Exciting New Pedagogy Based in the History of Ideas

A decade ago, several professors at Barnard College created a pedagogy based in the History of Ideas called "Reacting to the Past." I attended a session at the AHA discussing this pedagogy (the History News Network discusses the session here).

Their website explains:

Reacting to the Past” (RTTP) consists of elaborate games, set in the past, in which students are assigned roles informed by classic texts in the history of ideas. Class sessions are run entirely by students; instructors advise and guide students and grade their oral and written work. It seeks to draw students into the past, promote engagement with big ideas, and improve intellectual and academic skills. Pioneered by Barnard College in 1996, the project is supported by a consortium of colleges and universities.

Some of the games I heard discussed were based on Plato's Republic, Confucius's Proverbs, the division of India, Anne Hutchinson, and King Henry VIII. The games immerse the students in the ideas expressed. Students are divided into different factions and given certain goals they are trying to achieve. Some students are indeterminants that need to be persuaded to join one or another faction and often have the swing vote in classes. The games take up different amounts of time.

All the professors at the AHA session familiar with this pedagogy said that it transformed students. They arrived early and stayed late for class. The factions would chase down indeterminants in the hallways and unions trying to persuade them. Shy students felt nervous at first, but blossomed by the end. Freshman made lasting friendships.

The series started out as something more for a Freshman Year Experience course or a general education course, but historians are starting to adopt them. We have to be willing to give up a lot of content coverage in a lecture class, or they can be used in a seminar type class. There are several games already published, and more being worked on at the moment.

I was especially excited because I had plans for constructing something very much like this around the 1964 Democratic Convention. Delegates at that convention split into many different factions that expressed competing opinions among blacks and whites, northerners and southerners, politicians and activists. An EMU history prof at the AHA session, Mark Higbee, said he's developing a game for the Montgomery Bus Boycott. One black student told him that she had never understood the Civil Rights Movement until she had to take on the role of a white segregationist and argue for further discrimination and segregation. She then realized what Civil Rights Activists had been challenging.

The pedagogy has been used at small liberal arts colleges and major research one institutions. Barnard College holds a training session every summer and there are other regional conferences around the country.

What do you think? Do you have any controversies or texts in American Intellectual History that you think would work for this?

Exciting New Pedagogy Based in the History of Ideas

A decade ago, several professors at Barnard College created a pedagogy based in the History of Ideas called "Reacting to the Past." I attended a session at the AHA discussing this pedagogy (the History News Network discusses the session here).

Their website explains:

Reacting to the Past” (RTTP) consists of elaborate games, set in the past, in which students are assigned roles informed by classic texts in the history of ideas. Class sessions are run entirely by students; instructors advise and guide students and grade their oral and written work. It seeks to draw students into the past, promote engagement with big ideas, and improve intellectual and academic skills. Pioneered by Barnard College in 1996, the project is supported by a consortium of colleges and universities.

Some of the games I heard discussed were based on Plato's Republic, Confucius's Proverbs, the division of India, Anne Hutchinson, and King Henry VIII. The games immerse the students in the ideas expressed. Students are divided into different factions and given certain goals they are trying to achieve. Some students are indeterminants that need to be persuaded to join one or another faction and often have the swing vote in classes. The games take up different amounts of time.

All the professors at the AHA session familiar with this pedagogy said that it transformed students. They arrived early and stayed late for class. The factions would chase down indeterminants in the hallways and unions trying to persuade them. Shy students felt nervous at first, but blossomed by the end. Freshman made lasting friendships.

The series started out as something more for a Freshman Year Experience course or a general education course, but historians are starting to adopt them. We have to be willing to give up a lot of content coverage in a lecture class, or they can be used in a seminar type class. There are several games already published, and more being worked on at the moment.

I was especially excited because I had plans for constructing something very much like this around the 1964 Democratic Convention. Delegates at that convention split into many different factions that expressed competing opinions among blacks and whites, northerners and southerners, politicians and activists. An EMU history prof at the AHA session, Mark Higbee, said he's developing a game for the Montgomery Bus Boycott. One black student told him that she had never understood the Civil Rights Movement until she had to take on the role of a white segregationist and argue for further discrimination and segregation. She then realized what Civil Rights Activists had been challenging.

