I’m relieved it’s finally over. It’s been three weeks since the seniors finished classes, a period punctuated by end-of-the-year parties, final exams, the prom, the senior dinner, and other rituals. Graduation is the most tedious. People typically experience a string over a string of a dozen or so years: elementary school and middle school, then high school, college, each a little more bittersweet and dogged by anxiety, followed perhaps by a postgraduate degree. And then that’s it for a generation. But we teachers (especially high school teachers) go through the process every year. The students, the speeches, the recitation of the school song: they all tend to run together. If anything is likely to be memorable, it’s the weather: hot or rainy, surprisingly cool or surprisingly beautiful. There’s usually a moment of genuine gladness at some point in the morning, as we witness the visible signs of maturity in some of our charges. And there’s often a moment of genuine regret, too, when we face an esteemed colleague’s retirement, the graduation of the final child in a cherished family, or a fond farewell from a clutch of friends who complemented each other so nicely. Any of these people may reappear at some point, in some perhaps transfigured way. But the uncertainty of such scenarios, and the certainty of time’s passage, make such moments bittersweet at best.

It’s always a relief when you get in the car and head home after such rituals, and I’m glad to seize a life, however quotidian, that’s truly my own. For years now, it’s been my habit to come home from graduation and mow the lawn. I think of Winslow Homer’s 1865 painting “Veteran in a New Field,” which depicts a recently returned Civil War soldier threshing wheat. Figuratively speaking, my campaign is over, and I’m eager to get back to my farm. 

This notion of closure is among the greatest satisfactions of teaching. Other walks of life are comparably cyclical. But I don’t think any afford the kind of clean lines and closed books that a life in schools does. Many working people take extended summer vacations, but few of them are as expansive and sharply chiseled as that afforded by an academic schedule. As we are all veterans of schooling, this experience is a virtual birthright. But only teachers refuse to relinquish it. 

The time will come -- unexpectedly quickly -- when my longings will turn away from completion and repose toward the rebirth that comes with the fall. In my case, the longings typically return long before it's time to actually return to the classroom. But as I make my way from meeting to meeting, from a final faculty softball came to a final trip to the local watering hole before we all disperse, I pause to savor the cadence. The present is past. And history will be born anew.

I find all this exhausting, even depressing, to contemplate. I shouldn’t. My salary has gone up substantially over the course of the last decade, thanks a series of good contracts and my recent promotion to department chair. I now make more than double what I did when I started at the school a dozen years earlier, and recently broke through the sixth figure in my salary, putting me at the top of the profession. I am -- by most measures of most jobs -- well paid. Alas, I seem to have found ways to deploy my assets as soon as they’ve appeared. A big chunk of my take-home pay, roughly $6,500/month, or $78,000 annually, goes to cover the schooling expenses of my children; even with a substantial staff discount, tuition for the two currently in the school takes up about 40 percent, or $32,000, of it. The rest of it goes to pay our $2,300 monthly mortgage payment and about $1,500 a month in property taxes, which I gladly pay since I have a learning-disabled child in a good public school system. That leaves the salary of my wife, an associate professor at a nearby liberal arts college who makes a little less, to cover everything else, with the significant exception of my eldest child’s college tuition, covered thanks to the generosity and foresight of my in-laws. We spend too much on takeout, and too little on things like home maintenance (our house steadily becomes more shabby -- cracks in the driveway, fingerprints on the walls, a running battle against mildew in our bathrooms). And we don’t give enough to charity. A new minivan has already been deferred a couple times, and waiting much longer is asking for a harrowing breakdown on the highway with kids and or dogs in the old one.

I tell you these fairly quotidian details about my financial situation in part because it’s the kind of thing my peers just don’t talk about -- I sometimes think people in my demographic are much more willing talk about the tenor of their orgasms than the tenor of the their finances -- but also quite curious about. I also believe my circumstances -- and, more importantly, my attitudes -- are typical of an educator of my generation and point in the life cycle. (The proportion of my income that goes to my children’s schooling, for example, is an amount most people in other lines of work would consider absurd. I reckon we all have our indulgences, mine typical of my profession.) Like a great many Americans, I consider myself middle class, whether or not the facts -- in my case, a gross family income of about $200,000 in lower Westchester County -- warrant such a designation. I do think, with the support of some expert opinion I find in the business section of the New York Times and other publications that I regularly graze, that supporting such a lifestyle is relatively more expensive than it used to be. I live better than my parents, a housewife and a New York City firefighter, did. But the rate of improvement has been slowed by the rate of inflation for things like housing and education. And having four kids? Financially speaking, that’s just plain dumb.

Whatever the pay scale, few jobs seem more thoroughly middle class than teaching. No one ever gets rich as a teacher. Still, while it’s relatively low on the professional ladder, teaching is a bona fide career in a society where the middle is being whittled out of existence. Teachers are still generally on the right side of a jagged economic divide in that we receive salaries (not hourly wages), health care benefits, and paid vacation. Teaching has been an actual profession for a little over a century now, a development spurred by a series of convergent phenomena: a Progressive movement that spurred professionalization in many occupations; the emergence of education schools offering graduate degrees; and an influx of men taking what has often been considered “women’s work.”

Teaching has never had the prestige associated with law or medicine (though that of both has deteriorated in recent years), or the excitement associated with journalism (less professionally structured and not especially remunerative for most of its history, but alluring for its access to power and/or the spotlight). Nor does primary- or secondary school teaching enjoy the sense of stature associated with college or university instruction, which has generally placed much more emphasis on producing original scholarship than actively fostering the art of pedagogy. In terms of social cachet, primary and secondary education has a relationship with the professoriate that can be compared with that of medicine and nursing: as nurses are to doctors, teachers are to professors. The former are generalists who take care of what are perceived as the less complicated cases, often knowing and doing more than they get credit for, while the latter enjoy greater stature rooted in their analytic skills. (Again there are gender echoes here, as teaching and nursing have long been regarded as feminine “helping” professions).

I speak as a failed academic. I went to graduate school in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when I got a Ph.D. in American Studies. I held on for almost a decade in adjunct positions -- a couple very attractive ones, but all of them dead ends. I might have held on longer had not the arrival of children (among them unexpected set of twins and even more medically surprising daughter) rendered the long-distance commute I’d been doing untenable. It was time to grow up and think seriously about making money. Lacking the credentials to teach in public school, I was lucky to land a position at my current post, believing from the start that it would likely be the first and last real job I’d ever be offered. White, male, old, and overpriced in a market that prizes youth and diversity, I’m probably now unemployable were I try to teach anywhere else.

My gaze shifts back to the $281.92 on my calculator. Multiplied by 12, that’s $3,383.04 a year; over the course of a five-year loan it adds of up to $16,902.20. What about interest? How much would depend on the rate. I’m getting close to the edge of my numeric competency in any case. I figure I’ll need about $15,000 as a down payment. Damn. For thirty grand I could probably get a pretty nice sports car. Not this time.

 I remember joke a cousin of mine once cracked: “When a pretty girl smiles at you when you pull up at a traffic light while driving a minivan, that’s all you, man.” I’m not in the market for pretty girls anymore. I’m just trying to get the job done -- or, I should say, to do one job well enough and long enough to get another one -- that of family man -- done. Then, surely, I’ll be on easy street ….

Our technology maven, Jessica, an impressively competent outside consultant who’s clearly younger than her salt-and-pepper mane would suggest, is chatting away about all the tools and applications that are now at our disposal with the new software that can be easily downloaded at . . . I didn’t quite hear and don’t want to ask. My colleague Tony Snowden, who’s always been an early-adopter -- he had an iPhone on day one -- is querying her closely on how to access the feature she had been showing us before she moved on to whatever it is that she’s now doing. “You just go and adjust the settings on the system preferences menu,” she says, and Tony nods with satisfaction. “Just be sure you have it on the default settings option,” she adds.

“Oh,” Ed Vinateri says sarcastically. “The system preferences menu. “Naturally.”

“Of course,” Tony says in a tone of good-natured ribbing, “your default setting is permanently set to off, Ed.”

Absolutely,” he replies, happy to be the butt of a joke.

Our maven renders a thin smile. I have a fleeting sense of sympathy for her: it must be tedious to talk to idiots all day. I glance up at the clock. I’m missing a workout on the Stairmaster; the gym is usually empty this period.

Actually, there had been a point when I was looking forward to this session. At last year’s professional day, I had watched in amazement as one of my colleagues in the science department wrote with a virtual marker on a whiteboard and then instantly turned the words into type. Given the complaints and queries I constantly get whenever I write on the blackboard, this was something I was truly interested in learning about. Despite a twinge of unease to see those slate boards go -- I was surprised when picking up my daughter from a recent playdate to see that her host had a huge blackboard in his kitchen, surely a sign that what was once a commonplace object was well on its way to becoming an antique -- I was ready to finish stepping into the 21st century. Though of course many of the skills I was most eager to learn were ones I could have picked up years ago.

I note that our maven is just now beginning to demonstrate the latest aspects of the handwriting-to-text feature, and raise my hand. “Could we use a real-life example?” I ask. She’s reluctant, I can see from the fleeting expression of irritation that almost imperceptibly crosses her face. But I leap to the front of the room, grab a green virtual marker, and start writing some points I plan to use in class that very day. “You might want to go a little slower,” she says from behind me, having adjusted to my imposition. I try to write:

SOURCES OF WEALTH IN THE POST-CIVIL WAR WEST

• Land (farming) • Mining • Ranching

It quickly becomes apparent, however, that my handwriting on the Smart Board is even worse than it is on a blackboard -- smears of green sludge.

“You have to learn to write differently,” our maven says.

“Is that all?” Ed asks.

She ignores him. “You have to write more with your shoulder.” She demonstrates the motion. I nod as if I understand and grab the virtual eraser, dismayed that my sludge doesn’t disappear.

“You have to put the marker down first before you can erase.”

I do so. Now the eraser works, more or less. When I put it down, she comes over, takes the red marker and models how I should actually write. It of course looks perfectly legible.

“Now,” she explains as I take my seat again, “in order to turn this into type you must first turn it into an object.” She moves her index finger across her text and a box forms. She moves her finger to a small square on the upper-right hand corner of the box and a string of suggested words appears: “Sources of welts/Sources of welfare/Sources of wealth” and a few more I can’t quite take in. She selects “Sources of wealth” and voila: handwriting becomes type.

“Now you turned ‘sources of wealth’ into what you call an object,” I observe. But do you have to make a separate object for each line of the Smart Board?”

“Probably.”

Now I’m truly discouraged. It all seems like so much work: making sure you have the right settings; making sure you don’t pick up the eraser while you still have a marker; making sure you write the right way; drawing boxes around the objects; hoping you’ll get the right option for turning it into text: surely it’s simpler just to pick up a piece of chalk, no?

“I gotta run,” says Tony. This session has probably been pitched too low for him. He likes to tinker anyway. I look up at the clock again, and see that if I leave now I can squeeze in that workout after all. I see Ed is also motioning to go. He’s saying something to the maven that makes her break into a broad smile: a divide has been bridged. But not a technological divide: He and I have learned little useful information. We probably needed a day, not an hour. But a day would just be too much with everything else we have going on.

That night as I brush my teeth it occurs to me that some of my students must feel the way I did earlier that day -- probably not about technology, which they seem to take to instinctively, but some of the academic work they’re asked to do. They find it hard but pretend they don’t or try to laugh it off. They fake their way for a while, maybe get the hang of aspects of a subject, and try to keep moving. It’s the improvising that ends up being the skill that gets developed -- the bluffing, faking, and ad-hoc adaptation.

Three days later, a canceled meeting unexpectedly gives me a half hour, and I walk into my empty classroom. I turn on the computer and Smart Board, and begin stumbling around. A half-hour later, I’ve managed to write “Tomorrow’s class will meet in the library” and turn it into text. A triumph. I have no clear idea how facile I’ll ever be on this thing; I suspect I’ll settle into some simple routines that I won’t wander from very much. But I know I have to do this. There’s some part of me that will die less quickly if I do. Truth be told, I'm a little surprised, and more than a little pleased, that I'm not quite ready to be erased.

I’m stunned by how beautiful the pond is on this autumnal morning. The foliage shimmers on the still water and bursts against the crystalline sky. Dubious about this part of the overnight field trip -- instructing students to go into the woods and have a Transcendental moment strikes me as a contradiction in terms -- I’m nevertheless delighted to be here. In the afternoon, I’ll be one of a set of teachers leading classes along the Freedom Trail. I’m looking forward to indulging with a cannoli at Quincy Market.

I’m jostled back into attentiveness by an unexpected moment of silence that is apparently the result of Denise looking at her watch. "You will have fifty minutes," she tells the students. "That's enough time to walk around the whole perimeter if you want to, but you'll have to keep a good pace. She turns and points to her left. "If you simply want to see the site where Thoreau had his cabin, walk straight this way. It will take you about ten minutes. Whatever you decide, you have to be back on the bus at 11 sharp. Hey! Alan!" Denise claps twice and points at a sleepy student I don’t know (which is most of this batch). "To be awake is to be alive!" Some chuckles; I wonder if they get the allusion or are simply amused by the contrast between Denise’s no-nonsense energy and Alan's torpor. "All right then," she concludes. "Go!"

The students stand around dumbly for a moment, but begin to disperse with growing momentum. "I'm going over to the gift shop," Denise tells me. "I have to make some phone calls. I'll be over in a little while to help round up this herd of cats." I nod and begin walking around the pond, beginning at the far side from the cabin site.

I have ambivalent feelings about Thoreau. I’ve no patience for the cranky misfit of "Civil Disobedience," who thought he could simply opt out of paying taxes he didn't like. And no man who has his mother and sister do his laundry can call himself self-reliant. But for all his prickliness, I sense an inner struggle to live the words, and know that dismissing him as a phony is a little like complaining that sinning churchgoers are hypocrites: it's missing the point. I’m intrigued that Walden Pond is not -- was not -- the wilderness, in fact within easy walking distance from the village of Concord. I read that a railroad ran near the actual site of the celebrated cabin in Thoreau’s time, and apparently still does. Looking ahead I see a cluster of students, and evidence of a rail bed off to the left. I veer away from it so I can continue to savor my solitude.

I haven’t gone far off the main trail when I see two still figures lying side by side in a bed of pine about 100 feet away. They are not engaged in an overt sex act, but the sense of intimacy is unmistakable. From the angle of my approach I can only see sneaker bottoms clearly; the rest is partially hidden in evergreens. One kid apparently has his hands behind his head; the other appears nestled beside him. I don't recognize them, but either or both could be my students. Though I feel obligated to break up this idyll, I’m charmed by it. Years from now, long after Denise Richardson’s (undone?) assignment is forgotten, this will be what these two remember from this trip. Surely even a loner like Thoreau would, or should, approve.

I hear a voice shouting off far to her right. "Horace? Is that you?" It's Denise, motioning a cluster of students to keep moving toward the group's starting point. "Yes!" I respond forcefully. As I do, the two students scramble to their feet and begin running away, presumably to circle behind the cabin site and rejoin the group there. As they do, I see that they're both boys.

"Will you backtrack a bit and round up any slackers?" Denise asks.

"Sure,” I say, turning around and walking in the opposite direction. While I scrunch my eyes, trying to determine if I recognize either boy, I’m approached by my favorite student, Wilhelmina Sperry, notebook in hand, clearly running to make up lost time and ground.

"It's OK, Willie," I say reassuringly. "Is there anybody else back there?"

"No. I’m the last one," she says as she slows to a walk and adjusts her glasses, clearly out of breath. "I wanted to take a few more minutes to make some notes about a spider web I found. I guess I lost track of time."

"Good for you." Willie and I are now walking toward the bus at exactly the same pace.

"I love it here," she says. "That was a good assignment. Now that I've actually seen the pond, I need to re-read the parts of Walden we discussed in class."

"Sounds like a good idea."

A pause. And then: "Mr. Dewey, would you call Thoreau a Romantic writer?"

"Well, not exactly. Not in what I think of in the classic sense of the term, like Wordsworth or Emerson. But I'm sure a lot of people would."

"I just love him."

"Fair enough. But remember, Willie: it's a big world out there. There are lots of fish in the pond."

Willie turns her head at me, smiling. "You're not talking about how they restock the pond with fish."

"No, Willie, I am not."

Willie’s smile breaks into a chuckle. "OK, Mr. Dewey. I'll keep my standards up.”

"Thatta girl, Willie. Any writer would be lucky to catch you. Any non-writer, too."

All of these reasons seem to fall under the rubric of shooting the messenger. For all the ink spilt in the New York Times and in countless other major print media outlets, I found it quite refreshing if not entirely inspiring that Kristof, an authoritative journalist, valued academic work and wanted more of it. That he has a critique of our style seemed minor compared to his larger desire to want to learn from academic research.

For the past fifteen years, I have been trying to figure out ways to bridge the gap between the academy and the public. I organized three conferences when I was a graduate student at Columbia University and then published two anthologies based on the proceedings (Why We Write and Taking Back the Academy), all of which grappled in various iterations with the role of intellectuals outside of the alleged ivory tower. Since then I have blogged for the Huffington Post and have written dozens of articles in publications nationally and internationally that have attempted to engage a non-academic readership. So, when I read Kristof's op-ed, I was relived that someone else was thinking of a way to address this conundrum.

In general, Kristof argued that the main determinant blocking academics from being read by mainstream readers results from the arcane ways in which they write. That is not the problem. Many academics, who write for broader audiences, understand the need to write in different registers. Judith Butler and the late Edward Said, for example, both have written sophisticated, theoretical books, which some may accuse of being arcane, but they have each published accessible articles in mainstream newspapers.

The problem lies not with academics' prose, but rather with access to mainstream publications. Based on my experiences, many editors at national publications refuse to accept unsolicited articles or even queries from academics, and when they do, they often want academics to streamline their arguments to digestible aphorisms that a real housewife in Beverly Hills could recite.

In 2012, when my book Sick from Freedom was published, I was enormously fortunate to garner a great deal of media attention, and while I accepted every offer to publish and to be interviewed by every reporter and editor that wanted to learn more about my research, I, nevertheless, hit serious road blocks at some of the nation's leading magazines.

I queried a leading national magazine (Periodical A), who nibbled at my proposal, but then farmed me out to their online news editor. The editor then asked me for an article that highlighted the main arguments of my book, told the history of slavery, and then tied it in with the release of the film Lincoln and President Obama's Second Inaugural Address. I explained to the editor that I could make those connections only if I added the history of medieval aqueducts and the cultural biography of Tituba from The Crucible.

