinsky, the classics department chairman, who probably spends his spare time shouting at the wind, had the temerity then to compare that small sum with the $13 million being used to expand the football stadium from 65,000 to 81,000 seats.
Bill Holman believes that such criticisms were shortsighted and petty. “Why tear down one great institution,” he asks, “to build another one? Texas has the money. If you can go to the Regents and make the case for your library, they will build it. The policy-making people on the Board are by and large concrete-minded. If you can show them a tangible achievement, like a library or a medical center, they will do it.” Recent history, moreover, seems to bear Holman out. In the last five years under Head Librarian Merle Boylan, now departed to the University of Washington, the books and materials budget of the General Libraries on the Austin campus has increased to $2 million out of a total budget of $5.6 million. By way of comparison, the HRC budget this past year allocated $600,000 for acquisitions out of a total of $1.14 million. The problem, Holman insists, was weak leadership in the General Libraries all along. There never was a necessary conflict, he says, between the HRC and the other libraries on campus, which ought from the start to have been seen as allies.
Unfortunately, however, the HRC had first to become a pawn in the symbolic power struggle that has made the university and the state look unnecessarily silly to the rest of the academic world so many times in the last twenty years. It got caught between the business-oriented Regents and those abstractly ambitious faculty and administration members who seek to make every serious difference of opinion into a contest between darkness and light, crocodile morality and selfless virtue. By deluding themselves that they have no interests as a class beyond the common good of all, and by easy access to that most vociferous element of the student body which can usually be mobilized to act upon the same assumption, faculty members all over the country often achieve an effect upon public debate that is out of proportion to the cogency of their point of view.
To put it bluntly, faculty attacks upon the HRC and Ransom’s policies in building it had less to do with the specifics of the case than with wounded dignity and with power. One handy way the Texas faculty has always had of seeking power is to pretend, even among themselves, that academics in other parts of the country are accustomed to having a lot more of it than they do here, and that the UT Regents’ failure to consult the faculty in a detailed way before making fundamental decisions about future institutional goals and how to allocate funds, whether for football stadiums or libraries, prevents the place from becoming, in that troublesome phrase, “a university of the first class.” In fact such consultation as does take place, whether one is talking about Penn State or Harvard, is almost entirely ceremonial. The large size and complexity of an institution like the University of Texas almost requires that it be run at the highest levels more like a corporation than an academic department. The concept of faculty self-government has limited application in a time when a Renaissance man on a university faculty is as rare as a physics major on the Longhorn’s defensive line. Most faculty members simply do not understand the needs of other programs and disciplines and are prevented much of the time by jealousy and self-interest from learning about them. Faculty deliberative bodies often find themselves incapable of coming to agreement without astonishing delays on the most basic issues that are indisputably theirs to decide: academic requirements, grading policy, hiring and retention of colleagues, etc. (One could argue that administrative infringement in tenure decisions, the most problematic issue dividing many campuses, has generally resulted from the near incapacity of most academic departments to fire anybody at all unless forced to do so by outside pressures.) In truth academics are very well served by the current setup, since corporate-style governance has allowed, in fact encouraged, vast growth, departmental specialization, huge research funds, high salaries, and a hierarchical world view that permits faculty at places like UT to pass on most of the basic teaching work to low-paid graduate students.
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