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

Professional Societies in an Age of Academic Transformation

The following post is Society for U.S. Intellectual History President Paul Murphy's "President's Column" for the Fall 2012 issue of the S-USIH Notes, the Society's newsletter.  In addition to being President of S-USIH, Paul is Professor of History at Grand Valley State University and is the author of The Rebuke of History: the Southern Agrarians and American Conservative Thought (University of North Carolina, 2001) and The New Era: American Thought and Culture in the 1920s (Rowman & Littlefield, 2012).  He was also a founding member of this blog.

We have been in a national conversation about the future of education at all levels for a number of years now.  For those in higher education, this has meant wrenching debates about the professoriate, the future of public education, and the nature of a university education itself.  We who are professors may have reached a peak of discomfort with the latest round of high-tech start-ups in online university education, garbed as they are with the democratic promise of universally available quality education although bearing, too, the promise that the key to efficiencies and cost savings in higher education may finally be in the grasp of knowledge industry executives.  We begin to feel like E. P. Thompson’s weavers, confronted with the grim logic of technological innovation and needful again of the advice of the Assistant Commissioner for the West Riding, delivered in 1840:  “…warn them to flee from the trade, and to beware of leading their children into it, as they would beware the commission of the most atrocious of crimes.”[1]  Computerization and the internet revolution drive this conversation in part, but the roots of the debate are deeper, relating to globalization, the eclipse of public commitments to education, and, ultimately, what amounts to a new stage in the industrialization of education.  If we can replace the hardcover book with an interactive, multimedia digital data file, why not do the same with the professor?

This conversation ought to be of intense interest to the Society for U.S. Intellectual History because the transformation of the modes and manners of academic life is of necessity the transformation of American intellectual life as well, given the extent to which intellectuals are ensconced in academia.  Are we contemplating the digitization of intellectuals, as well?  More directly, as the university potentially becomes transformed into something new and quite different, becoming less and less a center for social scientific and humanistic inquiry (a theme of the concluding plenary session at the Third Annual U.S. Intellectual History Conference in 2010, entitled “Intellectual History for What?”), what is the fate of the ancillary features of academic life, such as professional societies?[2]  What is the role for a new Society such as our own at a time of such convulsive change?

            In one sense, S-USIH is a product of this transformation, born out of a listserv discussion, defined by an award-winning blog, present on social media (Facebook, Twitter), and existing organizationally, in many ways, because of the internet as a mode of communication.  S-USIH embodies the new-fangled means of connectivity.  One of our major efforts has been creating a new web portal for the Society ( http://s-usih.org/), a project that Secretary Ray Haberski has been shepherding to completion.  The new site will incorporate the existing U.S. Intellectual History blog and allow for a new range of connections and opportunities.  Our conferences have been organized and publicized via electronic forms of communication and publication.  This reflects one of the Society’s founding principles:  “Using all forms of media to reach broad audiences and engender vital debate and exchange of ideas.”

            At the same time, one of the key questions confronting our membership today (which should be over 100 members by the time you read this column) is the degree to which S-USIH should be defined by an academic “industry” in the midst of internal transition and at a historical moment when “academic” work (or “knowledge production,” scientific and otherwise) is shifting to new and proliferating venues—including the laboratories and campuses of technology companies, free-standing centers and think tanks of all sorts, and various online sites.  Is academia breaking down, and will (and ought) professional societies do the same?  The question is particularly acute as we consider another big agenda item:  Ought the Society to create a new academic journal devoted to U.S. intellectual history, and should it appear in print and be produced by an academic press along the lines of previous such journals?

            The answer may be entwined with another question:  Will S-USIH breathe new life into an old form, or ought it to be something else entirely?  In seeking to “advance the historical study of American thought among academic and non-academic scholars,” we need to think seriously about the degree to which twenty-first-century internet and digital communications, the further industrialization of higher education, and the de-funding of public education might actually be disintegrating the academy as we know it.  The fact that many of those who have created S-USIH have been unable to find stable academic jobs adds poignancy and urgency to the inquiry.  Are organizations like S-USIH going to become the places where intellectual life takes root?

            As a reflexive and obdurate traditionalist in many ways (who has spent part of my academic career studying even more cranky versions of this type), I find it puzzling to be in the position of advocating a move away from the red-brick, ivy-covered college of my imagination.  I can see, however, that I neither work in such a setting nor do I imagine that it exists in many places anymore.  Though I will clutter my home with cloth- and paperbound books to my dying day, we need to think of how we preserve the essential goals of academic professional societies of the past for the future:  Creating communities of scholars that are real and durable and fostering scholarship based on respectful but rigorous standards of self-criticism.  We think we are doing this by leveraging the internet in a way that brings us together as scholars in conferences, by fostering a widely read blog that reaches beyond academia, and, now, too, by creating such things at the Annual Book Award (the first of which will be awarded next year) that allow us to celebrate accomplished scholarship.  We have further goals, to embrace the full diversity of intellectual life in our past and broaden and make more inclusive the dialogue about that past in the present.  In this, we try to do what professional societies of the past have done.  However, professional societies have also served as adjuncts to the universities, helping in the credentialing process, designing and erecting barriers to entry into the field, laying out norms, channeling discussions into academic forums, and patrolling the borders of what is legitimate (and, in this way, achieving legitimacy for a specific field).  Are these latter tasks fruitful any longer?

            We continue as an organization devoted to revitalizing the subfield of U.S. intellectual history in the broader field of American history and in the discipline as whole.  We are, however, a nimble and creative newcomer to this task, arriving at a moment when internet portals, such as we are creating, may become the more democratic, more accessible, and dynamic sites for scholarship about the American past.  It may well be that our first task will be to salvage the discipline and its attendant community and traditions from the increasingly crisis-ridden and compromised academic system in which they have heretofore been nurtured. 

---

[1]E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York:  Vintage, 1966), 301.

[2]See Sarah Leonard, “Intellectual History for What?” The New Inquiry, Nov. 9, 2010 http://thenewinquiry.com/features/intellectual-history-for-what/.  

