Alpers on the Future of the Discipline

The 50th anniversary issue of Perspectives on History (Vol. 50, No. 9, Dec. 2012), my copy of which arrived in the mail on Thursday, features a forum on the Future of the Discipline.  Guest edited by Lynn Hunt, the forum includes a piece by Ben Alpers, "The Future of the Profession." 

As noted in Perspectives, Ben's contribution to the forum grew out of a talk he gave last year at the University of Texas at Dallas.  Ben was the keynote speaker at RAW, our annual symposium sponsored by the Graduate Student Association of the School of Arts & Humanities.  

Our theme at last year's symposium was The Future of the Humanities.  Historians are notoriously (and wisely) cautious about predicting the future, and Ben was no exception there.  But he did do an exceptional job of sketching out for a packed audience of grad students and professors some of the present pressing problems that cast a worrisome shadow on that future.  And he made some practical suggestions for what we can try to do about it. 

Ben published a revised version of his keynote speech on this blog.  His post, "The Academy in Peril," is well worth reading -- as is his article in Perspectives.  

Members of the AHA can access Ben's article online using this link:  

http://www.historians.org/Perspectives/issues/2012/1212/Future-of-the-Profession.cfm

Tim's Light Reading (4/26/2012): A New Blog, "Secular Humanism," LGBT History, Chuck Colson, And The Problems Of Peer Review

1. A New Blog Of Interest

Two names familiar to USIH readers---Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn and Michael Fisher, both of whom attended last year's USIH conference---now share space on a three-person blog originating in the Syracuse-Rochester corridor. The blog's title is Longing For The Real, and it has been in existence since January 2012. Thus far the content ranges far and wide, but I expect USIH topics to appear.


2. What Is "Secular Humanism," And How Is It Used And Abused?

Rick Perlstein tackles these questions in his latest Rolling Stone installment that serves as a shot across the bow, for Democrats, in relation to the upcoming election season. Some of us have had a lively discussion on Andrew Hartman's Facebook page about Perlstein's article. We've been trying to think through the Culture Wars to figure out which part of the Christian right benefits the most by trumping up fears about "Secular Humanism." By the end of the article one is left wondering about the difference between "deeply held beliefs" and the "invention[s] of hucksters with right-wing agendas."


3. USIH, Chicago's LGBT Community, And Public History

This article explores recent leadership problems with Chicago's famous Gerber/Hart Library. Before reading this piece (today), I would have recommended the Gerber/Hart Library to any intellectual historian with ambitions of understanding the recent history of Chicago's non-hetero community. Now I wonder whether that recommendation can be made, due to disarray in the organization and in relation to potentially supporting a renegade leader who appears to be thwarting the LGBT community's wishes in relation to holdings. It sounds like a public history nightmare. And it's complicated by the fact the public history (in a different sense of the phrase) of this community is new---still evolving. My heart goes out to those involved because, as a former resident of the area who lived steps away from the Library, I was proud on behalf of the LGBT community that they had created a public space for holdings and gatherings. In addition, one of my good friends spent YEARS volunteering at Gerber/Hart, helping them organize their collections. I fear for my friend's hard work.


4. Chuck Colson: Delivered Or Disguised?

Our own LD Burnett wrote on Colson's passing last weekend. She noted that "Colson's conversion to charity -- and by 'charity' I mean both 'philanthropy' and 'Christian love' -- did not seem to dull his political instincts." This theme was echoed and expanded upon in polemical-historical pieces by Francis Schaeffer, Jr. and S-USIH member David Greenberg. Schaeffer's entry is more autobiographical, but his message is clear: Colson used his redemption for nefarious ends. Greenberg seconds that point, and argues further (not precisely in these words) that (a) Colson's conversion seems to be at least partially a sham, (b) Colson should've removed himself from politics, and (c) Colson simply continued his pre-Watergate/pre-Nixon political initiatives, particularly with regard to faith-based org-gov't partnerships, but with a post-prison Christian conversion stamp of approval. Colson used his deliverance to disguise a latent thuggishness, so says Greenberg, and continued his ongoing concerns. So who is the real Chuck Colson?

5. What Are The Goods Of Peer Review?

The deceased historian, Princeton graduate (under Dan Rodgers, I believe), and former Chicago Reader contributor Cliff Doerksen asked this question in a September 2010 Reader piece. Here are some salient passages:

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In the eyes of its critics, anonymous peer review sucks because it's slow, undemocratic, and hostile to new and potentially game-changing ideas and arguments. Advocates of the new approach [open review] discussed in the Times propose "using the Internet to expose scholarly thinking to the swift collective judgment of a much broader interested audience." It's an interesting and attractive idea, and one rife with potential for unintended consequences. There's no question that the existing review process is slow: an article can take years to reach publication. But it's not clear, at least not to me, that it really disfavors innovation by empowering unaccountable gatekeepers who select against new and threatening ideas. That's because academics are fundamentally creatures of consensus. ...  

