Einstein once said something like this "Intelligent people will always encounter violent opposition from mediocre minds".

A high level of organization of information tends to scare the crap out of people who are in positions of power, who have done things in a less organized manner all their lives. A library certainly qualifies as an organized database of information. No doubt many, many people frequented this library, just because they had difficulty getting the information anywhere else. The library allowed them to do things faster and more convenently. This amount of traffic amounted to a great deal of power as the competitive advantages of such a system are obvious. These days computers are doing the same thing, and anyone who uses computers to accumulate and organize information (even if they use it for other things like complex math) will likely be attacked by someone eventually. But computers are rather ubiquitous, and right now there are 15-year olds who can outperform people with 50 years experience. They can and they will. It is possible that the modern war on terrorism is coming about because of the new ability of inexperienced (perhaps even demented) people to organize enormous amounts of technical information, and compete directly with larger, long-established institutions.

Around the same time when Hypatia was murdered by Christian monks the Christian emperor of Rome, Justinian, closed Plato's Academy, stating that it was a pagan establishment. The fall of Rome also occurred in around this time period. It seems to me to be a time of imminent collapse of many long standing institutions. Plato's Academy had been around for 900 years, for example, and many politicians were originally educated there. It may be that it was closed to eliminate political dissent, or to suppress opposition to the government. It may also have been closed for legitimate reasons. Who knows what "pagan" meant back then? The curriculum at Plato's Academy included arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and the art of conversation, some of which may have had unusual religious implications that upset people. Who knows. More than that, it is clear that it was a direct threat to the power structure of the Roman Empire. I have to ask why? Information Technology in its infancy.