Invisible Adjunct (February 2003 - August 2004)

Despite its name, the Invisible Adjunct's weblog was not defined by its attention to the problem of adjuncts in higher education. Or more properly, its interest in the plight of adjuncts was not reducible to a list of specific and narrow grievances suffered by the Invisible Adjunct herself.

The Invisible Adjunct held up a mirror to higher education and asked whether it liked what it saw. She drew in readers who had thought their own alienation from and disappointment with academia was only a private and personal feeling. In her postings and in the discussions that followed, they discovered that they were not alone. Whether they were currently suffering the trials of adjunct employment, had left academia as ABDs, or were struggling to make sense of life as a tenured professor, many readers found that they shared common dissatisfactions with academic life.

However, Invisible Adjunct's site was not for whiners, or axe-grinders with primordial grudges against the professoriate. She also pushed readers to consider what was valuable and precious about higher education. She consistently elevated the tone and substance of the conversation as a writer and as a host. The Invisible Adjunct's site brought together many readers and many issues under a single roof, in a shared dialogue. When the site ended, many of those conversations fractured and became far more divisive.

Maybe that was inevitable. Certainly no one faulted the Invisible Adjunct for shutting down her site, as she had promised, once she decided to give up on the quest for a regular tenure-track position. I think that one of the signs of academia's underlying problems is that someone like the Invisible Adjunct wasn't able to find a regular position, and that in some small but crucial way, academia has suffered for it. Because I like to think that had she found the position she was seeking, and kept her site going, that perhaps some of the most frustrating contemporary debates about academic politicization and similar issues might have been less divisive, less captive to the larger fractures in the body politic. One host, and one writer, really can make all the difference, and for an important time, the Invisible Adjunct did.

-- Timothy Burke

Mode for Caleb (July 2004 - August 2006)

I discovered Mode for Caleb, Caleb McDaniel's brilliant blog about history, academia, religion, politics, culture, and jazz, in September or October 2004, right around the time I was launching my own blog on a few of those subjects. Every post Caleb wrote made me realize that I'd have to work a lot harder than I'd planned. What Mode for Caleb showed me was that this new medium we're improvising need not be flimsy or disposable. Like the jazz music Caleb loves, blogging and history blogging in particular can be deep and rewarding and complex. With all due respect to the instapundits and daily link harvesters (we need them too) Caleb showed how well the history blog works in the long form. Call it"smartblogging"--or don't, that's pretty awful--week after week, Caleb delivered sustained intellectual solos, extended virtuoso riffs on teaching and writing, American and transnational history, nuclear weapons and the abolitionist mind.

Each of his posts claimed to be"improvised," but if that's true, he's an even more terrifying genius than I think he is. They all struck me as meticulously crafted, and worthy of serious thought and time. They're worth rereading, too: do yourself a favor and spend some time with his series on transnational history, or his case for nuclear abolitionism, or his essay on the origins and meanings of Memorial Day. It doesn't matter that these posts were written by some graduate student somewhere you'd never heard of. If anything, that makes it cooler. Those posts represent a powerful mind at work, and you got to see it in action (or else you get to now), in your browser or RSS reader, for free. If the story of Invisible Adjunct, our other inaugural Hall of Famer, exposed a failure--not a personal failure, by any means, but a collective failure of the academic profession–Mode for Caleb represents a glowing success. It's Caleb's success--he's got his PhD now, a tenure-track job, and a new baby on the way. We envy his students and wish him well. But it's a success for the medium of academic blogging, too.

-- Rob MacDougall

If IA were here, I'm pretty sure that she would respond by saying something like:"I'd like to thank the Academy ..." and I would smile at her references. Already, my day would be better. But this is simply to say,"The Academy would like to thank you, Invisible Adjunct and Caleb McDaniel."

Cross-posted from Blog Them Out of the Stone Age

Jeez, where to begin?