The Corporate Professor

I highly recommend the Spring 2012 edition of The Hedgehog Review, which is becoming one of my favorite magazines. The issue dedicates a large chunk of space to an engaging roundtable discussion on "The Corporate Professor." Given current trends in academia, made evident in the recent firing of University of Virginia President Teresa Sullivan for protecting "obscure academic departments" like classics and German, instead of buying into "strategic dynamism," whatever that is, the Hedgehog roundtable is timely. (It's also somewhat ironic given that The Hedgehog Review is published by the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the, yep, University of Virginia.) One of the pieces, "Do College Teachers Have to Be Scholars?"--by Frank Donoghue--persuasively argues that we would be better off redefining scholarship to include work spent preparing to teach, such as participating in reading groups. Another worth reading is the very useful "A Bibliographic Essay on the University, the Market, and Professors," by Ethan Schrum, a regular USIH conference attendee.


Other items in this issue of The Hedgehog Review that might be of potential interest to readers of this blog:



Jackson Lears, "The Trigger of History: Capitalism, Modernity, and the Politics of Place." In this essay Lears responds to the overarching theme of the issue--determinism--by arguing that earlier modernist thinkers like Marx, Weber, and Freud were much less deterministic in their thinking than their later more orthodox epigones and, more importantly, than our contemporary celebrants of technologically-determined progress. 


Also, Edward J. K. Gitre review's Grace Elizabeth Hale’s new book: A Nation of Outsiders: How the White Middle-Class Fell in Love with Rebellion in Postwar America. It seems this book relates well to our recent discussion about style and substance (here and here) since one of Hale's arguments is that both countercultural radicals and New Right activists "fell in love with rebellion," or at least, the rebel style. Based on our recent debate, it seems likely that Bill Fine and L.D. would find Hale's argument amenable, and that I would not. But I suppose I'll have to read the book to know for sure.

The Academy in Peril

As readers of this blog may be aware, I was in Dallas on Saturday where I delivered the keynote address at the 4th annual RAW symposium at the University of Texas at Dallas. Thanks, again to USIH's own L.D. Burnett for inviting to speak on the Future of the Humanities.

Rather than reproduce my entire talk,* I wanted to briefly summarize my main arguments and then re-answer a question from the q&a period, having come to regret the answer I gave at the time (ain't blogging grand!).

I began the talk by suggesting all the hopeful things going on in the humanities these days...and I really think there are many. We're experiencing an explosion of interesting humanistic work beyond the academy. And academic humanities departments are operating in relative internal peace compared to the often nasty divisions found within them well into the 1990s.

But the second half of my talk, sub-titled "The Academy in Peril," focused on what I feel is the biggest challenge facing the humanities today: the threat posed to higher education by both its enemies and many of its supposed friends, who have all embraced a narrow, economist understanding of higher education that sees tenured and tenure-track (TT) faculty as an unconscionable fixed cost that interferes with rationalizing the operation of the university.**

We are already seeing the effects of decades of forced casualization of the academic labor force. Today, two-thirds of the 1.5 million college and university faculty are in non-tenure track (NTT) jobs.  Most of these faculty don't have PhDs, though many of them are pursuing the degree.  Marc Bousquet, one of the most trenchant observers of the current state of the academic labor system, summarizes the situation grimly, but not entirely inaccurately, as one in which PhD recipients are the system's waste products.  Far from preparing them for an academic career, graduate school is, for many PhD candidates, the academic career itself, as they become markedly less employable after they receive their PhDs. But while it makes perfect sense from an administrative perspective focused on the bottom line to replace newly expensive (though pedagogically experienced) recently minted PhDs with cheap (though totally inexperienced) entering graduate students, neither teaching nor scholarship is served by such a management technique.

Unfortunately, rather than thinking comprehensively about this whole labor system, faculty, especially TT faculty, tend to think in terms of a semi-mythical job market, which involves the competition among PhDs for the shrinking number of TT positions.

I concluded my talk not with a solution to these problems (I'm not sure what that would be), but rather with three things we should all do in order to work toward a solution:

1) Analyze.  We need to have a better understanding of the overall labor system of academia.  TT faculty, in particular, need to gain a better understanding of the experiences, needs, and hopes of NTT faculty.  Before we can devise solutions, we need to understand the problem.

2) Organize. Any solution will involve organizing.  Though I'm less convinced than Bousquet that doing so is the solution, unionization is a critical first step...where possible. Unfortunately, many states, including my own, ban faculty unions at public institutions. And the most powerful form of unionization--one that would link TT and NTT faculty in a single bargaining unit--is being bitterly contested even in places in which faculty unionization is well established.***  But even if you can't join a union, you can--and should--join AAUP. And NTT faculty should also join the New Faculty Majority.****  Finally, it is appalling that many faculty still oppose graduate student unionization efforts.

3) Advocate.  For the humanities, on and off campus. And for a new vision of higher education that puts the focus back on education and scholarship broadly understood.

So that's more or less what I had to say.

Let me add here that these things are especially important right now because a lot of people on and off our nation's campuses want to make the lives of faculty--and with them the quality of education and scholarship that goes on in our colleges and universities--immeasurably worse.

If you're a tenured or TT faculty member (or just hope to be one some day), now's a good time to take a look at how the NTT faculty are treated on your campus. Include graduate instructors in your field of vision.  What you'll see won't be pretty. And yet, what you'll see is what your administrators and educational reformers--Democratic and Republican--want your job to look like in the future.*****

The latest example of this sort of thing appeared in the Washington Post on March 23. Opining that faculty don't work hard enough, educational consultant and former New School Chancellor David C. Levy argues that all college and university faculty ought to be teaching 6:6 or 7:7 loads.******

All of which brings me to the audience question from Saturday that I wish to re-answer.

The q&a opened with a faculty member (I think), asking me what my work on Leo Strauss (which L.D. had referenced in her introduction of me) had to do with my "activism" (this word is usually meant as a pejorative in such a context).

My answer was simple: "Nothing," I said.

What I meant by that was that my work on Strauss and the Straussians really isn't informed at all by the sort of things I was discussing in this talk.  I understand--and appreciate--that many humanists understand their activism and scholarship as a kind of seamless web, that their scholarly work is, in a fundamental sense, engagé.  But that ain't me.  I'm kinda old-fashioned that way.

