In Elite Library Archives, a Dispute Over a Trove

Authors and intellectuals spend lifetimes trying to earn a coveted place inside. Now, one of them is fighting desperately to get out.

In a move that has turned scholarly heads, Paul Brodeur, a former investigative reporter for The New Yorker, who donated thousands of pages of his work to the library, is demanding that the papers be returned. He claims that an institution renowned for its careful stewardship of historical documents has badly mishandled his.

The charges are roiling the genteel world of research archivists, who usually toil in dust-jacket obscurity, and inciting a lively debate about which pieces of the past are worth preserving.

Over the past few weeks, Mr. Brodeur — known for his zealous pursuit of asbestos manufacturers and corporate polluters as a journalist — has mounted an elbows-out campaign to shame the library, firing off e-mails to dozens of prominent academics and authors pleading his case and enlisting their support. The library, which rebuts Mr. Brodeur’s claims, is refusing to return all of his work, escalating a year-old dispute that has played out on an unusually public stage. Beginning last month, Mr. Brodeur and the New York Public Library posted dueling accounts on the Web site of the Authors Guild Bulletin, an influential newsletter for writers.

The back-and-forth has prompted several high-profile writers and academics to weigh in. Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor, told Mr. Brodeur in an e-mail that his experience seemed to be “a distinct departure from the standards of ethical propriety and intellectual integrity that I would have expected the New York Public Library to maintain.”

After learning of the controversy, John Stauber, author and founder of the Center for Media and Democracy, told Mr. Brodeur, “This is shocking.”

Ann Thornton, a top official at the library, called the situation “very unfortunate.” Mr. Brodeur calls it something else: “A breach of trust.”

During his years at The New Yorker, Mr. Brodeur, 79, a novelist turned award-winning reporter, built a career out of exposing the environmental hazards and health risks created by industry. In the process, he also filled an ever-expanding wall of file cabinets in his office. Mr. Brodeur said a colleague at the magazine, Philip Hamburger, mentioned that he had donated his own papers to the library and suggested that he do so as well. In 1992, Mr. Brodeur gave the library some 300 boxes.

In 1997, he recalled being told, the documents had been reviewed and prepared for public viewing, a claim confirmed by a senior library curator at the time.

That year, Mr. Brodeur and his wife toured what was described as the “permanent collection” of his papers in the main branch’s stacks, which stretch 88 miles. Mr. Brodeur watched, contentedly, as giant mechanized glass panels opened up to reveal the files behind his biggest exposés — on the flesh-eating enzymes in household detergents, the erosion of the ozone layer by industrial gases and a corporate cover-up of the links between asbestos and cancer.

So he was baffled?a year ago — nearly two decades after his donation — when the library notified him that it no longer wanted three-fourths of his papers. He was instructed to either retrieve the undesired documents or to allow the library to destroy them, according to copies of the correspondence he provided to The New York Times. “As I’m sure you understand,” William Stingone, a curator at the library, wrote him, “we need to manage our ever-diminishing resources, including space, even as our collection grows.”

As it happens, Mr. Brodeur did not understand. He was livid. In a June 2010 letter to the library demanding the return of his entire collection, Mr. Brodeur wrote, “I no longer have confidence in the New York Public Library’s stewardship of the papers I donated more than 18 years ago.”

The staff at the library called the episode a misunderstanding. Despite what Mr. Brodeur might have been told, curators said, they did not finish sorting through his papers until last year.

In a series of letters and phone calls to Mr. Brodeur over the summer, they explained that, as they did with every donation, they had carefully weeded out what would be useful to generations of researchers (original letters and rare primary documents) and excluded less-meaningful artifacts (photocopied news stories and multiple drafts of New Yorker writings). In the process, an original donation of about 320 boxes had been whittled to 53.

On a recent afternoon, Ms. Thornton, who oversees collections and exhibits, showed off the results of that winnowing, displaying a detailed catalog and a sampling of documents on a long table outside the library’s Rose Main Reading Room. The Brodeur collection appeared carefully labeled by subject and date. There were folders containing fan mail from readers (one called an article he had written for The New Yorker “extremely provocative and well-researched”). There were copies of letters from Mr. Brodeur to his colleagues at the magazine (including an angry missive to Seymour Hersh, who had backtracked on an endorsement of a much-debated Brodeur book about the dangers of electrical power lines in 1997. Mr. Brodeur called him “craven” and “lame.”). And there was an unfinished draft of a novel, titled “Coral Sea,” about an investigative journalist who stumbles on an important secret.

 

The Promise of Rapture for the High-Tech Elite

Ray Kurzweil, the influential technologist, came to the Palace of Fine Arts theater in San Francisco a few days ago to promote his vision of “the Singularity.” One attendee admiringly described it as “the cult Rapture of the Nerds.”

It was a much more fitting prelude to the Easter holidays than Mr. Kurzweil would like to think.

