London Calling Librarians

This guest post comes from Dana Goblaskas a former student of mine who works at the MIT library. Dana stuck out to me from the start because of her intellectual curiosity and because she was into pop music history, punk, and indie rock. Pluses in my book. Here she tells of her two-week trip across the water as a participant in University College London’s Librarianship Summer School.

Dana Goblaskas

As a self-proclaimed history nerd and an Anglophile, it’s hard for me to be giddier than when I’m immersed in the tangible history of England. And if I can earn credits toward my degree for that immersion, well, let’s just say the happy dances abound.

Last month, I took part in the inaugural session of University College London’s Librarianship Summer School, co-sponsored by the University of North Carolina’s School of Information and Library Studies. The two-week seminar examined the past, present, and future of Britain’s libraries and the field of librarianship, and featured daily field trips to museums, libraries, and archives throughout the city and beyond. Lectures by librarians, historians, and UCL faculty provided background for what my classmates and I saw during tours, and behind-the-scenes peeks into the workings of such places as the British Library and Bodleian Library at Oxford set our future-librarians’ hearts a-racing.

For the history nerd in me, there was plenty of “past” to learn about and see firsthand. Lectures about medieval manuscripts and eccentric pioneers of cataloging were coupled with glimpses inside Wren’s Library at Trinity College Cambridge (built in 1695), the Natural History Museum, and viewings of treasures like the Domesday Book at the National Archives.

Perhaps even more exciting than getting to drink all that in was seeing how much effort these institutions are presently putting into making their historical collections available to the world. With help from foundations like JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee), many of the places I visited were in the midst of massive digitization, indexing, or retrospective cataloging projects. Inspired by the popularity of the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? TV program, several libraries and archives were focusing on increasing public accessibility to the parts of their collections that could be used for genealogical research.

As for the future of Britain’s libraries, I think they’re heading in the right direction. Facing questions about libraries’ continuing relevance to society head-on, they are adapting to the communities around them and showing that they’re in it for the long run. A new “chain” of libraries called Idea Store is springing up around London, abandoning confusing catalog classifications and offering a wide variety of classes to support continuing education in their neighborhoods. The libraries in the London borough of Haringey recently won a grant that placed free medical clinics and wellness centers alongside their book stacks.

And in addition to focusing on expanding digital content and accessibility, some institutions are appealing to the public to help develop their collections. Projects such as Transcribe Bentham at UCL and Oxford’s First World War Poetry Archive rely on crowd-sourcing to create and identify materials, as well as on social networking tools like Twitter and Flickr to get the word out to wider circles of volunteers.

Coming back down to reality after two weeks spent doing not much more than hanging around inside and gawking at cool old libraries—or cool new libraries—was a little difficult. But coming back with great experiences, thousands of pictures, and a head full of ideas lessened the blow of the transition. And I’m excited by the prospect of so much more incredible content being made widely available. Now I just have to finish my research paper to earn those credits, and I think the happy dances will abound once again.

What is it Good for?

Randall Stephens

Standards, standards, impact, impact. In recent years historians in the UK have had the Research Assessment Exercise to contend with. (Sorry, your publications with Yea-oh University Press and Oxfort College Press don't pass muster.) Administrators and the public also push for disciplines in the humanities to prove their "usefulness" and "impact."

"As with philosophy," writes Ann Mroz in THE, "it is hard to show history's value beyond an intellectual pursuit. Any moves to make it demonstrate 'impact' risk pushing it down the heritage trail . . ." Your knowledge of Medieval tax law will help you to . . . ? Your study of child rearing in the Elizabethan Age equips you to . . . ? Start training to become a reenactor. Polish up your English Civil War "armour." Get that pike out of the closet.

Richard Overy's April 29 essay in THE, "The Historical Present," has created a stir. He throws down the gauntlet with these words:

Historians have always generated impact of diverse and rewarding kinds, and will continue to do so without the banal imperative to demonstrate added value. There is no real division between what historians can contribute and what the public may expect, but the second of these should by no means drive the first.

Nor should short-term public policy dictate what is researched, how history is taught or the priorities of its practitioners. If fashion, fad or political priority had dictated what history produced over the past century, British intellectual and cultural life would have been deeply impoverished. Not least, the many ways in which historical approaches have invigorated and informed other disciplines would have been lost.

Over at the NYRB, Anthony Grafton worries about the results of this utilitarian calculus. England's Slow Food academy has morphed into McDonald's. "Have it your way." Scholars working in fields that administrators deem useless--paleography, early modern, and premodern history, philosophy--have landed on the chopping block. "From the accession of Margaret Thatcher onward, the pressure has risen," writes Grafton. "Universities have had to prove that they matter. . . . Budgets have shrunk, and universities have tightened their belts to fit. Now they are facing huge further cuts for three years to come—unless, as is likely, the Conservatives take over the government, in which case the knife may go even deeper."