I digress. While I did manage to execute the tall order that the editor wanted, she, nevertheless, ultimately rejected my piece, claiming that I did not connect the history of slavery enough to the Lincoln film and Obama's address. While I recognize that rejection is a common part of the publishing process, the struggle lay more with the editor's desire to commission a piece that cobbled together four disparate themes under the common heading, I am guessing, of black people -- which itself raises a number of problematic assumptions and ideological implications. (I then published the piece in the Huffington Post.) But the most vexing part of that experience was the ensuing radio silence after I submitted my article. I continued to write to the editor asking if she had received it. First I waited three days after I did not hear from her, then I wrote a second and a third time in the following two weeks. When writing news or feature pieces that are time sensitive, this radio silence proves to be perilous. While I realize that this is a problem that all freelance writers and journalists confront, scholars remain more outside of the internal media networks than journalists and other writers, and, thereby, cannot pick up the phone to nudge someone else at a magazine to nudge the editor or to even know an editor at another suitable publication who might be keen on the idea.

In October 2012, I queried another top publication (Periodical B), about writing a piece to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, January 1, 2013. Like Periodical A, Periodical B also farmed me out to an online editor. This time, the editor and I both were on the same page about the piece. She wanted an overview of new books on the history of emancipation. I planned to report on the work of a conference that I had organized at Yale that highlighted new scholarship in the field. I submitted the article and then radio silence ensued again. I heard nothing. I always fear appearing as a nag, so I waited a few days before I followed up. Still nothing. Two weeks later, I wrote a third time and the editor told me that they would not be publishing my article because I had published a piece in the Sunday Review of the New York Times on emancipation. Even though my piece in the Times focused on my research and the piece for Periodical B focused on other scholars' research, she claimed that the articles were too similar.

This past summer, I queried TIME magazine to publish an article on new research that I conducted on the largest massacre of gay people in U.S. history. June 24, 2014 marked the 40th anniversary of the night when 29 gay men were killed in an arson attack in a bar converted into a church. The editors at TIME jumped at the story, but when it came to interviewing the remaining survivor, who I located, TIME insisted on assigning one of their star reporters to conduct the interview. They claimed that as a historian I did not have the skills to conduct the interview, and that according to their protocol, they had to have their own reporters do it. While that seemed reasonable, the story almost went to print with the reporter listed as the only name on the byline and I would be listed at the end of the article as simply providing research. Under the auspices of journalism, my research, my framework and my writing almost got erased from the story.

I write these examples, not because I have sour grapes, but rather to offer concrete evidence of the struggles that academics face when they attempt to get published in mainstream magazines. Further, my argument is simply that there are limited opportunities in the nation's leading magazines and newspapers in which academics can reach broader audiences; journalists and freelance writers certainly face these limitations as well. That said, I am simply attempting to argue that Kristof's critique neglected the fact that it is very hard for academics or any other writers for that matter to reach broad audiences. The sheer will to be a public intellectual is not enough; one needs access and often an Ivy League imprimatur after their name.

Based on my experience, this is not the case in the United Kingdom and in parts of Europe. When my book came out on an American history topic, I received a number of requests from a range of media outlets in the UK. It seems in the UK there is more of an interest, and dare I say reverence, for intellectual work. Further, I would speculate that unlike in the United States, where a number of journalists, have emerged as talking heads, experts and authors of blockbuster books, in the UK, professors occupy this tier of intellectual influence.

Finally, one of the most astute observations that Kristof later made in his blog that has also gone virtually overlooked is his claim that "when professors do lead the way in trying to engage the public, their colleagues sometimes regard them with suspicion." This is absolutely true. I cannot even begin to document the cruel and mean-spirited responses that I have encountered as I try to engage the public. Not only do most scholars snub insights that scholars, like me, make in the mainstream publications, but they seethe with insults about my desire to publish in this genre. The negativity that I have encountered from within the academy has been more of a detriment to me continuing to reach out to the public than anything else. Further, the fact that I emulate scholars, like Harvard Professor Jill Lepore, who writes for The New Yorker, or even Timothy Patrick McCarthy, another Harvard professor, who is a leading social activist, as important voices within national conversations, has only branded me with the scarlet letter a for adulteress -- to the academy.

Far from being the analysis of a tenured radical, this was the view expressed by William J. Brennan in his dissenting opinion in the Yeshiva case. To Brennan, one of the greatest liberals to sit on the Supreme Court in the twentieth century, the organization of faculty members at both public and private institutions seemed a natural response to the growing need of academics to find a place in an increasingly bureaucratized environment. And he was not alone. Indeed, Brennan referenced a 1973 Carnegie Commission on Higher Education report that noted the growing strains that the evolution of the university put on academic ideals and declared that “Faculty members should have the right to organize and bargain collectively if they so desire.”

But Brennan lost this argument. In Yeshiva, the Supreme Court held that in most cases faculty members at private academic institutions were not “professionals” covered by the National Labor Relations Act, but “managers” devoid of substantive rights. In the aftermath of the strike conducted on February 18-19 by the  UIC, United Faculty (UICUF) Local 6456 to speed up stalled negotiations with the university administrators over the status of adjunct faculty, it’s worth understanding why.

The Yeshiva case arose out of the refusal by Yeshiva University administrators to bargain with the faculty union, which petitioned the NLRB for an election 1974. The NRLB accepted the petition, noting that the faculty at Yeshiva were “professionals”, that is, they engaged in duties and responsibilities -- course selection, deciding course content, teaching methods, grading policies and student admission -- routinely associated with their profession.

Yeshiva administrators, in contrast, contended that the faculty were in fact akin to “managers” or “supervisors” -- a large group of workers (today numbering some ten million) to whom American labor law offers no protection because they are endowed with a measure of autonomy, discretion, and decision-making power. Barred from joining unions, these workers are supposed to cast their lot with higher management and eschew the type of collective action on which blue-collar unions once thrived.

Underlying this legal distinction is the conservative notion that in many cases, unionism is incompatible with the faithful performance of duty. Since the adoption of the Wagner Act, corporate America has insisted that it needs a reliable cadre of managers whose loyalty to the organization is not compromised by membership in a union that does not fully sustain business values. “A man can’t serve two masters”, they repeatedly argued as they opposed NLRB decisions extending bargaining rights to foremen and supervisors. As I show in my new book, The Employee: A Political History, the loyalty argument,although first put forth in the corporate battle against foremen’s unions in the 1940s, was gradually extended to many white collar workers, and by the 1970s, as faculty members started organizing, it resurfaced in the field of higher education with devastating consequences.

While it is often said that the Yeshiva case revealed how difficult it is to adapt the framework of the Wagner Act to a non-industrial setting, what this case yielded was in fact a highly ideological ruling compromising academic freedom. Tellingly, the task to overturn the NLRB ruling in Yeshiva fell to none other than Justice Lewis Powell, the author of the now infamous 1971 memo entitled “The Attack on the Free Enterprise System.” To Justice Powell, there was no difference between university professors and high-grade managers in a private company. “To the extent the industrial analogy applies,” he explained, “the faculty determines within each school the product to be produced, the terms on which it will be offered, and the customers who will be served.”

Powell never explained why the industrial analogy was apposite and why the unionization of faculty staff constituted a threat of “divided loyalty” for the university, but his opinion in Yeshiva was no doubt an important conservative victory, a key moment in the neo-liberal assault of the university. By ruling that professors were “managers,” Powell told faculty members that they could not fight the bureaucratization and marketization of the university because in fact they were caught within its web and owed loyalty to it.

Today, Yeshiva is still the law of the land, and in its wake the unionization movement at private universities quickly lost what impetus it had gained in the 1970s. By contrast, at public universities, unionization of tenured or tenured track faculty remained unimpaired.

Where are we some thirty-odd years later? The issues that surfaced in the 1970s have only grown more acute, and have spread even to public institutions. The strike led last week by the members of UICUF is a good guide. “We’re striking for the students”, explained two faculty members. “One of our issues in this strike is to take back decision-making power over the issues that matter to us -- curriculum, teaching conditions, the distribution of monies and the like,” they added. Indeed, what led to the two-day walk out, which gathered some one thousand protesters –faculty, students and supporters—in rallies and around the picket line, was a feeling of “voicelessness” as more than one year of negotiations by the union did not lead to a resolution and a contract.   

More than a concern for a democratic university, however, led faculty of UIC to stand on the picket line for two bitterly cold days in February. Compounding this concern over the limits of the collegiality of the “shared governance” system is the more recent bread and butter issue of the compensation of full time adjunct faculty. Like many other schools, UIC employs a growing number of year-to-year, non-tenure track adjunct lecturers. According to a recent AAUP report, non-tenured-track positions grew 300 percent between 1975 and 2009, while tenure track positions only grew by 26 percent. The work of these “adjuncts” has become essential to most universities, and in fact many of them are in ranks that traditionally lead to a consideration for tenure.

Yet this work is poorly compensated. There again, UIC seems a good example. There, the income of adjuncts hovers around $30,000 a year -- less than half the median salary of all faculty in the whole UIC system ($65,000). This is a striking inequality that the public nature of the university makes even more arresting. In the U.S. as in Europe, public universities -- once viewed as engines of social emancipation -- are now incubators of contingent labor.

Neither of these two problems, of course, is limited to public higher education. The recent UIC strike, however, has highlighted the profound legal disjuncture that separates public and private universities, for in private institutions, those scholars who no longer believe in the principle of “shared governance” would no doubt find it hard to replicate the UIC strike because the Yeshiva decision has put them in a legal twilight zone.

While the UIC strike has put the unionism of faculty members front and center, it is thus necessary to remember that the Yeshiva decision stands as one of the main obstacles to any attempt to defend a university model where education is not entirely commodified and where humanities are not expendable. Indeed, the Yeshiva holding can hardly be reconciled with the long held idea that universities, like secondary schools, should produce a most desirable public good –an educated citizenry. In this respect, the distinction between public and private universities collapses, not simply because private universities largely benefit from public assistance in the form of student loans and research grants, but also, more simply, because they are equally invested in providing American students with the knowledge and know how to become citizens and workers. It is doubtful whether this task can be achieved if universities are not run with a healthy dose of bargaining with the workers, whether university professors or school teachers whose work has a civic dimension essential to society.

I’ve known for weeks now that Ginger is a weak student. Utterly silent in class, she never handed in her first essay of the new semester, and when I asked her about it a couple days after it was due, she said that she had a bad Internet connection. That’s fine, I said. Just give me a hard copy tomorrow. When that didn’t happen, she said she was having printer problems, and would drop it off later that day. When that didn’t happen, I sent an email to her parents. The essay materialized the next day, along with apologies for the delays from them and her. Minimally acceptable in terms of content and structure, I decided that this was not a good time to tell her to do it again -- I inferred I’d already caused some tumult in her household, and establishing a reputation as a remorseless academic stalker would not be the best way to promote a working relationship. But clearly, I was going to have to keep an eye on her.

Her next essay, handed in on time, was even weaker. In my comments, I beat around the bush a bit, commending her for her evident engagement and willingness to grapple with the question, but finally confessed that I found it -- hesitating to use the word, but deciding it was best -- “incoherent.” I asked her to come and see me so that we could plot a course for revision. I felt both justified and guilty for this approach. Justified, because I felt it important to both be willing to help as well as ask her to take responsibility for her work, and guilty because I was asking her to demonstrate a level of maturity she’d already shown she lacked. I always feel a tug between trying to nudge my students along and protecting my time, and at some level I knew that if I wasn’t more proactive with Ginger, she’d slip my mind. As indeed she did.

It was her parents who pushed the process along, sending around group emails to her teachers asking for feedback about her work a couple weeks later. A flurry of email exchanges with her advisor followed, which culminated in a phone call from the school learning specialist telling me that she happened to be with Ginger as we spoke and wondering if she could send her my way. Yes, I said, turning back to my work with the added fervor of knowing it was going to be interrupted momentarily.

Now she’s here at my desk, backpack at her feet, awaiting her fate. Dark hair, dark eyes, she’s pretty, maybe even striking, but her sense of vulnerability is so palpable that it overrides any other attribute. I try to set her at her ease. Where do you live, Ginger (uptown), what do you your folks do (they’re both on the business side of the television industry), do you have any siblings (an older half-sister from her father's previous marriage). Her answers are direct, earnest, and dead ends. This is not a conversation.

“What do you do for fun, Ginger?”

“I dunno,” she replies. “Nothing, really.” Then, brightly, as if she’s suddenly realized the solution to an algebra problem that’s been posed to her: “I decided this week to work on sets for the spring musical!”

“That’s great,” I say, wishing I could make that ember flare. But I don’t have the presence of mind to ask her what she’s making, how the show is going, or something to keep the momentum going. The only thought that comes to mind is that she'll have one more reason to put off grappling with her academic difficulties. And I think, not for the first time, that I have a worse track record with girls than boys when it comes to dealing with struggling students.

We proceed to talk about her course work. Usually math and science are harder than history and English, but this year it seems to be the other way around. Last semester’s history teacher was different, she tells me. More facts and dates and smaller, more manageable, assignments. From another kid, this would be barely veiled criticism. I don’t think she means it that way, though perhaps she should. But we need to get down to the business at hand.

“So what did you understand my message to you to be in my comments?” I ask. This is a standard gambit of mine; it’s helpful for students to interpret what I said in their own words, and for me to be prompted, dozens of essays and days later, about what I said to one kid in particular.

“That I was incoherent,” she replies. Ugh. She got that message, all right.

I prompt her to tell me what she was thinking about when she was writing the essay, and once she gets launched on a little soliloquy, things get easier. I jot down some notes as she talks, structuring her various points into a simple outline. The essay she’s narrating is rudimentary, and doesn’t quite answer the question I ask. But if she can actually execute what she’s saying on paper, we’ll be making a discrete step forward.

I show her the outline. “Does this make sense to you?”

She looks at it intently. “Yes,” she says. “I had a pretty clear idea when I sat down, but I felt like I had so many ideas in my head, and I have attention deficit issues, and I dunno . . . .” her voice trails off. I don’t think she wanted to surrender the fact of a learning disability to me. But this is apparently what she’s supposed to do, and she’s going to play her part.

“I sort of understand,” I tell her. “I have a kid with learning disabilities. I won’t tell you I know what that’s like, but I think I have some notion of the issues.” She looks me in the eye for the first time. She understands my gesture for what it is, and her acknowledgment feels like one in its own right.

My problem now is that I don’t know where to go with this. I know it’s very easy to say the wrong thing -- promise too much, offer too little. Our silence is awkward. Ginger pulls together the two sides of the unzipped hoodie she’s wearing over her scoop-necked shirt, something she’ll do repeatedly in the remainder of our meeting. This saddens me.

Back to the task at hand. She’s going to work off this blueprint. She asks when I want the revised version. I ask when’s good for her. She tells me to tell her. How’s Friday. All right, then. We agree to meet again before an upcoming test. “This is going to work out fine,” I tell her. “I know it’s hard -- it’s hard for everyone, no one writes effortlessly -- but it’s going to be fine.” She smiles at me, hopefully and doubtfully, as she returns her papers to her backpack and zips it up. Our meeting is over.

Mom will follow up with an email; I promise to read multiple drafts. But it's been a few weeks now, and nothing has happened. Ginger avoids eye contact again whenever possible. Maybe she'll pull things together on my watch, or someone else's. She has the good fortune -- if at times she surely regards it as a mixed blessing -- of people looking after her. But for me the whole encounter is a reminder of the limited ability of teachers generally, and this teacher in particular, to fill the unaccountable holes that riddle our lives.

All men are created equal. All men are created equal. All men are created equal. All men are created equal. All men are created equal.

“So, kids, are any of these statements true?” I ask, turning around to face the class. “I mean, what a crock of bull, right? How could Jefferson -- himself a slave owner -- possibly be serious?" 

A few wry smiles. Some of them have apparently asked themselves this question before. 

I love that line!" Vanessa Thompson, ever the contrarian in her vintage Sex Pistols t-shirt. But she’s been too busy chatting with Janey Orlov to be much of a presence today. 

“Doesn’t matter whether they believe it," says Eduardo Salinas. "It’s propaganda.” 

I try to mask my surprise. This is the first time I’ve heard from Eduardo all year. I want to kindle the flame without smothering him.

“You think they’re lying?”

“Dunno,” he replies. “Maybe.” 

“You called this ‘propaganda.’ What do you mean by that?” 

“I mean they’re trying to persuade people.” 

“Can propaganda be true?” 

“I guess.”

“Do you think they were trying to persuade themselves?”

 Eduardo shrugs. I can’t tell if he’s expressing skepticism or a desire to be let off the hook. 

“I think they did believe it,” Zoe Leoni says without raising her hand. “I mean, you kind of have to believe it if you’re going to stick your neck out like that."

“You say 'they. Do 'they' all think the same way?” 

“No, probably not. But I don’t think they really have any choice. They’re desperate, right? Didn’t you say yesterday that there’s like this big invasion the British are planning?”

“Right. They’ve already landed on Long Island. They’re headed for Manhattan even as the Declaration of Independence is being written.”

“So of course they’re going to talk about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. So it sounds like they’re the good guys.” 

“But how do they think they can get away with it?”

“It was a bunch of rich white guys who wanted other people to help them,” Derek Simonson, who sits next to Eduardo, blurts out with an edge of impatience in his voice. Wonder of wonders: two silent types in one day. 

“I think you’re absolutely right,” I say, more eager to encourage him than to pursue the angle of ideological difference between the revolutionaries. “A big part of the Declaration was designed to attract foreign support, especially the French. But here’s what I wonder, Derek: Is this really the best language to use in order to do something like this? Let’s assume you’re right: these guys are essentially a bunch of frauds, and that people then could see through them then just like you are now. I'm reminded of the famous writer Samuel Johnson’s response to the colonists: ‘How is it that we hear the loudest yelps of liberty from the drivers of negroes?’ So how is a lot of talk of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness really going to convince anybody?”

Jiian Cheng raises his hand, and I acknowledge him. "I don’t think they really have any choice. I mean, you gotta start somewhere.”

Laura Lynn wants to weigh in and I nod to her. “Jiian’s right. It’s an important first step.”

“A step towards what?”

“Freedom. Independence. All that stuff.”

“Well, OK.” I point at the whiteboard. “But this says ‘all men are created equal.’”

She hesitates. Then: “Yeah, that too.”

“So freedom and equality go together? How does this work -- first we get the freedom, then we do equality?”

She’s lost. “Yeah, kinda.”

I shift my gaze from Laura and make a puzzled expression to the class generally.  “I don’t get it, kids. What does freedom have to do with equality? Are they the same thing?” 