It's hard to pick a fight around an academic conference table because every step of the industry's socialization process after admission to graduate school stresses playing well with others. When newly minted PhDs totter off to their first job interviews, they'll be lucky if a single person in the department to which they are applying has read so much as the title page of their dissertations. "On-campus" interviews, during which the candidate is typically entertained by his prospective employers for 48 hours, are simply protracted exercises in mutual butt-sniffing, designed to determine whether the prospective hire will fit harmoniously into the polyamorous marriage that is an academic department. 

The field of academic book reviewing is likewise a pillow fight. Few reviewers care to freely speak their minds when they know that an uncensored takedown might do real injury to the reviewed author's prospects for tenure or other advancement—and might piss off the author's friends and allies in the bargain. (Fun facts: Amid the thousands of academic book reviews accessible through Project Muse, a gargantuan database of 393 peer-reviewed journals, only nine books were deemed "poorly researched" by their reviewers. On the other hand, 374 were found to be "magisterial"—pretty much the warmest plaudit in the humanistic vocabulary.) 

On the odd occasion when scholars do get out their flick knives, it tends to happen outside of class and out by the bike racks....

Getting back to the issue of double-blind peer review: Theoretically the anonymity of the process creates conditions in which an academic referee can vote his or her conscience. In practice I question whether double-blinding really makes much difference, any more than the acquisition of tenure reliably turns your average prudent career academic into a fearless speaker of truth to power after years of careful self-censorship. ...By and large I have to agree with Professor Drummond Rennie, deputy editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, when he asserts that "there seems to be no study too fragmented, no hypothesis too trivial, no literature too biased or too egotistical, no design too warped, no methodology too bungled, no presentation of results too inaccurate, too obscure, and too contradictory, no analysis too self-serving, no argument too circular, no conclusions too trifling or too unjustified, and no grammar and syntax too offensive for a paper to end up in print." And keep in mind Dr. Rennie is referring here to the scientific precincts of scholarship, where especially robust standards of proof and argumentation supposedly prevail. 

So what then might we anticipate from a brave new protocol of scholarly review premised on the idea that anyone with access to the Web is entitled to an opinion? Probably something pretty interesting, and at least as dysfunctional as the mess we have now.
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 Comments, praise, and disparagement are welcome! - TL

The Foreign Language Requirement

Last week, while I was busy procrastinating revising my conference paper, I became tangentially involved in a minor kerfuffle on Twitter regarding the foreign language requirement for doctoral students in the humanities -- specifically, for PhD students in U.S. history and/or English/American literature. 

The chief interlocutors in the debate were Rosemary Feal of the MLA, Rob Townsend of the AHA, and Erik Loomis, an environmental historian who writes for the blog "Lawyers, Guns & Money."  (Loomis is an assistant professor at the University of Rhode Island.)

Feal was touting the MLA's latest recommendation calling for "advanced competence" in a single foreign language for students pursuing PhDs in English, and Townsend seemed to think the same requirement would be a good idea for U.S. history PhDs.  Loomis, on the other hand, decried any foreign language requirement for U.S. history PhDs as an unnecessary bit of academic gatekeeping that smacked of elitism and would alienate students from working-class backgrounds.  He suggested that it would be more useful and valuable for students to learn a programming language.  I will respond to (some of) Loomis's ideas about the needs of working-class students below. 

First, though, I'd like to say a brief word about Twitter -- what it is, and what it ain't.  Twitter is a great medium for making quick synaptic connections -- promoting links, bloggers, blogs, news articles, finding interesting people doing interesting work.  It's a great place for starting conversations, but an infelicitous forum for carrying on a sustained argument.  Generally speaking, a Tweet is less a fully-articulated thought than a place-holder or pointer indicating that one has some Ideas Worth Discussing that Ought to Be Explored in More Depth Elsewhere.  Happily, Erik Loomis has elaborated his ideas on the language requirement in a blog post here. 

Loomis, Feal and Townsend are not the first academics to publicly disagree about the worth or utility of a foreign language requirement.  Indeed, this is a Very Worn Argument.  If you want to have a little fun with JSTOR, do a search for "foreign language requirement" (in quotes) and "history."  Here are the search results, ranked by relevance, and here they are ranked by date (newest to oldest). As you can see, the earliest salvos in this debate are pretty dang old.