Historians working in America, too, struggle with the burdens of constrained budgets, reduction in full-time positions, eliminated raises, and the push for "relevant" curriculum. But, if the buzz in THE is any indication, what's happening in the UK is something else. Surely, the field of history won't vanish into thin air, as Overy imagines. (More doubtful are his comments on Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan, who "in her 2008 book, The Uses And Abuses of History, called on her peers to reduce their commitment to theory and to write shorter sentences. To do so would be to dumb down what history as a human science is doing." Really?) Still history across the pond may suffer much in this new climate.

Roundup: More on Writing in the Humanities

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Gordon Wood, "In Defense of Academic History Writing," Perspectives on History (April 2010)
Instead of writing . . . narrative history, most academic historians, especially at the beginning of their careers, have chosen to write what might be described as analytic history, specialized and often narrowly focused monographs usually based on their PhD dissertations. . . . [A]cademics have generally left narrative history writing to the nonacademic historians who unfortunately often write without much concern for or much knowledge of the extensive monographic literature that exists. >>>

Rachel Toor, "Bad Writing and Bad Thinking," Chronicle, April 15, 2010.
Many people—publishers of scholarly work, editors at higher-education publications, agents looking for academic authors capable of writing trade books—who think about the general quality of scholarly prose would admit that we're in a sorry state, and most would say there isn't much to do about it. >>>

George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language," 1946. Posted on Mount Holyoke's website.
Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. >>>

John L. Jackson Jr., "Just Bad Writing," Chronicle, April 13, 2010.
I actually enjoy reading certain kinds of "bad writing," at least some of the time, especially from the scholars who often get hammered for their impenetrable prose. That's usually anybody who invokes the notion of "performativity" or cites the work of Michel Foucault or gets described as a disciple of Cultural Studies. >>>

Keith Hopper, "Aidan Higgins, The Writer's Writer," TLS, March 31, 2010.
Aidan Higgins is often regarded as a “writer’s writer”, which is usually code for contrary, experimental and out-of-print. Derek Mahon, writing in the TLS in 2007, called him “an austere and often difficult writer, more than a touch old-fashioned, with an astringency that can stir the bile of whippersnappers.” >>>

First Annual Conference on Public Intellectuals, 23-24 April 2010, Harvard University

Randall Stephens

This weekend I'll be taking part in an interesting new conference on public intellectuals. The organizers Larry Friedman (Harvard) and Damon Freeman (UPenn) hope to draw interested parties to the conference. All sessions (held in Harvard's William James Hall) are open to the public.

Here's the summary:

In 1993, literary critic Edward Said defined the ideal intellectual as someone who stood outside circles of power while advancing knowledge and freedom for the wider public in "speaking truth to power." This first annual Conference on Public Intellectuals seeks to deepen and broaden Said's critique by providing an opportunity to scholars who are writing on public intellectuals.

The conference will take place over a period of two days, Friday and Saturday, 23-24 April 2010 at Harvard University. It is free and open to the public. The conference venue is in Room 1305 of William James Hall, 33 Kirkland Street on Harvard's campus. Sixteen papers are spread over four sessions: Public Intellectuals as Cultural Icons; Religion, Science, and Tolerance; and Race, Gender, and Protest, Parts One and Two. The conference also features two plenary sessions on Career Reflections. The conference is also working in conjunction with "The Future of American Intellectual History" symposium taking place Friday afternoon, 23 April in the Lower Level Conference Room at Harvard's Busch Hall.

See the full program here.

Liberal Arts, Humanities Roundup

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The following appeared in recent days. Just when you thought there could not be any more essays or forums on the decline in liberal arts education of the crisis of the humanities. . .

Nancy Cook, "The Death of Liberal Arts," Newsweek, April 5, 2010
. . . . But there's no denying that the fight between the cerebral B.A. vs. the practical B.S. is heating up. For now, practicality is the frontrunner, especially as the recession continues to hack into the budgets of both students and the schools they attend.>>>

Richard A. Greenwald, "Graduate Education in the Humanities Faces a Crisis. Let's Not Waste It," Chronicle Review, April 4, 2010.
I was recently reading Dr. Seuss to my 2-year-old daughter, when, bored of The Cat in the Hat and The Lorax, I picked up a lesser book from the Seussian canon: I Had Trouble Getting to Solla Sollew. To my surprise, the plot of that little-known children's book reminded me a great deal of the current crisis of American higher education.>>>