The pedagogy has been used at small liberal arts colleges and major research one institutions. Barnard College holds a training session every summer and there are other regional conferences around the country.

What do you think? Do you have any controversies or texts in American Intellectual History that you think would work for this?

Tony Judt on American and European liberalism

Tony Judt was one of the first intellectual historians I read and enjoyed. I spent a semester during courses thinking about the choices about communism made by western leftists after Stalin. Then when his masterful Postwar Europe came out during my comps, I was first in awe and then cursed its timing.

I was saddened today to learn that he has an advanced form of ALS and is now a quadrapalegic. An article in the Chronicle shows that his mind and sense of humor are still sharp.

A taste:

He began by joking, referring to himself as "a quadriplegic wearing facial Tupperware" and promising not to use overdramatic hand gestures. The tension abated, and Judt moved into the substance of his talk, "What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?" [...]

Americans and, to a lesser extent, Europeans have forgotten how to think politically and morally about economic choices, Judt warned, his fragile, British-accented voice growing louder. To abandon the gains made by social democrats—the New Deal, the Great Society, the European welfare state—"is to betray those who came before us as well as generations yet to come. [...]

I ask how he felt after the lecture. "Elated," Judt replies simply. Some friends and colleagues had encouraged him to scrap his planned remarks and speak instead about ALS. "I thought about it," Judt says, "but I have nothing new to say about ALS. I do have something new to say about social democracy, and by saying it in my condition I can maybe have some influence on people's understanding of sickness." He takes a deep breath. "There is something to be said for simply doing the thing you would do anyway, doing it as well as you can under the circumstances, and getting past the sympathy vote as soon as possible."

Tony Judt on American and European liberalism

Tony Judt was one of the first intellectual historians I read and enjoyed. I spent a semester during courses thinking about the choices about communism made by western leftists after Stalin. Then when his masterful Postwar Europe came out during my comps, I was first in awe and then cursed its timing.

I was saddened today to learn that he has an advanced form of ALS and is now a quadrapalegic. An article in the Chronicle shows that his mind and sense of humor are still sharp.

A taste:

He began by joking, referring to himself as "a quadriplegic wearing facial Tupperware" and promising not to use overdramatic hand gestures. The tension abated, and Judt moved into the substance of his talk, "What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?" [...]

Americans and, to a lesser extent, Europeans have forgotten how to think politically and morally about economic choices, Judt warned, his fragile, British-accented voice growing louder. To abandon the gains made by social democrats—the New Deal, the Great Society, the European welfare state—"is to betray those who came before us as well as generations yet to come. [...]

I ask how he felt after the lecture. "Elated," Judt replies simply. Some friends and colleagues had encouraged him to scrap his planned remarks and speak instead about ALS. "I thought about it," Judt says, "but I have nothing new to say about ALS. I do have something new to say about social democracy, and by saying it in my condition I can maybe have some influence on people's understanding of sickness." He takes a deep breath. "There is something to be said for simply doing the thing you would do anyway, doing it as well as you can under the circumstances, and getting past the sympathy vote as soon as possible."

Career Opportunities

I've been following with interest the discussion on this blog and elsewhere about the state of the academic job market in history. I put a few thoughts in a comment on Tim's post below, but I thought I'd expand on them in a post.

Let me start with some caveats: I have not studied this problem systematically. Like most of the other folks commenting on this issue, I rely on the professional organizations for my data and my own experience of the profession for further evidence (while recognizing that the plural of anecdote is not data). I haven't read Marc Bousquet's How the University Works though it's been on my seemingly endless to-read list for some time. My understanding of his views is based on reading shorter pieces by him, such as his recent blog entries in this conversation, as well as reviews of the book. I apologize if I have, therefore, misconstrued any of his positions and welcome clarifications from those more familiar with his book.