But I think I misunderstood the spirit of the question. Or at least, my very pithy answer didn't cover all it's potential meanings.

Almost immediately after the q&a ended, however, I began to wonder whether this question may have actually been intended as way of asking "Shouldn't you be doing your work instead of this sort of thing?"*******

At any rate, there is, in fact, a very direct relationship between my scholarly work and my "activism": if my conditions of employment significantly deteriorate, I will not be able to do my work on Leo Strauss and the Straussians or much of anything beyond teaching (badly due to the increased load).  Which is, I suppose, also why I object a little to the word "activism" here.  I'm not, after all, choosing to be involved in a political struggle. I'm just thinking about and trying to improve, or at least preserve, my own labor conditions.  And suggesting that if others in a similar position don't do so as well, we will all likely pay a very heavy price for our failure.

_____________________
* I gave the talk off of an extended outline, so reproducing it would either involve reprinting a series of notes to myself or attempting to reproduce the thing ex post facto.

** I've blogged at greater length about these issues on USIH before here, here, and here.

*** Last week, an Illinois State Court prevented such a combined union from gaining recognition at the University of Illinois at Chicago, which is happy to bargain with split unions.

**** Seriously. If you're a faculty member--and that includes grad students who teach--and aren't a part of those organizations, follow those links now!

*****Although my talk at UTD was generally well-received by its majority grad student audience, I heard through the grapevine that some senior faculty felt that I had come across as young and naive.  Though I'll admit that I've reached the age at which being called "young and naive," like being carded, has become more compliment than insult, I really do think that, with the possible exception of those of us lucky enough to be tenured at the best-funded and least sectarian private institutions in this country, all of our jobs are--or will shortly be--under direct, sustained attack.  The naive position at this point is to conclude that, because you have tenure, the bell does not toll for you.

****** Levy's argument is pretty self-refuting. But if you crave refutations, you can visit Paul Krugman at the Grey Lady (for a short one) or Robert Farley at LGM (for a longer version).

******* Though in all fairness to my interlocutor, my own capacity for guilt and self-punishment enables me to translate, say, a desire to grab a second cup of coffee into the question "shouldn't you be doing your work instead of this sort of thing?"

Tim's Light Reading (11-24-2011): The Thanksgiving Edition

If you're bored with your relatives, TV, or the general holiday scene---or if you love USIH so much that you're browsing here on a Thanksgiving whim---something from the entries below may be of interest. I will offer up reflections on our conference next week. - TL

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1 (of 8). Nietzsche in America

Check out this review of Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen's new book, Nietzsche in America. I don't know how I'm going to top Ross Posnock for my USIH review, but don't count on seeing my effort soon; I just got my copy of the book yesterday.


2. Middletown and Intellectual History

Slate's John Plotz writes here on his attempt to make some sense of the newly released readership information from Muncie (IN) City Library (from the 1891-1902 period). It's an interesting read for many different reasons. But I was struck by the following two paragraphs in relation to how intellectual historians conduct some of their work (bolds mine):

The book I’m currently trying to write is about the way that ordinary readers—Louis, me, or you [Louis is late 19th-century Muncie reader]—can sometimes feel drawn into a book, so far into it, that it gives us a partial sense of a life elsewhere—until we recall that our hands ache, our eyes are tired, and it’s time to pick up the kids. My working title is Semi-Detached, and that about summed up my feelings by the end of my Bloom experiment. I was partially there with Louis in the Muncie library—but I was also a very, very long way away. I’d gathered and crunched some data, and heard some stories, but …. I was always gaining on Louis, but somehow I was never fast enough to fall into stride with him, to turn sideways and find myself looking him straight in the eye. I was struck by Stuart’s reaction [one of Louis's grandchildren] when I asked him what we could deduce from his granddad’s reading. He laughed and said, “You know, I don’t even think the books I read as a kid say much about who I am now. It was all baseball then and I haven’t even seen a game in 20 years. Even as a grown man I changed; I feel like I’m in my fourth lifetime now.”

Stuart’s point about the gap between what you read and who you are got me thinking. Maybe the way Louis receded as I chased after him was not my problem but my answer. In the books Louis checked out he found, as readers everywhere always do, more than just a perfect mirror of his own life (as if “what Middletown read” told us “what Middletown really was”). He also found a way out: a glimpse of the Italy where scientists experimented with frog’s legs, or the state of Mississippi back when killing a slave was a simple property crime. The books he read might even have helped him catch a glimpse of what he wanted his own future to be working in the world of mechanics and of physics, far from Muncie (“Go West, young man”—yes, until you hit the Philippines). Thanks to those books, he too had a telescope. Like mine, it was small and imperfect, with no guarantees about the accuracy of what he glimpsed through it. Still, coming from the sort of Muncie life that he did (his mom had moved them in with in-laws, had even been threatened with having to send the kids off to various relatives) I bet that glimpse at a distant world loomed fairly large for him.

I forward these passages for your consideration because I often think about the difference between what my subjects read and what they actually took away---what they used.


3. Is a Rise in Faculty Salaries the Cause of Higher Education Tuition Inflation?

Reuter's columnist Felix Salmon says no. Here's a key passage from the piece (bolds mine):

Overall, if we exclude for-profit schools, which were a tiny part of the landscape in 1999, we have seen tuition fees rise by 32% between 1999 and 2009. Over the same period, instruction costs rose just 5.6% — the lowest rate of inflation of any of the components of education services. (“Student services costs” and “operations and maintenance costs” saw the greatest inflation, at 15.2% and 18.1% respectively, but even that is only half the rate that tuition increased.)

The real reason why tuition has been rising so much has nothing to do with [William] Baumol, and everything to do with the government. Page 31 of the report is quite clear: “except for private research institutions,” it says, “tuitions were increasing almost exclusively to replace losses from state revenues or other private revenue sources.”

In other words, tuition costs are going up just because state subsidies are going down.

...It's the State Subsidy, Stupid!