The Singularity, as he explains it, is a point in the near future when rapidly escalating technological advances will allow the most evolved humans (i.e., Mr. Kurzweil and his early-adopting followers) to incorporate technology into their bodies. Doing so will allow them to live hundreds of years and perhaps forever. Mr. Kurzweil wrote a book on the subject in 2005 and has been proselytizing ever since. The quick sell: Join me in outsmarting death.

This vision has obvious appeal to the Silicon Valley set, which holds sacred the belief that technology can solve most any problem; Google’s co-founder Larry Page, and a long list of other tech celebrities, helped establish Singularity University, where rich or deep-thinking techies try to get an edge on the future.

New Agers, too, find something alluring in the idea of man transcending the mere self and attaching to a more grandiose vision of the human project.

Yet there is a flip side to the Singularity, a distinctly unmodern religiosity of the sort that often horrifies high-powered engineers and sophisticated citizens of the New Economy. Mr. Kurzweil offers the best of both worlds, as it were: an answer to existential questions and the ageless quest for immortality, wrapped in a package of science and innovation.

Michael Lindvall, a theologian and pastor of Brick Presbyterian Church in New York, pegs Mr. Kurzweil’s Singularity dogma as a modern iteration of the Gnosticism prevalent in the second and third centuries.

Gnosticism “was basically the idea that people save themselves by being smart,” Mr. Lindvall said. “By knowing these secret things, you would become cognoscenti, one of the few, elitist. Gnostics looked down on the hoi polloi Christian masses.”

Kevin Kelly, a co-founder of Wired magazine and an influential technology theorist himself, is not an adherent of the Singularity, but has spoken at length with Mr. Kurzweil about it and certainly sees the appeal.

“It attracts people who are scientific, rational, not religious,” Mr. Kelly said, “and it offers them the same comforting idea that heaven offers to someone more religious.”

Mr. Kurzweil said, via e-mail, that any comparison of Singularity to religion was “incorrect.”

“Religions emerged in pre-scientific times” he wrote, and are “based on faith and not science.”

“We need to update our understanding of the destiny of our human-machine civilization based on what science now tells us,” he added. “The bottom line is that my thesis is based on a detailed scientific analysis of the history of technology and not on faith.”

Certainly, some of Mr. Kurzweil’s adherents seemed overcome with religious fervor at his recent San Francisco appearance. “His fans notoriously swarm the stage, like they are doing here!” an event organizer barked at other staff members during a V.I.P. reception, warning them to be alert.

Mr. Kurzweil predicts the Singularity will occur in about 2040. Mr. Kelly suggests he so tirelessly promotes it in hopes of speeding things along. In 2040, Mr. Kurzweil would be 92. He obsesses over his diet and consumes 150 pills a day to stave off aging.

Thoughts of mortality produce “profoundly sad and lonely feelings,” Mr. Kurzweil said in “Transcendent Man,” a filmed accompaniment to his live presentation. “So I go back to thinking about how I’m not going to die.” (The German words “kurz weil,” by the way, translate into “short time,” so perhaps Mr. Kurzweil was predestined to obsess over ways to extend his life.)

Ken Marks, a local mathematician, was one of 700 or so who came to hear Mr. Kurzweil — and he was skeptical about the whole thing. His objections were scientific, rather than theological, saying that the Singularity ignored the scientific principle of complementary pairs. Like space and time, or electric force and magnetic force, “death and life are a complementary pair,” Mr. Marks said. “Death is intrinsic to life.”

“If you do not have death, you do not have life,” he said.

Mr. Kelly suggests such scientific nitpicking wouldn’t hold much sway with Mr. Kurzweil, though he, too, is a man of science.

“The remarkable thing about Ray is that he has no doubt,” Mr. Kelly said. “He has an answer for every objection. His certainty is unwavering.”

Is that faith, in the traditional sense? “Exactly,” Mr. Kelly said. “He has faith.”

 

The Choice: Why So Many Applications for So Few Elite Spots? Continuing the Discussion

Earlier this week, NPR’s “To the Point” asked “Who’s Applying to Harvard and Who’s Getting In,” with the program focusing on the surge of applications to the two or three dozen elite colleges and universities.

The host, Warren Olney, was the latest person to wonder why applications to Harvard have increased 50 percent to nearly 35,000 annually — even as it accepted about 2,200, a little over 6 percent, in April. Joining him were Andrew Ferguson, author of “Crazy U,” (and who discussed the book with Choice readers), Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce (who’s also talked about education with this blog), and The Choice’s Jacques Steinberg, who pointed out:

Some schools spend literally hundreds of thousands of dollars on slick marketing campaigns begging kids to apply for the privilege of being rejected, and yet the colleges will tell you there are so many kids who get this material, apply, get in and go who would have never known to do so had they not received it.

Listen to the admissions discussion (which begins about 7 minutes into the broadcast) and share your thoughts in comments, below.