I share Bousquet's concerns about the casualization of academic labor. And I agree that there is no substitute for addressing the demand side of the academic job market, organizing, and fighting back against the dominant trends in the structure of academic employment. Though I fear that this is easier said than done (about which I'll have more to say in another post), I am extremely grateful that people like Bousquet's are leading the good fight. Incidentally, if you're an academic and you're not a member of the AAUP (on whose council Bousquet serves), stop reading this post and join now. I'll wait for you here...

Welcome back!

While I'm happy to join Bousquet on the ramparts of the demand side, I remain puzzled by his position on concerns about the supply side of the academic job market. It seems to me that one can think one of three things about the number of PhDs currently being produced in a field (let's talk about history, since this is a history blog): 1) we're producing too many history PhDs; 2) we're producing too few history PhDs; 3) we're producing roughly the right number of history PhDs. Which of these three positions one takes will naturally depend upon how one defines the right number of history PhDs. And I agree with Marc Bousquet that we should absolutely resist the temptation to assume that the number of tenure-track jobs (or even the number of jobs period) that are currently available is the same as the ideal number of PhDs seeking employment. Indeed, I take his central concern about supply-side talk to be that it tends to take the demand side as a given. With this, too, I agree. Worrying about the supply side can be no substitute for attending to the demand side structures. And, indeed, supply-side worries can help naturalize demand-side changes that we ought to be actively resisting.

The problem is that I don't see any alternative conception on Bousquet's part of what the right number of PhDs is. Instead one gets the sense that he objects to any concern at all about how many PhDs are being produced. This is, I take it, the point of associating such concern with Reaganomics (e.g. "This is the sort of thing that used to get said all the time by disciplinary-association staffers -- as what I call part of a 'second wave' of thinking about academic labor, emerging out of discredited supply-side thought dating back to the Reagan administration.") But Reagan-era supply-side economics was a theory of macroeconomics that argued not for limiting the supply-side, but doing the opposite, i.e. lowering perceived barriers to the production of good and services. The microeconomics of the academic job market don't have much to do with this, but to the extent that we want to draw a metaphorical connection, the idea of limiting the production of PhDs, whatever its merits, seems to me to have very little to do with the "discredited supply-side thought dating back to the Reagan era." This sounds to me like argument by pejorative.

In fact, I think that there are very good reasons to limit the production of history PhDs, especially in the short run. First, the size of PhD programs tends to be determined by a series of factors that has next to nothing to do with either the actual or the potential demand for people with PhDs. Having a PhD program tends to add to a department's prestige. At most institutions, the larger the program, the better it is for the department within the institution. Graduate students also provide a supply of cheap labor that helps limit the size of of faculty teaching loads (or that substitutes for less qualified people, e.g., undergraduates, teaching instead).* Mentoring graduate students can, of course, be very personally fulfilling to historians. Factors that limit the number of PhDs produced by a department tend to include student demand and the availability of funding and/or assistantships.

None of this has much of anything to do with employment demand for the PhDs being produced by the department. At this point I should pause and note that while I have taught for three history departments with PhD programs, I have never had a tenure-track appointment in one (my current, tenured appointment is in an undergraduate-only unit). So there are perhaps conversations taking place in meetings in which I have not been involved that took the question of job opportunities for my various departments' future PhDs into consideration when thinking about how large the PhD program ought to be. But I certainly never heard any such conversations. And I know for a fact that, at least back in the 1990s, when I taught at one of these three departments--a flagship midwestern state university with a fine history department--it did not even track the record of its PhDs on the job market.

And while I take Bousquet's point that a restructured demand side might need a substantially larger number of PhDs than the current casualizing market does, in the context of the current market, we are producing a vast reserve army of the unemployed that helps to ease the process of casualization, as there are always unemployed and underemployed PhDs willing and available to take the ever worsening deals offered to them by universities and colleges in the hope that they will eventually get something better. Far from denying the need to organize, I think that reducing the pool of history PhDs would substantially improve our bargaining position.

