In a desperate attempt to rescue the lost works of Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, Voltaire, Locke, Smith, Hayek, Friedman and other Great Books that have been expunged from the curricula of higher education, renegade librarians at MIT have launched a clandestine preservation project to help preserve the works for a hoped-for, post-Woke era.
“Please don’t publish my name,” begged the panicked leader of the effort. “If the other librarians find out I’m doing this, I’ll be run out of town.”
The underground operation stands in stark contrast to MIT’s official archival priorities. The Division of Student Life’s lavishly funded Intercultural Engagement office, complete with its own physical “SPXCE” (pronounced “space”) for “learning about personal identity”, recently launched the Library of Underrepresented Narratives and Archives (LUNA), dedicated to preserving works by Black, Latino, Indigenous, Middle Eastern, Asian, LGBTQ+, Feminist, and postmodern authors.
Meanwhile, Plato gathers dust.
“We’re running out of time,” whispered the defector, adjusting her disguise. “Students are graduating without ever encountering the Federalist Papers, the Iliad, or Paradise Lost. They can recite Audre Lorde and bell hooks, but they’ve never heard of Edmund Burke or Alexis de Tocqueville.”
The secret Western Canon Preservation Initiative operates after hours, smuggling first editions of Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill into temperature-controlled storage while Intercultural Engagement celebrates its latest RISE Awards for “Excellence in Programming” and “Emerging Leaders” in identity-based activism.
“It’s like watching the Library of Alexandria burn,” the anonymous librarian concluded, “except this time my DEI-hire colleagues are lighting the match and getting federal grants to do it.”
Story suggested by the Pulse Newsletter