4. Herbert Marcuse's FBI File

Lawrence Winsaft of the UC-San Diego Philosophy Department has done a little research on his department and uncovered some faulty FBI book assessments of Herbert Marcuse's works (esp. Reason and Revolution, One Dimensional Man, and Essay on Liberation). Good stuff.


5. Heretics and the Gospel of Education

In a collective review of four recent books about education (higher and secondary), titled "The Educational Lottery" and published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Steven Brint frames the books in a novel way. He posits each author as a particular kind of heretic in relation to the pervasive American myth that education is at the root of all social, political, and cultural progress. Here are a few paragraphs from the review's opening (bolds mine):

Education is as close to a secular religion as we have in the United States. In a time when Americans have lost faith in their government and economic institutions, millions of us still believe in its saving grace. ...“The answer to all of our national problems,” as Lyndon Johnson put it in 1965, “comes down to one single word: education.”

The American education gospel is built around four core beliefs. First, it teaches that access to higher levels of education should be available to everyone, regardless of their background or previous academic performance. Every educational sinner should have a path to redemption. (Most of these paths now run through community colleges.) Second, the gospel teaches that opportunity for a better life is the goal of everyone and that education is the primary — and perhaps the only — road to opportunity. Third, it teaches that the country can solve its social problems — drugs, crime, poverty, and the rest — by providing more education to the poor. Education instills the knowledge, discipline, and the habits of life that lead to personal renewal and social mobility. And, finally, it teaches that higher levels of education for all will reduce social inequalities, as they will put everyone on a more equal footing. ...

The advance of the education gospel has been shadowed from the beginning by critics who claim that education, despite our best efforts, remains a bastion of privilege. For these critics, it is not that the educational gospel is wrong (a truly democratic, meritocratic school system would, if it existed, be a good thing); it is that the benefits of education have not yet spread evenly to every corner of American society, and that the trend toward educational equality may be heading in the wrong direction. They decry the fact that schools in poor communities have become dropout factories and that only the wealthy can afford the private preparatory schools that are the primary feeders to prestigious private colleges. The higher education Establishment recognizes critics like these as family. They accept the core beliefs of the education gospel and are impatient only with its slow and incomplete adoption.

Brint then goes on to outline several schools of heresy: "the new restrictionism"; "the 'free the students' school"; "the 'fool’s gold' group"; and "the 'true educators' sect."


6. Occupy AHA?

Werner Herzog's Bear says yes, and has drawn up a preliminary manifesto to aid the cause. Here are the first five demands (of ten total) in the manifesto:

1. That the AHA officially repudiate the rhetoric of "overproduction" and acknowledge that the lack of good jobs is the biggest cause of the current crisis in employment for historians.
2. That the AHA create high-level positions in its organizational structure specifically intended to be filled by and to advance the interests of graduate students and contingency faculty members.
3. That the AHA encourage departments that persist in using non-tenured labor to establish permanent positions with decent pay, health benefits, and job security, and to officially censure those departments that fail to meet these standards.
4. That the AHA recognize the current crisis in academic publishing and encourage departments to make their tenure and hiring decisions.
5. That the AHA put an end to the conference job register and discourage the practice of on-site conference interviews, and encourage their replacement with preliminary interviews over the phone of via video chat. ...

I think I like 3 and 4 from this excerpted list the best. Check out the rest here.


7. Pepper Spray

It's not organic.


8. History Corps

If the AHA wants to avoid scenes with pepper spray and an OWS-style movement, they could do worse than support a plan offered by USIH friend Culture Rover (aka Michael Kramer): he calls it "History Corps." Kramer's plan expands on one offered by Jesse Lemisch in his dialogue with Anthony Grafton (latest installments here and here). Here's Kramer's summation:

This kind of endeavor would address the very real economic issues that younger historians and aspiring historians face. But it does so not by telling them that they should have gone to business school. Instead, it offers a vision of historians as professionals. It gives them dignity and it more clearly distinguishes the distinctive skills, perspectives, and expertise that historical training brings. It’s not about making historical training applicable for other fields, but rather of clarifying how history as a field is necessary to a good society.

Read the whole thing here.

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Enjoy! - TL

Occupy Academia (and More Mundane Concerns)

The growing Occupy Wall Street movement heartens me. I’m not quite as optimistic as some about its likely impact, and am thus probably aligned with Zizek’s pessimism: “The only thing I’m afraid of is that we will someday just go home and then we will meet once a year drinking beer and nostalgically remembering what a nice time we had here.” Nonetheless, I’m heartened to see people taking to the streets in large numbers, finally, over the obvious injustices endemic to our plutocracy.

Ideally, the Occupy Wall Street movement would simultaneously expand into an Occupy Academia movement. This makes sense on a number of levels. Rule by Wall Street has ravaged the public sector, including higher education. Universities operate more like corporations, as made crystal clear by Marc Bousquet in his must-read, How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation. And, finally, a good chunk of the OWS protestors are graduate students and tenuously employed academics whose very existence is evidence of the tight causal connections between Wall Street misrule and an insecure academic labor market.

Thinking in bold political fashion about how to transform academia is much more interesting to me than discussing the depressing details of the so-called academic labor market and other mundane professional concerns. I hope I am not alone in thinking that this blog, our conference, and S-USIH did not come into being in order to make U.S. intellectual history more professional. I despise the hyper-professional turn academia seems to have taken as a symptom of a larger crisis. Rather, we sought to create space for discussion of U.S. intellectual history, from an academic perspective, to be sure, but not solely on the hyper-professional terms of academia.

And yet, the sad state of the job market is something that smart and well-meaning people seeking gainful academic employment must pay attention to, on its own awful terms no less. Thus, it is also something that an academic society like ours must turn its attention to. In short, my ideas on how we need to “occupy academia” is my roundabout way of qualifying, rationalizing, and apologizing for the need to discuss what might seem like more mundane concerns, although they are anything but mundane to those seeking jobs.