All that being said, the devil is in the details....and here I must say that I don't have a strong sense of how one should go about equitably limiting the number of new history PhDs. Jonathan Rees endorses Ralph Luker's view that some marginal PhD programs should be simply shut down and replaced with MA programs. This seems like a sensible idea in principle, though the incentives for particular PhD programs to go out of business are pretty weak. And I'm not sure who could be empowered (or who we'd be comfortable with empowering) to tell them they have to go. Moreover, there's no particular reason to assume that an overproduction problem is best solved by eliminating entire programs rather than shrinking but retaining programs. There's a good case to be made that a greater number of programs (with a greater number of faculty supervising PhDs) increases the diversity of the discipline in any number of ways. All of which is to say that, while I tend to think that we ought to be reducing the number of newly minted history PhDs, I don't know the best way to do so.

Sometime later this week I'll return with a few thoughts about the challenges of addressing the demand side.
________________________________
* Bousquet uses this fact as an argument against limiting the number of PhDs:

[J]ust imagine the shrinkage of grad programs.

Who would do the work that grad students were doing? On what terms? Would they be more qualified or less? At some institutions administrations will want to replace grad student discussion leaders with undergrads. What would be a proper replacement for the grad student discussion leader? A teaching-intensive faculty member? In that context are teaching-intensive faculty “historians” to the AHA? Ditto small colleges and community colleges?

In the end, any actual shrinkage of doctoral programs leads you right back to the tough questions that “job market theory” initially bypasses–because those doctoral programs are that size for a reason: the students are working!

Here, as elsewhere, Bousquet seems to assume that the only reason to discuss the supply side is to avoid discussing the demand side. I agree with him 100% that shrinking graduate programs would necessarily entail a restructuring of academic employment, i.e. addressing the demand side. I just don't see this as much of an argument against shrinking the size of PhD programs.

Career Opportunities

I've been following with interest the discussion on this blog and elsewhere about the state of the academic job market in history. I put a few thoughts in a comment on Tim's post below, but I thought I'd expand on them in a post.

Let me start with some caveats: I have not studied this problem systematically. Like most of the other folks commenting on this issue, I rely on the professional organizations for my data and my own experience of the profession for further evidence (while recognizing that the plural of anecdote is not data). I haven't read Marc Bousquet's How the University Works though it's been on my seemingly endless to-read list for some time. My understanding of his views is based on reading shorter pieces by him, such as his recent blog entries in this conversation, as well as reviews of the book. I apologize if I have, therefore, misconstrued any of his positions and welcome clarifications from those more familiar with his book.

I share Bousquet's concerns about the casualization of academic labor. And I agree that there is no substitute for addressing the demand side of the academic job market, organizing, and fighting back against the dominant trends in the structure of academic employment. Though I fear that this is easier said than done (about which I'll have more to say in another post), I am extremely grateful that people like Bousquet's are leading the good fight. Incidentally, if you're an academic and you're not a member of the AAUP (on whose council Bousquet serves), stop reading this post and join now. I'll wait for you here...

Welcome back!

While I'm happy to join Bousquet on the ramparts of the demand side, I remain puzzled by his position on concerns about the supply side of the academic job market. It seems to me that one can think one of three things about the number of PhDs currently being produced in a field (let's talk about history, since this is a history blog): 1) we're producing too many history PhDs; 2) we're producing too few history PhDs; 3) we're producing roughly the right number of history PhDs. Which of these three positions one takes will naturally depend upon how one defines the right number of history PhDs. And I agree with Marc Bousquet that we should absolutely resist the temptation to assume that the number of tenure-track jobs (or even the number of jobs period) that are currently available is the same as the ideal number of PhDs seeking employment. Indeed, I take his central concern about supply-side talk to be that it tends to take the demand side as a given. With this, too, I agree. Worrying about the supply side can be no substitute for attending to the demand side structures. And, indeed, supply-side worries can help naturalize demand-side changes that we ought to be actively resisting.

The problem is that I don't see any alternative conception on Bousquet's part of what the right number of PhDs is. Instead one gets the sense that he objects to any concern at all about how many PhDs are being produced. This is, I take it, the point of associating such concern with Reaganomics (e.g. "This is the sort of thing that used to get said all the time by disciplinary-association staffers -- as what I call part of a 'second wave' of thinking about academic labor, emerging out of discredited supply-side thought dating back to the Reagan administration.") But Reagan-era supply-side economics was a theory of macroeconomics that argued not for limiting the supply-side, but doing the opposite, i.e. lowering perceived barriers to the production of good and services. The microeconomics of the academic job market don't have much to do with this, but to the extent that we want to draw a metaphorical connection, the idea of limiting the production of PhDs, whatever its merits, seems to me to have very little to do with the "discredited supply-side thought dating back to the Reagan era." This sounds to me like argument by pejorative.