What I regard as a fruitful line of discussion is disrupted by Wilhelmina (a.k.a. Willie) Sperry, who has already emerged as one of my favorite kids, maybe of all time. I often see Willie walking the hallways, hunched over a backpack that looks like it’s crushing her and bearing a grim expression in marked contrast to the animated child who’s most fully alive in the classroom. In other words, a girl after my own heart. Not pretty, really -- red-haired, flat-chested and a little scrawny, Willie’s warm personality has always made her appealing, at least to adults and what seems to be a small circle of friends. But will the boys see it? (Maybe it won’t matter; maybe she’s gay.) Willie, who has been silently following this conversation with her usual intensity, chooses this moment to raise her hand. But I’m disappointed that she seems to be taking us way off course.   “They’re hypocrites,” she says. “The King simply has to go after them. If they’re allowed to get away with this, it would set a bad example. They have insulted him . . . .” 

I begin to lose track of what Willie is saying. For one thing, it seems tangential: what does the King have to do with what we’ve been talking about? For another, I realize I’m hungry. And yet I marvel at how fully immersed she is in this discourse. Even Janey Orlov has noticed. Not approvingly.

I cut her off. “I’m not sure we need to shed any tears for George III, Willie. If there’s anyone in the world who can brush off some punk critics, surely it’s him. But I tell you who I am worried about,” I say, pausing for effect. “The King of Spain.” I put my hand on my chin, and narrow my eyes. "I mean, here’s a guy who’s going to be losing sleep at night." 

"Who is the King of Spain?" Willie asks, genuinely curious.

I dunno," I reply, not changing my expression. "Carlos the twenty-something. They were all called Carlos back then." The class breaks into laughter.

"See, here’s the problem,” I say when it subsides. There’s nothing old Carlos would like more than to stick it to Britain. He wants it so badly he can almost taste it. The problem is that if he and his Bourbon cousin Louis XVI enter an American war against Britain on the side of a group of rebels who have issued this revolutionary manifesto, then his own subjects in places like Mexico and Peru might actually begin to take some of the nonsense in that manifesto seriously. And that would be a real mess.” 

“So what does he do?" This from Vanessa, who’s back among us. My, my: I am on a roll today. 

“Well, ultimately, he takes the plunge -- he joins France and declares war on Britain. And his fears prove justified, because even though he gets some real estate out the deal, within a generation all hell breaks loose in Central and South America. Eventually, the Mexicos and Perus of the world declare their own independence. The King of France, who tended not to worry as much, ends up literally losing his head in the name of abstract ideals like freedom and equality -- which, I’ll point out in passing, we’re still lumping together as if they’re two sides of the same coin. We can’t blame all of this on the Declaration of Independence, of course. But it certainly didn’t help matters if you’re the King of Spain." 

“Which,” I continue, after a pause, “is another way of saying that you’re right, Eduardo and Derek. The Declaration of Independence was a piece of propaganda by a bunch of rich white guys who were desperate enough to say whatever they thought might help them at that particular moment. The problem is that in so doing they let a genie out of a bottle, because some people, despite much evidence to the contrary, actually began to believe what the Declaration said -- or, maybe more accurately, they acted as if they believed what the Declaration said. ‘Acted,’ in the sense that they pretended, and ‘acted’ also in the sense that they ended up doing things that they otherwise might not have done had there been no Declaration of Independence. That genie ended up doing a whole lot of mischief all over the world.” 

“Still does,” says Willie with a smile.

“You think so?”

“Yes.”

“Really?”

“Yes.” Willie is firm. So smart, so innocent. Eduardo is packing up his books: my signal that my time is up. Derek is looking, inscrutably, at Willie. Oh, dear girl.

“You think so too, Zoe? You think Willie is right?”

She nods.

“Well, then, I guess we’ve figured this all out. See you tomorrow.”

* * * * *

People of all temperaments and ideological persuasions become teachers, but the nature of the job as it’s currently constituted makes them instinctive progressives. I should add that I’m using the term in multiple senses, some of which I am avowedly skeptical. But their valences are powerful and should be recognized, even if they’re not dominant in the U.S. education system in particular or American society generally.

In its most specific educational formulation, the word “progressive” refers to a pedagogical philosophy that took root in the late nineteenth century and has in various iterations persisted to this day. Its patron saint is John Dewey. Central to Dewey’s vision was an emphasis on process (discussion) over product (test scores); subjective experience over objective truth; learning by doing rather than having information delivered. As a movement, progressive education in this country probably peaked in the 1930s, and has largely persisted as an alternative educational subculture in the decades since.

That said, important elements of the progressive ethos have long been absorbed as common sense even in schools that consider themselves traditional. Such schools may emphasize traditional values, basic skills, and mastery of content (and relentless testing). But they will hardly disparage -- indeed, they will likely explicitly uphold -- critical thinking, diversity of thought and experience, and pragmatic problem solving, all of which are hallmarks of progressive education. Virtually no educators will assert the primacy or necessity of lecturing as the best or only means of delivering instruction, even when teacher-centered information delivery is the primary approach. Ironically, one of the major problems for the contemporary progressive education movement as a movement is that many of its core ideas are now taken for granted, even when they conflict with others. So it is that parents and educators insist on growth and rigor, or diversity and continuity, whether or not they’re simultaneously achievable.

The second way teachers tend to be progressive is more generally political. In school systems of all sizes, where different constituencies jockey for maximum room to maneuver, teachers are the inheritors of the Progressive tradition -- note the capital “P” to distinguish indicate the movement in electoral politics that spanned roughly from 1900 to 1920. It’s important to note, however, that there was a curious bifurcation in the Progressive movement that it never entirely resolved. On of the one hand, early Progressives were locally based, experimental, and highly empirical in their approach to social reform (not just in schools, but also business regulation, municipal services, and electoral reform, among other initiatives). They were very much bottom-up. On the other hand, Progressives were also -- and this became increasingly apparent as the movement gained momentum in the second decade of the twentieth century, when it dominated that nation’s political life in both major parties -- great centralizers of power, as long as it was concentrated in the hands of independent experts who acted in the name of the common good. If the settlement house worker Jane Addams personified the first strand of Progressivism, Theodore Roosevelt was the epitome of the second. By the time of Roosevelt’s successor, Woodrow Wilson, however, there were growing questions about whether experts really could be trusted to act on the common good -- Wilson, who held a Ph.D. in political science, was notoriously high-handed in his foreign policy, for example -- and whether they really knew as much as they thought they did. Though Progressives and their contemporary heirs have always thought of themselves of champions of The People, their skeptics have always regarded them, not without reason, as elitists insufferably blind to their own arrogance.

Whether or not they identify as latter day inheritors of the old Progressive tradition, most teachers in their day-to-day lives embrace the Progressivism of the localized Jane Addams variety. In contrast to administrators or politicians who want to impose their ideas for reform from the top down, they see themselves working with the facts on the ground: particular children responding to specific circumstances that may or may not correspond to a reform template. To at least some extent, this is a matter of self-interest: workers in many occupations tend to insist on the necessity of discretion in performing their jobs well. But teachers aren’t the only ones who make this case for their roles in the classroom; a long tradition of reformers, some of them in positions of administrative authority, have embraced the principle of teacher autonomy, even if this has always been a minority view in policymaking circles.

The third and most decisive way in which teachers tend to be progressive is what might be termed temperamental. In a literal sense, to be a progressive is to believe in progress, and anyone who’s in the business of educating children that does not believe in progress is probably in the wrong line of work. In this realm, too, the word has multiple meanings.

The most fundamental, of course, is at the level of the individual child. Teachers must act as if -- and at least try to believe that -- every student is capable of improving. This uniform principle gets affirmed in highly variable ways. A good teacher will assess where a student is and identify an attainable goal, and in a good teacher’s assessment of student work, the distance that student has traveled will matter at least as much as the objective quality of the work. The essence of fairness in this context means taking differences into account, of honoring the struggle more than the effortlessly achieved excellence.  This is an admittedly tricky matter, inherently subjective in nature. But it’s a standard worth pursuing. The fact of the matter is that virtually all students do make progress, variously understood, over the course of their academic careers. The school or instructional climate will never entirely account for it, though such factors (among them a child’s teacher) really can matter.

This progressive principle also applies to the craft of teaching itself. As anyone who’s done it for any length of time will agree, you get better at as you go along. Improvement can take the form of formal professional development, acquiring more knowledge from casual reading, or simply mastering a curriculum by repeatedly teaching it. There is certainly something to be said for the vitality of a new teacher, whose receptiveness to experience and willingness to shoulder often onerous demands (like teaching unfamiliar material) should not be underestimated as a source of institutional vitality. And there’s no question that that dead wood -- which is to say teachers who have given up trying to grow -- is a problem at virtually every school. But the seasoned veteran teacher is an asset any successful school will have in abundance.

The most profound way in which teachers are temperamentally progressive is generational: they believe in the future, a faith grounded in their engagement with the children who will take their place as adults. Strictly speaking, a desire and ability to work with young people doesn’t necessarily mean you think the future will be better than the past. (I don’t, for reasons I’ll explain shortly.) But unless you’re animated by some sense of hope about tomorrow, teaching becomes an exercise in grim fatalism, no doubt a contributing factor in dead wood syndrome.

Perhaps more than teachers elsewhere, American teachers have a particular attachment to seeing their work as part of a larger drama in the progress of U.S. society. For much of the nineteenth century, the dominant strain of historical interpretation in Great Britain and the United States was the so-called Whig school, which emphasized the degree to which history was a story of progress -- moral no less than scientific -- embodied in the White, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant politicians who emphasized the importance of liberty (notably the liberty of American colonists in their revolutionary struggle for independence, whose supporters in England were known as Whigs).  The Whig interpretation of history fell out of favor around the time of the First World War -- events in the first half of the twentieth century discredited confident assumptions of progress -- and are regarded as racist today. But the notion that American life has been one of gradual improvement remains an article of faith that continues to animate everyday life inside as well as outside of classrooms.

You can see this progressive sensibility in just about any U.S. history textbook. If the Whig school cast its notion of progress in terms of white supremacy, these books instead depict a slow, irregular, but unmistakable march toward pluralistic egalitarianism. Particularly in the early going, these books have a demographic emphasis. We’re introduced to groups of people of African, European, and Native American origin, and the divisions and interplay between them.  However subjugated they are at the hands of imperial Europeans, those shut out of power manage to maintain their dignity and their hope in the face of considerable adversity. Though they experience tragedy, even catastrophe, they manage collectively to live another day. They’ll have their postcolonial moment, just like the United States has. History is destiny -- of a hopeful kind. It’s what we think students need.

But -- and this was the point of that opening anecdote -- this progressive version of U.S. history is not something I tell them. This is something they tell me. It’s a logic they’ve absorbed into their bones long before they reach me. I’ve done this “all men are created equal” exercise a bunch of times, and it always goes pretty much the same way. I’ll usually get a student or two who says it really is nonsense. But inevitably one or two students will come forward and say that such a judgment is too harsh. I press them to explain, they may or may not flail in their attempt to do so, and a classmate or two (or three) will jump in. The gist of their riposte will be, in effect, that the Declaration of Independence was a kind of first draft of progressive history. First the white men were created equal. Then we remembered the ladies. Then the slaves got freed. And so on through gay marriage. That’s our history. It may short on facts. But it’s long on vision -- which, let’s face it, is the most you can really hope for in a history course.

My problem is I’m not sure I really believe it. Yes: it is possible, desirable -- right -- to think of events like the ending of slavery, suffrage for women, the egalitarian achievements of the Progressive era, the New Deal, and the Civil Rights Movement(s) as constituting an upward moral as well as material trajectory in American history. But if we stipulate that -- and we put aside social hydraulics that seem to suggest gains for some people always seems to mean losses for others (e.g. the decline of economic equality that has accompanied racial equality in the last four decades) -- progress is not a permanent state. Republics and empires come and go: that seems to be the iron law of history. The arc of history is long, but it is an arc: what goes up must come down.

Unfortunately, this is not something I’m experiencing as an abstract proposition. Virtually every sentient American in the early 21st century is uncomfortably aware of a discourse of decline in our national life, particularly in the economic and political realm. Though (shockingly for anyone over 30), events like 9/11, the Iraq War and the financial crisis of 2008 are distant events for today’s students, all have grown up in homes where recent history casts long shadows. For some students, they loom large in their overall perception of American history; for others they don’t, either because they haven’t fully absorbed their impact or because they imagine them as developments that are not really part of the historical record. Mostly, I think, reconciling recent events with their progressive vision of history is a matter of living with cognitive dissonance in the form of cultural lag that’s quite common to people in all times and places.

I don’t directly challenge the historical progressivism of my students, other than to note at some point in the school year that visions of history come in many shapes: circles, spirals, straight lines, and inclines (I usually draw them for the visual learners).  I don’t particularly want to evangelize my fatalism, partially because my instinctive skepticism makes me question my own certitude -- events rarely happen in the way or at the pace we predict. But even if I did have certainty, I wouldn’t push it on them, because I can’t see how it would do them any good. I don’t want to puncture their confidence. Instead, I hope to sharpen their understanding -- here’s where the facts and information come in, because they can help a good student get a particular version of the story straight -- and send them on their way. In this regard, I really am a progressive educator in that first pedagogical way I talked about, the heir of a movement that emphasizes the plasticity of knowledge and the need for children to construct their own working models about the way the world works, but to do so in a social context where they are interacting with others.

And yet -- and this is something I struggled with as a form of cognitive dissonance in my own life -- I am not a progressive in the broadest, most historical, sense of the term. There are days when I feel like I’m leading lambs to the slaughter, when I am fostering habits of thoughts and behavior that will be singularly unhelpful in a coming world that will not be like the one in which we are living. Sometimes I imagine that future world as one of chaos; other times it’s one of stifling autocratic order. Either way, I imagine former students bitterly recalling the irrelevance, or worse, of what they learned in school.

So what keeps me going? My salvation is my ignorance: I don’t know, I can’t know, what will happen in the future. Call me an existentialist progressive: I labor in the faith -- in the end, that’s all it is -- that something I do, something I say, something I ask my students to read, will have some utility in their later lives. Some sliver that will be transubstantiated into an act of leadership -- or, more simply, some act of decency -- that will bring good into the lives of that student and the broader community in which that student lives. That’s not much to count on, I know. But sometimes it’s the counting that’s the problem.

Some of the nation’s poorest people work at higher educational institutions, and many of them are members of the faculty. Oh, yes, there are still faculty members who receive comfortable middle class salaries. But most faculty do not. These underpaid educators are adjunct faculty, who now comprise an estimated 74 percent of America’s college teachers. Despite advanced degrees, scholarly research experience, and teaching credentials, they are employed at an average of $2,700 per course. Even when they manage to cobble together enough courses to constitute a full-time teaching load, that usually adds up to roughly $20,000 per year -- an income that leaves many of them and their families officially classified as living in poverty. Some apply for and receive food stamps.

Adjunct faculty face other job-related difficulties as well. Lacking employment security of any kind, they can be hired to teach courses the day before classes begin -- or, for that matter, not hired at all. They often receive no healthcare or other benefits, have no office space, mailboxes, or email addresses at colleges where they teach, and drive long distances between their jobs on different campuses. As the impoverished migrant labor force of its day, this new faculty majority deserves its own Grapes of Wrath.

By contrast, others on campus are doing quite well. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, forty-two presidents of private colleges and universities were paid more than a million dollars each in 2011 -- up from thirty-six the previous year. The highest earners were Robert Zimmer of the University of Chicago ($3.4 million), Joseph Aoun of Northeastern University ($3.1 million), and Dennis Murray of Marist College ($2.7 million).  Unlike adjunct faculty, whose income, when adjusted for inflation, has dropped by 49 percent over the past four decades, these campus presidents increased their income substantially. Zimmer’s pay doubled, Aoun’s pay nearly tripled, and Murray’s pay nearly quadrupled from the previous year. The yearly compensation packages for eleven of the forty-two million-dollar-or-more private college presidents nearly doubled.

Furthermore, high-level administrative positions often come with some very substantial perks. At the University of Nebraska, top administrators are given free memberships in country clubs, as well as very expensive cars, like the Porsche driven by the chancellor of its medical center. At New York University, the trustees gave president John Sexton -- whose university compensation in 2011 was $1.5 million -- a $1 million loan to help him purchase a vacation home on Fire Island. According to a New York Times article, Gordon Gee -- the Ohio State University president who received university compensation in 2011-2012 of $1.9 million -- was known for “the lavish lifestyle his job supports, including a rent-free mansion with an elevator, a pool and a tennis court and flights on private jets.”

Some have argued, of course, that top campus administrators genuinely deserve these kinds of incomes and lifestyles. But faculty and others are not so sure. At NYU, after the faculty voted no confidence in President Sexton’s leadership, the trustees convinced him to retire at the end of his contract, in 2016. At Penn State, where President Graham Spanier was the highest-paid public university president in the United States in 2011-2012 (at $2.9 million), he was dismissed in connection with the crimes of the former assistant football coach who was convicted in 2012 on forty-five counts of sexual abuse. Spanier is expected to stand trial on charges that he failed to report the crimes and tried to cover up what he knew. On other campuses, top administrators have been convicted of extensive fraud and embezzlement.

But even if one assumes that most campus administrators do a good job, why should there be a widening gap between their incomes and the incomes of those who do the central work of the university:  the faculty?

Furthermore, why should there be an ever-growing number of administrators -- presidents, vice presidents, associate vice presidents, assistant vice presidents, provosts, associate provosts, deans, associate deans, assistant deans, and a myriad of other campus officials?  Between 1993 and 2009, the ranks of campus administrators expanded to 230,000 -- a growth of 60 percent, ten times that of the tenured faculty. Not surprisingly, a recent report by the American Institutes for Research, revealed that, in 2012, there remained only 2.5 instructional or nonprofessional support employees for every administrator.  As colleges and universities are flooded with administrative officials, is there no longer a role for those who do the teaching and research?

Perhaps the time has come to redress the balance on campus by cutting the outlandish income and number of administrators and providing faculty members with the salaries and respect they deserve.

First right-wing entrepreneurs, who see American universities as a nest of inefficient yet arrogant tenured radicals, proclaimed that higher education was a "bubble." Traditional universities, they announced, would be rendered extinct by the MOOC-as-category-killer, which could deliver a free product to consumers around the world.

Academics fired back, insisting that taped lectures, multiple-choice questions graded by algorithm, and troll-filled discussion threads were no substitute for actual human beings. As results from the road-testing of MOOCs started to trickle in over the second half of 2013, the critics proclaimed victory. Typically, less than ten percent of students who initially signed up for such "courses" completed them.