Doug Steward's 2006 article, "The Foreign Language Requirement in English Doctoral Programs" (Profession: 203-218), is especially helpful in sketching out a historiography of the debate about the foreign language requirement for literature PhDs.  Steward's assessment of the issue offers a far more nuanced and nicely argued version of the basic idea that informed my incredulous tweet accusing Erik Loomis of advocating provincialism.  Steward writes:

Our linguistic and research biases in the English profession are as "US-centric" as biases usually are in the United States, and that includes a kind of obeisance to the definition of science that obtains here.  Two consequences of such a deference to the scientific research model are narrow specialization...and the utilitarian devaluation of any skill, such as knowing a foreign language, that does not yield quickly tangible research benefits.  These biases also include an unconscionable, if unconscious, complicity in the English language's global hegemony and in the views that language is a transparent medium of communication and that English is the language of the United States....Culturally, English monlingualism means national isolationism and a parochial self-regard.  If this is a problem in the United States English-language population at large, I can think of no good reason to condone such isolationism among the most educated Americans -- those with research degrees... (213-214)

Now, Steward is talking about English (including, of course, American Literature).  Simply substituting "the U.S. history profession" for "the English profession" here would probably represent a wildly inappropriate conflation of one discipline's history and character for another.  So I would be grateful if my colleagues and/or readers who are historians of higher education or have an especially good command of the history of the profession would offer some insights here on whether or not Steward's assessment "in the abstract" might be aptly applied to the particular situation of U.S. history or U.S. historians.  Narrow specialization, complicity in the English language's global hegemony, parochial self-regard -- is this us?  Alternately, if someone can point us to an article that lays out the history of the foreign language requirement (or lack thereof) for U.S. history -- something I was not able to find -- that would be helpful.  Perhaps U.S. history has been less monolingual as a profession or discipline than English or American lit.  And perhaps not.

In the meantime, though, I would like to address one aspect of Loomis's argument.  He writes:

History should be a tool for work. It should be a tool for the work of many of us. And our students are in fact leaving the history major because they don’t see it as valuable for their future. Holding onto the belief that people should major in humanities because they will be smart has its own value, but it’s also not enough to compete in the reality of the 21st century university marketplace, particularly among students with working-class backgrounds. We need to show our students that history does have concrete value for their future, including BUT NOT ONLY, that it will make them more educated and interesting.

It is not clear what Loomis means here by the "reality of the 21st century university marketplace," but I assume he means the academic job market, since he concludes his post with a discussion of the difficulties of finding a tenure-track job.  However -- and regrettably -- the "marketplace" has come to the university in a multitude of ways that reach well beyond the "job market."  I suppose a resigned acknowledgment that the market has triumphed once and for all, that only those skills that are easily instrumentalized and obviously and immediately lucrative are worth the time and money it takes to teach them or learn them, is a sensible and even defensible position.  But it is a presentism with no future -- no future for the academy, and no future for the working-class students about whom Loomis is rightly concerned.

Whatever the degree requirements for getting a PhD in history, the profession of U.S. history as a whole -- I mean the whole field, broadly construed -- requires that there be scholars who are conversant in languages other than English, not only for archival research but also to critically engage with current scholarship.  If the hegemony of "the market" has done anything, it has helped to undermine the paradigm of the singular nation-state with discrete geographic, economic, cultural and epistemic borders.  The field of U.S. history extends far beyond the borders of the United States, and the contours of the field for practitioners within the U.S. seem to be bending towards something like a transnational turn, if that's not already in our rearview mirror.  So the profession will continue to need trained historians who are skilled in languages other than English, and those scholars who do have such language skills might have a competitive edge in "the market."

Besides, if "the market," rather than the profession, is to dictate the skill set that makes for well-trained historians, how are working-class students served by the suggestion that they forgo language training?  It is hard enough to compete for a tenure-track job against star applicants from top-tier programs that will probably not waive the language requirement.  Why make it harder by choosing to further diminish the kind of training offered to PhD students at non-elite institutions?  You do working-class students no favors by telling them to aspire to be less skilled and less prepared than the top tier of their cohort.  If anything, language training should receive more emphasis and support at non-elite schools.  Instead of clamoring to have this requirement waived, PhD students in U.S. history should clamor for more and better language training for undergraduates at their institutions, and more support for intensive language tutoring in their graduate programs.

As a profession, we don't have to stand by and let "the market" decide that a less skilled, less well-trained academic workforce is beneficial.  It's not beneficial to society, and it's not beneficial to the discipline of history.  It's only beneficial to those who seek to deliver education on the cheap.  Working-class students -- and I have been one, and I guess I still am one -- have been shortchanged in so many ways already.  They don't need to be complicit in the further narrowing of their own horizons.  Instead, they -- we -- ought to collaborate with the other disciplines in the humanities -- and especially with the beleaguered foreign language departments -- to contend for a more robust, more rigorous graduate education for all of us.

Professing History: Not for the Faint of Heart

Among the sessions I attended at the AHA in Chicago this past January was the special session designed to address the crisis in employment for newly minted history PhDs, and to do so "from the demand side." 
In other words, the point of the session, moderated by outgoing AHA President Anthony Grafton, was not to lament that academe is producing way too many history PhDs who have no chance of landing the kind of jobs for which they we are being trained.  Rather, the point was to explore whether and how the AHA as a professional organization could do anything to increase the number and kinds of jobs available to all these newly-minted PhDs.

