As a professor in my 57th year at Johns Hopkins, I can report that neither Mr. Akst’s review nor Mr. Marriott’s book exaggerate. When I arrived, a green rookie, I asked a Hopkins legend and great pedagogue, Prof. G. Wilson Shaffer, for advice. He counseled that, for the best results, one should throw students into the deep end of the Milton S. Eisenhower Library and see if they can swim. Shaffer’s method worked like a charm.
But, about 10 years ago, I detected that troubles were brewing. I would ask students, juniors and seniors, to return library books for me, and they would ask where the library was. The first few times this happened, I thought they were pulling my leg. But they weren’t. They informed me that they had never been in the library. When I asked whether they had ever read a book that wasn’t a textbook, the shocking answer was often “no.”
Imagine that.