We--two historians who are preparing to launch one of Cornell's first MOOCs, American Capitalism: A History--think that both sides are wrong. MOOCs can transform higher education--by strengthening universities in ways that decrease the cost of education and enhance the role of traditional teaching. These transformations promise improved education, both for college students, and for everyone who wants to learn more. Either/or apocalyptic thinking has blinded academics to the possibilities inherent in the MOOC concept. MOOCs can't replace traditional classrooms, but they can turn the classroom back into the realm of discussion and active learning that the defenders of traditional education say it should be--yet too rarely is.

Let's start with how MOOCs can transform the traditional college classroom. We found that just as exciting as figuring out how to communicate half a millennium of human experience, from slave plantations to container ports, was the process of thinking about the MOOC's form. We discovered that MOOCs--previously seen as a way to convey technical knowledge--are just as useful for the humanities as they are for the STEM fields.

The essence of a humanities education, whether in history, literature or philosophy, is critical conversation. You can't have a debate, however, unless students have gained actual knowledge to discuss. Traditionally, professors have used two methods to impart that knowledge: the lecture and the textbook. But while some lecturers are great, too often lectures are simply boring. Students end up transcribing from PowerPoint rather than thinking about the material. Worse than that, the use of lectures as the main way of imparting knowledge leads students to think of education as simply a one-way transfer of facts from professor's mouth to their passively receptive brains.

In recent years, educational reformers have championed the "flipped classroom." Content learning takes place at home and the classroom is for discussion. Lecture halls are replaced with seminars. Flipping classrooms is hard, however, because students too often don't have much to replace the lecture except textbooks. And textbooks are even worse than lectures. Even the ones that aren't dry, one-sided, or out-of-date are simply too damn expensive. If the MOOC is a category-killer, the dinosaurs who need to watch out for meteors are the corporations that have grown rich by publishing college textbooks that often cost over $200 per copy. Given that students--and often professors--don't get to choose what textbook to use, it isn't surprising that the conglomerates who control textbook publishing jack up prices every year, while producing slightly modified "new" editions that block any encroachment on their sales from the resale of used copies.

The MOOC, in our view, is the ideal way to flip the classroom, replacing both the lecture and the textbook. Whether they build their own content or draw on an existing MOOC, professors can off-load content to on-line formats and spend face-to-face time interacting with students. Students will actively debate history -for instance--rather than transcribing the professor's lecture. Universities will not be destroyed, only lectures, and in their demise better conversations will happen.

But what about the nontraditional student, who will not encounter the MOOC in the context of a course at a university or college? We are not terribly surprised that MOOCs thus far have had low completion rates, for they have been framed as a way for individuals to learn in isolation. Yet education has always been a collective pursuit--whether in a formal classroom or in a monthly book club--because groups create reciprocal obligations. Athletes don't let down their teammates. Borrowers in a microcredit lending circle help each other repay their debts. Reciprocal obligations help people to stick to difficult tasks, like learning things that are new and challenging. The failure of MOOCs is not the absence of professors, it is the absence of classmates.

The failure of MOOC completions comes from the failure to provide good support for group participation, both virtual and real. As much as the classroom should be an inspiration for MOOCs, the more accurate model for those who aren't students in traditional colleges and universities is the book club. Book clubs exist because people actually like to have intelligent discussions. They emerge naturally out of our basic institutions: churches, libraries, unions, workplaces, neighborhoods, etc. Would having a professional teacher, in the form of common enrollment in a MOOC, produce "better" learning outcomes? Probably. A professor, like any professional, knows their craft better than the average person. But book clubs aren't just about maximizing knowledge--they are about the experience of learning together. While standalone MOOCs might someday provide certification in some fields, we believe that education can be an end-in-itself.

We aren't naïve--particularly about making money in capitalism. There is profit to be made in MOOCs, but it lies in concierge services that provide convenience and further enrichment, not the MOOC itself. For students who want to learn more or have their learning recognized, there will be costs in the form of custom readers and (eventually) accredited testing. Still, we think that to unbundle the costs of education is a good thing. Students who just want to take the MOOC and talk about it with their MOOC club can do so, and students who want to pay something for additional services can do so as well. The either/or model of either being a "real" student or nothing no longer applies. Education can take place on a spectrum, as it should.

For the two of us, understanding capitalism's arc of growth and inequality over the past few centuries matters tremendously. And now is the time when we desperately need to learn. Economists' models, which proclaimed the magic of the unfettered market, failed disastrously in the recent crisis. People have been reminded of just how much economic institutions, policy choices, and human foibles can wreck everyone's lives. Those who have suffered through bubble, crash, recession, and choked growth are hungry for different explanations of why the world works the way that it does.

MOOCs offer a tremendously promising way to communicate about pressing ideas with a broad audience. In one semester the two of us can teach, at most, a few hundred students at Cornell. Indeed, all of our Cornell colleagues combined could teach a few thousand. But in a MOOC we can reach tens of thousands, all around the world, for free. Commuters can listen to the podcasts of our lectures, or even watch the lectures on their phones during a coffee break. Education can be flexible, and it can bring people together--sometimes in classrooms, but often or even most of the time somewhere else.

So rather than a triumph of individualistic, market values, the MOOC represents a democratic way to raise collective education. Rather than creating a uniform product consumed in isolation, MOOCs are more likely to restore critical conversations to the classroom--and the book club. Rather than disempowering faculty members and universities, MOOC technology can give them greater reach while eliminating inefficiencies that profit nobody except for a few corporate behemoths. MOOCs can support a flipped classroom inside the university and democratic education outside the university. Thus academics, students, and people in general shouldn't hopelessly pine for a past before anyone thought of a MOOC. Instead, we should figure out how to use MOOCs to help make a future that fits our democratic values.

Watch the promotional video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KP6z7f4kSNE

Follow the discussion and see sneak peak videos on: https://www.facebook.com/AmericanCapitalismMOOC

Join the MOOC: https://www.edx.org/course/cornellx/cornellx-hist1514x-american-capitalism-1307

Cross-posted from the Huffington Post

"Hello?"

"Mr. Dewey?"

"Speaking."

"I'm so glad to reached you. This is Ruth, Jason's mom? We met at the basketball game a couple weeks ago. I'm calling about the History Day project.”

Now I remember: Jason is partnering with Tom Schlacter on the decision to drop the atomic bomb. Originally, they wanted to do World War II. I told them the subject was too broad. They've narrowed it down to the bomb, and are working on a PowerPoint (the first refuge of scoundrels). The first draft I saw was not too promising. Big slabs of text, relatively weak in conceptual organization. Ominously, I’ve seen nothing new on Jason and Tom's project since they handed in their notably sketchy first draft last week, only an email with a string of questions that could have been answered if they’d actually studied the assignment’s parameters.

"What I don't understand," she continues, "is the timing of this project. Why does it have to be just before the break? We're leaving for St. Bart's tomorrow morning. We’ve planned this trip for months, and I'm pulling the kids out of school tomorrow to get an early start.”

I click on the WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY link. Snow to begin late this afternoon; six to ten inches by morning. Fine by me: I’m not going anywhere.

"Well,” I respond, “the deadline for this project is something my department periodically reviews. But we've learned from experience that it makes more sense to have the project due before the break so that really we clear the decks for kids to have a real vacation. Nobody likes to have a big assignment hanging over their heads going into a stretch of time off." 

Ruth is pressing the point: "I've got to tell you, an assignment like this really wreaks havoc on family life."

"Again, I'm sorry to hear that. Is there something you'd like me to do? Would you like me to talk with the boys?”

“That would be good," she says. "But what would really help is giving them more time. I don't think these two really understood what they’ve gotten themselves into. Do you think you could give them another day or two?"

I can't resist a smile. Normally, I'd be in a position I really hate: having to say no. To accede to this request would not only precipitate an avalanche of similar ones -- the word would be on the street almost immediately -- but get me into trouble with my colleagues, as we've all sworn a blood oath to hold the line in the face of these pressures. I realize I'm taking a chance here, but if my bluff gets called, I can say I was certain, however mistakenly, that there was going to be a snow day, rendering the deadline moot.

"Well, I don't like to do this, but understand extenuating factors in this particular situation. So I'll allow Jason and Tom a little more time to finish this up. As long as I have it we get back from break, there should be no harm done."

"I really appreciate that. I want you to know that Jason loves your class.”

Yeah, right. "Thank you. I enjoy working with him."

"The best part of this," she tells me, adopting a confiding, even conspiratorial, tone, "is that Jason will be spending the second week of the break with his father. For once in his life, the man will actually have to pay attention to his son's needs. Can't wait to see that.”

 * * * * *

There are multiple frictions in the triangular relationship between parent, teacher, and student, ranging from grades to school budgets. But on a day-to-day basis, the most pervasive, if evanescent, is homework.  It’s a subject on which each party feels ambivalence. Students typically say they hate homework, but it’s often the source of their most substantial achievements. Teachers feel they need homework to make class time more productive, but assigning it usually means more grading. Parents want to feel their children are learning, but worry about the demands on their time and the way homework can sometimes interfere with extra-curricular and/or family activities. (Having been involuntarily been drawn into my own children’s projects, sometimes as a matter of the specific mandate of teachers, I can sympathize with this exasperation.)

Of these three constituencies, it’s teachers who are the most stalwart champions of homework. Mastery of anything is always to some degree a matter of a willingness to invest -- and a willingness to waste -- time in the pursuit of long-term gain. This is a truth that students experience in realms ranging from sports to computer games. Not all students are eager to make such an investment in Spanish or chemistry, but they certainly can understand why their parents and teachers want that for them.

Which is not to say that homework is always assigned thoughtfully or usefully by teachers. Inexperienced or lazy ones will sometimes use homework as a crutch to compensate for failures to use class time efficiently. Or they will assign homework that has no clear relationship to the material being covered in class. Or assign it without assessing it in a timely way -- or at all, an omission that breeds resentment and fosters corrosive corner-cutting by students.

It’s for reasons like these that education reformers like Alfie Kohn argue for the elimination of homework entirely. Such arguments get additional support when one considers how little a role homework plays in leading educational powers like Finland. And how much of role it plays in others like South Korea, where saddling students with extra work has become an arms race of sorts generating so much misery and alarm that the government has resorted to police raids on tutoring classes that run beyond the state-mandated curfew of 10:00pm.

Perhaps predictably, I will state that I’m a homework partisan. There are two core tasks that homework is good for -- that homework is uniquely good for. The first important homework task is reading. Adults typically laud it, for themselves and children -- “readers are leaders,” a beloved uncle of mine, a construction worker who as far as I can tell was indifferently educated at best, used to say -- but few of us really have much stamina for it. Reading requires a sense of focus that’s difficult to attain, because there’s so little time in the day, or because of our physiological limitations, or both. I think of reading as really quite akin to physical exercise: the more you do it, the better you get at it, and the faster your mind works. Reading may well be less important for the actual content you encounter than the habits of mind it inculcates -- attentiveness, imagination, a capacity for abstraction. In the end, reading is the sin qua non of learning: everything else is a short-cut, a compensation, a substitution (like a fad diet in lieu of exercise). To use a cooking metaphor: reading is homemade; getting it in lecture form is store-bought. Sure, reading takes longer. But it’s just plain better.

Reading is so crucial because it’s foundational for success in an even more demanding intellectual task that’s also best undertaken as homework: writing. Writing is among the most complex neurological tasks the human brain performs, and it’s hard work. Paradoxically, good writing seems effortless. Which is one of the reasons students find it so daunting: it seems like it should be easy, and when it isn’t they assume they’re bad at it, which makes them even less willing to undertake it. But knowing that it’s hard for everyone will only get you so far: writing is like bench-pressing a lot of weight -- you have to work yourself up to it. That’s what school is for: creating a space where such activities are promoted and sustained, precisely because there’s really nowhere else it would happen on a mass scale.

But -- really -- the single most important reason to ask students to write is that it’s something that they must do alone. Only when they’re by themselves, grappling, seeking, struggling to communicate with somebody else, are they fully engaged in the task of learning. Actually, they can’t really begin to explain something to someone else until they’ve explained it to themselves, which is what first drafts are for. Writing is also a collaborative enterprise, in that peers and parents can provide feedback, and in some cases teachers can sit beside students and coach them through the process. But even when this happens, there still needs to be a time and place where students follow through on their own: the coach must step aside.

The coaching analogy is a very rich one for understanding teaching generally, but it has particular value in the context of homework. Coaches prescribe workouts, some of which are executed on the field of play, but much of which take place offsite. The coach can’t monitor any given athlete continuously; nor can a coach be certain that a particular routine will pay off equally or at all for every athlete. It’s a game of percentages which, should the student honor the coach’s instructions, is likely to yield long-term gain. Beyond some general parameters (like the length of a practice and care for the health of the athletes), the coach doesn’t know or care what else the players may have to do, and a coach’s personal regard for a player should not cloud the coach’s judgment about who is or isn’t in shape. There are no guarantees. But the best way to win games is to practice.

* * * * *

The goals of the History Day project that Jason and Tom are working on are a bit different than what I’ve been outlining here. My school participates in the National History Day, a program that annually involves 50,000 students from 49 states who work within the parameters of an annually chosen theme like “Turning Points in History,” “Revolution, Reaction and Reform,” or “Rights and Responsibilities.” Students can work alone or collaborate in groups of up to three people, and choose formats within a menu of options that include tabletop exhibitions, documentaries, dramatic presentations and websites. My colleagues and I believe that the work of formulating arguments may be easier for students when working in media other than traditional essays, which is why this project is a capstone assessment for the quarter (a grade-wide research essay is the main undertaking for the end of the year).

We’re pretty upfront with students at the time when we assign this project in January that it’s as much about managing the enterprise as it is about the content. That means planning ahead for deadlines that come up in stages: topic, bibliography, first draft, final draft. We tell them: choose your partners carefully, because you sink or swim together. Someone who does all the work will get the same grade as a member of your team that does none. (In fact, we keep an eye on this, and make a mental note the balance the ledgers in some silent way.)

For all our planning and justifications, however, we never entirely feel we’re in control of the assignments we give. Loopholes and ambiguities inevitably present themselves; so do unplanned exigencies like snowstorms. My delight in conferring on Ruth and Jason Thompson an extension dissipates quickly as my colleagues in the History Department realize the storm is creating a logistical mess, and a flurry of emails swirl among us. If the History Day project was a run-of-the-mill essay, we might simply expect students to email their work to us, whether or not school was in session. But given the number of projects that actually have to be brought in and set up (the kindly librarians have given us some space), we can’t expect that. Since we need to be uniform, we decide the project will have to be due the first day back after the break. The very thing we were trying to prevent -- having kids with homework over the holidays -- has come to pass. Jason and Tom’s project, long on images and short on interpretation, gets a B.

In the aftermath of the year’s assignment, we decide that maybe a post-break due date isn’t such a bad idea after all. In fact, we agree, the thing to do is to have draft workshops the first week back, and have the projects due the second week. That will create a grading squeeze before the semester ends, but it seems worth it. For teachers no less than students, there’s no substitute for experience. We learn by doing -- and redoing.

It was a real challenge to get this course off the ground, and it took a couple of years of tinkering to get it right. Now it hums along, and there are times when I find it a little boring. When you do the same book year after year, you tend to get lazy; I haven’t actually re-read Huck in years. I’ve got a well-annotated copy I review as we get underway for about a two-week stretch of classes, and I’m probably one of the few people who uses SparkNotes for its supposed purpose: as a means to review the book (as opposed to a substitute for reading it). Actually, my main source of preparation for class, adopted at the urging of my tech-savvy colleage, is the online forum in which students are required to post passages they find interesting and to explain why. I’ll pluck out something I think has possibilities for close reading, or note if there’s a passage that seems to get multiple takers.

I’ve also got a few set pieces that I know from experience will generate a good conversation. One, of course, is the famous passage in Chapter 31, in which an anguished Huck, is torn between returning lost (human) property to its legal owner versus helping that property find his freedom. He finally decides on the latter: “All right, then, I’ll go to hell,” he says, ripping up the note he’d written disclosing the location of the escaped slave Jim.

So it is that when I walk in to the classroom for what will be my fourth discussion of Huck Finn on a chilly but brilliant autumnal day I’m a little rusty but ready to improvise. I’ve got to pocket Chapter 31, because it will be awhile before we get there. So instead I’ll ask the students to summarize the novel through the first eight chapters, which is a relatively easy point of entry as well as a device to jog my memory. So gang,” I ask, raising a steaming paper cup of coffee to my lips, “who is Huckleberry Finn?”

I sip in silence. Damn. This is a misfire: I intended a kid to say something like, “He’s a boy from Missouri who’s running away from his father and traveling with an escaped slave.” But it seems my query has been interpreted more interpretively and thus difficult to answer, as if I’m expecting something like, “He’s an empathic pragmatist in a morally corrupt social milieu.” I put my cup down on my desk, wait a beat, and say, “He’s a very blank person who blanks. Go ahead in fill in those blanks.”

Still nothing. And then Alba Montanez -- decent student though her last essay was all over the place -- blurts out, “He’s obsessed with death.”

I think: Blech.

I say: “Interesting, Alba. Can you elaborate a bit?”

Kim Anders -- volleyball team, got a 92 on the last test, litigated another three points out of me -- says, “Yes! I was thinking the same thing!”

What wavelength are these kids on? “OK,” I say. “But why?”

Kim continues her interruption of Alba. “Well, his mother is dead, right? That’s like the first thing we’re told.”

“Yes, we’re told that. But where do you get the idea of this death fixation?” I know I sound little impatient, but I think it’s a fair question, and I think in any case that I can get away with posing it, even with some irritation, to Kim.

But it’s Alba jumps back in. “It says right here on page six that the widow read to him about Moses. ‘She let it out that Moses had been dead a considerable long time; so then I didn’t care about him; because I don’t take no stock in dead people.’”

“Hmmm. So the fact that he’s talking about a dead person -- says he doesn’t care about dead people -- is evidence of an obsession.” I make this a statement, not a question. I’m hoping I can gently jog her out of what I regard as a foolish assertion.

Instead, Alba says “Exactly.” I’m about to argue the point but stop myself. “What do the rest of you think? Do you agree with Alba and Kim that Huck has a death fixation?

I scan the faces in the room. Steven Gridley is looking out the window. Tommy Giddens is whispering to Zak Pacek. Tara Millberg is staring at her laptop. Evelyn Wu Wong is looking at me expectantly. She’s paying attention but clearly has no intention of jumping into the fray. Tara, who has permission to take notes with the laptop but in all likelihood has been shopping for shoes, looks up. “He’s just so, what’s the word . . . you know when you’re just only reacting to what other people do --”

“Passive?”

“Yeah, passive.  Like he’s so obsessed with what Tom Sawyer thinks.”

“Yes, but what does that have to do with being obsessed with death?”

“I dunno. It’s just, like, he’s not living. It’s almost like he’s a zombie.”