In fact, I think that there are very good reasons to limit the production of history PhDs, especially in the short run. First, the size of PhD programs tends to be determined by a series of factors that has next to nothing to do with either the actual or the potential demand for people with PhDs. Having a PhD program tends to add to a department's prestige. At most institutions, the larger the program, the better it is for the department within the institution. Graduate students also provide a supply of cheap labor that helps limit the size of of faculty teaching loads (or that substitutes for less qualified people, e.g., undergraduates, teaching instead).* Mentoring graduate students can, of course, be very personally fulfilling to historians. Factors that limit the number of PhDs produced by a department tend to include student demand and the availability of funding and/or assistantships.

None of this has much of anything to do with employment demand for the PhDs being produced by the department. At this point I should pause and note that while I have taught for three history departments with PhD programs, I have never had a tenure-track appointment in one (my current, tenured appointment is in an undergraduate-only unit). So there are perhaps conversations taking place in meetings in which I have not been involved that took the question of job opportunities for my various departments' future PhDs into consideration when thinking about how large the PhD program ought to be. But I certainly never heard any such conversations. And I know for a fact that, at least back in the 1990s, when I taught at one of these three departments--a flagship midwestern state university with a fine history department--it did not even track the record of its PhDs on the job market.

And while I take Bousquet's point that a restructured demand side might need a substantially larger number of PhDs than the current casualizing market does, in the context of the current market, we are producing a vast reserve army of the unemployed that helps to ease the process of casualization, as there are always unemployed and underemployed PhDs willing and available to take the ever worsening deals offered to them by universities and colleges in the hope that they will eventually get something better. Far from denying the need to organize, I think that reducing the pool of history PhDs would substantially improve our bargaining position.

All that being said, the devil is in the details....and here I must say that I don't have a strong sense of how one should go about equitably limiting the number of new history PhDs. Jonathan Rees endorses Ralph Luker's view that some marginal PhD programs should be simply shut down and replaced with MA programs. This seems like a sensible idea in principle, though the incentives for particular PhD programs to go out of business are pretty weak. And I'm not sure who could be empowered (or who we'd be comfortable with empowering) to tell them they have to go. Moreover, there's no particular reason to assume that an overproduction problem is best solved by eliminating entire programs rather than shrinking but retaining programs. There's a good case to be made that a greater number of programs (with a greater number of faculty supervising PhDs) increases the diversity of the discipline in any number of ways. All of which is to say that, while I tend to think that we ought to be reducing the number of newly minted history PhDs, I don't know the best way to do so.

Sometime later this week I'll return with a few thoughts about the challenges of addressing the demand side.
________________________________
* Bousquet uses this fact as an argument against limiting the number of PhDs:

[J]ust imagine the shrinkage of grad programs.

Who would do the work that grad students were doing? On what terms? Would they be more qualified or less? At some institutions administrations will want to replace grad student discussion leaders with undergrads. What would be a proper replacement for the grad student discussion leader? A teaching-intensive faculty member? In that context are teaching-intensive faculty “historians” to the AHA? Ditto small colleges and community colleges?

In the end, any actual shrinkage of doctoral programs leads you right back to the tough questions that “job market theory” initially bypasses–because those doctoral programs are that size for a reason: the students are working!

Here, as elsewhere, Bousquet seems to assume that the only reason to discuss the supply side is to avoid discussing the demand side. I agree with him 100% that shrinking graduate programs would necessarily entail a restructuring of academic employment, i.e. addressing the demand side. I just don't see this as much of an argument against shrinking the size of PhD programs.

