Scarlet and Gray Congressional Breakfast

Yesterday was the annual Scarlet and Gray Congressional breakfast, held this year at the Hyatt Regency on Capitol Hill and attended by nearly 300 supporters of The Ohio State University, including numerous Members of Congress, Congressional staffers, and local alumni. Retiring Senator George V. Voinovich reflected on his two terms in the United States Senate. The Glenn Fellows were among hosts of the event, which meant, among other things, that they got to join Archie Griffin on the dais for a lively rendition of Carmen Ohio. Afterwards, they spent some time in conversation with President E. Gordon Gee.

Anyone who has ever heard Dr. Gee speak knows that he is unusually eloquent on the subject of what makes The Ohio State University a special institution. He is not alone in recognizing that our land-grant universities rank very highly among our national treasures. In a recent issue of the New York Review of Books, Tony Judt, an Englishman, describes how he drove across the country in a rented Buick when he first visited the United States in 1975. Somehow, he seems to have bypassed Columbus, but he didn't miss the larger point: Our land-grant universities, and particularly their libraries, are America's cathedrals. Judt puts it this way:

By far the best thing about America is its universities. Not Harvard, Yale, e tutti quanti: though marvelous, they are not distinctively American—their roots reach across the ocean to Oxford, Heidelberg, and beyond. Nowhere else in the world, however, can boast such public universities. You drive for miles across a godforsaken midwestern scrubscape, pockmarked by billboards, Motel 6s, and a military parade of food chains, when—like some pedagogical mirage dreamed up by nineteenth-century English gentlemen—there appears…a library! And not just any library: at Bloomington, the University of Indiana boasts a 7.8-million-volume collection in more than nine hundred languages, housed in a magnificent double-towered mausoleum of Indiana limestone.

A little over a hundred miles northwest across another empty cornscape there hoves into view the oasis of Champaign-Urbana: an unprepossessing college town housing a library of over ten million volumes. Even the smallest of these land grant universities—the University of Vermont at Burlington, or Wyoming’s isolated campus at Laramie—can boast collections, resources, facilities, and ambitions that most ancient European establishments can only envy.

The contrast between the university libraries of Indiana or Illinois and the undulating fields almost visible from their windows illustrates the astonishing scale and variety of the American inland empire: something you cannot hope to grasp from afar.

Is this a great country, or what? Read Judt's article in its entirety here.