There’s something incongruous about Tara Millberg -- lustrous hair, ruddy cheeks, fingernail polish that picks up the accents on her wool sweater -- talking about death. It seems so remote that she can barely talk about it coherently. And yet she’s not entirely wrong. And, sure as she sitting there, death, like that character in the Emily Dickinson poem, will be coming by to claim her. For the first time, I’m curious about what will happen in the meantime.

“I’m a little confused,” I say, returning my gaze to Alba. “How can you be obsessed with death at the same moment you’re saying you don’t put no stock in dead people? Isn’t that a contradiction?”

Alba narrows her eyes, taking the question in. Is she going to be able to parry it? If she doesn’t, maybe I can steer this conversation back on course -- or, maybe more accurately, out of the gate. I’m thinking the opening of Chapter 4, in which Huck talks about his schooling (he could “spell, and read, and write just a little, and say the multiplication table up to six times seven is thirty-five”). Can’t go wrong talking about education with high school kids.

But now it’s Sam Stevens -- Dad writes for the Times, apparently he’s a good guitar player -- who enters the fray. “What’s with the staging his death thing?”

“Staging his death thing?”

“Yeah. When his dad starts beating him. He makes it look like he’s been killed.”

“Right. That’s how he makes his escape. It’s a means to an end. Doesn’t mean he’s obsessed with death, does it?”

“Kinda weird, if you ask me.”

 I guess I did ask. Maybe these kids are on to something.

“I think Huck is depressed.” This from Dana Weiss. Figures. It’s not the first time I’ve heard therapy-speak from her. I remember her once referring to Arthur Dimmesdale of The Scarlet Letter as having low self-esteem. Tell me Mom isn’t a psychotherapist.

“Depressed, huh?”

“Yeah. I think so. I actually read ahead a little bit to the whole Grangerfords and Shepherdsons clan war thing. That whole part about Emmeline Grangerford. After she dies Huck seems really upset. It’s interesting after the whole Moses thing Alba just read. It’s like this is the first time he allows himself to really grieve. And then he says something like ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’”

I’m a little stunned by this insight. My memory of the book is sketchy, but I know what Dana is talking about.

“Thanks a lot for giving the plot away!” Kim exclaims.

I’m about to try to explain to Kim that it’s not that big a deal when suddenly the fire alarm goes off. Damn. I remember the assistant principal telling me yesterday we’re behind on the quota that the state mandates. “Oh!” Dana says, genuinely upset. Steven Gridley looks like he’s just received a get-out-of-jail card. As per our protocol, we file out of the room and out of the building silently.

Shivering on the sidewalk, waiting for the all-clear, an essay question begins to take shape: Some observers of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (wink, wink) say that the Huck Finn we meet at the start of the story is suffering from depression, and in particular an obsession with death. Do you agree? If not, why not? If so, explain why -- and where, if anywhere, you think that begins to change. In what ways would you say his state of mind is shaped by his historical circumstances? Be sure to use evidence from the novel to support your thesis. Gonna have to think about the depression thing -- how to define it. Then again, let’s see if any of them do it. I’m always talking about defining your terms. Maybe a few of them will.

“Two down, six to go,” my colleague Eddie Vinateri says of the fire drills as we get the signal to head back into the building. After a pause, he gestures toward my clutch of returning students, a few of whom have, unaccountably, taken the book out with them. “How’s Humanities going?”

“Good,” I say. “The class teaches itself.”

When I turn around from standing in front of my closet to check the time, I see it’s 6:43 a.m. I’ve been rooted here in my underwear for a solid six minutes -- far too long. This was supposed to be easy. It’s Friday, which means I get to wear my favorite faded blue jeans and my solid navy blue cotton shirt. The question has been which tie should go with them. Even though it’s early in the semester, I’ve already gone through some of my favorites -- the one with Beatles album covers, the one with the Gettysburg Address, the Van Gogh “Starry Night.” What’s left? There’s Shrek, but that goes better with my black or khaki jeans. Ditto for the Chinese food. I love that Paul Klee my wife bought for me at the Metropolitan Museum of Art last summer, but that would be cheating, since I wore it the first week of school. There’s Superman, which gets lots positive comments, but I always feel a little immodest wearing it, as if I’m implying I’m Superman. I could go for a more low-key approach -- red polka dots on a field of royal blue, or the metallic paisley of red, blue and silver. But today is a full day, and since I’m teaching most of my classes, I’d like to don something from my A list.

Ah ha -- I remember I’m giving a unit test in my Humanities course today. I finger my way through one of the racks on the closet wall looking for tie I have with the pair of dice. I’ll imply taking a test is a game of chance. On my way there, though I encounter something even better: Edward Munch’s The Scream. Now that seems apropos for a test. Let’s see if anyone gets the joke.

* * *

Schools have varying rules about couture for faculty as well as students, but one way or another everybody wears a uniform. When left to their own devices, teachers usually opt for the informal, men (as usual) having more leeway, principally in the form of less censure for slovenliness. Sometimes, clothes make an ideological statement, most commonly when teachers express affirm their class politics by dressing down. Other times, fashion reflects complacency, if not sloth: my job is secure, and there’s no one I need to impress. Very often, it’s a matter of pragmatism; in a job where you spend a lot of time on your feet, sensible shoes (even athletic shoes) prevail. Of course, these and other motives mingle, as do manifold exceptions. But teachers rarely dress like doctors or lawyers, and while few are foolish enough to chase adolescent style, the choices of students do exert a gravitational pull, which is precisely why some schools to impose rules on both (and why both will try to stretch them).

I’m a fairly typical specimen in this regard. In the first years of my job as a high school teacher, I wore khakis, a dress shirt, a tie and work shoes. More recently, I’ve lapsed back toward jeans and cords, clinging to the shoes and (especially) the ties, which have become more colorful as my shirts have turned toward earth tones. The ties have become my signature -- most of my large and growing collection are gifts, and I only half-jokingly call them anti-soporific devices. They’re like a shaft of personality I allow to escape my otherwise unprepossessing visage.

The act of getting dressed in the morning -- in particular, the act of threading my belt and filling my pockets -- is one of the most satisfying rituals of my day. There’s a fixed sequence: keys on the left, phone on the right, comb back left and wallet back right. Pillbox with the keys; mints in the change pocket. I glide a lacquered pen (another indulgence) into my shirt pocket. My watch clips onto a belt loop, a legacy of carpel tunnel syndrome. So does my photo ID, a requirement that followed in the wake of school shootings and a reminder of the price we pay in prioritizing the freedom of gun owners over that of children. But I’d be lying if I didn’t confess that I regard that plastic card as a satisfying piece of girding for the day’s labor. Sometimes as I dress I imagine the lipstick rolling, the shirts buttoning, and the boots zipping as my fellow travelers converge on the building we share.

Among contemporary multicultural educators and consultants, there’s a discourse about the problem of students (and, in some cases, faculty) having to “check your identity at the door.” This discourse addresses the fact that there’s often a minority -- racial, sexual, socioeconomic, religious, disabled -- that feels obliged to conform to the dominant culture of a school, and to downplay, even deny, the realities of their own lives. This conflict continues when they return home, as they navigate the gap between their communities of origin and the ones they’re being socialized to join -- “code-switching,” in the lingo of multiculturalists. In some schools, administrators and parents strive to close this gap through tools like quiet subsidies for field trips, creating student affinity groups, and the like.

At the risk of some presumption, I’ll say that I have at least some idea about what these people are trying to do, because as an undergraduate scholarship student with growing awareness that many of peers lived decidedly different lives than I did, I experienced such tensions first-hand. I don’t insist they be embraced or passively accepted by students or those trying to help them. That said, I believe there are times and ways when there is nothing more liberating than checking your self at the door. When I enter a building literally bearing my identity as a teacher, the school logo trumps the idiosyncrasies of my face and all the other particularities of my life, among them that tie, an affectation likely to be ignored by others and forgotten by myself. Once I’m at work, I have a set of privileges and responsibilities that offer the promise of relief from self-consciousness. That promise isn’t always realized, of course, as often because I sabotage it as because outside forces (like a phone call from home) disrupt it.  Still, the mere prospect is among the most precious assets of the gainfully employed.

Students also savor checking their identities at the door and becoming members of mass, whether it’s that of a school, a class, or a member of a team. (Is there any talisman of collective identity more savored than those of the team jersey or varsity jacket?) There’s a long and dishonorable history of students being denied this experience, one that should be remembered and actively resisted. But this is a problem of exclusion, not suppression.

One of the most valuable aspects of checking your identity at the door is the way your memory of having done so remains with you after you’ve checked out. In some respects this is humbling -- the person in that bathrobe you see in the mirror is usually a good deal less impressive than the one you see after you get dressed. A similar laxity extends to behavior. More than once I’ve winced, after yelling at my kids or doing something else I regretted, when I imagined my students witnessing what I’ve just said or done. Ironically, playing a role can keep you honest.

It also has its guilty pleasures. When I was the father of young children and subject to the demands of that role, the promise of a working day at school felt like freedom. Days or weeks off -- and the absence of daycare that usually accompanied them -- loomed large. These days, I savor a holiday or three-day weekend as much as any of my colleagues, even if my pastimes are of the most quotidian kind. But pending burdens, like long-term illness or the aging parents, are always around to remind me that a job can feel like a vacation.

Each of us is a repertory company: we’re not really functional, much less happy, unless we’re playing a variety of parts. And changing costumes. Most of the time, we’re handed our scripts. The rest is a matter of interpretation -- and impersonation.

* * *

“Ooooh, The Scream -- I love it,” my colleague Denise Richardson, who teaches English, tells me while we wait on line for a cup of coffee before the first class of the day. “Feeling a little suicidal today, Horace?”

“Nope. Test this afternoon.”

“How lovely. I’m sure your students will appreciate your solicitude.”

But they don’t seem to notice. When I enter the room most of the girls seem freaked out, poring over study guides and querying each other on the main provisions of the Mayflower Compact. I’m asked a few stray questions, which I answer as I arrange desks into rows, something I suspect reassures some of the students even as it may frustrate others. The exam goes off without a hitch; I’m asked leading or inane questions by students seeking to wring a few points out of me (“What does ‘predestination’ mean?”; “When you say ‘the Virginia Company’ do you mean a business or just a group of people trying to make money?”), which I try to deflect the best I can.

The last person to finish is Kim Anders, who’s double- (or triple-, or quadruple-) checking her work even as students are gathering just beyond the closed door, peering in as a hint that it’s time for her to clear out so they can get in for the next class. 

“I saw that painting recently at the Museum of Modern Art,” she says, gesturing at my tie as she approaches me at the front of the room. “I went with my Dad. What’s his name -- Edward Mensch?”

“Munch.”

“The Scream, right?”

“Right.”

“Is that supposed to be joke?”

“Kinda.”

Kim nods, mirthlessly. Then she walks over to the door, puts her hands to her ears, and issues a brief, punctuated scream: “HAAAA!” The kids on the other side flinch. After the initial terror, a few laugh; others look at her angrily.

Kim she looks back at me as she opens the door to exit. “Thanks, Mr. Dewey.”

“For what? You like taking tests?”

Kim squints, considering the question. “Ummm, I dunno. The tie, I guess. I like it.”

“I should be thanking you,” I say with a smile. But Kim has already disappeared amid the incoming tide. 

Because I have the privacy of students to protect, names and situations have been changed. I have also resorted to outright invention in a few cases, though everything I describe is rooted in more than a quarter-century’s experience of classroom teaching. My credibility lies in the truth of my storytelling.

—H.D.

* * * * *

“Excellent, Kim. The family structure -- or maybe I should say the lack of family structure -- in Virginia is indeed one of the distinguishing features between New England and the South in the seventeenth century. What are some other differences?”

Two hands go up. One is Sam Stevens, but he’s already spoken too many times today. Uneasy about it, I gesture toward the other kid. “Go ahead -- ”

Shit! What’s his name?

“ -- Yes. You. Go right ahead.”

This is embarrassing. He knows I don’t know. And so does everybody else. Keep going -- you’ve fumbled, but we’re already on to the next play.

“ . . . and the Southern economy is about cotton,” mystery kid is saying.

Bluff. “Yes, good, except that at this point the Chesapeake is really about tobacco, not cotton. Cotton won’t come until much later. Yes, Cara? What do you think?”

Off she goes. Cara tends to unspool for a while before getting to the point. Normally, this is exasperating. But now it gives me a chance to regroup.

It’s week two of the new school year, and the ship whereby I can keep asking kids to identify themselves has already sailed. I’ve got most of them. But there are a couple (Adam Kirby? Who the hell is he? And who’s the other dirty-blonde kid in the corner?) who elude me. But I’ve got to get back in the saddle. Which is going to be hard, because I have no clue what Cara just said.

Phew. Wilhelmina’s raising her hand. Port in a storm.

“What do you think, Willie?”

“Well, I just want to add on to what Adam said -- ”

Adam! Yes! So the other one looking at the clock must be Chris.

Silence: Willie’s done. They’re waiting on me. “Good, Willie.”

I wasn’t paying attention to her. Is that a smirk on Jack Altieri’s face? He’s such a prick. So was his brother. Into Duke on his daddy’s checkbook. “So let me ask you this, gang. If you were a nineteen year-old boy in 1625, where do you think you would rather go -- “colonial Williamsburg or colonial Plymouth?” Sam’s hand goes up again. I nod at him. Finally. On track.

The only question now is whether I’ll be able to keep Adam and Chris straight this time tomorrow morning. The odds, I think grimly, are 50-50. But on his way out the door, I make a point of saying, “take care, Adam.” Maybe that will buy me a little good will? “OK,” he says. “Schmuck,” he thinks.

* * *

There are many complex relationships in public life that blend the personal and professional in ways that defy easy description. But there’s nothing quite like the dance of intimacy and formality between student and teacher. No teacher who connects emotionally with students will ever be considered a failure by them: something will be learned, and long remembered, whatever the teacher’s competence in a given subject. But no teacher can be an effective educator without sustaining a discrete distance from students, emotional and otherwise. Finding the balance between the two is an unending life’s work.

Students always learn in multiple ways. But it remains a truism that students learn best when they work with a teacher that knows them (their first teachers, of course, are their parents). This of course begs the question of what it means to “know” a student. The most superficial answer is being able to match a name and a face -- which is not superficial at all as far as many students are concerned: if you can’t remember my name, why should I remember anything you tell me? It may be a misguided question, but it’s there all the same, and no teacher who hopes to be effective can long ignore it.

A second level of knowing is similarly superficial, and at the same time even more important: the impression you have of the student as a student. This is often a perception that takes shape even before you know their names: sharp or dull; active or passive; charming or abrasive. (I don’t mean to link these adjectives; sometimes the ones you suspect are smartest hang back, for example.) Oftentimes you pick such impressions up unconsciously, taking your cue from body language, diction, the glaze of an eye. These sensory perceptions can prove quite accurate once you begin to see their work or talk with your colleagues about them. Then again, they may not.

Right or wrong, your initial perceptions often prove significant -- and not always in a good way. Once I get a sense of a kid as a B student, for example, it becomes harder -- not impossible, but harder -- for that kid to get an A, in part because I try to ration the As and am often looking for reasons to deny them in an effort to maintain a sense of standards: I want those As to actually mean something, if for no other reason than a kid who gets one will feel she has earned something. I’m not usually conscious of being easier or tougher on kids I don’t perceive as especially bright -- or more lenient on kids I like for one reason or another -- but on some level I know this must be true. At the same time, my self-image also requires me to show myself that I’m capable of revising my perceptions of a kid. So it is that we see through a glass darkly.

Knowledge of a student is also socially constructed, which is to say the product of perceptions of others you have no way of verifying, but which you nevertheless absorb directly or indirectly. Some reputations reside in the student body: he’s a jock; she’s a slut; they’re geeks. Constructing and maintaining a persona is one of the most important tasks of childhood and (especially) adolescence, and one valuable indicator of intelligence is how effective a student is in modulating social equilibrium with peers and adults, and toggling between them.

One’s colleagues are also an important source of data about students. Some of this is in the official realm of report cards and other feedback that are part of a student’s scholastic record. More often, information is anecdotal, varying greatly in its degree of legitimacy, even propriety. There are times when gossip is genuinely helpful; it may lead one to see a student’s behavior in a larger pattern or context, and in some cases lead you to make allowances you might not otherwise make (his parents are going through a divorce) or take more forceful action (you mean he’s done that to you, too?).

But amid all this contextual knowledge of students, there are also avenues of that can be startlingly direct, even personal. The most obvious form is student writing. For the most part, grading student essays is an unpleasant task, in large part because students say predictable things badly. But every once in a while I’ll be surprised by a revelation of how a student actually thinks that’s arresting for its candor, insight, or both. Even bad writers can convey a disposition or an ideology, whether they intend to reveal it or not. So it is that I occasionally learn just how narcissistic, narrow-minded, empathic or insightful a kid can be. Sometimes I finish reading an essay just liking a student so much, marveling at an inexplicably attained preternatural wisdom and thinking how marvelous it would be to be that person’s friend. I’m reminded of that line from that adolescent perennial, J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye: “What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.”

But of course I can’t be such a student’s friend -- not in that way, at least. I will on occasion seek strike up a conversation with a kid about weekend plans, the meaning of a slogan on a T-shirt, hoping something interesting will shake out in the conversation that follows. Under certain circumstances, like walking together on a field trip, I might go further and ask the kid about what the parents do for a living, what schools the kid attended previously, and other biographical details. Occasionally, a student will turn the tables and ask me such questions, which I’ll reluctantly answer, even as my esteem for the kid goes up a notch.

Every once in a while I’ll find myself in among a klatch of students and manage to fade into the woodwork as they talk among themselves. It’s in moments like these that I get a better sense of their standing among each other. There may come a moment when I’m drawn into the conversation -- I’ll agree that this musician really is awful or that movie was quite good -- and for the briefest moment our respective different social positions will vanish. For me these moments are tenuous and brief -- they tended to be tenuous and brief when I was an adolescent, too -- but I’ve never tried very hard to do much better in this regard. The truth is that I don’t really want to be all that close to these kids. Most of the time I can’t really listen to them for more than fifteen minutes or so without getting restless. Part of this is envy -- I don’t want to press my nose against the glass -- and part of is the knowledge that I have happily left some of the work they’re doing happily behind.

Some of my colleagues finesse these interactions with more effortlessly than I do. They seem to be able to tease, scold, cajole, even touch students and have it seem natural, and they can self-disclose with unselfconscious ease. And they do all this without compromising their integrity or authority. Such people, who are almost always a minority in a school, are indispensable. They’re not necessarily good teachers in the conventional sense of the term. But they’re excellent educators, and can make a deeper, more lasting impression than the most dedicated or brilliant instructor.