In this light, I pose this question to those of you on the market: How is it this year? Any better or worse than the past few, which have been described as the worst since the early 1970s, if not worse than that? My cursory examination of the listings at H-Net and AHA lead me to think it’s fairly sparse in most areas. I only count two jobs specifically directed at U.S. intellectual historians, one for an intellectual/cultural historian, and one for an intellectual/religious historian. So how else do you all sell yourselves? For now, cultural and social history, focused on gender, race, and ethnicity, and sometimes religion, seem paramount in the discipline, as they have for decades. I assume those of you who consider yourselves intellectual historians also, then, consider yourselves cultural historians of a sort, for reasons necessarily professional? (Not to discount good epistemological reasons!)

How do we create what Pierre Bourdieu called “cultural capital” for our sub-discipline of U.S. intellectual history? Perhaps S-USIH might act as a beachhead in this endeavor. At our second conference, Thomas Bender speculated that intellectual history might be the wave of the future, based on the enthusiasm for it shown by an increasing number of grad students and junior scholars, on display at our conference, among other places. If so, we might expect intellectual history positions to be explicitly listed with more frequency at some point in the not-too-distant future. If so, how much lag time should we expect? I offer up this post as a discussion board for these issues.

Now, back to fighting the plutocracy!

The Conference Panel as Academic Technology

As a member of this year's USIH conference committee, I've been doing a lot of thinking in recent months about what makes academic conferences work.  Thanks to vast changes in digital technology, scholars have many more ways to share work than we did even fifteen years ago. Yet I think most of us continue to find academic conferences, at least well focused and organized ones, very valuable.  For me at least, the explosion in methods of communicating ideas with each other has helped me better distinguish what conferences offer that we don't get  from journals, blogs, listservs, social media, YouTube and the many other methods of scholarly transmission. 

What distinguishes conferences, at least good ones, from these other, often newer, technologies, is the exchange of ideas that takes at them. The first ingredient of this exchange is interesting people doing interesting work in areas of mutual interest. Good conferences attract such people as both participants and attendees. Often they're sharing work that is in its earliest, most protean form. And though exchanges take place not only in sessions, but outside of them--over lunch, dinner, and drinks--the life of a good conference should be the panels themselves.


The best panels feature interesting individual projects that somehow speak to each other and a respondent who is able to somehow tie them together. But most important of all, I think, is the discussion that follows the papers and the response. After all, many of the other technologies that I mentioned work fine as means of exchanging papers.  We can even watch whole conferences on YouTube these days. But we still need to be in the room to participate fully in that discussion.*

I've been meaning to blog a bit on the panel as an academic technology, in part because of a post by Paul Campos entitled "Why Do People Read Papers at Conferences?" that appeared several weeks ago on Lawyers, Guns, and Money, one of my favorite semi-academic blogs.**  Campos decried the practice of reading conference papers and received overwhelming agreement from his commentariat on this point.

I, however, want to mount at least a semi-defense of reading conference papers.

We've all had the experience of sitting in the audience as someone reads a conference paper badly.  We've all experienced papers that weren't written to be read out loud, that were wildly too long (leading to their being cut on the fly or, what's worse, simply taking up way more than the allotted time), or that were simply delivered in a way that was entirely soporific. A conference paper is a theatrical form, and like any piece of theatre, it can be badly written or performed. With that much I agree.

But reading from a prepared text makes sense for a variety of reasons. It makes it more likely that complicated ideas will be communicated precisely. Due to their brief length, conference papers require more concision than journal articles or books. Due to their oral presentation, they require even greater clarity of expression.  Writing down one's remarks in advance makes both of these things more likely. Moreover a conference paper written-to-be-delivered is one of the few ways to assure that the panel's respondent will be commenting on what the audience will actually have heard.

Now it should also be said that history is somewhat different from other fields when it comes to the significance of conference papers. More than any other discipline, historians tend to focus on producing books. A paper, even a published journal article, is very often part of a much longer work. In the sciences, hard social sciences, and even some other humanities, academic papers play a more important role as scholarly end products.  My sense is that in many of these other fields, conference papers are, almost by definition, shorter versions of longer scholarly papers, rather than stand-alone think pieces or parts of much larger projects.  My guess is this fact plays a role in how especially unpopular the practice of reading conference papers is outside of our discipline.

A final thought on the conference panel:  what I think of as the standard conference session--three (sometimes four) papers followed by a comment and discussion from the audience--is an incredibly entrenched format.

For as long as I've been attending scholarly conferences (which is now over twenty years), conferences have attempted to encourage scholars to present their work in non-traditional formats.***  This year's USIH conference committee tried to encourage such formats.  But other than a couple brown bags and a handful of roundtables (two of the more traditional alternative formats), nobody took us up on the suggestion.****

So despite occasionally griping about the format, historians, at least, seem fairly wedded to the traditional conference panel.

What do you see as the upsides and downsides of conference, panels and papers (read aloud or otherwise)?  What makes a conference a valuable experience?  How might we improve the format of conferences in the future?
_____________________
* And, no, I don't think even live teleconferencing provides the same experience.  Intellectual discussions are fundamentally embodied things. The really experience the best such discussions, you need to be in the room.

** The writers on LGM are all academics, but the focus of the blog is usually not academic.

*** In the early '90s, poster sessions seemed to be very popular. I never understood the point of these for most historical projects. 

**** I've always been a fan of session which discuss pre-circulated papers. This is the format of Princeton's Davis Seminar.  In many ways, it distills what's best about conferences, turning the entire session into an intensive exchange of ideas. It also allows for the discussion of longer works of scholarship than a conference paper. Its main downside is that those who fail to read the paper in advance are largely left out of the conversation. I would have loved to have one or more such sessions at USIH 2011, but none were proposed.

The Conference Panel as Academic Technology

As a member of this year's USIH conference committee, I've been doing a lot of thinking in recent months about what makes academic conferences work.  Thanks to vast changes in digital technology, scholars have many more ways to share work than we did even fifteen years ago. Yet I think most of us continue to find academic conferences, at least well focused and organized ones, very valuable.  For me at least, the explosion in methods of communicating ideas with each other has helped me better distinguish what conferences offer that we don't get  from journals, blogs, listservs, social media, YouTube and the many other methods of scholarly transmission. 

