Dear Mr. Stewart,

First off I must say that I'm a fan of the show, despite your sometimes liberal smugness and disdain for those of us who live in the flyover regions of the country.  I like the fact that you don't really appear to have any sacred cows and seem inclined to critique hypocrisy where you find it.  It's amazing how often you get things right, even though you make no claims of journalistic integrity or political altrusim.

That said, I have to admit that I was greatly disappointed by the portion of last night's program on the Archivist job opening at UC-Santa Cruz for the Grateful Dead papers.  I'll admit, this is something just begging to be made fun of and in general the bit was funny.  However, your apparent ignorance of the archives profession and formal archives education was troubling for a number of reasons.

First of all, that you would decide to scoff at the scholarly merit and marginalize the duties of a relatively small professional group might be understandabe, but it's still pretty lame.  A little bit of research from your staff would have shown that archives education exists only at the graduate level in a number of the most respected institutions across the country. Some universities in Europe and Canada offer the BA (in addition to the MA and Ph.D.) in archival studies, but none in the U.S. do.  Why is this, you might ask, if archivists only job is organizing things "alphabetically and numerically"? Well, because archivists do so much more than that.

Formal graduate archival education is a relatively recent development and the archives credential is typically offered as a focus or major area of study within other larger schools of Library and Information Studies and History.  The archival profession has been around in some form since people began to put thoughts and language into writing, and has continued to evolve and expand as new communication and recording technologies necessitated.  Modern archival studies and professional practice draws from this long tradition and has developed a rich body of knowledge that incorporates intellectual and methodological components from across academic disciplines within the humanities and social sciences.

The fact is, a BA only offers the very basics that are needed to comprehend the complexity of archival work.  Graduate archives education has a practical, vocational element to it in addition to understanding the interplay of technology and documentation, the role of records creators in society on the macro and micro levels, and how social functions and structures determine the historical record.  Archivists secure, preserve, and make available our nation's historical resources, thereby helping to insure public accountability and cultural continuity.  Out mandate is far more ambitious than organizaing things alphabetically and numerically, particularly in an era where information and records are overly abundant.

So, Mr. Stewart, please keep being funny and irreverent, but also be mindful that when you're inulting towards something that you don't know anything about you risk looking like the misinformed media idiots that you so often skewer.  As someone who makes a living off the never ending news cycle, I'm sure you can appreciate the role of archives and records in society if only because they seem to find their way into so many of those news stories.

Perhaps the next time you read a political or historical book, or watch footage from an old tv broadcast, you might be reminded that these things are not possible without the work of archivists who facilitate such cultural production.

Sincerely,

Brad Wiles

Manuscripts Archivist

Baton Rouge, LA