The final, essential point to be made here that the information between student and teacher flows in two directions. All the ways I’ve been describing in which a teacher comes to know a student -- facial recognition, initial impressions, community reputation, written communication, observed and direct conversation -- also apply to the way a student comes to know a teacher. Indeed, many teachers are “known” to a student long a teacher has any idea who a student is. Individual student opinions can be idiosyncratic, conflicting, and poorly articulated. But the composite picture is usually reasonably accurate -- or, at any rate, often no less so than the reputation a teacher has among peers.

Sometimes, a student will teach you things about yourself. This might happen when you jump to a conclusion with a kid who calls you on it, when you get a back-handed compliment that pains you in ways that weren’t intended, or when you realize that your issues with a particular kid have uncomfortable affinities with other kids in a specific demographic. Addressing such problems is not always easy, and actually correcting them may be impossible. But such feedback can be helpful in checking your impulses and sidestepping at least some mistakes.

Every once in a while you get a gift. Some years back I barked at a student who I felt was dragging her heels on doing her homework. This student didn’t seem particularly engaged by my class, though I recognized an underlying intelligence -- she had a real sense of style that modulated an understated beauty -- and I knew that she was highly regarded by faculty and students as a singer and visual artist. But at that moment I was just annoyed. Later, I learned that my immediate reason for my ire rested on a misunderstanding. But even before that, I knew I’d been unfair -- I’d just been diagnosed as diabetic, and I’d taken my distraction and irritability out on her. So I sent her an email to apologize and explain my outburst. “I knew something was wrong,” she told me the next day when I ran into her in an empty hallway. “That just wasn’t like you.” I found her compassion unexpected and moving, and it led me to disclose that my fear of aging had gotten the best of me. When I paid a visit to the college she went on to attend, I made a point of contacting her and we had a lovely brief chat. I’m not sure I’ll ever see her again (except on facebook -- I do a mass friending of graduating seniors each June -- and she surfaces from time to time). But I’ll always feel a tie to her.

Indeed, a great dividend of teaching is your former students. Sometimes -- especially in the short term -- relations with them can be awkward, because they come back from college all breathless and eager to speak with you, and you’re still deeply immersed in a world they’ve left behind (a reality I imagine is likely to inspire alternating relief and melancholy). But as they ripen into adults you can lower your guard a little and converse with them in a manner that approaches that of peers. Sometimes, their affection for you is unstinting even as they surely see, perhaps with newfound clarity, the contours of your limits. They understand amid their own creeping mortality that it’s important to honor vitality, however partial, wherever they find it (even if only in memory).

In the end, the most important curriculum a teacher will ever study is the student body. In time, the appeal of any given formal curriculum will fade. But as long as you find the students interesting -- as long as they entertain, bemuse, provoke or enlighten -- you’ll have something worthwhile to do.

* * *

“Mr. Dewey!”

“Ella!” We embrace at the top of the stairs near my office. “How are you? How is Wesleyan?”

“Great! You look great!”

“So do you.” She’s lying; I’m not. A woman, not a girl. Short hair is better. The winter coat she’s got on is smashing. The scarf adds a splash of red.

“What are you now, a junior?”

“A senior. Can you believe it?”

“No, but that’s how these things go, Ella. By the way, call me Horace.”

A pained look crosses her face. “How is your sister?” I ask. “And Eddie?”

She brightens again. “Great! Catherine graduated from Amherst two years ago and is applying to law school for next fall. Eddie is working for Goldman Sachs.”

“And you turned out to be a History major -- I remember from your last visit.”

“And I turned out to be a History major,” she repeats wistfully. “I’m thinking about graduate school.”

“In History? God forbid, kiddo. You’ve got better things to do.”

“Do I?” A retort laced with self-doubt. “I had a second major in East Asian Studies. I went to China last year. I’m looking into doctoral programs.”

Yikes. Time to backtrack. “Well if anybody could get a professorship in this market, it would be you.” I mean it. She was a wonderful student.

“I’m also thinking public history or material culture. I’ve got something lined up for this summer at the Met.”

“Good for you.”

“It’s your fault, you know,” she says, breaking into a smile and shaking a finger a gloved finger at me. “Tenth grade. You got me hooked. And it was that paper on the Boxer Rebellion that got me interested in Chinese history.”

“You did a nice job with that.”

“And how about you?” she asks after a pause. “How are things going here?”

“Oh, you know. Same old stuff.”

We’re running out of steam. “Anyway,” she says, gliding her coat sleeve back with one hand so she can see check her watch on the other. “I’ve got to run. But I just wanted to come by and say hello.”

“I’m glad you did. Say hi to your family.”

“I will,” she says, as we hug again. “Great to see you, Mr. Dewey -- I mean Horace.”

“Likewise, Ella. Take care.”

Only after I cease to hear the click of her boots do I remember that her name isn’t Ella.

Related Links

Teacher's Lounge

The university’s new mission became increasingly evident in the spring of 2013, when Andrew Cuomo -- New York’s pro-corporate Democratic governor -- began barnstorming around the state, calling for a dramatic “culture shift” in the SUNY system. Faculty, he said, would have to “get interested and participate in entrepreneurial activities.” The situation was “delicate because academics are academics. ... But ... you’d be a better academic if you were actually entrepreneurial.”

Cuomo’s barnstorming tour was a key part of his high-powered drive get the state legislature to pass Tax-Free New York, a scheme to provide ten years of tax-free status to private businesses, their owners, and their employees that relocated to SUNY campuses, university communities, or a few private colleges. This corporate welfare plan, renamed Start-Up New York, was enacted by the legislature in June with great fanfare about economic development and job creation -- although, at the time, New York State had already spent about $7 billion annually for economic development without any evidence that this funding produced anything useful.

Actually, Start-Up New York is only one component of a drive by the governor and SUNY’s bedazzled chancellor, Nancy Zimpher, to create a business-oriented university. Among other things, New York State’s new SUNY 2020 program provides for a $165 million Emerging Technology and Entrepreneurship Complex on the SUNY/Albany campus and encourages the hiring of faculty on the basis of their ability to fund themselves through outside income. In addition, Cuomo established the SUNY Networks of Excellence, designed, as a SUNY/Albany press release noted, “to foster entrepreneurialism and economic growth through public-private partnerships and give researchers the tools they need to bring their ideas to market.” The governor noted that this SUNY program would “draw new venture capital to invest in commercialization activities” and “will help bring our best ideas to market right here in New York State.”

The jewel in the crown, however, is SUNY’s College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering. Developed and headed by Alain Kaloyeros -- a wheeler-dealer who, with an annual salary of $1.3 million, is the highest-paid public employee in the state -- this enterprise was begun with a twenty-year $1 billion investment by New York and has reportedly drawn in $17 billion of investments from the nation’s biggest corporations, such as IBM and Intel.

Governor Cuomo, absolutely delighted by this thriving public-private partnership, has made Kaloyeros his top advisor on higher education and has given him the green light to create such SUNY partnerships elsewhere. The first, Nano Utica, was announced in October, and involves a $200 million state investment in a computer chip manufacturing and research center to be run by Kaloyeros’ NanoTech College and the SUNY Institute of Technology. Announcing the venture, the governor declared that “this partnership demonstrates how the new New York is making targeted investments to transition our state’s economy to the twenty-first century and take advantage of the strengths of our world class universities.” Only a few days later, the news broke in the Albany Times Union that “the NanoCollege has been aggressively acquiring real estate property from Albany to Rochester,” and was “quietly seeking developers for a similar [chip manufacturing] facility in Syracuse.” Amid talk of billions of dollars in private investments, the article noted delicately that the Syracuse venture “would likely need an educational component to fit in with Cuomo’s strategy of using the SUNY system to attract high-tech employers.”

Local campus administrators have been quick to jump on the bandwagon. In an article (“SUNY Cortland’s entrepreneurial spirit”) published in the summer 2013 issue of SUNY/Cortland’s alumni magazine, Erik Bitterbaum, the campus president, declared that his school was “taking steps to make sure our campus culture nurtures the spirit of entrepreneurism, one of the primary strategic goals” of the SUNY system. “Our graduates have built companies, restaurants and theme parks,” he boasted, and “own chain franchises, run mom-and-pop business and open health-, wellness- or fitness-related enterprises.” Furthermore, “business economics is now one of our most popular and fastest-growing majors,” “the College has an active Entrepreneurship Club,” and it recently began offering a two-course sequence in “entrepreneurism.”

Other SUNY campuses were not far behind. In the fall of 2013, SUNY/Albany hired an Associate Vice President of Business Partnerships and Economic Development to manage and advance public-private partnerships at the university, including the Emerging Technology and Entrepreneurship Complex and the Start-Up New York program. Even before that, the Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences called a special meeting of department chairs to hear a presentation about Start-Up New York by the campus president’s chief of staff and to address such questions as: “What kinds of businesses could your faculty potentially foster? Where would those businesses be located?” Other campus ventures included what the administration described as “the Young Entrepreneurs Academy (YEA!) . . . an eight month program that teaches middle and high school students how to start and run their own REAL businesses.” At SUNY/Delhi, the campus president told the press that she was hopeful that, under Start-Up New York, her college could work with a manufacturer on a new “biodigester” that would make good use of cow manure.

Turning a public university into a generator of private business activity and development seems a considerable departure from SUNY’s official mission statement, which promises that the university will “provide to the people of New York educational services of the highest quality.” Indeed, is it appropriate for an educational institution to be so thoroughly devoted to the fostering of “entrepreneurialism”?

In October 2010, a fourth grader returned from school and set her history book on the table. Flipping through Our Virginia: Past and Present, a book approved by Virginia's State Department of Education, her mother came across a sentence that made her livid. The book claimed that "thousands" of African Americans fought for the Confederacy, "including two black battalions under the command of Stonewall Jackson." This mother, Carol Sheriff, also happened to have a PhD in history and was on the faculty at Virginia's College of William and Mary. "It is disconcerting that the next generation is being taught history based on an unfounded claim," she said. "It concerns me not just as a professional historian but as a parent."

That thousands of African Americans voluntarily fought to safeguard their continued enslavement is a claim that can be verified in no archive. No document supports it. No self-respecting historian embraces it. The claim is spread by those whose mission is to cast the bloodiest war in American history as a conflict over the "Southern way of life." The myth of "Black Confederates" is constructed of whole cloth, analogous, as Professor Sheriff put it, to asserting that the Jews "helped the Holocaust."

"I Found It on the Internet"

How does pseudo-history burrow its way into materials for schoolchildren? When a Washington Post reporter contacted the publisher, Five Ponds Press, and asked where their author got her facts, they provided the reporter with three links, all to same website: the Sons of Confederate Veterans -- a "patriotic, historical, and educational organization ... dedicated to ... preserving Southern Culture."

As teachers will tell you, it is not just textbook authors who get duped by digital con artists. In an age in which "library" is spelled G-o-o-g-l-e, accepting false information as truth is an everyday classroom occurrence. Responding to teachers' queries about how they "know" that our president was born in Kenya or that the Mossad (or George Bush himself) plotted 9/11, students (our so-called digital natives) blithely respond, "I found it on the Internet."

The sites that snare young people (and adults) often cloak themselves in scholarly garb. Spurious footnotes reference like-minded propagandists. Pseudo-historians anchor claims to established historians by ripping phrases from context or mangling them beyond recognition.

Welcome to the information revolution's digital free-for-all. In a previous age, when children were taken to the library to decipher the hieroglyphics of the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature, the big question was how to find information. But today, deluged by an avalanche of information, students face a different question: should this information be believed?

Yet, instead of preparing students for this reality, we teach in ways that are no different from how we taught when making a phone call meant putting the index finger into a dial. History teaching has a cozy sameness. The past still arrives in tidy textbook nuggets, with linear presentations that eschew divergent viewpoints and present an unruffled view of a bygone era. But coziness exacts a price. The "read-the-chapter-and-answer-the-questions-in-the-back" pedagogy is akin to training swimmers to navigate a raging sea but never letting them out of a wading pool. The world that we're preparing students to enter does not exist. Confronted by an array of claims and counterclaims (a.k.a. the world outside of school), students drown in a sea of information.

Exploring the Gray Area

How, then, do we close the gap between old world teaching and the twenty-first-century world that students are linked to by their smartphones? Don't hold your breath for a change in the textbook industry. Curriculum materials will all become digital -- the same drivel packaged with multi-colored illustrations and interactive maps. What then? We can wait for Godot or ... we can get to work.

My colleagues at the Stanford History Education Group have chosen the latter path. Over the past three years, we’ve uploaded to the Internet scores of lesson plans for teaching American and World history, each organized around questions that stick their finger in the eye of a single right answer. We've come up with assessments that privilege thinking over memorizing. Our curriculum celebrates the ambiguity of the social world and teaches students to cope with it. Each lesson comes with original documents so that students can hear the cacophony of voices belonging to people who made history. These sources often feature diametrically opposed perspectives, shedding light on history from multiple angles. They are supplemented by classroom-ready materials that scaffold students' small-group discussions. Here are just a few examples:

• Was Abraham Lincoln a racist?

• Was the Dust Bowl crisis Mother Nature's fault or the consequence of human greed?

• Was the Cuban Missile Crisis defused because, as Dean Rusk boasted, "the other fellow just blinked" or because of a backroom deal between Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and his diplomatic partner, Soviet ambassador Anatoly F. Dobrynin?

Such questions force students to contend with shades of gray, to weigh competing evidence, and to consider an author's trustworthiness. They make students exercise the duties of citizenship.

We are guided by the belief that knowledge should not be a commodity bartered for profit, but available for no cost to anyone who seeks to learn and grow. All of our materials are free. Our work is supported by private contributions and foundations. To date, our materials have been downloaded over a million times.

Have we changed the world -- or even our little corner of it? Hardly. But we take solace in the hope that, after encountering our materials, students will no longer defend their conclusions about history with the sham justification, "I found it on the Internet."

I am not just talking about marginalizing the teaching of history, though that is definitely one direct consequence of current reform policies. Even more serious are institutional decisions which end up destroying historical memory and the possibility of using the wisdom and cultural capital of past generations.

First among these are school closings, which have had their primary effect in inner-city neighborhoods, from Buffalo to Baltimore, from Chicago to Los Angeles. These so called "failing schools" have all had rich histories, some of them close to a hundred years in the making, which involve themes ranging from migration and immigration, to musical creativity, to changing economies and neighborhoods, which live in the experience of alumni as well as documents the schools themselves have preserved.

Closing the schools not only shatters the possibility of drawing upon that rich cultural capital, it sends a message to students that nothing in the past is that important, including their own families and cultural traditions, treating them as clay to be molded by people who see the past -- at least for people like them -- only as failure.

Second, and connected, is the destruction of teaching as a lifetime profession, reflected not only in the firings and layoffs associated with schools closings, but with thinly disguised efforts to drive veteran teachers out of the profession through a combination of burdensome and humiliating assessments and observations, and open preference for teachers who come from alternative certification programs like Teach for America (where the vast majority of participants stay for only a few years). More and more, the schools in poor and working-class neighborhoods are filled with young teachers who don't live in those communities, don't know anything about their histories, and stay only a few years.

All this has happened very fast, but we need to ponder its consequences. Basically, what we have done is erased the power of historic memory among a whole generation of young people growing up in poor communities, implicitly suggesting that they are in possession of no traditions worthy or preserving and that the people most important in their lives, family members, neighbors, religious leaders, and the like, are not to be looked to for wisdom, leadership and inspiration.

And if school reformers have their way, this erasure of memory will spread to public schools everywhere, treating children not as members of families and communities whose traditions can enrich teaching and learning, but as clay to be molded as the behest of powerful elites.

This has been going on under the radar screen for many years. It is time it's undemocratic implications be exposed and discussed.

Derek Bok was named president of Harvard not once but twice: in 1971, after anti-Vietnam War protests of 1969 had left students' blood on his predecessor Nathan Pusey's hands and had shut down the university in 1970; and again in 2006, after a faculty vote of no-confidence in the obstreperous Lawrence Summers prompted the obstreperous Wall Street Journal to claim that Harvard's faculty has "as much intellectual diversity as the [North Korean] Pyongyang parliament."

Each time, Bok worked to heal bitter divisions that threatened to make the university ungovernable. Each time, he worked to renew American liberal education's essential but always fragile mission: not only to serve the liberal capitalist republic on whose Constitution and munificence academic freedom depends, but also to question and sometimes even challenge the very corporate and state powers on whose restraint academic and political freedom also depend.

Each time, Bok succeeded in that high-wire act. "Awesome" is a word I wish my students at Yale would outgrow, but I've talked with Bok just often enough since 1998 to know that it characterizes his balancing of an adherence to high principle, an alertness to paradox, and an adroitness in leadership. And now, at 83, he has published Higher Education in America, a magisterial yet often contrarian assessment of challenges facing university governance, teaching, and, indeed, survival.

Wesleyan University President Michael Roth has just reviewed Bok's new book briefly here in Huffington Post, but my purpose is different. I want to tell a couple of stories about Bok that aren't in the book and to quote some passages that Yale's new president, Peter Salovey, and its new provost, Ben Polak, and their deans and functionaries should read, as should faculty at Yale and other institutions who are working to defend academic freedom against manifold encroachments from people who would destroy it in order to save it.

Bok shows why defending academic freedom requires hard judgment calls, such as one he doesn't mention in the book: Shortly after becoming president in 1971, he unilaterally tenured the eminent political theorist and European Jewish emigre Judith Shklar, naming her the John Cowles Professor of Government in a department where she'd been languishing for almost 15 years as an untenured lecturer.

A Harvard president has a "constitutional" right to do that. But was Bok's move an unwarranted encroachment on scholarly self-governance and peer review? Or a long overdue blow against a sexism that hadn't openly declared itself?

These questions take on new inflections if you imagine that Lawrence Summers tenuring someone he favored in a foot-dragging department. Bok was able to do it only after he pondered peculiarities of the case that I won't go into here and because enough faculty trusted his balance of high principle, alertness to paradox, and nuance in leadership to accept, even welcome, his decision.

Such was Bok's credibility that not only did he serve as president for 20 continuous years, until 1991; he was called back for a year in 2006 to put Harvard together after the division and debacle of the Summers years.

If American universities are to survive what's happening to this country, many brave, sound judgments will have to be made by faculty and administrators, often working together, but often by challenging one another. They'll have to find ways to steer liberal education through cultural, economic, and political riptides without degrading it into a commodity, a grand strategy, or an ornament for a global managerial class that answers to no republican polity or code.

With students and even faculty scrambling to serve the casino-like financing of a consumer-groping global juggernaut that's delivering millions from grinding poverty into soulless depravity, who'll ensure that universities keep asking the right questions about it and finding answers that haven't been over-determined by profiteering or political pressure?