What distinguishes conferences, at least good ones, from these other, often newer, technologies, is the exchange of ideas that takes at them. The first ingredient of this exchange is interesting people doing interesting work in areas of mutual interest. Good conferences attract such people as both participants and attendees. Often they're sharing work that is in its earliest, most protean form. And though exchanges take place not only in sessions, but outside of them--over lunch, dinner, and drinks--the life of a good conference should be the panels themselves.


The best panels feature interesting individual projects that somehow speak to each other and a respondent who is able to somehow tie them together. But most important of all, I think, is the discussion that follows the papers and the response. After all, many of the other technologies that I mentioned work fine as means of exchanging papers.  We can even watch whole conferences on YouTube these days. But we still need to be in the room to participate fully in that discussion.*

I've been meaning to blog a bit on the panel as an academic technology, in part because of a post by Paul Campos entitled "Why Do People Read Papers at Conferences?" that appeared several weeks ago on Lawyers, Guns, and Money, one of my favorite semi-academic blogs.**  Campos decried the practice of reading conference papers and received overwhelming agreement from his commentariat on this point.

I, however, want to mount at least a semi-defense of reading conference papers.

We've all had the experience of sitting in the audience as someone reads a conference paper badly.  We've all experienced papers that weren't written to be read out loud, that were wildly too long (leading to their being cut on the fly or, what's worse, simply taking up way more than the allotted time), or that were simply delivered in a way that was entirely soporific. A conference paper is a theatrical form, and like any piece of theatre, it can be badly written or performed. With that much I agree.

But reading from a prepared text makes sense for a variety of reasons. It makes it more likely that complicated ideas will be communicated precisely. Due to their brief length, conference papers require more concision than journal articles or books. Due to their oral presentation, they require even greater clarity of expression.  Writing down one's remarks in advance makes both of these things more likely. Moreover a conference paper written-to-be-delivered is one of the few ways to assure that the panel's respondent will be commenting on what the audience will actually have heard.

Now it should also be said that history is somewhat different from other fields when it comes to the significance of conference papers. More than any other discipline, historians tend to focus on producing books. A paper, even a published journal article, is very often part of a much longer work. In the sciences, hard social sciences, and even some other humanities, academic papers play a more important role as scholarly end products.  My sense is that in many of these other fields, conference papers are, almost by definition, shorter versions of longer scholarly papers, rather than stand-alone think pieces or parts of much larger projects.  My guess is this fact plays a role in how especially unpopular the practice of reading conference papers is outside of our discipline.

A final thought on the conference panel:  what I think of as the standard conference session--three (sometimes four) papers followed by a comment and discussion from the audience--is an incredibly entrenched format.

For as long as I've been attending scholarly conferences (which is now over twenty years), conferences have attempted to encourage scholars to present their work in non-traditional formats.***  This year's USIH conference committee tried to encourage such formats.  But other than a couple brown bags and a handful of roundtables (two of the more traditional alternative formats), nobody took us up on the suggestion.****

So despite occasionally griping about the format, historians, at least, seem fairly wedded to the traditional conference panel.

What do you see as the upsides and downsides of conference, panels and papers (read aloud or otherwise)?  What makes a conference a valuable experience?  How might we improve the format of conferences in the future?
_____________________
* And, no, I don't think even live teleconferencing provides the same experience.  Intellectual discussions are fundamentally embodied things. The really experience the best such discussions, you need to be in the room.

** The writers on LGM are all academics, but the focus of the blog is usually not academic.

*** In the early '90s, poster sessions seemed to be very popular. I never understood the point of these for most historical projects. 

**** I've always been a fan of session which discuss pre-circulated papers. This is the format of Princeton's Davis Seminar.  In many ways, it distills what's best about conferences, turning the entire session into an intensive exchange of ideas. It also allows for the discussion of longer works of scholarship than a conference paper. Its main downside is that those who fail to read the paper in advance are largely left out of the conversation. I would have loved to have one or more such sessions at USIH 2011, but none were proposed.

Elephant Still in Room; Intelligent Observers Continue Not to Notice

In her Sunday post on pedagogy and U.S. intellectual history, Lauren linked to Louis Menand's recent New Yorker piece on "why we have college," and asked what we thought of it.

The Menand piece is thoughtful, interesting, and very much worth reading (like most of what Menand writes IMO).  In the course of reviewing two books on the (eternal) Crisis in American Higher Education®--Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa's Academically Adrift and Professor X's In the Basement of the Ivory Tower--Menand considers some of the reasons we might (and do) give for why students ought to have a college education.

Menand considers three possible "theories":  1) College courses are designed to distinguish the better students from the less good students in ways helpful to future employers hoping to hire the smartest workforce; 2) College courses are designed to teach students things about the world and themselves that they won't discover anywhere else; 3) College courses are designed to pass on specialized information necessary to successfully pursue a career in today's economy.  Menand labels these views meritocratic, democratic, and vocational.  He's a proponent, incidentally, of Theory 2.

Menand's article takes a slightly different approach from two other recent reviews of books on the higher-ed crisis--Peter Brooks's March 29, 2011 New York Review of Books essay (which reviewed the Arum and Roksa book, among others) and Nicholas Dames's April 13, 2011 n+1 essay (which reviewed Menand's own Marketplace of Ideas, among other books)--that I blogged about in April (respectively here and here).  The Brooks and Dames reviews are much more focused on what professors do and don't do (and should and shouldn't be doing).  Menand's essay focuses instead on what we--not only as professors but as a society--should expect post-secondary students to gain from their education.


But despite this very different focus, Menand shares a blind spot with Dames and Brooks.  He largely ignores what I continue to feel is the most important factor in the current edition of the crisis in American higher education: the changing structure of the American economy and our often irrational hopes for higher education in relation to it (to be fair: Brooks mentions larger economic structures but doesn't sufficiently grapple with their meanings for higher ed; Dames, like Menand, doesn't deal with them).