I will not summarize the arguments presented by the panelists, Jesse Lemisch, Edward Balleisen, John R. Dichtl, and Lynn Hunt.  History News Network has posted a brief but apt summary of the session, along with video remarks from each speaker on the panel. 

Instead let me tell you a little bit of what it was like to be in that packed-out room, both during the panel and during the Q&A that followed.  I know I wasn't the only PhD student in there, sitting on the edge of my seat, desperate to hear something that would give me a modicum of hope as I look ahead at what appears to me and many others to be an absolutely abysmal academic job market. 

Man, did I get an earful. 

That panel was a Clash of the Titans, with Jesse Lemisch on one end and Lynn Hunt on the other, and no love lost between them.  I mean, it was intense.  Imagine being the most junior of junior scholars, just a PhD student, a mere acolyte in the great tradition of history as philosophy, as vocation, as profession -- imagine sitting there, witnessing two senior historians whose work I have been reading and reading about since I started my program, go head to head in an intellectual contest that was no mere intellectual exercise. 

Lemisch and Hunt are historians with a capital "H." They don't just produce riveting and revolutionary scholarship -- they don't just "do" history; rather, they are history.  They and their fellow senior colleagues are the profession.  They instantiate and exemplify and model what it means to be a historian.  They weren't just arguing about their competing views of the profession and its future; they were arguing about their identity, their values, who they are, what makes their work matter, what makes all our work matter.  It was astonishing to witness. 

I listened to Lemisch, and I could not help but admire his rhetorical ferocity and  his uncompromising idealism.  (My guess is that he would say that if more people would commit to his ideals, that idealism would become realism.)  I listened to Hunt, and I was stunned by her bold brilliance -- superseding even what I've read on the page -- and her ability to sharply illuminate the context and subtext of the debate in a way that makes her vision impossible to deny or ignore.  (My guess is that she would say that the insistence of some people to do just that -- deny and ignore that context and subtext -- is precisely what is so problematic about the historical profession.)

I don't mean to short or shortchange the other two panelists; they were not just potted plants.  (Dichtl in particular took some heat from Lemisch, and did his best to give as good as he got.)  But their most crucial contribution to that panel may have been simply to put some distance -- intellectual, polemical and spatial -- between Lemisch and Hunt.  Yeah, it was that intense. 

Indeed, I think all of us in the audience were probably somewhat relieved when Anthony Grafton got up and opened up the discussion to questions from the floor.

Our relief was short-lived.

The very first question from the floor came from a historian who was also an administrator at a small regional college -- the college president, if I am not mistaken, though I didn't write it down in my notes and so I couldn't swear to it.  Anyhow, coming from a small department at a small school, this questioner had served on every search and been a part of every hiring committee for history professors at his institution since his arrival there. 

Here is part of what he had to say about why history PhDs are having trouble finding jobs:  "A large percentage of the graduates from your programs are not really worth looking at."  Out of scores of applications, this commenter said, "maybe the top ten percent are head and shoulders above the rest," and the rest do not seem to be qualified for academic work period.  He said that PhD programs are producing sub-par scholars.  "And," he concluded, "I haven't heard any of you address this."

The silence in that packed-out room was deafening.  Nobody moved.  Time seemed to stand still. 

I don't know what anybody else was thinking.  I didn't know what to think myself.  Here I was at my first AHA meeting, at practically the first panel I attended, and I had just had the astonishing experience of listening to two senior historians engaged in an intellectual and ideological battle that left me in slack-jawed shock with my head still spinning.  And now this? 

What was I as a PhD student, and as someone who spends a great deal of time thinking about the idea of the university, supposed to do with this?  What was anybody else in the room supposed to do with this?

I was sitting on the end of a row, about twenty rows back from the panel.  I was looking all around the room trying to make eye contact with somebody -- anybody -- to see if I was alone in my shock and awe.  The panelists all looked as astonished as everybody in the audience.  There was Anthony Grafton, standing at the podium, stunned into silence.  He wouldn't know me from Adam, but he happened to look out at me just as I glanced up at him, and our eyebrows went up in unison.  The effect of that commenter's remarks on that room was something to behold.

After a moment -- what seemed like an interminable moment, from where I sat -- Grafton simply said, "Next question?" 

I didn't even hear the rest of the questions.  I was thinking the whole time about what that commenter had stood up to say.  In part, I was thinking, "Is this true?"  And if it's true, what does it mean?  What does it mean for me and my colleagues?  What does it say about the state of the university in America?  What does it mean for the future -- the future of our profession, the future of our culture?