Bok doesn't tell old stories to guide the perplexed. He offers wise judgments and summarizes new research to show liberal educators know what to watch out for and how to be better navigators in shifting cross-currents. Thus the same Derek Bok who elevated Judith Shklar and learned that "Presidents may have a better sense of the real-world constraints and the institution's needs" also writes that "professors frequently have a clearer appreciation of academic values than do top leadership." And he warns that presidents who "believe that they will be judged almost entirely by their success in 'growing' the institution... are more likely to resort to dubious methods of raising money and to overlook nascent threats to academic values."

"It is executive authority, after all, not [faculty] governance, that was primarily responsible for such debacles as the well-known excesses of big-time college athletics and the costly failure of for-profit internet ventures undertaken by several prominent universities around the beginning of the century," he adds.

He even finds it "difficult to accept the view of trustees and former presidents who claim that [shared administrative-faculty governance of universities] dysfunctional and that faculty participation should diminish. Professors have obvious interest in the internal affairs of universities and their support for decisions affecting teaching and research is so essential to success that there is no real alternative to shared governance."

Shared governance isn't achieved if administrators appoint faculty "amen corners" of professorial courtiers who don't communicate openly with colleagues and aren't much trusted by them. Such appointments break the faith and trust that universities depend on.

Yale's president Richard Levin and four of its trustees broke that faith when they unilaterally committed Yale's name and its administrative and pedagogical resources to a joint venture with the corporatist, manifestly repressive city-state of Singapore. They broke it further by appointing an "advisory committee" of ambitious professors in New Haven to mediate the deal. Two earlier Yale presidents who savored academic leadership's paradoxes and nuances without sacrificing its principles were A. Whitney Griswold, a descendant of colonial Connecticut governors who crusaded for liberal education against both McCarthyism and Communism during the Cold War, and his successor Kingman Brewster, Jr., a direct descendant of the Elder William Brewster, the Plymouth Pilgrims' minister, who defended liberal education against both would-be revolutionaries in the streets and conservative reactionaries among Yale alumni who had somehow missed out on liberal education itself.

Doing that took not only immense personal strength but a deep sense of liberal education's mission and the university's soul. Brewster once deflated one of his relatives' preening about their distinguished lineage by joking that he was glad they'd had "the wisdom to choose such a magnificent ancestor."

It was out of that sort of confidence that, when Columbia University exploded in a police bust of anti-war demonstrators assailing an administration as clueless as Harvard's would be a year later, Brewster called his old Harvard Law School colleague Archibald Cox, the future Watergate special prosecutor, to propose an emergency strategy session at a secret picnic spot between New Haven and Cambridge.

Cox brought along Bok, who was just then becoming the new dean of Harvard Law School, to the hillside meeting with Brewster near Mystic Seaport, on the Connecticut coast. Bok recalls that Brewster arrived in a limousine bearing a butler who set out a table with white linen service and crystal - another instance of Brewsteresque panache that presaged an intensely serious discussion from which he emerged to become the Ivy president whose adroit balancing of high principle and alertness to paradox prevented Yale from exploding during the 1970 murder and conspiracy trials of several Black Panthers, including Bobby Seale, in New Haven.

Brewster's public statement, given atop a metaphorical powder keg, that he was "skeptical of the ability of Black revolutionaries to achieve a fair trial anywhere in the U.S." disarmed some self-styled revolutionaries who were hankering to blow up Yale, but it made him a lightning rod for alumni and other conservative critics whose bitter resentments of the anti-war and black power demonstrators might have fallen even more heavily upon students who were supporting the trial defendants. His strategic opening of the campus, instead of barricading it, may have saved it from being stormed, occupied, and violently vacated, as Harvard's and Columbia's had been.

Although Bok didn't need to head off such violence as Harvard's president, he did have to cope with its aftermath. And although he doesn't write about that in this book, academic leaders and scholars will devour his judicious renderings of challenges facing liberal education's mission now, a mission that is both conservative and radical: As universities struggle to separate educational fads and corporate mirages from reforms that truly strengthen their capacity to preserve and extend knowledge, they learn to resist the seductions and manic demands of profiteering that stampedes the faddists toward dead ends.

Among such dead ends, Bok warns, is the predatory sub-priming of higher education by some for-profit universities.

He notes that only 20 percent of American undergraduates attend four-year, residential colleges and that many of the rest are older, have dependents, and are desperate to find careers. While some profit-driven schools may serve them, too many for-profits play on young people's yearnings, drawing them into inappropriate environments and insupportable debts.

In the process, universities are transformed from crucibles of a shared civilization and civic cultures into over-the-counter cultures, and students are taught not to be citizens who can deepen their commitments to society while in college, but to be consumers who are out only for themselves.

To keep from drifting toward such degradation of society and individuals, universities need wiser "investors," some of them public, some private, some intellectual, some economic - civic-minded leaders who "are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it," as Thomas Jefferson wrote in founding the University of Virginia in 1819.

Bok shows that neither a top-down, business-corporate model nor a statist one will encourage universities to "tolerate any error" or to liberate reason to combat it. Doing that requires the artistry and courage of a Whitney Griswold, a Kingman Brewster, or a Derek Bok - not necessarily an American aristocrat, as they were, but anyone who can measure up to the challenges Bok surveys in Higher Education in America.

Repeatedly he urges an understanding of undergraduate liberal education as a resource for citizens who can think critically and give voice effectively to their concerns while listening to the concerns of others - even when they're "citizens" of the world more than of a particular country. As Bok poses the challenge, "How can colleges prepare their students for a world in which their lives are likely to be linked increasingly with countries and cultures far different from their own?"

If, for example, New York University wants to prepare its students by opening portal campuses in Abu Dhabi and Shanghai, shouldn't it first have proved that it can prepare a student from the affluent New York suburb of Scarsdale to "link increasingly" to a student from the South Bronx, where NYU abandoned a handsome campus years ago? Shouldn't Yale show that it can link its students to those of the radically different cultures and social classes living only a few blocks away?

Or are campuses abroad more a dodge than an engagement of the differences that will really matter in the global village? Bok stops short of endorsing them without strong cautions. He cites enormous political risks and their drain on energies and resources that are increasingly needed at home. And he tells me that takes a dim view of Singapore, where Yale has co-founded a Yale-National University of Singapore College.

"I had my own run-in with [Singapore's authoritarian founder] Lee Kuan Yew some years ago," he told me, "when the government in Singapore jailed the young head of the Harvard Club for 'consorting with the wrong people.' I wrote in protest to Lee and was surprised to receive a letter of several typewritten pages from him trying to persuade me that Asian values are different from those in the United States."

Lee's concoction of "Asian values" has been widely discredited -- and he himself has tempered it -- as a deterrent to Western moralists who dare to judge repressive societies. But as authoritarian rulers try to ride the golden riptides of global finance, communications, labor migration, and consumer marketing, they're expanding state coercion to shore up the social cohesion their societies once drew from the Confucian, Islamic, or even Western colonial traditions that are dissolving amid huge new inequalities and degrading and criminal behavior.

The Economist magazine casts "a sceptical eye" on this variant of state-capitalist control, which it says was pioneered by Singapore's Lee, whom it characterized as "a tireless advocate of 'Asian values,' by which he meant a mixture of family values and authoritarianism."

Such rulers want liberal education to help them finesse the brutality and hypocrisy of their bargains with "go go" economic development in the name of increasing prosperity (and increasing inequality and cultural instability.) They want American colleges' imprimaturs and the "critical thinking" and felicity in writing and speaking that a liberal education may provide to regime managers and spokesmen. But Bok told me that "Nothing in that experience [with Lee Kwan Yew] would tempt me to try to establish a Harvard College in Singapore." His commitment is to improving teaching and learning for undergraduates, and while no one questions that many students in burgeoning new Asian markets are energetic and terrifically bright, their regimes are bent on channeling what they learn. Universities have more than enough such "channeling" to contend with in the United States, whose civil society and politics are collapsing before our eyes for want of civic-republican leadership training of the kind that American colleges used to provide.

Bok worries that even most professors are unaware of a large, growing body of rigorous research that discredits their rosy assumptions about what their students are actually learning. Only "efforts from outside the faculty itself" will "make professors aware that the methods of instruction they are using or the assumptions on which their course requirements rely are open to serious question in light of emerging evidence."

The technological opportunities and social pressures, and, with them, the habits and expectations of undergraduates, have changed so much in recent decades that they retain far less from lectures and spend less time studying than their lecturers assume.

University departments haven't taken a hard look what they're actually teaching to undergraduates who'll never become scholars but who need to enhance critical thinking and communicating as citizens and professionals - abilities that, the best research now shows, aren't enhanced by most of their courses:

"Only a small fraction of the questions asked on exams in liberal arts colleges and research universities demanded critical thinking; most questions simply called upon lower levels of skills of memory and comprehension of material."

"The key to educational reform lies in gathering evidence that will convince the faculty that current teaching methods are not accomplishing the results that professors assume.... Once that is acknowledged, the underlying values of the faculty will usually compel them to seek corrective actions. The critical questions, then, are whether academic leaders will actively seek to identify existing weaknesses and how they can best go about doing so."

Bok cites devastating, depressing studies of what undergraduates actually take away from coursework, especially in their majors. Here the same Bok who recognizes the indispensability of faculty to university governance notes that professors need to be prodded by others - including enlightened college presidents -- to stop using "academic freedom" and "autonomy" to cover for self-interested methodological preoccupations that compromise their teaching of undergraduates who won't follow them into labyrinths of research.

"The rationale for the discipline-based liberal arts major is far from clear," he notes, challenging departments to develop learning objectives for students who won't become academics. And he suggests breaking up lectures into interactive and applied group exercises.

He's remarkably - and, again, perhaps, paradoxically -- open to pedagogical possibilities in emerging technologies, as long as we don't inflate them for mercenary reasons: "As technology develops, [online] encounters will come to seem more and more similar to classes in which all participants are sitting in the same room." Even "computer games, along with avatars in virtual words and other vivid simulations, create additional opportunities for engrossing learning activities...."

I haven't done even rough justice here to Higher Education in America. It has sections on professional schools, research protocols and trends, and more. Bok has also written other books on universities in the marketplace, undergraduate education, and affirmative action.

But university leaders and faculty who want to save liberal education from corporatization and to rescue undergraduates' preparation for citizenship from consumerism should read this book and put more energy in to shared governance as he portrays it and has mastered it, with all its tensions and warts.

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Robert O. Blake performed the diplomatic equivalent of gold-medal figure skating last April in a meeting at the authoritarian central Asian nation of Kazakhstan’s Nazarbayev University when a student asked him about warnings by American critics and human-rights monitors that “a democracy cannot have its universities making partnerships with authoritarian governments,” as the questioner put it.  

How could Blake justify his enthusiasm for American universities’ extensive contracts in Kazakhstan, when his own department had reported that country’s “rampant and diverse” human-rights violations and “pervasive corruption”? Similar assessments have been offered Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Reporters Without Borders, and Freedom House, and also by The Economist magazine’s yearly Democracy Index for 2012, which ranked Kazakhstan 143rd among 167 nations (behind Iraq, Belarus, and Angola) in protecting civil liberties, press freedoms and other elements of liberal democracy.

Blake acknowledged “a trend, not just in Kazakhstan,” toward what he delicately called a “more constrained space for civil society.” But he insisted “we have high expectations of Kazakhstan” and “a very positive and open dialogue” with its government and “we strongly support efforts by various American universities to establish more partnerships with... universities like [Nazarbayev University].” 

 “[W]e’re really supporting... our own universities who... want to have a diverse student body in the United States, wonderful students like all of you,” he added, finessing the student’s question about why American universities haven’t only welcomed students from authoritarian lands to the U.S. but have also been scrambling to offer their services and prestige to such regimes.

U.S. diplomats do have raisons d’etat to encourage American colleges to collaborate with authoritarian regimes in nations strategically pivotal to American interests. But liberal-arts colleges have even stronger reasons to resist establishing campuses constructed, funded, and ultimately guided by regimes like those in Kazakhstan, Abu Dhabi, Singapore, and China, which are eager to buy liberal education’s “skill sets” and imprimatur, but not its commitment to interrogate the latest flows of power and wealth, not just ride and facilitate them.

It’s one thing, and probably a good thing, for Western research universities to set up research projects and programs in law, business, medicine, and technical training in a wide variety of societies. Nearly 250 are doing so, eight in Kazakhstan alone (including Duke, Carnegie Mellon, the University of Pennsylvania, and Pittsburgh, as well as Wisconsin), dozens in the United Arab Emirates and China, a dozen in Singapore. 

Some have been shrewd enough to put down only light footprints: Columbia University’s undergraduate “learning centers” in Europe and Asia can be pulled back fairly quickly if it decides its academic mission and freedoms are being compromised. Carnegie Mellon’s undergraduate college in Qatar’s huge, $33-billion “Education City” gives degrees mostly in sciences, in a building it shares with Northwestern University, whose undergraduate curriculum emphasizes journalism and communications. Georgetown offers a bachelor's degree in Foreign Service in “Education City.”

But it’s another thing entirely for liberal-arts colleges to stake their prestige and strained pedagogical resources on collaborations with repressive authoritarians to introduce their own hand-picked young and transient international students to what the political philosopher Michael Oakeshott called the “the Great Conversation” of the humanities about lasting challenges to politics and the spirit -- all under contract to regimes that have become quite deft at suppressing such conversations with surveillance and seductions, as well as truncheons and prison cells.

We Americans have an infamously bad habit of exporting contradictions and hypocrisies we ought to face and resolve at home. If the British Empire grew “in a fit of absence of mind,” as the historian John Robert Seeley suggested, the single-minded stampede of American liberal educators to share liberal education with the world on the tabs and under the thumbs of illiberal rulers is as delusional as the more Christian collegiate mission early in the last century “to evangelize the world in a generation,” as the slogan of the campus based Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions put it.

Yet if any academic mission is now proclaimed with equal ardor by the proudly public University of Wisconsin at Madison, the venerably private Yale University, and the hard-driving New York University (“a private university in the public service,” it styled itself, before becoming “A Global Network University”), it’s to bring the blessings of liberal education to illiberal societies in a world connected and flattened by commerce. 

NYU President John Sexton enthuses that his “Global Network University” will “mirror the flow of talent and creativity that increasingly defines the world.” 

Yale University’ claims that the new college it has co-founded with Singapore’s National University will be “a place of revelatory stimulation” that will reinvent liberal education “from the ground up,” in “A community of learning, founded by two great universities, in Asia, for the world.” 

Liberal education with an American republican inflection struggles to realize Thomas Jefferson’s vision, in founding for the University of Virginia in 1819, of a crucible for citizen leaders who “are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.” its emphasis is on nurturing “citizens who can think critically, understand their own history, and give voice to their beliefs while respecting the views of others,” as the American Academy of Arts & Sciences put it recently in a call to renew the humanities.

Some of us who try hard to teach this way believe that when efforts to sustain the liberal arts as a civic art have worked well, they’ve made democracy more resilient. As Assistant Secretary Blake suggested, they’ve attracted international students who want to escape rote learning in repressive homelands.

But the American Academy worries rightly about the humanities’ prospects in the United States itself, more than in societies where they’ve never taken root. Buffeted by market, political and social pressures, liberal educators whose own public funding is dwindling and whose students’ resources and aspirations are narrowing have set sail for lavish subsidies and burgeoning new student markets. But they’ve forgotten that whoever pays the piper ultimately calls the tune.

* * * * *

When Kazakhstan approached the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 2009 for help in establishing a biotechnology program, the Wisconsonites, flush with liberal idealism, proposed instead a School for the Humanities and Social Sciences “to extend ‘the Wisconsin Idea’ to Kazakhstan and the world,” as their letter of intent put it.

The new school would educate “leaders who will have an impact... like the thousands of UW-Madison graduates who have joined the Peace Corps over the decades,” said Gilles Bousquet, a UW dean and vice-provost, after visiting the country. Kazakhstan approved the proposal, giving Wisconsin nearly $1 million in initial design contracts and the inside track to $55 million in faculty salaries paid by the regime.  

But “The Wisconsin Idea” was developed more than a century ago by Progressives (including UW faculty) to strengthen labor rights and democratic procedures and to loosen the grip of robber barons. To say the least, that isn’t Kazakhstan’s idea. Its new, $2 billion Nazarbayev University is named for its President Nursultan Nazarbayev, 72, who ran the country in its final years as a Soviet republic and whose rubber-stamp parliament has anointed him "Leader of the People," elevating him and his family and state apparatus above the law.

Not surprisingly, Nazarbayev has a representative on his university’s governing board, clouding its promises of academic freedom, which, as in all such regimes, declines to “follow truth wherever it may lead” if it leads to pointed questions about freedom and the rule of law.

Shortly after Wisconsin’s school opened in 2011-- a year before Assistant Secretary Blake’s talk -- the Peace Corps removed its 117 volunteers from the country “following several sexual assaults and reported instances of harassment by the state intelligence service,” according to the historian Allen Ruff and investigative journalist Steve Horn in an exhaustive account of Wisconsin’s venture there. At about the same time, Kazakhstan state security forces opened fire on striking oil workers in the Caspian Sea oil company town of Zhanaozen, killing many, detaining and beating many more and blacking out communications from the region. The regime held show trials and even arrested some of the workers’ attorneys.

* * * * *

Blake did have “reasons of state” for skating around these developments’ implications for liberal education. Although Kazakhstan’s population is only 17 million, its 4,000-mile border with Russia, its 1,400-mile frontier with China, and its billions of dollars in contracts with American firms like Exxon Mobil give the U.S. a foothold and buffer in central Asia.

And Blake was really only emulating his boss, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who had made a similar pitch at a 2011 celebration of “people to people” exchanges between the U.S. and China, whose restraints on freedoms of scholarship, journalism, and public expression are well known. Praising New York University’s plan to open a full “NYU Shanghai” campus as a joint venture with the East China Normal University -- it has just opened -- Clinton invited NYU President John Sexton to stand for a round of applause, praising his “vision” and saying, “we’re very excited about this endeavor.” 

NYU’s endeavor in Shanghai follows its opening of a stand-alone “portal” campus in Abu Dhabi, whose Crown Prince, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, presented the university with a no-strings gift of $50 million even before paying for the entire campus’ construction, faculty salaries, and substantial tuition subsidies.

Abu Dhabi’s “significant human rights problems” in 2012, according to the U.S. State Department, included “arbitrary arrests, incommunicado detentions, and lengthy pretrial detentions;” limitations on freedoms of speech, press, and association; “reports of police and prison guard brutality’” interference “with citizens’ privacy rights,” and a lack of government “transparency” and “judicial independence.” 

