Tim's Odds And Ends

No, this is not a new menu item at my fictional BBQ shack---or some kind of new junk book store. Rather, I'm using today's post as a dumping ground for intellectual history items that don't fit my usual, ironically titled "Light Reading" series---though these items truly are light USIH reading.

1. If my schedule were free February 2-3, 2012, and I happened to be on the campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara, I'd attend this gathering in a heartbeat: "The Port Huron Statement at 50."

I confess that I had never really done the obvious in thinking about the Port Huron Statement as an object of intellectual history until I read Cotkin's Existential America (pp. 241-249---even Howard Brick only gives it a few mentions in his better-than-survey assessment of the decade's thought). Indeed, I hadn't thought of Tom Hayden as an actor in America's intellectual history until I pondered, courtesy of George, Hayden's relationship with Camus. There's a whole post I "chould" (should and could) write about the Port Huron Statement, Hayden, and the Occupy movement. But I need to work on my own project for a while (even if I get an extension on the last--fingers crossed).

2. Like Ben, I intend on putting page updates here for the near term to hold myself accountable and get motivated. Here goes: I only wrote about 50 words this past week as I cleared my desk of the task of creating my spring term syllabi. But after I put up this post, my day is clear for writing.

3. Happy 48th birthday to our current "FLOTUS." I predict that someday she'll be the object of an intellectual historian's work.

4. I appreciated the following passages from Jennifer Howard's post-AHA interview with Anthony Grafton, appearing in the Jan. 9 Chronicle (bolds mine):

The Chronicle sat down with Mr. Grafton in Chicago to talk about his presidential year, scholarly directions in the field, the push to rethink graduate education and history careers, and the work that remains to be done.

"The association only matters insofar as it's vital to the profession and to the discipline—two separate things," he says. "Nobody's sure the annual meetings have much of a future." He would like to see the group become more of a communication hub for members, "a place of virtual discussion and dialogue."

In a back-and-forth about new directions in scholarship, Mr. Grafton mentioned intellectual history as a trend "which really delights my soul."

Intellectual history was counted out in the 1970s in favor of cultural history, but it now is clearly a very strong presence, he said.

As some examples, he mentioned recent work on the history of intellectual networks done by scholars like Daniela Bleichmar, an assistant professor of art history and history at the University of Southern California, and Harold J. Cook, a professor of history at Brown University.

Such approaches are "not the way we did intellectual history in the past," he said. "It's not intellectual history in its traditional sense, but it's informed by it, and it's in dialogue with it. It's intellectual history plus a social history of ideas. ... All of these are fields that are transformed by digital-humanities methods and digital archives."

...I'd say that some of that "strong presence" is a direct reflection of the work we've done creating the USIH conference and S-USIH. ...Pat yourselves on the back.

5. Check out the returns on this 1963 survey conducted by a 16-year old San Diego high school student named Bruce McAllister. Here are the opening three paragraphs of McAllister's story as told recently in the Paris Review:

In 1963, a sixteen-year-old San Diego high school student named Bruce McAllister sent a four-question mimeographed survey to 150 well-known authors of literary, commercial, and science fiction. Did they consciously plant symbols in their work? he asked. Who noticed symbols appearing from their subconscious, and who saw them arrive in their text, unbidden, created in the minds of their readers? When this happened, did the authors mind?

McAllister had just published his first story, “The Faces Outside,” in both IF magazine and Simon and Schuster’s 1964 roundup of the best science fiction of the year. Confident, if not downright cocky, he thought the surveys could settle a conflict with his English teacher by proving that symbols weren’t lying beneath the texts they read like buried treasure awaiting discovery.

His project involved substantial labor—this before the Internet, before e-mail—but was not impossible: many authors and their representatives were listed in the Twentieth-Century American Literature series found in the local library. More impressive is that seventy-five writers replied—most of them, in earnest. Sixty-five of those responses survive (McAllister lost ten to “a kleptomaniacal friend”). Answers ranged from the secretarial blow off to a thick packet of single-spaced typescript in reply.

Read the rest here.

6. What's on your mind? If nothing above excites your imagination, leave your topic of choice in the comments. - TL

Grafton: Why are universities failing?

Historian Anthony Grafton's New York Review of Books essay--a review of several books about higher education--paints a grim picture of students mortgaging their futures for something likely to fail them. Thoughts?

Tim's Light Reading (10-6-2011)

[Update: Obviously I wrote this post before the news of Steve Jobs' passing hit. - TL]

1. Stanley Fish asks: Who is your Stanley Fish?

Here's my favorite passage from the piece:

Why? Because were I ever to meet him [i.e. your "Stanley Fish"], the odds are that I would like him (the public record suggests that he is an admirable fellow) and if I liked him it would be hard for me to continue beating up on him. (Despite the proverb, familiarity does not breed contempt.) In fact I would immediately regret, and want to take back, all the nasty things I had said with such zest.