I'm still thinking about this man's remark -- about the justice or injustice of it, the truth or the mistakenness of it.  But at the time, and even more since, what I have mostly been thinking about is the extraordinary courage that it must have taken for him to stand up and say it in the first place, and then face the indignant or angry or perhaps simply bemused silence of that room.  He wasn't going to win any popularity contests with that remark.  And he knew it.  And he said it anyway -- not because he wanted to be obnoxious or contrarian, but because he thought it was important, and he thought it was true.

What do I think about that question, and about the whole panel?  I'm not sure yet.  I'm still working it out. 

But I can tell you this much:  when the session was over, I didn't leave the room thinking, "What is the future of the historical profession?"  Instead, I walked out of there thinking, "What the hell have I gotten myself into?"  

Good question.

Is Academic Blogging A Zero-Sum Game?

In February of this year I offered some reflections on blogging as a professional historian. In that piece I hoped to add to David Sehat's earlier series, as well as make an argument for what I called the "blog-as-lab approach."

In today's post I offer some reflections on the hazards and usefulness of blogging through another post by Edward J. Blum at Religion in American History. Blum's post, overall, looks at blogging through a somewhat jaded lens and offers six "reservations and lessons" for others---especially junior scholars---looking to make their mark through blogging.

I agree with several of Blum's points. But I also agree with a commenter who nudges us to consider some positives.

Problems arise in relation to the respectability of blogging when one views it as a zero-sum game in relation to other publishing endeavors. The fact is that blogging and paper publishing are synergistic. Blogging can quicken one's paper publishing efforts---whether it be by my blog-as-lab theory, or simply by helping you break writer's block. And publishing helps your blogging because it brings respect and awareness to your overall work, whether it be presented in scholarly formats, or in snippets. Academic publishing brings attention to one's (valuable?) non-peer-reviewed work.

All thoughtful writing is valuable. And the web, when other writers do their homework, actually helps prevent intellectual theft. When you get your thoughts "out there" in a coherent fashion, others will find your work.

There seems to be a deep-seated tendency in human nature to get at sources and roots---a tendency which profits historians immensely. People seem want to know who thought of something first and give honor. But maybe my observations are too one-sided, too optimistic? If so, let me offer a pessimistically worded conclusion:

Academic blogging will die as a useful endeavor when the zero-sum-game folks win. - TL

Is Academic Blogging A Zero-Sum Game?

In February of this year I offered some reflections on blogging as a professional historian. In that piece I hoped to add to David Sehat's earlier series, as well as make an argument for what I called the "blog-as-lab approach."

In today's post I offer some reflections on the hazards and usefulness of blogging through another post by Edward J. Blum at Religion in American History. Blum's post, overall, looks at blogging through a somewhat jaded lens and offers six "reservations and lessons" for others---especially junior scholars---looking to make their mark through blogging.

I agree with several of Blum's points. But I also agree with a commenter who nudges us to consider some positives.

Problems arise in relation to the respectability of blogging when one views it as a zero-sum game in relation to other publishing endeavors. The fact is that blogging and paper publishing are synergistic. Blogging can quicken one's paper publishing efforts---whether it be by my blog-as-lab theory, or simply by helping you break writer's block. And publishing helps your blogging because it brings respect and awareness to your overall work, whether it be presented in scholarly formats, or in snippets. Academic publishing brings attention to one's (valuable?) non-peer-reviewed work.

All thoughtful writing is valuable. And the web, when other writers do their homework, actually helps prevent intellectual theft. When you get your thoughts "out there" in a coherent fashion, others will find your work.

There seems to be a deep-seated tendency in human nature to get at sources and roots---a tendency which profits historians immensely. People seem want to know who thought of something first and give honor. But maybe my observations are too one-sided, too optimistic? If so, let me offer a pessimistically worded conclusion:

Academic blogging will die as a useful endeavor when the zero-sum-game folks win. - TL

History in the Intertubes

Having engaged in some long-form commenting below, here's a little short-form blogging on three topics of interest to this blog and its readers:

1) David Lowenthal, author of the terrific The Past is a Foreign Country, thinks we are become more presentist, which is not a good thing. I'm not sure if the "we" Lowenthal has in mind is Americans or people in the twenty-first century (it's certainly not historians). I'm also honestly not sure whether or not I agree with Lowenthal's diagnosis of rising presentism (though I'd agree that presentism is generally not a good thing). What d'ya think?

2) Based on a forthcoming U.S. Department of Education study, the Chronicle of Higher Education declares tenure dead. HNN asks readers to comment on what should be done now that it is. Predictably (given HNN comment threads) the first response consists of someone dancing on tenure's grave. Is tenure dead or merely dying? Either way, what is to be done? And, finally, why does HNN have such godawful comment threads?

3) Following a lot of recent lobbying from various quarters, Ulysses S. Grant is slowly climbing the presidential ratings charts. Currently he's ascended from bottom tier to middle of the pack. Where does he belong? And which, if any, of the changing views of Grant is most presentist? [h/t to Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns and Money, who expresses justified disgust at the fact that sixty years ago historians thought that Grant was a worse president than Andrew Johnson.]