The NRO article makes much of the apparent failure of the American Historical Review to publish much concerning military history. But it overlooks the fact the 2004 annual meeting of the American Historical Association had as its theme"Thoughts on War in a Democratic Age." And while there is truth in the fact that the American Historical Review seldom publishes military history, no one has checked independently to see if 1) military historians are actually submitting articles for consideration by the journal; and 2) the submissions meet the high standards expected from any flagship professional journal.

A contraindication may be had by noting that the Journal of American History, generally considered to be as"leftist" as the AHR, has in fact commissioned an article on the current state of the field of American military history. Wayne E. Lee, a rising star at the University of North Carolina, is currently completing that study.

Noticing that miitary historians were no longer even trying the organize sessions dealing with their field, the program committee for the 1996 Organization of American Historians annual meeting used its clout to insist upon a"presidential session" that showcased military history. I suspect the 1997 program may have done the same. In any event, at the request of a committee member I organized a session for the 1996 OAH -- the subject was race and war in the American experiences; panelists included the late Craig M. Cameron of Old Dominion University,myself, and Brian M. Linn of Texas A&M, as well as our commentator, Tami Davis Biddle, then of Duke University. Our moderator was John Shy of the University of Michigan.

The 1997 OAH panel took the form of a round table on the future of teaching military history in civilian academe. In this case, I can't recall who else was on the panel -- maybe I can look it up -- but I recall that Richard H. Kohn presided over it.

No doubt about it, some in academia indeed view military history with jaundiced eye, just as others are impatient with women's history or unwilling to provide enough faculty positions to cover adequately the non-North American, non-European regions of the world. And it must also be acknowledged, candidly, that military historians have not always been good ambassadors for their field. But the situation is nowhere near as bleak as the article portrays.

The business about the"problem" of the infiltration of social history into military history, for its part, is by far the weakest part of the article. Edward M. Coffman, the Wisconsin professor emeritus the author praises in the second paragraph of "Sounding Taps," was in fact a social historian of the American army. Coffman wrote two classic works on the subject -- The Old Army: A Portrait of the American Army in Peacetime, 1784-1898, and The Regulars: The American Army, 1898-1941 -- and trained a generation of fine military historians, many of whom employ the same approach; e.g., Joseph T. Glatthaar's Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and White Officers.

The article quotes John A. Lynn on his belief that once he retires from the University of Illinois, he will probably not be replaced. But it overlooks the fact that in 1997, Lynn wrote a classic article for the Journal of Military History in which he argued that gender history and the new cultural history provide powerful tools by which to get at a core concern of military history: the experience of combat.

I could go on longer -- and I think I will. But first, time for a steaming cup of coffee.

Gavin Bowd,"Liberty, Equality, and Fecundity," Scotsman. com, 24 September, reviews Lucy Moore's Liberty: The Lives And Times Of Six Women In Revolutionary France and David Lawday's Napoleon's Master: A Life Of Prince Talleyrand. It's a reminder of the limited vision of the revolutionary enlightenment. Thanks to Arts & Letters Daily for the tip.

Robert Birnbaum interviews Sean Wilentz, The Morning News, 26 September. An excellent interview. Thanks to Alfredo Perez at Political Theory Daily Review for the tip.

At Inside Higher Ed, our colleagues, Mark Grimsley and Scott McLemee, have back-to-back columns: Mark's"An Inappropriate Illness," Inside Higher Ed, 26 September, wherein he fields considerable discussion in the comments; and Scott's"A Liberal Dose of Reason," Inside Higher Ed, 27 September, wherein he reviews Michael Bérubé's What's Liberal about the Liberal Arts? Classroom Politics in Higher Education. Don't miss the podcast.

Finally, there's Dana Larson,"Popeye the Pothead," Canabis Culture/Marajuana Magazine, 2 February 05. Lately, the weed seems less threatening than spinach. What can I say? It [the article, that is] comes highly recommended by an anonymous tipster.

Cross-posted from Blog Them Out of the Stone Age

Dear John,

Thanks for nothing.

