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‘In a revolutionary epoch, sometimes men taste every novelty, sicken of them all, and return to ancient principles so long disused that they seem refreshingly hearty when they are rediscovered.’
—Russell Kirk
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Christopher Fear
55 posts
Christopher Fear
@ChristopherF198
Traditional Academic 🎓 Views my own 🇬🇧 Veritas liberabit vos
Yorkshire, UK Katılım Haziran 2014
1.7K Takip Edilen1.9K Takipçiler
@PlumridgeNancy @LoudBonnet Double-stacked is definitely verboten.
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@ChristopherF198 @LoudBonnet Well I guess I’m in trouble as I have six large bookcases with books double stacked on the shelves. Such a stupid safety check!
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Following a standard workplace safety check, I have just received an email from a university administrator in which my custom of keeping books on the shelves in my office is described as "the unnecessary storing of combustible materials".
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@WarrenLNaida They especially dislike the horizontal arrangement, because they are more likely to fall -- and of course it makes the titles dangerously easy to read.
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Referring to a man’s books as “combustible materials” is almost as egregious as referring to his children as potential hostages.
Christopher Fear@ChristopherF198
Following a standard workplace safety check, I have just received an email from a university administrator in which my custom of keeping books on the shelves in my office is described as "the unnecessary storing of combustible materials".
English
Good grief! Mind you I was told off for keeping posters behind my office door as they could restrict mobility...
Christopher Fear@ChristopherF198
Following a standard workplace safety check, I have just received an email from a university administrator in which my custom of keeping books on the shelves in my office is described as "the unnecessary storing of combustible materials".
English
@SimoninSuffolk That's good news. The ones stacked under my hookah are pretty tightly packed.
English
Just pack them tightly. I used to work in a large second hand book shop in Cambridge back in the days when people smoked pretty much everywhere. The boss had no problem at all with people smoking as they browsed. Books, he said, are very hard to burn if they're tightly packed. They're difficult to ignite and smoulder very slowly when they do.
Not sure if he'd ever tested this, mind you...
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@bmzachariah I'm afraid not. It's social realism of the René Magritte variety.
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You cannot be serious. Is this a spoof?
Christopher Fear@ChristopherF198
Following a standard workplace safety check, I have just received an email from a university administrator in which my custom of keeping books on the shelves in my office is described as "the unnecessary storing of combustible materials".
English
@6079_WSmith An English university, but the general problem is very probably the same.
English
Glad to see administrators continuing to support the academic mission of American universities:
Christopher Fear@ChristopherF198
Following a standard workplace safety check, I have just received an email from a university administrator in which my custom of keeping books on the shelves in my office is described as "the unnecessary storing of combustible materials".
English
@WilliamArthurs Nice idea, but that book was withdrawn from the stock of Libraries NI, so it's now my duty alone to see that it doesn't combust. It's a constant worry.
English
@ChristopherF198 Why not placate them with an immediate concession, that all library books will be returned to the library. This will take care of 1 (one) of those shown. They can then conduct a quinquennial follow up.
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@MagnaAulae @william_whyte As if we need any more strategy documents.
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@william_whyte Are they particularly inflammable? Have you been issued with a bucket of sand?
x.com/ChristopherF19…
Christopher Fear@ChristopherF198
Following a standard workplace safety check, I have just received an email from a university administrator in which my custom of keeping books on the shelves in my office is described as "the unnecessary storing of combustible materials".
English
This shelf mark shows I’m reading dangerous literature in the Bodleian today…
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@AugheyArthur There's very little on my shelves between Marx and Plato that they would approve of: Mill, More, Mosca, Douglas Murray, Nietzsche, Nozick, Oakeshott, Ortega y Gasset, Noel O'Sullivan, Pareto...
All highly inflammatory.
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@ChristopherF198 Only combustible books like those of Oakeshott I suppose
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Argentine footballers turn out to be a gang of graceless, petulant, spoilt cheats.
Everyone surprised.
Lewis Mackenzie@Lewismac101
Argentina should hang their heads in shame. Insufferable in victory against England and pathetic in defeat against Spain. Billions are watching and you chose to start a fight and disgrace your nation. Do better. #ArgentinaVsEspaña #ESPARG
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Christopher Fear retweetledi
I don't think anybody really grasps how desperate this situation is.
University professors are now saying they are unable to teach history because reading long books and passages is how a person learns history. College kids are incapable of reading more than a few pages.
Some classes don't assign any reading at all now, only lectures.
There is an assumption among the people managing this decline that reading is just a way of receiving information. It isn't. Proper reading is how we build the mental muscle to synthesize ideas and evaluate them.
If the catastrophic decline in reading and literacy is not addressed now, we risk losing everything.
Western civilization cannot survive the death of reading because it was built by people with the kind of cognitive depth that a culture of deep reading brings:
Complex reasoning, extended internal dialogue, the capacity to hold opposing ideas in tension. Our systems and institutions are complex, and they require well ordered minds to maintain them.
Reading forms minds, and the West was built by the richest minds in history.
Athenaeum Book Club@athenaeumbc
Elite university students are now incapable of reading a book. Instead of fixing this, universities are simply reducing reading requirements to shorter and shorter excerpts. This is no mere literacy crisis. It is a civilizational one. To fight back, we started an online book club to study the great texts of Western Civilization — if the schools and universities won't teach the great books, we must form reading groups to study them ourselves. Every month, we read a new great work. We've covered texts like Augustine's Confessions, Dante's Inferno, The Count of Monte Cristo, Don Quixote. We're now reading Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. We must study the ideas upon which the West was built if we are to preserve it. It takes effort to read these texts, and even more to read them well. Thats what we're doing, slowly, in dialogue with each other. If you'd like to be part of this, please join our reading group and consider a paid subscription. It makes a HUGE difference to the time and resources we can dedicate to this project. We are entirely funded by our members. You'll get: - Live book club discussions (biweekly) - Access to our incredible community chat - Essays to guide you through the Great Books - All past recordings, essays, and podcasts - Ability to vote on what we read next athenaeumbooks.com/welcome Welcome!
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@BGStaniszewski Yep. This is precisely where the Pope is right about this: it is dangerous because it enters into contexts where real relationships are lacking, and hollows them out further. Yet this is also why AI will never replace the human: a simulated relationship is not a relationship.
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@ChristopherF198 Ironically, OP was also written by AI. This is AI arguing with AI. Dead internet.
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Christopher Fear retweetledi
I highly recommend Alan Sokal's excellent paper
Academic freedom, no-platforming, and appeals to "disciplinary competence": A critical analysis of Simpson-Srinivasan's arguments
published today in @JConIdeas.
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Christopher Fear retweetledi
"The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries."
— René Descartes
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Christopher Fear retweetledi
"Intellectuals are naturally seduced by the idea of a planned society, because they think they will be in charge of it."
--Philosopher Roger Scruton
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@rbnmckenna86 This is an important point. And perhaps a more general cognitive phenomenon is relevant here:
People are only interested in a problem when they have an opinion about how it should be solved.
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@CRJFear I’m not against talking about it but: I’m unsure how to raise the issue because properly discussing it requires addressing the root cause, which is the broken funding model that incentivizes British universities to do this, and a lot of people don’t want to hear about that.
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Academic X, help me understand this. Every year people, many thousands of people, are graduating from British universities with a Master's degree, despite (1) having read nothing, and (2) not being competent in English, either written or spoken. Why is no-one talking about this?
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