History in the Intertubes

Having engaged in some long-form commenting below, here's a little short-form blogging on three topics of interest to this blog and its readers:

1) David Lowenthal, author of the terrific The Past is a Foreign Country, thinks we are become more presentist, which is not a good thing. I'm not sure if the "we" Lowenthal has in mind is Americans or people in the twenty-first century (it's certainly not historians). I'm also honestly not sure whether or not I agree with Lowenthal's diagnosis of rising presentism (though I'd agree that presentism is generally not a good thing). What d'ya think?

2) Based on a forthcoming U.S. Department of Education study, the Chronicle of Higher Education declares tenure dead. HNN asks readers to comment on what should be done now that it is. Predictably (given HNN comment threads) the first response consists of someone dancing on tenure's grave. Is tenure dead or merely dying? Either way, what is to be done? And, finally, why does HNN have such godawful comment threads?

3) Following a lot of recent lobbying from various quarters, Ulysses S. Grant is slowly climbing the presidential ratings charts. Currently he's ascended from bottom tier to middle of the pack. Where does he belong? And which, if any, of the changing views of Grant is most presentist? [h/t to Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns and Money, who expresses justified disgust at the fact that sixty years ago historians thought that Grant was a worse president than Andrew Johnson.]

Blogging USIH: Only Paradoxes to Offer?

Some time ago one of our own, David Sehat, started a series called "Blogging Academic Knowledge." His series lasted for only a couple of posts, but he covered the general nature of online communities, professional authority, fostering discussion, and the perils of online communication (i.e. mobbing others, comment misinterpretation, anonymity, etc.). Our discussion of David's posts was rather limited---probably a disappointment to him, but also perhaps a consequence of the fact that he echoed our questions and none of us had answers. In any event, I will extend David's discussion in a narrow way to blogging about U.S. intellectual history. In other words, let's talk about what we do here at a meta level---go epistemological on blogging USIH.

After three plus years of posting and observing posts here, when it comes to writing directly about intellectual history I have observed some paradoxes.

All of us---here at least---are generally committed to disseminating knowledge about USIH through paper and electronic media. However, the profession, particularly our subfield, values books most of all. They're the currency of the realm. This works against a professional doing any heavy lifting on either articles (refereed or no) and other shorter pieces. It makes the historian feel guilty for committing too much time and energy to ephemeral(?) media---precisely the kind of media that reaches the most people. That feeling and the book-as-currency issue prevents historians of the intellectual life from disseminating knowledge in reader friendly, affordable formats. This is paradox #1.

I have also come to believe that many intellectual history topics are not conducive to blogging. There are two reasons for this. First, USIH topics often require adequate depth in order to explain nuance. In a blog format this opens one up to the charge of treating complex topics too lightly. No intellectual historian wants to be accused of shallowness. Second, no one wants to read long posts! But USIH topics seem to often require lengthy treatments. So the "topical problem" is paradox #2.

Solutions? I'm not sure I have any for paradox #1. The profession is what it is. No regular USIH blogger will succeed in the profession if blogging is all the historian does. Period. However, an answer to paradox #2 goes some way toward helping with #1.

I believe that more intellectual historians need to see blogs as book and article laboratories. This works in the early stages of drafting because all good writers know that draft #1 never, never, never (yes, I'm partly emphasizing this for myself!) really looks like the final version. Writers who transition straight from drafts to final copies are the exception, not the rule. Because of this no one should fear posting early ideas for an article. And if this blog-as-lab approach applies for articles, it applies to book projects triply. Think of all the things that are cut from chapter drafts. Using the leavings from the cutting room floor for blog posts seems like a fruitful line of thinking.

Over the past year or two I have noticed that many authors are posting early drafts of material in order to solicit comments for revisionary purposes. This is no different than passing around chapter drafts to colleagues. Why not do it on a smaller scale, with chapter sections? And what better audience for revisionary-comment purposes than USIH blog followers?

I also think that blogging involves a commitment to professional service on the part of the historian. We must place a higher value on brief discourses and the simple underscoring of ideas in order to popularize the subfield. Indeed, one can ponder without being ponderous or pedantic. Intellectual historians should be content to post shorter pieces and be happy with longer comment sections---and participating in those comment strings. Indeed, posting shorter pieces prevents one from being ponderous on a topic before the audience gets on board. In fact it's probably best to post only 1/4-1/3 of a longer post one has drafted and leave the rest for comments if your audience feels your momentum.

Although this post applies of course to my USIH colleagues immediately as well as broadly, it also adds to the conversation about ~how~ to blog academic knowledge.

