Hello. I have been one of the part-time librarians here at the Ursula Schwerin Library since the Fall of 2023. You may have asked me a question at the Reference Desk or perhaps you attended one of my Information Literacy workshops in the library with your English class or Communications class. If you search for “James Wechsler” on the internet, you may get stories of how I confronted Senator Joseph McCarthy in testimony before his notorious Government Operations Committee in 1953. That James Wechsler is not me. And if you use the search terms “James Wechsler” and “CUNY,” you will likely find the following confrontation at Hunter College in 1958 between James Wechsler and the Beat Generation novelist, Jack Kerouac:
KEROUAC:…James Wechsler…Who’s James Wechsler? Right over there. James Wechsler, you believe in the destruction of America, don’t you?
WECHSLER: No. [Laughter.]
KEROUAC: What do you believe in, come here, come here and tell me what you believe in …You told me what you don’t believe in. I want to know what you do believe in. [Cries from the audience: “That’s right.”] This is a university, we’ve got to learn . . . I believe in love, I vote for love [applause].
WECHSLER: I believe in the capacity of the human intelligence to create a world in which there is love, compassion, justice and freedom. I believe in fighting for that kind of world. I think what you are doing is to try to destroy anybody’s instinct to care about this world.
Again. Not me. To this Wechsler, that Wechsler’s articulate critique of McCarthyism epitomizes the phrases “courage of convictions” and “truth to power.” However, I don’t agree with that Wechsler’s conclusion that Jack Kerouac’s writing weakened anybody’s instinct to care about the world (and I certainly would never have suggested that caring about the world is a shared human trait, let alone instinctual.)
Maybe it’s best to search for “James Wechsler” and “librarian.” Then you will see that I have been a CUNY librarian for the last six years. I started at City College (CCNY), where I served as a substitute ILL (Interlibrary Loan) librarian during the pandemic. I am proud to have kept that service operating (albeit at a much-reduced capacity) while the campus was closed. Because of my efforts, library patrons’ access to information was not as limited as it could have been and a number of faculty-members even met book publication deadlines despite the pandemic. If you search for “James Wechsler” and “CCNY,” you’ll see that I joined the CUNY library team in 2020. And, hopefully, you will find my discussion of Our Constitution, a magnificent painting by Harlem Renaissance artist Charles Alston in the CCNY collection. I am the James Wechsler in both of these references. But be careful. Your search results may also include James Wechsler’s account of how 1500 CCNY students packed the Sheppard Hall auditorium in a show of sympathy with Columbia students protesting “the powers of war and fascism” and that university president’s “bitter anti-strike pronouncement.” I would not blame you for assuming it was written about current events by this James Wechsler. However, the other James Wechsler wrote it in 1935.