You might be surprised to know that my bugbears are not usually hard-working intellectuals. For the most part, I try to avoid bashing people who actually attempt to think through things---even when I disagree with their conclusions. I've found that my "long-time personal pinatas" are usually of the pseudo-intellectual variety: politicians, pundits (some left and right-leaning), popular culture figures (e.g the (former) cult of Oprah), or some mix of the three (e.g. Newt Gingrich). I dislike the passive and active anti-intellectualism of posers and poseurs.

2. Classroom Styles, Colorfully Described

Here's the piece (which was inspired by this). I think I've seen all but "the corporate style" at work, and I'm not eager to experience that one.

3. More on the Consensus of the 1970s Being Really Important

My title sounds mocking, but I'm on board. I agree with Andrew Hartman's spring 2011 USIH post on the subject, which built on one he wrote last fall. A common thread in those posts was Judith Stein's relatively new book, Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies (Yale, April 2010). I now have news that Stein's book is going to get "the treatment" in the November 2011 issue of The Historical Society's journal, Historically Speaking

4. Dissertations or...Peer-reviewed Journal Articles?

Michael Ruse proposes, contra Anthony Grafton, that history doctoral programs should socialize their graduates to write peer-reviewed journal articles and not dissertations (i.e. bad books). I see the point---of both. I think I'd prefer to keep the dissertation, but cap its length and require all dissertation writers to submit one chapter for publication in a journal. Perhaps a condition for graduation could be successful acceptance? I agree with Ruse that acquiring experience in article writing, submission, and publication would be highly valuable to most doctoral students in relation to the changing demands of the field (i.e. fewer t-t positions).

5. Smart Set Aside: Michael Lewis is Hot

It's not what you think. It's that things written by Michael Lewis are hot. Or, as New York magazine puts it: "It's Good to be Michael Lewis." After reading The Blind Side last year, and seeing the on-screen version of his book Moneyball this past weekend, I'm on the bandwagon. It's a great film with a thoughtful message---i.e. a message about thinking.

6. The Political Economy of History Instruction

I think this might be the best framework, or paradigm, for looking at the academic job market in history. [Full disclosure: I'm on the job market this year, so this topic is constantly in the back of my mind.] Let me connect the post explicitly to our chosen field:

When we change the frame of reference like that, we see the context for the (post-PhD) job market includes post-BA labor of graduate assistants (either as TAs in charge of sections, or in charge of discussion groups, or as graders of essays) as well as part-time and full-time instructors with BA, MA, or PhD, and post-docs with teaching duties. To put it in a formula: the real job market for [history] teachers begins post-BA, so that PhDs are not just competing against other PhDs but also against anyone else who teaches [history], holders of the BA and MA included.

When our frame of reference is the "political economy of [history] instruction" we can explicitly talk about several factors that are only implicit in the discussion of the (post-PhD) "job market."

First, we can see the role of university administrators, who are, after all, responsible for the shifts in employment patterns in [history] instruction. ...To an administrator, [sections of US, European, and world surveys, or Western civilization] ... taught by a BA or MA is a section taught, and taught at low cost. This focus on administrators enables us to connect "job market" discourse with the analyses of the "corporate university," the "privatization of the university," and like matters.

Second, we can see the connection to other issues in political economy, such as long-term employment trends toward precarious labor in other industries. We can also see the connection to constantly increasing health care costs in the US system in which employment has been a traditional avenue to health care insurance; precarious labor does not require the long-term commitment to offering health insurance that (current?) TT jobs do. And we also see the connection of the current (post-PhD) job market to "austerity" programs in response to the Global Financial Crisis of 2008.

7. The History of Philosophy for 10-Year Olds

Scott McLemee reviews a new book by Nigel Warburton titled A Little History of Philosohy (Yale Press, 2011). Yes, the book is aimed at a target audience of ten-year olds. In other words, it might work for a first-year college class on the history of philosophy. :) - TL

Grafton on Cronon and Academic Freedom

There's a blog post by Anthony Grafton over at the New York Review of Books website on academic freedom in light of the Cronon affair. He makes a lot of the usual points, but in the midst of his post he suddenly veers into a territory that I find welcome. While defending academic freedom, he also lays out a vision of academic responsibility that goes hand in hand with academic freedom and is necessary for the maintenance of academic freedom's legitimacy. He says:

"Scholars and scientists, of course, have all the same rights as other citizens: they can enter debates, join political organizations and work for campaigns. But when they enter the public sphere in their special capacity as acknowledged professional experts, they bear special responsibilities: they’re not acting as ordinary citizens, nor as pundits who are ready to pronounce on anything. They should be real experts on the problems they attack. They should acknowledge their own fallibility and the provisional character of the knowledge they rely on. They should expect contradiction, both from other experts and from those whose interests they cross, and maintain civility amid the eldritch yips and guttural growls of American public debate. And the conclusions they put forward must be the ones that their expertise dictates, whether or not they find these pleasing. It’s a little bit like being a Raymond Chandler detective. You go out into the mean streets, armed only with knowledge and determination, knowing that you can easily be wrong, and grimly aware that your only reward for being right may be a blow on the head. It’s a great, quixotic part of the vocation of science and scholarship. That’s why universities have come to agree that honest public interventions are a legitimate part of academic work, and why they do their best to protect those who engage in them from personal and political attack."