"Graduate Humanities Education: What Should Be Done?" Chronicle Review, April 4, 2010.
Does graduate education in the humanities need reform? By nearly all indications, the answer is yes. The job picture is grim. The Modern Language Association is projecting a 25-percent drop in language-and-literature job ads for the 2009-10 academic year, while the American Historical Association announced that last year's listings were the lowest in a decade.>>>

Simon Jenkins, "Scientists may gloat, but an assault is under way against the arts" the Guardian, March 25, 2010.
Which is more important, science or the humanities? The right answer is not: what do you mean by important? The right answer is a question: Who is doing the asking?>>>

Elizabeth Toohey, "The Marketplace of Ideas: What’s wrong with the higher education system in the US and how can we fix it?" Christian Science Monitor, March 11, 2010.
The structure of the American university has long been a subject of contention, and now is no exception, especially given the current economic climate. Last year, Mark Taylor called for an end to tenure and traditional disciplines in The New York Times op-ed, “End of the University as We Know It,” and William Pannapacker’s column, “Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don’t Go,” was among the most viewed links on the Chronicle of Higher Education’s website.>>>

Ars Brevis, Vita Brevis?

From the Observer, Sunday, February 28, 2010:

Anushka Asthana and Rachel Williams, "Growing outcry at threat of cuts in humanities at universities: Academics offer stark warning over future of the arts in Britain in letter to the Observer."

An influential group of leading academics and cultural figures has issued a stark warning that they fear for the future of the arts and humanities in British universities.

A letter to the Observer, signed by the directors of major arts institutions and a number of university vice-chancellors, claims that funding cuts and a decision to focus on the sciences have left subjects such as philosophy, literature, history, languages and art facing "worrying times". . . .

Related articles:

Carolyn Foster Segal, "Chiseling Away at the Humanities," Chronicle Review, February 28, 2010.

At last we have the answer to the question that comes up at every one of my college's faculty meetings: Where have the liberal arts gone? China! It seems that China, concerned about creativity and critical thinking, will be handling them from now on—and in small classes, too, at least according to The Chronicle's own "Less Politics, More Poetry." . . .

Jennifer Howard, "Humanities Remain Popular Among Students Even as Tenure-Track Jobs Diminish," Chronicle Review, February 28, 2010.

The results of an important new cross-disciplinary survey of humanities departments make it clear that the humanities remain popular with students and central to the core mission of many institutions. They also confirm that the teaching of English, foreign languages, and other humanistic subjects has become more vulnerable at American colleges and universities. . . .

Nostrum Fatum: Humanities on the Downward Slope

Randall Stephens

This will be an outside scoop item for those of you who saw William M. Chace's "The Decline of the English Department," American Scholar (Autumn 2009). But for those who didn't, Chace raises some interesting questions for English and other departments now fighting it out with fewer students and less support than in decades past. His essay goes along with similar topics Chris Beneke discussed here in recent months.

Here's Chace:

During the last four decades, a well-publicized shift in what undergraduate students prefer to study has taken place in American higher education. The number of young men and women majoring in English has dropped dramatically; the same is true of philosophy, foreign languages, art history, and kindred fields, including history. As someone who has taught in four university English departments over the last 40 years, I am dismayed by this shift, as are my colleagues here and there across the land. And because it is probably irreversible, it is important to attempt to sort out the reasons—the many reasons—for what has happened. . . .

Here is how the numbers have changed from 1970/71 to 2003/04 (the last academic year with available figures):

English: from 7.6 percent of the majors to 3.9 percent
Foreign languages and literatures: from 2.5 percent to 1.3 percent
Philosophy and religious studies: from 0.9 percent to 0.7 percent
History: from 18.5 percent to 10.7 percent
Business: from 13.7 percent to 21.9 percent

Off-campus, the consumer’s point of view about future earnings and economic security was a mirror image of on-campus thinking in the offices of deans, provosts, and presidents. . . .

Well worth a close read.

The Book Business, Down and Out

Randall Stephens

Toby Barnard's essay in the May 8th TLS, "Textual Healing—Ireland: Land of Scholars and Publisher Saints," is well worth reading. (Though the on-line version isn't up on the TLS site just yet.) Barnard considers the fortunes of Irish publishing over the last few decades and laments the 2009 demise of Four Courts Press.

