Basement books… Kate Wagner replies… Reading Pirandello (online only)… Gus O’Connor replies…
In “Construction Follies,” Kate Wagner aims harsh scorn at two of the University of Chicago’s most significant recent initiatives in the arts and humanities [November 2025]. While we appreciate The Nation’s engagement with the humanities, we wish to clarify several points.
Mansueto Library and the Logan Center for the Arts were deeply informed by guidance from UChicago faculty and students, including many in the arts and humanities. Of the many uninformed statements in the piece (no, the university has not lost money on crypto), we were particularly surprised by the suggestion that the library is inaccessible and “little more than something interesting to look at.”
Mansueto shares an entrance with Regenstein Library, which allows public access to 5 million volumes on open shelves. The browsable collection in Regenstein is larger than that of most university libraries, though it constitutes a fraction of the 13.5 million print and digital volumes in UChicago’s library system. Mansueto and Regenstein are visited more than 1.1 million times annually, drawing global academic visitors for their unique collections, especially in the humanities.
When Mansueto Library opened in 2011, universities worldwide had long since started sending collections to off-site storage, usually taking days to deliver books to borrowers. In contrast, UChicago expanded collection storage on campus. Mansueto provides high-density storage in ideal preservation conditions, delivering books to patrons in minutes. The airy top level houses a conservation facility and a beloved reading room used by hundreds daily. In our view, this makes the library highly suited to its function, visually interesting, and a cherished facility for humanities research.
Torsten ReimerUniversity Librarian and Dean of the University Library,University of Chicago
My piece did not intend to disparage the library system at the University of Chicago, which I have used to great delight, having lectured there. But it is inaccessible on three points. (1) The books, of course, are inaccessible for browsing by design. I understand this choice, but I don’t have to like it. (2) The building is inaccessible as a public space, as it has no on-street access. (3) The process of visiting the library as a layperson is arduous, though this is typical of university libraries. Differences about accessibility aside, my ire was directed solely toward the administration, which has undertaken many expensive building projects—of which Mansueto was one of very few necessities—while defunding the humanities and deferring maintenance necessary to bring the school’s quad up to contemporary standards.
The fact of the matter is, the university is in massive debt. Some of this is construction debt, but much of it comes from overleveraged financial plays that have not panned out (such as a very real foray into cryptocurrency). When the university’s board behaves in financially negligent or reckless ways, the humanities bear the cuts—God forbid anyone touch the business school. Walking by such expensive and frivolous buildings as Campus North (as good a signifier as any of the university as luxury) and the Rubenstein Forum (a gargantuan monument to the administration itself), one cannot help but become indignant, even enraged. At the end of the day, architecture is about money and power and about who has it and who doesn’t. At the University of Chicago, those dichotomies are very much clear.
Re “Luigi Pirandello’s Broken Men,” by Gus O’Connor [TheNation.com, December 2, 2025]: As a translator of Luigi Pirandello’s One, None, and a Hundred Grand, I was very sorry to see Gus O’Connor reduce the Nobel laureate to a fascist. It’s inarguable that at one time Pirandello was a supporter of fascism—though within a few years he’d torn up his party membership card, under the nose of a high-ranking official. One, None, and a Hundred Grand itself begins with a nose—a “defective” one, with a pronounced rightward lean. Rightward asymmetry is a hard-to-misunderstand metaphor for the political currents that would lead Europe into madness and mass murder; and for the narrator, Vitangelo Maggot, this nose-realization sets in motion a quest to “coax forth the many Maggots living inside my closest companions, and destroy them one by one.” It’s Gogol meets P.G. Wodehouse, and offers readers comic scenes equal to the very best of the latter author’s work. And much as Wodehouse is still widely read and adored in England, despite his own putative fascism, Pirandello holds a place of primacy in contemporary Italian hearts. He is only a “half-forgotten castaway of European letters” for non-Italian readers.
Given the opportunity to address O’Connor’s accusation from a century’s distance, I would turn to this passage from the novel: