Tuesday, February 5, 2013

More on the same


An article was recently posted on the New York Times Review on the new documentaries on US History by Oliver Stone. I personally only saw the episode on World War II. Before I read the article, I thought that it was an interesting take on World War II, neither particularly creative nor innovative. But as the review indicates, the purpose of the documentary is not to create new history, but rather to bring the ideas of revisionist historians to popular culture: "The real problem, they say, is that this revisionism has yet to penetrate the public schools, the mainstream media, and “those parts of America that cling to the notion of American exceptionalism.” Their version of history may not be untold, but “it has been almost entirely ‘unlearned.’”

The conclusion to the article is particularly interesting. The author of the article states: "Although the book by Stone and Kuznick is heavily footnoted, the sourcing, as the example of Wallace’s 1952 article suggests, recalls nothing so much as Dick Cheney’s cherry-picking of intelligence, particularly about the origins and early years of the cold war. The authors also devote many thousands of words to criticism of such destructive American policies as Ronald Reagan’s in Central America and George W. Bush’s in Iraq, but much of this will be familiar to readers of these pages, as will their objections to Barack Obama’s use of predator drones. This book is less a work of history than a skewed political document, restating and updating a view of the world that the independent radical Dwight Macdonald once likened to a fog, “caused by the warm winds of the liberal Gulf Stream coming in contact with the Soviet glacier”—but now more than twenty years after the dissolution of the Soviet empire.

The key points in the review is this: the work, in spite of its engagement with scholarship is a skewed political document. This brings to an interesting point about what historians do, in fact, do. We are not simply reading books and create arguments. We consider sources in a holistic manner, trying to bring in as wide and array of perspectives as possible; we evaluate the sources by answering a particular set of questions; these questions allow us to look beyond coincidence, to look beyond personal bias and to craft novel arguments using theory. In principle, we should be equally critical both of primary sources and secondary sources.

This said, perhaps  Oliver Stone is being deliberately provocative… but in this case he is not doing history.