In 1925 W. B. Yeats intoned: "We . . . are no petty people. We are one of the great stocks of Europe. We are the people of Burke; we are the people of Swift, the people of Emmet, the people of Parnell. We have created most of the modern literature of this country." Even with that illustrious past, Barnard notes: "only one Irish University, Cork, maintained its own press." Why? "[A]lmost from the invention of printing," writes Barnard, "ambitious Irish authors, uncertain how far their words would be spread, preferred to be published outside of Ireland. As well as authorial pride, there were financial incentives.” Turning to the present, Barnard looks at the dire impact of the economic downturn on the industry.

Reading Barnard’s bleak assessment—and his eulogy for Four Courts—I was reminded of a controversial article that appeared about a year ago in Times Higher Education: “Publish and Be Ignored.” Matthew Reisz gauged the shortcomings of British academic publishing that had led a number of “authors to sign up with U.S. and mainstream imprints.” For scholars who churn out specialist monographs, “the only realistic choice is between a British or US academic press. American books tend to be cheaper. British editors, often responsible for far more titles, may adopt a less ‘hands-on’ (or interventionist) approach. But what are the differences in terms of author experience?” The differences were great, said Reisz.

And now, stateside, dark clouds are once again appearing on the horizon. Louisiana, reeling from the financial crisis, may make big cuts to LSU Press, reports the Chronicle: “The Louisiana Legislature wants to slash funds for higher education, and that includes a proposed $40-million cut for the press’s home institution, LSU at Baton Rouge, said Bob Mann, a professor of mass communication there. He also edits a series for the press.” The University of Missouri Press cut half of its staff in the spring. Other state university presses are running behind budget and rethinking financial strategies.

I’ll still keep buying books in some vain hope that my purchases will lend a little help.

See also Ted Genoways’ post at the Virginia Quarterly Review site: “The Future of University Presses and Journals (A Manifesto)”; and Robert B. Townsend, “History and the Future of Scholarly Publishing,” Perspectives (October 2003).

The Last Historians, Seriously

Chris Beneke

My friend Benjamin Carp, a highly regarded historian of the American Revolution, has offered a good-natured response to “The Last Historians?”—my post from last week. It’s comforting to know that scholars as sensible as Carp and his fellow Common-Place blogger, and renowned early national U.S. historian, Jeffrey Pasley are less worried than I am. Apocalyptic warnings about the imminent, digital-driven demise of the traditional university were obviously premature a decade ago, and they are probably premature today. Yet, of all people, historians should appreciate that technological revolutions can sometimes take decades to make their full social impact. Moreover, there are some alarming trends converging on the modern university—an expensive cost structure, high levels of indebtedness among U.S. families, the globalization of college competition, unfavorable demographic patterns, and a host of distance learning innovations—that even a non-futurist might recognize as looming threats to our existence. In fact, you don’t have to hold a degree in economics to see that the tuition bubble of the last two-and-a-half decades looks remarkably similar to the housing bubble. Universities, and especially humanities scholars within universities, need to think hard about how we can develop both better and cheaper forms of higher education. Otherwise the end times (or some comparably grim tribulations) might really be quite near for those of us at institutions with endowments less than the gross domestic product of entire nations.

Now to Carp’s specific criticisms. Do I believe that an iTunes lecture series will substitute for the experience of working closely with Carp or Pasley in a seminar or as advisees? Of course not. But is a student in a typical lecture class of one hundred going to learn significantly more than she would with online course content, a great lecturer video series, and a part-time facilitator? Even if the answer to that question is “yes” and the live lecture course represents a more effective approach to teaching and learning, we still have to ask whether the marginal difference is worth a couple of thousand bucks to the students and their families. We also have to appreciate that our calculus may differ significantly from the calculus made by people outside the academy. You could protest that the university is not a corporation and should not be run like one. And I’d agree. The rub here is that perfectly rational mothers, fathers, and anxious teens often measure the worth of an education the same way that they measure the worth of other goods. And we, as academics, will either provide more educational, cultural, and economic value for their dollar than the alternatives, or we will fail.

What can be done about this value problem? To begin, I would suggest that historians make a stronger case for smaller classes with research-active faculty and that they design courses with more student-faculty interaction built into them. I would also suggest research-active historians consider writing fewer books and articles (and blog posts, for that matter) so that they can devote enough time and intellectual energy to teaching, advising, and programming, thereb making the experience worth the extra money their students are paying to be around living, breathing professional historians.

