Rage

The article "An Army of Educators Saves a Liberian College" appeared in the New York Times, Monday, September 4. It's available (though it'll cost you $2.95): go to http://www.nytimes.com/ and search for "kakata journal" (including the quotes).

According to the Times, the Booker T. Washington institute is "Liberia's sole surviving institution of higher learning." The University of Liberia "was destroyed by the raging militias of President Charles G. Taylor in the days before he left for exile on August 11. The rest of the school system is a wreck." According to the Times, the staff of BTW have been standing guard 24 hours a day to prevent the looting and destruction of the school. The institute is in Kakata, roughly 40 miles east of Monrovia.

Some actions are so monstrous as to be unforgivable. Hijacking a war-torn country's system of higher education and accreditation is a profoundly villainous act. Claiming legitimacy for "universities" which will sell degrees to someone with the intellectual capacity of a pigeon is dishonest in the extreme. To profit this way from the nightmarish state in Liberia (whose administrative institutions are too shattered to protect things of value) is beyond the pale. These are the acts of inhuman sociopaths.

 

The same people tried to destroy St. Regis but had trouble finding it.

 

Something tells me that the University of Liberia will soon reopen as a francise of SRU.

 

"At the leafy campus of the University of Liberia, on a main road leading to downtown, groups of professors sat in small circles recently discussing how to reclaim their most important tools of learning. It wasn't the looted computers they were worried about or the chairs or even the archives with student records. It was the books. [...] Students vie for time with the few remaining textbooks, most of which date to the 1980s, the last time the education budget was spent on education. [...]
"Through the years of fighting, the University of Liberia, a state school with ties to many elected officials, managed to hold classes. Taylor, who became president in 1997, offered 11,000 scholarships to friends but did not pay their tuition bills, according to university administrators. His government did not pay public school teachers either, and most public elementary and secondary schools that had not closed in the early years of the fighting all shut down. For the past five years there has been little public education."
-- http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45476-2003Sep8.html

 

I hope not.

 

You can read the New York Times article free of charge at http://www.iht.com/articles/108635.html

 

Was it Marc Antony that burned the great library at Alexandria? There's nothing new under the sun, I'm afraid.

 

The first person blamed for the destruction of the Library is none other than Julius Caesar himself. In 48 BC, Caesar was pursuing Pompey into Egypt when he was suddenly cut off by an Egyptian fleet at Alexandria. Greatly outnumbered and in enemy territory, Caesar ordered the ships in the harbor to be set on fire. The fire spread and destroyed the Egyptian fleet. Unfortunately, it also burned down part of the city - the area where the great Library stood. [...]

The second story of the Library's destruction is more popular, thanks primarily to Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. [...] Theophilus was Patriarch of Alexandria from 385 to 412 AD. During his reign the Temple of Serapis was converted into a Christian Church (probably around 391 AD) and it is likely that many documents were destroyed then. [...]

The final individual to get blamed for the destruction is the Moslem Caliph Omar. In 640 AD the Moslems took the city of Alexandria. Upon learning of "a great library containing all the knowledge of the world" the conquering general supposedly asked Caliph Omar for instructions. The Caliph has been quoted as saying of the Library's holdings, "they will either contradict the Koran, in which case they are heresy, or they will agree with it, so they are superfluous." So, allegedly, all the texts were destroyed by using them as tinder for the bathhouses of the city. Even then it was said to have taken six months to burn all the documents. But these details, from the Caliph's quote to the incredulous six months it supposedly took to burn all the books, weren't written down until 300 years after the fact.

-- http://www.ehistory.com/world/articles/ArticleView.cfm?AID=9

 

Alexandria...

But the library has already burned.

We are watching vandals sell the ashes, claiming that they are books. They will only see a new library as another source of profit and will purchase the services of an arsonist to convert it to something they are able to sell.

 

That's right, I remember now...Bernard Shaw's play about Julius Caeser refers to the library burning.

Major loss, BTW. I have a friend who is an historian of methematics who tells me that the Egytians developed a significant body of math knowlege.

 

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The first person blamed for the destruction of the Library is none other than Julius Caesar himself. In 48 BC, Caesar was pursuing Pompey into Egypt when he was suddenly cut off by an Egyptian fleet at Alexandria. Greatly outnumbered and in enemy territory, Caesar ordered the ships in the harbor to be set on fire. The fire spread and destroyed the Egyptian fleet. Unfortunately, it also burned down part of the city - the area where the great Library stood. [...]
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This is the version of the library burning presented in the 1963 Hollywood extravaganza "Cleopatra" . I always wondered if it was accurate, and it's interesting to see the two alternative scenarios.