What are your blog strategy ideas, for intellectual historians or speaking broadly? Has this post hit near the mark in identifying the problems with blogging on USIH topics? - TL

PS: My title comes with apologies to Joan Wallach Scott. I can't say, however, that my title has much to do with the main thrust of that book.

Blogging USIH: Only Paradoxes to Offer?

Some time ago one of our own, David Sehat, started a series called "Blogging Academic Knowledge." His series lasted for only a couple of posts, but he covered the general nature of online communities, professional authority, fostering discussion, and the perils of online communication (i.e. mobbing others, comment misinterpretation, anonymity, etc.). Our discussion of David's posts was rather limited---probably a disappointment to him, but also perhaps a consequence of the fact that he echoed our questions and none of us had answers. In any event, I will extend David's discussion in a narrow way to blogging about U.S. intellectual history. In other words, let's talk about what we do here at a meta level---go epistemological on blogging USIH.

After three plus years of posting and observing posts here, when it comes to writing directly about intellectual history I have observed some paradoxes.

All of us---here at least---are generally committed to disseminating knowledge about USIH through paper and electronic media. However, the profession, particularly our subfield, values books most of all. They're the currency of the realm. This works against a professional doing any heavy lifting on either articles (refereed or no) and other shorter pieces. It makes the historian feel guilty for committing too much time and energy to ephemeral(?) media---precisely the kind of media that reaches the most people. That feeling and the book-as-currency issue prevents historians of the intellectual life from disseminating knowledge in reader friendly, affordable formats. This is paradox #1.

I have also come to believe that many intellectual history topics are not conducive to blogging. There are two reasons for this. First, USIH topics often require adequate depth in order to explain nuance. In a blog format this opens one up to the charge of treating complex topics too lightly. No intellectual historian wants to be accused of shallowness. Second, no one wants to read long posts! But USIH topics seem to often require lengthy treatments. So the "topical problem" is paradox #2.

Solutions? I'm not sure I have any for paradox #1. The profession is what it is. No regular USIH blogger will succeed in the profession if blogging is all the historian does. Period. However, an answer to paradox #2 goes some way toward helping with #1.

I believe that more intellectual historians need to see blogs as book and article laboratories. This works in the early stages of drafting because all good writers know that draft #1 never, never, never (yes, I'm partly emphasizing this for myself!) really looks like the final version. Writers who transition straight from drafts to final copies are the exception, not the rule. Because of this no one should fear posting early ideas for an article. And if this blog-as-lab approach applies for articles, it applies to book projects triply. Think of all the things that are cut from chapter drafts. Using the leavings from the cutting room floor for blog posts seems like a fruitful line of thinking.

Over the past year or two I have noticed that many authors are posting early drafts of material in order to solicit comments for revisionary purposes. This is no different than passing around chapter drafts to colleagues. Why not do it on a smaller scale, with chapter sections? And what better audience for revisionary-comment purposes than USIH blog followers?

I also think that blogging involves a commitment to professional service on the part of the historian. We must place a higher value on brief discourses and the simple underscoring of ideas in order to popularize the subfield. Indeed, one can ponder without being ponderous or pedantic. Intellectual historians should be content to post shorter pieces and be happy with longer comment sections---and participating in those comment strings. Indeed, posting shorter pieces prevents one from being ponderous on a topic before the audience gets on board. In fact it's probably best to post only 1/4-1/3 of a longer post one has drafted and leave the rest for comments if your audience feels your momentum.

Although this post applies of course to my USIH colleagues immediately as well as broadly, it also adds to the conversation about ~how~ to blog academic knowledge.

What are your blog strategy ideas, for intellectual historians or speaking broadly? Has this post hit near the mark in identifying the problems with blogging on USIH topics? - TL

PS: My title comes with apologies to Joan Wallach Scott. I can't say, however, that my title has much to do with the main thrust of that book.

Tim's Light Reading (2/19/2010)

1. Historians As Activists---Against Bad History: The History Channel is at it again---meaning irritating professional historians. InsideHigherEd has relayed that a group of political historians are protesting an upcoming series on the Kennedy family. The show's script writer, however, retorts that their complaints are premature---that the show isn't finished yet. Saying that the show is "not a documentary [but] a dramatization," Steve Kronish actually underscores other important issues in history---popularization versus nuance, public history versus traditional practice, the role of money in distorting exchanges about history, and political families who protect their legacies via manipulating archival access and lording over the work of historians (e.g. Kennedy family protectors fearing the work of Joel Surnow, a friend of Rush Limbaugh). Overall of these fears is the forgetfulness by everyone involved (historians ~and~ their subjects) that history is perspectival, subjective, and has always been a field of competing accounts. But it is also true that the free flow of truth---whether by storytelling or in conversation---is often overwhelmed by unequal concentrations of wealth in the hands of political partisans. In other words, propaganda fed by money can make the truth difficult to discern. In this particular case, it looks like there is enough blame to go around.

