Summary of David Dekok's Murder in the Stacks

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 Penn State University, the largest and most prestigious public university in Pennsylvania, was also the most inaccessible. It was a small town with a big university.

#2 Penn State University, the largest public university in Pennsylvania, was also the most inaccessible. It was a small town with a big university.

#3 The Penn State University library was the most inaccessible. It was a small town with a big university.

#4 Penn State University, the largest and most prestigious public university in Pennsylvania, was also the most inaccessible. It was a small town with a big university.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Sep 9, 2022
• ISBN: 9798350001570

IRB Media

With IRB books, you can get the key takeaways and analysis of a book in 15 minutes. We read every chapter, identify the key takeaways and analyze them for your convenience.

Book preview

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

Penn State was a university in Pennsylvania, and it was largely white and rural. It was a collection of classroom buildings surrounded by postwar housing developments. The town of State College seemed to jump straight from an Archie comic book.

#2

The Penn State library, Pattee, was a beautiful walkway lined by stately elm trees. It was easy to get lost in the library's stacks, but that was part of the charm.

#3

The Vietnam War was killing thousands of American soldiers and Vietnamese troops, as well as an uncounted number of Vietnamese civilians. The Republican president Richard Nixon had convinced Congress to replace the old method of deferments, in which local draft boards had the last word on who would serve, with a national lottery.

#4

At Penn State, race relations were a major problem in 1969. There were just under three hundred black students, some of them foreign, amid nearly twenty-six thousand whites. The university did not have many black high school graduates to choose from in the state.

#5

The first memos about security problems in Pattee Library were dated July 12, 1968, and addressed complaints from students about incidents in the stacks and reading rooms. The library staff was reminded that the Campus Patrol was on twenty-four-hour call, would respond to these incidents, and that calling them would allow for quicker action.

#6

Charles L. Hosler, dean of Penn State’s College of Earth and Mineral Sciences from 1965 to 1985, saw many examples of misbehavior at the university that went unpunished. There was a reluctance to punish anyone, and a tendency to shelter people who felt sheltered.

#7

The Penn State library was a popular place for gay teenagers to meet and have sex, and it became a haven for sexual activities that the state police termed vice. administrators sent mixed signals on how far they were willing to go to clear out vice.

#8

The Penn State library was a hotbed of activity for sex crimes, and it was difficult to keep a permanent patrolman there. Pelton did not want to increase security, but Jackson used library funds to hire two part-time security guards.

#9

In November 1969, the Pattee library was a hotbed of sexual activity. On November 24, a man exposed himself to a young woman in the Level 3 stacks. Another coed was accosted by an exhibitionist on the following evening.

Insights from Chapter 2

#1

On November 28, 1969, Marilee Erdely, a graduate student at Penn State, was flipping through a book she had just pulled off a shelf in the Pattee Library. She had gone to the stacks to find a book to complete a term paper for English 501, Research Materials and Methods, a class taught by Harrison Meserole and Nicholas Joukovsky.

#2

The Penn State library was not deserted on the day after Thanksgiving. In fact, it was quite the opposite. It was a popular place for students to be on a slow day.

#3

When Erdely saw the girl on the floor, she thought she had fainted. But help arrived almost immediately. When the books crashed to the floor at 4:55 p. m. , the sound traveled up through a floor grating and was heard by librarians in the Circulation Department directly above.

#4

The two ambulance drivers struggled to maneuver a stretcher down the narrow stairs to Level 2. They brought Betsy Aardsma to the base of the stairs, and asked a librarian if there was any other way