Here's some of what I wrote on this topic in my post on the Brooks essay:

Education is in a very strange place in this nation's political culture today. On the one hand, with the very peculiar exception of the military, it is the only public institution whose efforts at improving individuals' social status are seen as entirely legitimate.  On the other hand, as a result, our educational system is being asked to substitute for our denuded social safety net and for policies that might be designed to alter the structure of income and wealth in our society. The fantasy is that, even in a winner-take-all society, if we are all educated well, we can all be winners.  But when that fantasy inevitably fails, someone needs to blamed, or at least "held accountable." And the most convenient targets are teachers and professors.

Unlike Menand, I don't think Americans can simply be asked to choose among Theories 1, 2, and 3.  We want our education simultaneously to reward merit, to be democratic, and to pass on specialized knowledge immediately helpful for young people entering the workforce. And we want these things especially fervently precisely because succeeding in today's economy (let alone achieving the kind of intergenerational upward mobility that Americans expected in the mid-20th century) is so difficult.

Source for Image: http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-in-america-chart-graph

A recent study by Michael Norton of Harvard Business School and Dan Ariely of Duke surveyed a representative online panel of Americans regarding the actual distribution of wealth in America today and their ideal distribution of wealth in a society.  The findings were striking: Americans believe that the distribution of wealth in our society is much more balanced than it actually is and would prefer it to be even more balanced still.  As Norton and Ariely put it, most Americans would rather live in a society whose distribution of wealth looks like Sweden's than like their own country's.  Of course, such a desire and the policies needed to achieve it are far beyond the fringes of our nation's political debates.

In many ways, our arguments over education have been a very imperfect proxy for a serious discussion of the growing structural inequalities in our society...."very imperfect" because they rely on a fantasy that having everyone attend college can somehow transform--or at least overcome--that structure.

Just as common education is now often expected to substitute for the absence of welfare as we knew it, higher ed is now called upon to substitute for the much more democratically structured economy of the three decades immediately following the Great Depression.

And our discussions about higher education cannot reach serious or sensible conclusions unless we name the problem of the structure of our economic system and admit that higher education alone cannot produce a solution to it.

Elephant Still in Room; Intelligent Observers Continue Not to Notice

In her Sunday post on pedagogy and U.S. intellectual history, Lauren linked to Louis Menand's recent New Yorker piece on "why we have college," and asked what we thought of it.

The Menand piece is thoughtful, interesting, and very much worth reading (like most of what Menand writes IMO).  In the course of reviewing two books on the (eternal) Crisis in American Higher Education®--Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa's Academically Adrift and Professor X's In the Basement of the Ivory Tower--Menand considers some of the reasons we might (and do) give for why students ought to have a college education.

Menand considers three possible "theories":  1) College courses are designed to distinguish the better students from the less good students in ways helpful to future employers hoping to hire the smartest workforce; 2) College courses are designed to teach students things about the world and themselves that they won't discover anywhere else; 3) College courses are designed to pass on specialized information necessary to successfully pursue a career in today's economy.  Menand labels these views meritocratic, democratic, and vocational.  He's a proponent, incidentally, of Theory 2.

Menand's article takes a slightly different approach from two other recent reviews of books on the higher-ed crisis--Peter Brooks's March 29, 2011 New York Review of Books essay (which reviewed the Arum and Roksa book, among others) and Nicholas Dames's April 13, 2011 n+1 essay (which reviewed Menand's own Marketplace of Ideas, among other books)--that I blogged about in April (respectively here and here).  The Brooks and Dames reviews are much more focused on what professors do and don't do (and should and shouldn't be doing).  Menand's essay focuses instead on what we--not only as professors but as a society--should expect post-secondary students to gain from their education.


But despite this very different focus, Menand shares a blind spot with Dames and Brooks.  He largely ignores what I continue to feel is the most important factor in the current edition of the crisis in American higher education: the changing structure of the American economy and our often irrational hopes for higher education in relation to it (to be fair: Brooks mentions larger economic structures but doesn't sufficiently grapple with their meanings for higher ed; Dames, like Menand, doesn't deal with them).

Here's some of what I wrote on this topic in my post on the Brooks essay:

Education is in a very strange place in this nation's political culture today. On the one hand, with the very peculiar exception of the military, it is the only public institution whose efforts at improving individuals' social status are seen as entirely legitimate.  On the other hand, as a result, our educational system is being asked to substitute for our denuded social safety net and for policies that might be designed to alter the structure of income and wealth in our society. The fantasy is that, even in a winner-take-all society, if we are all educated well, we can all be winners.  But when that fantasy inevitably fails, someone needs to blamed, or at least "held accountable." And the most convenient targets are teachers and professors.

Unlike Menand, I don't think Americans can simply be asked to choose among Theories 1, 2, and 3.  We want our education simultaneously to reward merit, to be democratic, and to pass on specialized knowledge immediately helpful for young people entering the workforce. And we want these things especially fervently precisely because succeeding in today's economy (let alone achieving the kind of intergenerational upward mobility that Americans expected in the mid-20th century) is so difficult.

Source for Image: http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-in-america-chart-graph

A recent study by Michael Norton of Harvard Business School and Dan Ariely of Duke surveyed a representative online panel of Americans regarding the actual distribution of wealth in America today and their ideal distribution of wealth in a society.  The findings were striking: Americans believe that the distribution of wealth in our society is much more balanced than it actually is and would prefer it to be even more balanced still.  As Norton and Ariely put it, most Americans would rather live in a society whose distribution of wealth looks like Sweden's than like their own country's.  Of course, such a desire and the policies needed to achieve it are far beyond the fringes of our nation's political debates.

In many ways, our arguments over education have been a very imperfect proxy for a serious discussion of the growing structural inequalities in our society...."very imperfect" because they rely on a fantasy that having everyone attend college can somehow transform--or at least overcome--that structure.

Just as common education is now often expected to substitute for the absence of welfare as we knew it, higher ed is now called upon to substitute for the much more democratically structured economy of the three decades immediately following the Great Depression.

And our discussions about higher education cannot reach serious or sensible conclusions unless we name the problem of the structure of our economic system and admit that higher education alone cannot produce a solution to it.