2. The State of Academe: Sadly, William Pannapacker gets closer and closer to some truths about academe and the life of the mind today with every column he writes. It's hard for some of us (no matter your position or security within the academy) to distance ourselves from the job situation out there, but there can be no question that a future intellectual historian will have to deal with downside of credentialism in the intellectual life, particularly in humanities graduate studies.

3. Another Important Subfield With Identity Issues: Kevin Schultz and Paul Harvey authored a piece for InsideHigherEd that documents an "everywhere and nowhere" identity problem in the history of religion in America. The title of their article mimics precisely a line from Wilfred McClay's assessment of USIH that appeared in Historically Speaking last fall. Here's the Schultz-Harvey thesis:

Religion is everywhere around us, and religious historians have written about it in compelling and exciting ways, but within mainstream historiography it has been basically left behind. In a sense, religion is everywhere in modern American history, but nowhere in modern American historiography.

4. The Myth and Reality of Christianity's Role in America's Founding: Continuing somewhat the theme from point #3, the historical question of the Christian origins of America was recently addressed in the NY Times. Presented in the context of textbook adoption and revision discussions for Texas schools, here's the article's thesis:

[Christian conservative activists] hold that the United States was founded by devout Christians and according to biblical precepts. This belief provides what they consider not only a theological but also, ultimately, a judicial grounding to their positions on social questions. When they proclaim that the United States is a “Christian nation,” they are not referring to the percentage of the population that ticks a certain box in a survey or census but to the country’s roots and the intent of the founders. The Christian “truth” about America’s founding has long been taught in Christian schools, but not beyond. Recently, however — perhaps out of ire at what they see as an aggressive, secular, liberal agenda in Washington and perhaps also because they sense an opening in the battle, a sudden weakness in the lines of the secularists — some activists decided that the time was right to try to reshape the history that children in public schools study. Succeeding at this would help them toward their ultimate goal of reshaping American society.

Tim's Light Reading (2/19/2010)

1. Historians As Activists---Against Bad History: The History Channel is at it again---meaning irritating professional historians. InsideHigherEd has relayed that a group of political historians are protesting an upcoming series on the Kennedy family. The show's script writer, however, retorts that their complaints are premature---that the show isn't finished yet. Saying that the show is "not a documentary [but] a dramatization," Steve Kronish actually underscores other important issues in history---popularization versus nuance, public history versus traditional practice, the role of money in distorting exchanges about history, and political families who protect their legacies via manipulating archival access and lording over the work of historians (e.g. Kennedy family protectors fearing the work of Joel Surnow, a friend of Rush Limbaugh). Overall of these fears is the forgetfulness by everyone involved (historians ~and~ their subjects) that history is perspectival, subjective, and has always been a field of competing accounts. But it is also true that the free flow of truth---whether by storytelling or in conversation---is often overwhelmed by unequal concentrations of wealth in the hands of political partisans. In other words, propaganda fed by money can make the truth difficult to discern. In this particular case, it looks like there is enough blame to go around.

2. The State of Academe: Sadly, William Pannapacker gets closer and closer to some truths about academe and the life of the mind today with every column he writes. It's hard for some of us (no matter your position or security within the academy) to distance ourselves from the job situation out there, but there can be no question that a future intellectual historian will have to deal with downside of credentialism in the intellectual life, particularly in humanities graduate studies.

3. Another Important Subfield With Identity Issues: Kevin Schultz and Paul Harvey authored a piece for InsideHigherEd that documents an "everywhere and nowhere" identity problem in the history of religion in America. The title of their article mimics precisely a line from Wilfred McClay's assessment of USIH that appeared in Historically Speaking last fall. Here's the Schultz-Harvey thesis:

Religion is everywhere around us, and religious historians have written about it in compelling and exciting ways, but within mainstream historiography it has been basically left behind. In a sense, religion is everywhere in modern American history, but nowhere in modern American historiography.

4. The Myth and Reality of Christianity's Role in America's Founding: Continuing somewhat the theme from point #3, the historical question of the Christian origins of America was recently addressed in the NY Times. Presented in the context of textbook adoption and revision discussions for Texas schools, here's the article's thesis:

[Christian conservative activists] hold that the United States was founded by devout Christians and according to biblical precepts. This belief provides what they consider not only a theological but also, ultimately, a judicial grounding to their positions on social questions. When they proclaim that the United States is a “Christian nation,” they are not referring to the percentage of the population that ticks a certain box in a survey or census but to the country’s roots and the intent of the founders. The Christian “truth” about America’s founding has long been taught in Christian schools, but not beyond. Recently, however — perhaps out of ire at what they see as an aggressive, secular, liberal agenda in Washington and perhaps also because they sense an opening in the battle, a sudden weakness in the lines of the secularists — some activists decided that the time was right to try to reshape the history that children in public schools study. Succeeding at this would help them toward their ultimate goal of reshaping American society.