Andrew Carnegie died in 1919, and I became a librarian in 2012. In many ways, Carnegie’s idea of the library still affects my working life today, as it does many others in the library profession. With a staggering largess, Carnegie conspired to shape the library—both physically and professionally—into a service model of dull efficiency and grinding productivity, thereby transforming the library according to his own capitalist view of industry and labor. The thousands of Carnegie libraries scattered across the US stand as a testament both to his dictatorial generosity and to his crushing vision of higher education as workforce development. In this post, I take a brief look at Andrew Carnegie and the connection points among his philanthropy, the library profession, and the anti-intellectual pro-business forces at work in today’s higher education.
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