I was struck by this passage because Grafton hits a different note than I normally hear. Consider this passage from Felix Frankfurter in his concurring opinion in Sweezy v. New Hampshire (1957):

"Progress in the natural sciences is not remotely confined to findings made in the laboratory. Insights into the mysteries of nature are born of hypothesis and speculation. The more so is this true in the pursuit of understanding in the groping endeavors of what are called the social sciences, the concern of which is man and society. The problems that are the respective preoccupations of anthropology, economics, law, psychology, sociology and related areas of scholarship are merely departmentalized dealing, by way of manageable division of analysis, with interpenetrating aspects of holistic perplexities. For society's good - if understanding be an essential need of society - inquiries into these problems, speculations about them, stimulation in others of reflection upon them, must be left as unfettered as possible. Political power must abstain from intrusion into this activity of freedom, pursued in the interest of wise government and the people's well-being, except for reasons that are exigent and obviously compelling. These pages need not be burdened with proof, based on the testimony of a cloud of impressive witnesses, of the dependence of a free society on free universities. This means the exclusion of governmental intervention in the intellectual life of a university. It matters little whether such intervention occurs avowedly or through action that inevitably tends to check the ardor and fearlessness of scholars, qualities at once so fragile and so indispensable for fruitful academic labor."

Here Frankfurter states the issue somewhat differently than Grafton does. Academic freedom is freedom from governmental intrusion, Frankfurter says, allowing unfettering inquiry into the full range of existence without fear of political consequence. But many proponents of academic freedom argue that it entails the freedom to enter the public sphere to influence the workings of government, something implied by Frankfurter but never quite elaborated or explained. Grafton's warning that academic responsibility requires that we limit our political interventions to those problems on which we are experts seems to be a necessary limitation to this vision of academic freedom. It is the only way that we can justify that freedom.

Grafton on Cronon and Academic Freedom

There's a blog post by Anthony Grafton over at the New York Review of Books website on academic freedom in light of the Cronon affair. He makes a lot of the usual points, but in the midst of his post he suddenly veers into a territory that I find welcome. While defending academic freedom, he also lays out a vision of academic responsibility that goes hand in hand with academic freedom and is necessary for the maintenance of academic freedom's legitimacy. He says:

"Scholars and scientists, of course, have all the same rights as other citizens: they can enter debates, join political organizations and work for campaigns. But when they enter the public sphere in their special capacity as acknowledged professional experts, they bear special responsibilities: they’re not acting as ordinary citizens, nor as pundits who are ready to pronounce on anything. They should be real experts on the problems they attack. They should acknowledge their own fallibility and the provisional character of the knowledge they rely on. They should expect contradiction, both from other experts and from those whose interests they cross, and maintain civility amid the eldritch yips and guttural growls of American public debate. And the conclusions they put forward must be the ones that their expertise dictates, whether or not they find these pleasing. It’s a little bit like being a Raymond Chandler detective. You go out into the mean streets, armed only with knowledge and determination, knowing that you can easily be wrong, and grimly aware that your only reward for being right may be a blow on the head. It’s a great, quixotic part of the vocation of science and scholarship. That’s why universities have come to agree that honest public interventions are a legitimate part of academic work, and why they do their best to protect those who engage in them from personal and political attack."

I was struck by this passage because Grafton hits a different note than I normally hear. Consider this passage from Felix Frankfurter in his concurring opinion in Sweezy v. New Hampshire (1957):

"Progress in the natural sciences is not remotely confined to findings made in the laboratory. Insights into the mysteries of nature are born of hypothesis and speculation. The more so is this true in the pursuit of understanding in the groping endeavors of what are called the social sciences, the concern of which is man and society. The problems that are the respective preoccupations of anthropology, economics, law, psychology, sociology and related areas of scholarship are merely departmentalized dealing, by way of manageable division of analysis, with interpenetrating aspects of holistic perplexities. For society's good - if understanding be an essential need of society - inquiries into these problems, speculations about them, stimulation in others of reflection upon them, must be left as unfettered as possible. Political power must abstain from intrusion into this activity of freedom, pursued in the interest of wise government and the people's well-being, except for reasons that are exigent and obviously compelling. These pages need not be burdened with proof, based on the testimony of a cloud of impressive witnesses, of the dependence of a free society on free universities. This means the exclusion of governmental intervention in the intellectual life of a university. It matters little whether such intervention occurs avowedly or through action that inevitably tends to check the ardor and fearlessness of scholars, qualities at once so fragile and so indispensable for fruitful academic labor."

Here Frankfurter states the issue somewhat differently than Grafton does. Academic freedom is freedom from governmental intrusion, Frankfurter says, allowing unfettering inquiry into the full range of existence without fear of political consequence. But many proponents of academic freedom argue that it entails the freedom to enter the public sphere to influence the workings of government, something implied by Frankfurter but never quite elaborated or explained. Grafton's warning that academic responsibility requires that we limit our political interventions to those problems on which we are experts seems to be a necessary limitation to this vision of academic freedom. It is the only way that we can justify that freedom.