Regarding Ben’s brief against altering PhD and tenure requirements, I may have gotten ahead of myself in this case. It is nonetheless clear that we are producing too many PhDs with Research I credentials who end up as adjunct lecturers working for $5000/course and no benefits. It’s also clear that we’re publishing a lot of scholarship, especially in the form of books, that gets neither read nor cited (the latter, of course, not always requiring the former). Would the field of history suffer if we produced twenty percent fewer monographs? I doubt it. My sense is that few historians can keep up with all of the work generated in their field of specialization, let alone the profession. Nor do their college libraries have enough money to buy all of the books in a particular sub-specialty from university presses that barely have enough resources to produce them. The point I’m making here is not new. But the convergence of dismal trends (see paragraph one above) does make it newly urgent. I am more and more convinced of the value of research to good teaching. But I don’t believe that we should continue increasing scholarly output just so that we can add lines to our resumes and percentages to our salaries. The educational value of research needs to be repeatedly demonstrated. Teaching and research really do need to complement each other.

At least a year before the recession began and the financial crisis struck, my friends and family members had started to badger me about the high cost of a college education. Was a four-year undergraduate degree really worth $200,000 they’d ask? I’d try to explain. I’d tell them about the generous financial aid packages, the luxurious student facilities, and the economic benefits of a bachelors degree—as well as the great education our students were receiving. They seldom bought it. To non-academics, our self-rationalizations are looking more and more like a bill of goods. As historians, the task of justifying our existence has never been easy. We know implicitly that we’re in the business of educating rather than job training. We know that our research can enrich our teaching. Now we may finally have to prove it.

The Last Historians?

Chris Beneke

In January of this year, Stanley Fish caused something of a stir (again) with a blog entry titled The Last Professor, in which he discussed Frank Donoghue’s sharp and gloomy book: The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities. At the conclusion, Fish observes that he “timed it just right, for it seems that I have had a career that would not have been available to me had I entered the world 50 years later. Just lucky, I guess.” Here was a nice occasion for Fish to emphasize his own humility and for humanities professors to reacquaint themselves with the sensation of excruciating professional angst. Donoghue’s argument, as you might guess from the title, is that the modern non-profit university is increasingly run on a corporate model with teachers hired for short-term contracts and institutional goals defined by explicitly professional ends (on the student side of things) and financial success (on the administrative side). The picture he paints of the humanities job market is bleak. The picture he paints of the conditions of adjunct faculty is bleaker still. Donoghue takes pains to emphasize that the tension between the corporate world and the academic study of the humanities is as old as the tenured, research-oriented humanities professoriate itself. Moreover, he denies that we’re in a “crisis.” This is a long-term trend, he contends, rather than a short-term anomaly. Still, Donoghue makes it abundantly clear that he believes the academic study of humanities subjects to be on the tail end of a long slide toward irrelevance.

What should academic historians make of such a scary report—and what can they do to alter the dismal trajectory that Donoghue charts? The Last Professors offers few concrete recommendations, aside from his wise injunction to stop defending tenure on the grounds of academic freedom because that strategy only “exacerbate[s] the divide between the dwindling number of tenured professors and the growing rank of adjuncts.” And so, with The Last Professors in mind, but with no pretensions to originality or expertise, I offer the following unsolicited recommendations:

First, we need to forthrightly and repeatedly stress the value of the humanities in general, and the work of history in particular. That means, too, that we should think hard and maybe even talk a bit more about the larger value of the humanities in general, and the work of history in particular. And please, let’s try to avoid making the process look like an extended graduate seminar.

Second, we need to make sure that what we do with our students in the classroom and on-line is as conducive to their learning and thinking as it is distinctive. If you’ve seen the lectures at Academic Earth or listened to the lectures at iTunes University, you will have already realized that much of a history professor’s traditional teaching responsibilities can now be easily replicated and widely distributed. Making sure that we bring the latest research into the classroom in an engaging way will help to justify our scholarship, as well as our teaching.

Third, we should ensure that pay, benefits, and respect are more fairly distributed to all of the professionals in our field. For a group that votes overwhelmingly Democratic , tenured and tenure-track professors (as a whole) pay inexcusably little attention to their colleagues who do quite similar work on short-term contracts and for much less pay. Equity and enlightened self-interest both demand that the most privileged among us attend seriously to the conditions of those who now teach sixty-five percent of our classes.

Fourth, we must be engaged with popular works of history that both non-historians and historians will actually read and discuss. We should even be prepared to write such books ourselves.

Fifth, we need to stop pretending that all the work in our discipline is, or should be, of intrinsic interest to the rest of the world. To this point, we could substitute more rigorous teacher training for grad school research commitments and alter tenure and PhD requirements so that a series of article-length essays may be accorded the same worth as a four-hundred page dissertation. We should also reward good public history as generously as we reward good intra-academic scholarship.

Frank Donoghue’s dismal trends may indeed have originated long ago and his dark prophecies may take years to fulfill. But if we’re to avoid being the last generation of history professors, we will need to act quickly.