‘Tis the season to lament the state of academic employment

With the AHA underway, it’s a good time to join the chorus of voices complaining about the academic job market. I will refrain from warning against anyone seeking a university career in the humanities, as Thomas Benton does in the Chronicle—“Just Don’t Go,” is how he puts it to those weighing the pros and cons of graduate school in the humanities. Rather, I would like to address some of the reasons for this current sad state of affairs, gleaned from my recent reading of Marc Bousquet’s much discussed book, How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation.

Bousquet’s book is must reading. His main purpose is to understand the shift in the nature of academic employment that has taken place over the past 40 years. Whereas tenure-line faculty taught 75% of college courses nationwide in 1970, now, this number has dropped to 25%. This means that 75% of current college courses are taught either by graduate students or adjunct faculty. In other words, the vast majority of college teachers have tenuous working conditions, and can barely eek out a living. In short, they are exploited. Bousquet terms this the “casualization” of academic labor. This is all well known (although the numbers have been disputed--if Bousquet is even half right, it's a major problem, in my eyes).

One of the more provocative arguments Bousquet puts forward is that there is not an oversupply of PhDs. Rather, there is an undersupply of tenure-line jobs. (He reiterates this point at his blog in a number of posts on the AHA.) In other words, college students need teachers, as ever, but they are now mostly taught by exploited adjuncts and graduate students. The solution to our problem is not to limit the size of graduate programs. This would be impractical: administrators control the purse strings and benefit from larger graduate programs, since graduate students do the cheap teaching. The solution, obviously is to collectively organize. To fight back!

A skeptic might say: universities are merely responding to the market, to skyrocketing operating costs, etc. For the university to remain operative, cheaper teaching labor is imperative. In other words, Bousquet has to explain why universities, most of which remain, officially, non-profit in status, exploit teachers in the same way that corporations exploit factory workers. So Bousquet is compelled to make the case from the top-down: that universities, in fact, operate by the logic of capital. They're very bit as interested in capital accumulation as are corporations, even though shareholders don't reap the profits from university accumulation, as with corporations. Capital accumulation in the university works as such: presidents and assorted higher ups make obscene salaries; high-profile coaches make even more, and are usually a state's top paid employee (related to this, University of Texas faculty is protesting the new fat contract offered up to its football coach, Mack Brown); the university operates as a sports spectacle; the president uses capital for power and prestige, by funding pet projects; and most nefariously, capital accumulation in the university has allowed for the growth of a large administrative class. University administration is a career path of its own now.

One area of administrative growth that I’ve noticed on my campus is the whole “in loco parentis” industry. This is Christopher Lasch’s nightmare scenario—the “helping professions” are taking over the university! Entirely new classifications of administrators are popping up dedicated to the psychological well-being of our supposedly distressed students, giving lie to the bogus notion that the white middle class values rugged individualism. I see it as a way to profit from the “helicopter parent” phenomenon. (My wildly speculative hypothesis is that many such helicopter parents also hold ideologies about the welfare dependency in relation to the so-called “underclass.”)

Reading Bousquet has led me to questions related to previous discussions on this blog. First, is our discussion of a job market for intellectual historians—accentuated in our review of the Historically Speaking forum on the state of intellectual history—sheer folly in light of the overall situation? Have we been divided and conquered? By we, I mean intellectual historians as against, say, cultural and social historians? If we compelled the universities to shift back to the 75% paradigm, there would be more than enough jobs for all of us. In fact, there would be a shortage of qualified PhDs.

Second, has the creeping reality of academic labor shifted our attention away from the culture wars? Whereas in the 80s and 90s, professors of all ideological stripes engaged in culture war discussions—often against traditionalist conservatives, or as James Livingston makes clear, against one another over the legacies of liberalism—have we moved beyond that to focus squarely on whether our institutional niche is withering? Conservative critics of the academy certainly haven’t shifted gears. For instance, a blogger at a conservative academic watchdog site saw fit to review my book in light of my claims that the Cold War led to a more conservative educational system (even though, ironically, I’m a Marxist with a university job). This is still the stuff of the culture wars. Sure, most professors in the humanities are left to liberal. But why is this so concerning in light of the corporatization of the university? (Thanks to Ariane Fischer and Allison Perlman for discussing these issues with me.)

AH