Some Thoughts on the Crisis in Higher Education (2011 Edition)

Like masculinity, higher education is apparently always in crisis in the United States.  The March 28, 2011 issue of The New York Review of Books featured what to me was an entirely sensible assessment by the Princeton literary scholar Peter Brooks of four books on higher education today, two of which were minor sensations last year: Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus's Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids—And What We Can Do About It and Mark Taylor's Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities (h/t for the link to the Brooks piece to bookforum.com).


Now to be fair, responding to Taylor and Hacker & Dreifus is a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. Their portraits of the university today seem transparently unfair; their solutions arbitrary and ill-conceived.  I'm not going to repeat the bill of particulars here. Those interested can read Brooks's take on them, with which I feel wholly sympathetic.



Brooks essentially argues that there's much more right than wrong in US higher education today, and that the principal challenges that our colleges and universities face come more from off-campus than from on:  a collapse in public funds for public institutions, leading to huge increases in student fees, and the ever-widening gap between rich and poor in American society, which is mirrored on campus by an increasing gap between the haves and the have-nots within higher education itself.

Along the way, he mounts a vigorous defense of tenure as not only required by academic freedom, but also as a key aspect of faculty self -governance:

if the body of permanently appointed professors is not to determine who merits appointment as professors, according to peer review of their competence and the prospect of their remaining active and engaged, who will? Who will do the hiring and the firing?

But while I'm entirely comfortable with my agreement with Brooks's rejection of Taylor's and Hacker & Dreifus's prescriptions, there's a side to me that's a bit suspicious of my easy acceptance of Brooks's essay.  To begin with, it strikes me as too defensive. While earlier crises in American higher education featured robust critiques from both left and right, for most of the last three decades, the voices of criticism from the right have been much louder.  And the responses to them from the left have often been oddly, well, conservative.

Brooks, to his credit, acknowledges that there are aspects of the academy today that merit real concern:

The affluence gap between Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, plus a few others, and the rest of the universities has indeed increased, and permits a degree of luxury to both students and faculty in those institutions that are the envy of the rest.  . . .

Meanwhile, many students who would previously have gone to a four-year college have to be content with a two-year community college, where faculty are typically underpaid and overworked. Even at many relatively more prosperous institutions, full-time tenured faculty—expensive and immovable—are being replaced by various temps and adjuncts. As in the rest of corporate America—and universities are increasingly corporate in their management style—a hungry and mobile labor force is considered desirable. There is in fact some evidence that increased access to higher education has simply perpetuated or even exacerbated social stratification since the educational “system” is itself so highly tiered, and expansion tends to come in lower tiers rather than the elites.

But these observation occur in Brooks's piece in an odd context, as an explanation for what Brooks sees as the largely arbitrary concerns of the authors of three of the four books under review*:

The result, I think, is a fair measure of bafflement and ressentiment, resulting in a kind of indiscriminate flailing about in criticism of the university, some of it justified, much of it misdirected, and some pernicious.

Brooks is not wrong, I think, to link the concerns of Taylor, Hacker, and Dreifus--and the avid audience for them outside the academy--to larger social changes.  But his notion that these critics are merely confused by an unsettling time strikes me as punting an interesting and important intellectual historical story, one that Andrew Hartman is probably better suited to tell than I am.

Brooks notes the odd way in which critics simultaneously call for a return to the "Great Books" and demand that higher education more directly serve the post-college job market:

On the one hand, all the critics of the American university claim to be partisans of the liberal arts, to want students to study philosophy and literature, even the arts, and to learn “critical thinking” (the currently accepted mantra—not a bad one). On the other hand, the tests proposed always seem to have to do with job preparation—even as the critics in the same breath deplore “vocationalism” and point to the impoverished education that many majors in business or accounting receive. And one would like to know whether the level of higher education attainment measured by the OECD is in fact liberal education or simply technocratic training at a high level.

Though this position is seemingly incoherent, both aspects of it seem to me to flow out of the waters of the culture wars of the last thirty years.

And the tendency to blame supposedly lazy, self-interested faculty (and the supposedly cushy conditions of their employment) for all the failings of higher education is closely paralleled by the tendency of the currently dominant sect of would-be reformers of public primary and secondary education, who blame teachers and their unions for all of public education's ills.

Education is in a very strange place in this nation's political culture today. On the one hand, with the very peculiar exception of the military, it is the only public institution whose efforts at improving individuals' social status are seen as entirely legitimate.  On the other hand, as a result, our educational system is being asked to substitute for our denuded social safety net and for policies that might be designed to alter the structure of income and wealth in our society. The fantasy is that, even in a winner-take-all society, if we are all educated well, we can all be winners.  But when that fantasy inevitably fails, someone needs to blamed, or at least "held accountable." And the most convenient targets are teachers and professors.

Of course professors are also among the exemplars of the "New Class," that has been a bête noire among some quarters of the right for a couple generations.

Rather than representing ressentiment-tinged "flailing about," the seemingly contradictory critiques of higher education today reflect a complicated but traceable heritage.

The other problem with Brooks's treatment of the real, economic crisis that is hitting higher education--and especially public higher education--today is his sense that nothing can be done about it. So sure is Brooks of this sentiment that he expresses it almost parenthetically. And the sense that public education cannot be improved in the most meaningful way in which Brooks feels it might be improved not surprisingly underscores the basic defensiveness of his message:

I am not so much impressed by the faults and failings of the university—they are real enough, but largely the product of frightening trends toward inequality in American society that the universities can combat only to a limited degree. It’s more the survival of the university that amazes and concerns me. It’s one of the best things we’ve got, and at times—as when reading these books—it almost seems to me better than what we deserve.

As I say above, I admit there's a side to me that feels very comfortable with this tone.  There's a fairly delicious irony, I think, for those of us on the left to go to battle in a culture war as defenders of our nation's established culture and institutions.  It's also, however, a lot easier to do this than to try to really address the ways in which America's growing social inequality affects academia. And it's an (unfortunate) luxury of tenure that some of us can avoid such a confrontation.

So while Brooks's argument feels in many ways more comfortable to me, the more difficult path of active, progressive reform proposed by folks like Marc Bousquet probably has more merit.    
________________________

*  Brooks praises Martha Nussbaum's Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, but discusses it only in passing.