In April 2011, five Abu Dhabi dissidents  -- including Nasser bin Ghaith, who was teaching at the country’s branch of the University of Paris, Sorbonne -- were arrested, detained for several months, and given prison sentences for urging direct elections of the Federal National Council. They were pardoned following an international outcry, but no thanks to NYU or the Sorbonne, which were silent. 

The State Department was silent, too, and small wonder: The petrol-rich, geographically pivotal emirate is as important to the U.S. as is Kazakhstan. The 70-plus percent of Abu Dhabi residents are migrants with few rights and no nationalist fervor, and they pose little threat to American strategic or economic interests, let alone to Abu Dhabi’s authoritarianism. And the regime and its partners in the United Arab Emirates risk nothing by hosting international students seeking American degrees. The risks are to the essence and spirit of liberal education itself.

* * * * *

In Singapore, Yale has co-founded “Yale-NUS College” with the National University of Singapore to offer a new, residential liberal education under the strict scrutiny and ultimately the control of that wealthy, tightly-run city-state. Like Abu Dhabi, Singapore is paying virtually all the costs of constructing and operating Yale-NUS’ brand-new panopticon of a campus. 

Also like Abu Dhabi and Kazakhstan, the tiny, corporate city-state of Singapore is pivotal in its own way to American interests. It’s a critical base and listening post for foreign policy makers and the American military, an entrepot for global finance competitive with Hong Kong, and now, it hopes, an education hub, “the Boston of Southeast Asia.” The country’s ruling Han Chinese elite knows the Chinese colossus to its north very well, and it speaks English well, owing to its British colonial past: English is Singapore’s official language.

Here, too, the American academic rhetoric has been missionary. Yale-NUS President Pericles Lewis, a former Yale professor, announced that deliberations in the summer of 2012 by the new faculty, on a hilltop in New Haven and then in their campus in Singapore, were nothing less than “the liberal arts experience made manifest” in a place where “the forces resisting change do not exist,” as the Yale-NUS faculty’s preliminary Curriculum Report put it. 

The college, which opened in August, will “rethink liberal education” in a Common Curriculum fostering “shared belonging... in a community” that will “instill habits of critical judgment and forbearing tolerance that arise from seeing peers struggle with problems one knows well oneself.” Students will keep portfolios of their progress and hone their speaking and writing skills.

But the college’s slick brochure for applicants promises them entry to a global managerial elite that answers not to any republican polity or code but to investors riding the casino-finance, corporate-welfare, consumer marketing. Although their degrees will be granted only by NUS, graduates will be “fully integrated” into “the Yale Alumni community” and so can host clients at the elegant Yale Club of New York on visits to the United States. The first such visit, for many of the new students, was a month-long stay in “one of Yale’s beloved residential colleges” on the New Haven campus, with tours of Boston and New York, before they settled into their Singapore campus.

Although the Yale-NUS admissions office claims that it culled its inaugural class of 157 from among 11,400 eager applicants, making the new college one of the most highly selective of its kind, 9,000 of those applications were made thanks solely to the Yale College admissions office in New Haven’s decision to put a small box on all application forms to Yale that, if checked, would forward the same application, automatically and without elaboration, to the Yale NUS admissions office in Singapore.

 “Despite the Admissions Office’s assurances, applicants may have felt that their decision of whether or not to check the NUS box might affect their chances of admission at Yale in New Haven,” wrote Diana Rosen in the Yale Daily News. “Or, the Yale-NUS option on the application may have simply served as way of convincing applicants that they were improving their chances of receiving a diploma with the name ‘Yale’ on it. It’s deceiving and it’s wrong.”

Singapore itself is too infamously Orwellian in its repressions of freedoms of expression to be trusted to honor more than a boutique humanities curriculum. Reporters Without Borders ranks the island 149th out of 179 this year -- down from 135th in 2012, owing partly to its recent crackdown on political websites. It has a truly flabbergasting array of legalistic restraints on freedoms of the press, political activity, and labor rights.

Singapore’s founder Lee Kuan Yew, now in his ‘80s, has even tutored Kazakhstan’s Nazarbayev in the arts of authoritarian governance, including the control of their universities’ governing boards. (Lee has even persuaded Nazarbayev to make English Kazakhstan’s official language.) The National University of Singapore is one of the institutions partnering with Nazarbeyev University.

Liberal education can’t take root in a bubble. “In a host environment where free speech is constrained, if not proscribed, faculty will censor themselves, and the cause of authentic liberal education... will suffer," warned the American Association of University Professors last year in a letter criticizing Yale’s venture and posing sixteen questions that Yale has declined to answer.

Jothie Rajah documents exhaustively in Authoritarian Rule of Law that Singapore’s meticulous, sanctimonious, politicized judiciary enforces broad laws on “public order,” the press, and religious and racial expression. These have been rammed through parliament by the ruling party in unvarying sequences of declared “emergencies”; orchestrated denigrations of critics in parliamentary “hearings” that are show trials; the infantilization of citizens in the name of looking after their best interests; and deliberately vague wording of statutes to leave room for the state manipulate the laws at it wishes.

Critics who still protest are charged with “defamation” or “scandalizing the judiciary;” they are invariably convicted; bankrupted by large fines, and imprisoned and/or barred from leaving the country. Chee Soon Juan, who holds a PhD from the American University of Georgia and is now secretary general of the tiny opposition Singapore Democratic Party, was fired by NUS from his position as a lecturer in neuropsychology in 1993 after he joined an opposition party; when he attempted to contest his dismissal, he was charged with defaming public officials, imprisoned, bankrupted, and barred from leaving the country.

After Singapore incurred international embarrassment by preventing Chee from accepting a human-rights award in Oslo, I and some others were able to bring him and another opposition leader, Kenneth Jeyaretnam of Singapore’s Reform Party, to speak at Yale. Apparently Singapore thought the better of embarrassing its latest American university partner.

The Singaporean Professor Cherian George, an internationally distinguished scholar of press freedom, was denied tenure at his country’s Nanyang Technological University in a process so heavy handed it was condemned by his own colleagues -- who showed unusual bravery -- and by distinguished scholars abroad.

Five American universities have pulled out of Singapore, most recently a branch of the University of Chicago’s Business School and two programs established by NYU in arts and in law. Some withdrawals have been prompted by financing and marketing projections that didn’t pan out, but others have been spurred by Singapore’s meddling to thwart the prospects of professors with dissenting opinions and to rein in students’ criticisms of government. 

The faculty of Britain’s Warwick University forced its administration to withdraw from Singapore on such grounds before a college it was planning there had opened; California’s Claremont Colleges rebuffed Singapore’s offer to establish a similar college after an animated faculty opposed the president’s inclination to go.

* * * * *

Yale-NUS students won’t be free to form political associations, much less to protest government policies, even on campus. In this, Singapore isn’t unusual. There’s little precedent for student freedom anywhere in the region.

China’s Johns Hopkins-Nanjing Center, which offers graduate programs in international relations, has experienced draconian restrictions on political discussion and expression such as an attempted on-campus showing of a documentary about the Tienanmen Square uprising and a decorous but short-lived student journal whose distribution off-campus was banned. Chinese authorities are insistent that no such projects touch anyone who isn’t formally enrolled at the center and therefore carefully watched.  

Officials at Duke University’s campus in Kunshan, “after pretty good conversations with people at Hopkins,” decided they “would be comfortable drawing similar distinctions between “intra-campus discussion and what you do at large,” Duke President Richard Brodhead told Bloomberg News. “If you want to engage in China, you have to acknowledge that fact.”

"What we [Americans] think of as freedom, they [Singaporeans] think of as an affront to public order,” said Yale-NUS’ inaugural dean Charles Bailyn, explaining Singapore’s curbs on public assembly. 

The ease with which Americans accept such restrictions in the name of multicultural engagement is instructive as well as frightening. Liberal educators abroad have begun to sound like business-corporate managers who adjust their labor and other practices downward to their host countries’ standards in order to facilitate their investments there. The Texas-based Houston Community College, under contract to the Qatar government as a vendor of educational services through "Qatar Community College," segregates its classes by sex.

“I have no trouble distinguishing between rights of academic freedom and rights of political expression,” NYU’s President Sexton declared when some students and faculty in New York protested the virtual indentured servitude of migrant workers constructing the Abu Dhabi campus two years ago. He added that ivory tower moralists should get “out of their comfort zones.” Faculty “no-confidence” votes against Sexton in five NYU schools and programs didn’t shake him from his own comfort zone. 

And when a Yale faculty resolution warned that university’s administration against dealing with Singapore in ways that compromise “ideals that lie at the heart of liberal arts education and of our civic sense as citizens,” President Richard Levin dismissed it as “unbecoming” and carrying “a sense of moral superiority.” Levin resigned his presidency a few months later, but the Singapore venture proceeds, and Yale has refused to disclose the full terms of the contract.

* * * * *

Why are university presidents so willing to make such compromises and even to celebrate them? Some, hoping sincerely to carry the blessings of liberal education to humanize globalization and even (sotto voce) to liberalize authoritarian regimes, are beguiled by “democratic" window dressing, designed by western-educated consultants.

The regimes’ smooth and/or sharp-tongued, Western-educated apologists easily fool or cow American innocents abroad, sometimes by wagging accusing fingers at the failures and hypocrisies the Americans left behind. The apologists dare not wag their fingers at failures in their own societies, whose repression displaces and intensifies their projections of disdain for their guests.

Many university leaders are vulnerable to such put-downs because, having come to think like corporate CEOs, they’ve forgotten the difference between the democratic rule of law that most Americans still honor and the simulacra of legalism in the cruel regimes that are hosting them. The more that they learn to characterize those regimes not as “authoritarian” but as “authoritative,” the more their own understandings of democracy and liberal education sound corporate, statist, and unfree.

The suppression or distortion of clear thinking abroad bleeds back into its suppression at home. The University of Wisconsin at Madison has asked the state legislature to exempt it from Wisconsin’s vaunted Open Records Law, a proud legacy of the Wisconsin Idea that enabled Allen Ruff and Steven Horn to produce their account of its Kazakhstan project. “The Wisconsin Idea” has already been rolled back in the state’s revocation of collective bargaining for public-sector workers and even more fatefully for UW with cuts in state funding from almost 50 percent of the university’s budget in the 1960s to less than 19 percent today. No wonder that it welcomed Kazakhstan’s offer.

Yale is less strapped for funding than Wisconsin, but three current or recent members of its small governing corporation advised and/or invested in Singapore’s sovereign wealth and investment funds for at least a decade before the Yale-NUS deal was arranged with their ardent support. Charles Goodyear IV, Charles Ellis, and G. Leonard Baker seem to think that they’ve glimpsed the Future in rising, wealthy state-capitalist regimes whose civil societies seem more orderly and energetic than America’s faltering, libertarian-capitalist one.

Another former Yale trustee, the journalist and global political commentator Fareed Zakaria, touted Singapore in The Future of Freedom as a model for his claim that societies that liberalize economically will liberalize politically. At Davos Zakaria interviewed Singapore’s founder Lee Kuan Yew and his son, Lee Hsien Loong, the current prime minister, almost worshipfully. Months later, Yale President Levin interviewed Zakaria before a New Haven audience inaugurating Yale’s new Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, which brought Tony Blair to teach a course on “faith and freedom.”

Presidents such as Levin lose liberal education’s compasses as they move from being scholars and teachers, of whatever caliber, to serving on multiple business-corporate boards, where they learn to think about expanding any institution's brand name and market share. When a university president treats liberal education as a game of money, power, and public relations, he has “played the role cast for him by the large forces shaping research universities today, which are the very forces that led the [Harvard] Corporation to think he was the man for the job," as Lewis, the former dean of Harvard College, put it.

If university leaders imagine that they’re advancing America’s highest foreign-policy goals and strategic interests, diplomats such as Blake and Clinton have been happy to indulge them. After all, the diplomats are fiscally strapped, their embassies becoming fortresses, their networks of trust fraying amid leaks of their communications. Universities can accomplish “people-to-people” exchanges far more easily and convincingly.

* * * * *

The real danger isn’t that these relationships will produce collisions and open conflict between American educators and their hosts in Kazakhstan, Abu Dhabi, Shanghai, and Singapore, although they may. It’s really that the relationships will facilitate a smooth, clueless co-dependency on what a special issue of The Economist identified as a convergence of Asian and American “state capitalism:” The Asian model “liberalizes” a bit politically and cosmetically, while the American model becomes more statist and corporatist, inducing educators and diplomats to define liberal expectations down. The “new normal” becomes a neoliberal purgatory where neither Socrates nor Jefferson could breathe.

Just after World War II, a more resilient American democracy opened liberal education to millions of Americans themselves through the G.I. Bill and National Defense Education Act loans, as Daniel Duedney and John Ikenberry note in a Council on Foreign Relations paper that calls for a new “liberal internationalist American Grand Strategy” that would begin with democratic renewal at home.

* * * * *

Authoritarian rulers have weaknesses, too, as they try to ride the global tides that have carried Western universities to their shores. They’re expanding state coercion to try to shore up the social cohesion their societies once drew from Confucian, Islamic, or even Western colonial traditions that are dissolving amid riptides of global finance, communications, labor migration, and consumer marketing that, so far, have generated huge inequalities amid prosperity and loosened restraints on degrading and criminal behavior.

The Economist casts “a sceptical eye” on this variant of state-capitalist control, pioneered by Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew, whom it characterized as “a tireless advocate of ‘Asian values,’ by which he meant a mixture of family values and authoritarianism.” The Lees have drawn subliminally from Confucian traditions that present the head of state as a paterfamilias in order to rein in the county’s increasingly soulless and demoralizing materialism. “States hover like crows over the nests that nations make,” warned the historian Robert Wiebe in 2001 against these hollow, often brutal invocations of old cultural wellsprings to shore up new concentrations of power and profits.

Similarly, the sheiks of the Emirates -- and even Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan -- have adapted Islamic traditions to offset the civic and social costs of their own simultaneous promotions of go-go investment and marketing that dissolve pre-market cultures of honor. 

These rulers want liberal education to help them finesse the brutality and hypocrisy of these bargains. They want American colleges’ imprimaturs and the “critical thinking” and felicity in writing and speaking that a liberal education may provide to regime managers and spokesmen.

The students themselves are often as well-meaning as they are bright, and some hope that the new colleges will give them some intellectual and political wiggle room. But most simply want lucrative careers, just as most American students do: “In an Asian society likes ours,” a Singaporean student in the United States told me, “there is an infatuation with the Ox-bridges, HYP (Harvard Yale Princeton). So much so that joint programmes are the flavour of the day, example Singapore-MIT, Duke-NUS, Yale-NUS, and a now defunct Johns Hopkins-Singapore program.”

* * * * *

Liberal education does need to make accommodations to wealth and power. At the dawn of the eighteenth century, Yale’s own Puritan founders, eager to purify a mission they thought was being corrupted by Harvard, found themselves turning for support to Elihu Yale, an officer of one of the world’s first multi-national corporations, the East India Company, which a century would later acquire the island of “Singapura” for the British crown.

But now university leaders are wandering a bit like Alice in Wonderland -- or in NYU’s case, like Captain Cook -- into fogs of duplicity cast by regimes whose “features of Western-style democracy are worn relatively lightly and combined with a markedly authoritarian mode of rule,” as a recent analysis by the Washington-based Trans-Atlantic Academy put it. Authoritarian rulers must be laughing up their sleeves at their good fortune in capturing American innocents abroad.

No one expects university leaders to pose Socratic questions to such rulers or to captains of commerce and finance who are riding the golden riptides. American colleges are “like ships caught in the same current, some more obviously helpless than others, ... but all drifting toward certain destruction on a lee shore,” the American editor Lewis Lapham warned in 2001.

Still, someone should warn them against supplying riders of the storm with little more than well-disciplined crews and tighter rigging. Colleges have to nourish and hold to the understanding, always fragile to begin with, that wise interrogation strengthens a society’s public life in ways that armies and states can’t.

If American colleges, surfing the golden tides, transform themselves from the crucibles of civic-republican citizen-leadership that they’ve been at their best into career-networking centers and cultural galleria for a global managerial class that answers to no republican polity or moral code, the American republic will lose its own compass and its anchors.

Adjunct history faculty face heavy workloads, low pay, and poor working conditions, according a new report prepared for the Organization of American Historians.

“Adjunct and contingent faculty have a very, very desperate sense of their future,” Edward Reiner, the report's primary author, said in a phone interview. “The consensus, particularly within the humanities, is that adjuncts are treated very poorly, and most never see full-time employment.”

Reiner is an adjunct professor of continuing and professional studies at New York University. He was commissioned by the OAH, along with market researcher Catherine Walton, to analyze data on contingent faculty in all fields released by the Coalition on the Academic Workforce in 2012.

The CAW report surveyed nearly 20,000 contingent and adjunct faculty at colleges and universities across the United States on their working conditions. Reiner and Walton, using membership rosters from the OAH and the American Historical Association, filtered the 731 historians who participated in the survey, and compared their responses to the larger dataset compiled by the Coalition.

The study found that 54 percent of adjunct faculty are under the age of 35; 45 percent hold master's degrees and 31 percent PhDs; and 52 percent earn less than $35,000. By comparison, American Historical Association data compiled in 2010 shows that the average salary for new assistant professors of history is approximately $52,000.

Many surveyed hold full-time positions in all but name, but are classified as contingent faculty to keep costs down.

Unlike tenure-track historians, most adjuncts lack a basic benefits package. One in ten adjunct historians lack health insurance (though some 40 percent have shared-cost insurance plans through their employers), only around a quarter have employer-supported retirement plans, and less than 2 percent have access to child care. Eleven percent of contingent history faculty are union members, compared to the 23 percent of full-time history faculty who work at institutions with a collective bargaining unit, according to the most recent CUPA-HR salary report. (The full CAW report notes that 39.4 percent of all contingent faculty have union representation.)

Adjunct historians also overwhelmingly desire full-time, tenure-track employment, though according to Reiner, a part-time humanities position that leads to full-time work is exceedingly rare. Most contingent and adjunct history faculty never see full-time employment.

“In the sciences and in business, job prospects and salaries are better for contingent faculty,” he said. It is in the economic interests of colleges and universities, he added, to use inexpensive adjunct and contingent labor to control costs by teaching less profitable humanities courses.

Ironically, according to the OAH press release that accompanied the report, historians are actually more optimistic about their chances of securing full-time and tenure-track appointments than their counterparts in other disciplines.

But “historians are very much at the bottom of the barrel,” Reiner cautioned. “They just don't have the same career options available to them” as faculty in the sciences and business.