Friday, February 1, 2013

Reflections on the future of Academia- No Solutions Offered


If you are a Ph.D student in the humanities (I cannot speak for other disciplines), you must have heard the “doom and gloom” speech about the state of the job market in the profession. If you have not had your future career dismantled when it has not yet started, perhaps you ought to ask your advisor about what Ari Kelman has called “the ruined wastes of what used to be known as the job market” (reference below). The bottom line is this: most of us will not get R1 research jobs, and most of us will not get tenured: a fact, which in no way means that I will not try my hardest to get an academic job. This is simply the reality I am confronted with.
Considering the state of the market, it is natural to understand how it got there (and blame certain people, though I am not sure fingerpointing is a particularly useful exercise). Two blog posts by excellent scholars have had interesting perspectives. The blog of Historian on the Edge points to the conquest of the discipline by non-specialists, as well as the contempt of the media and other pundits of our profession, in that, scholars are not in any way remunerated for insights given to third parties.[1] Perhaps not, but Ari Kelman responds quite shrewdly that “if one wants one’s work to be made available to the public, one either has to do it oneself or find someone else to serve as a mouthpiece.  Personally, I’m delighted when journalists or popular historians want to talk about my work — though I do hope they’ll credit me with any insights they glean from the conversation.”[2]
From the few meetings we have had as a graduate community, as well as conversations with peers at various institutions, it appears that the humanities are faced with an important conundrum. First, as Ari Kelman remarked, in the cited blog post, on “the glut of Ph.Ds” flooding the market. This is a problem with which scholars involved at the graduate level are keenly aware. “Plan B” (alternatives to academia) solutions seems to be a new area of discussion amongst Directors of Graduate Studies.
So, if there are too many graduate students on the market, what can be done (and here is the conundrum part)? Accepting less is unfortunately a limited option. Graduate students are needed, not by the market writ large, but by the academic institutions. Large lecture halls require one professor, but two to three graduate students. The way things are at present, I can teach up to three sections of thirty students. The aggregate number of students is tremendous (grading papers takes forever), but what is most frustrating for me is the large class size. I simply cannot give the attention to the students that they need. So, how do you respond to the facts that a) there are too many Ph.Ds on the market, and b) the universities will not fundamentally be able to retain appropriate teaching quality while continuously dropping enrollment of graduate students. That is, graduate students are needed by the academia for a certain amount of time, but much less so by the market on the other side of graduate school (the professorial market, and the “real-world” market). By way of analogy, not everyone entering the military becomes a ranked officer.
At a very fundamental level, I will agree with a friend, also a Ph.D student from the less-than-sexy field of Medieval Studies (I like it, but hey…): “Will I get disappointed if I don’t get a job? Sure. But if you get in this field in order to get a job in that field, you are clearly in the wrong field.” Underlying my friend’s comment is something I could not agree with more: we are historians because we love history. Why I love history (aside from delusions of ever being Indiana Jones), I am not entirely sure. I just do. And this is why I am in graduate school: I want to be a professional in the field that I love.
Amateurism in the field of history is a problem only for professionals (myself included). Having first undergone the selection processes at the undergraduate level to become one of the top of my class, having then undergone the selection process for getting into graduate school, (hypotheticals follow, based on the Historian on the Edge post) then (hopefully) survived graduate school, and (hopefully) getting an academic job to finally (hopefully) getting tenure SHOULD qualify me as a historian. Being called a historian SHOULD then be a matter of pride. So when bozos on the History Channel call themselves historians (that guy who wrote Holy Blood Holy Grail), it is a problem for me. They are not, in fact, historians. I share the Historian on the Edge’s frustration, as well as Kelman’s on that one. We are trained, we have acquired a technique, a skill through our training. It is not a skill that is natural, or inherent in human beings, though some people are more prone to exhibiting it, just like mathematics for those kids that “just got it” in High School. Think about Aristotle’s Poetics: there is a technique to writing drama.
But as I am considering the grim prospects of my future, yet taking tremendous pleasure in my present, I remembered Grafton’s point in Worlds Made by Words: academics have never been particularly wealthy. This point is reiterated by a classicist, Alan Cameron, in The Last Pagans of Rome. The literary scholars of the late-fourth century were, in general, neither the top aristocrats, nor were they known to be extraordinarily wealthy. Ausonius was a wealthy landowner, but by no means on par with the Anicii or “Jerome’s widows.” Likewise, Augustine was not a member of the high aristocracy of North Africa, and coveted well-paid positions of tutoring (and even then one can argue whether the intellectual pursuits were his primary goals). Then, are we harking back to a golden age that really existed in the post-world-war II economic boom (1950-1970), and again briefly from 1980 to 2000? Did that golden age even exist?
The point that Kelman makes in the end (agreeing with the Historian on the Edge) is that ““professional historians should become more involved in the discussion about the crisis of history education — if, amidst the push for ever more STEM education, we’re still having that discussion at all” is well made. Perhaps this is our plan B: get involved in the communities. I do think our training has value: synthesis of large bodies of text, cultural sensitivity that is not principled, but ingrained by our postcolonial training, number of language known, etc… It is now up to us to relate our training to modern needs. No family member of mine currently works in academia, much less in the humanities, so at dinner parties, I am often asked: “What does a historian of Rome do?” When I explain, people are often amazed, sometimes indifferent. But those people that are amazed, though they are unlikely to fund our research, are intrigued by the difficulty of the training, the commitment of the student, and the set of skills that is acquired (sorry for all the passives, gnomic statements are terrible for that).
Remember, medieval scholars were not all Aquinas or Abelard:
I, a wandering scholar lad, 
Born for toil and sadness, 
Oftentimes am driven by 
Poverty to madness.
Literature and knowledge I 
Fain would still be earning, 
Were it not that want of pelf 
Makes me cease from learning.  
These torn clothes that cover me 
Are too thin and rotten; 
Oft I have to suffer cold, 
By the warmth forgotten.[3]
Scarce I can attend at church, 
Sing God's praises duly; 
Mass and vespers both I miss, 
Though I love them truly.
Oh, thou pride of N---------, 
By thy worth I pray thee 
Give the suppliant help in need, 
Heaven will sure repay thee.

Take a mind unto thee now 
Like unto St. Martin; 
Clothe the pilgrim's nakedness 
Wish him well at parting. 
So may God translate your soul 
Into peace eternal, 
And the bliss of saints be yours 
In His realm supernal.

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[1] http://600transformer.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-siege.html
[2] http://arikelman.org/policing-boundaries/?fb_source=pubv1
[3] http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/medievalstudentsongs.asp