"Sounding Taps," your September 26 article in National Review Online, is on the surface a sympathetic lament for the supposed marginalization of academic military history. But it is constructed so tendentiously, and overlooks so many relevant facts, that it is really quite misleading.

So misleading, in fact, that you may have done more to harm academic military history than any bunch of"tenured radicals" has managed to do in many years, if ever.

Take, for example, your starting point: Wisconsin's failure to run a search to fill the Ambrose-Hesseltine Chair. You say that"more than $1 million" sits in the endowment. That sounds like a lot, but it isn't. At Ohio State, the minimum needed to fund an endowed chair is $1.5 million, and even then internal funds are routinely needed to top off the chairholder's salary. Two million dollars is a more realistic figure nowadays.

You could have started with Ohio State. We do have $1.5 million sitting in a bank to fund an endowed chair in military history, and guess what? My department, which includes numerous historians of gender, class, race, and culture -- and even a historian of fashion -- voted unanimously to run a search to fill the position at the earliest possible moment. To do less, everyone understood, would have been an insult to the benefactor, General Raymond E. Mason.

Got it? Not just an endowed chair in military history, but one endowed by, and named for, a retired Army general.

That's how radical my"tenured radical" colleagues are.

Oh, I nearly forgot: a second endowed chair in military history is coming online over the next five years, through the generosity of a donor who wishes to remain anonymous. Not because they're ashamed of military history, I feel obliged to add, given your genius for subtle distortion of anything that doesn't fit your agenda, but because they're modest. Fancy that.

It will not surprise you to know that many wealthy people who wish to give something back to their society are both politically conservative and often fascinated by military history. But they didn't become wealthy by making bad investments, and your article conveys the distinct message that giving money to support academic military history would be a bad investment.

Again, thanks for nothing.

My field's professional organization, the Society for Military History, has plans afoot to approach benefactors and"marry them" to receptive history departments in order to create more military history positions.

I sure hope those potential benefactors don't read National Review Online. You've given them good reason for pause. We'll urge the opportunity, they'll wave"Sounding Taps" in our face.

Thanks. For Nothing.

You concede that a few military history programs do exist, but their existence hurts the point you want to make, so you blat out the names and hurry on. One name you don't blat out is Duke University. Another is the University of North Carolina. I wonder why not? Could it be that Duke and UNC are too well known as bastions of liberalism? It's kinda awkward for your thesis that Duke and UNC have jointly created -- actually revived -- one of the best military history programs in the country. In fact, since unlike you I like to be honest in my presentation, the Duke-UNC program is as good as ours at Ohio State and arguably even a little better.

But it gets no mention at all from you. I wonder why?

Happen to have heard of COL H.R. McMaster, the Army officer who during Desert Storm won the battle of the 73 Easting and nowadays regularly makes headlines for his tough-minded, innovative approach to the Iraqi insurgency? He got his PhD from UNC, after study in the Duke-UNC military history program.

I could go on, and believe me, I will. That's the great thing about blogging -- I could never win an argument with someone who buys ink by the barrel, but I have access to as many electrons as National Review Online.

Let's face it, pal. You don't give -- as my drill sergeants used to say -- a lusty crap about academic military history. Yours are crocodile tears. You'd love to see us disappear, because it would make a nice talking point in the increasingly stupid culture wars.

Well, sorry to disappoint you. Our graves ain't dug yet. And right now, the only one I see wielding a shovel is you.

Thanks. For. Nothing.

His senior year he made all A’s and B’s. It nearly killed him, but he did it. The Briarcrest academic marathon, in which Michael started out a distant last and had instantly fallen farther behind, came to a surprising end: in a class of 157 students, he finished 154th. He had caught up to and passed three of his classmates. When[former Ole Miss basketballer] Sean [Tuohy] saw the final report card, he turned to Michael with a straight face and said, “You didn’t lose; you just ran out of time.”

He had had a truly bizarre academic career: nothing but D’s and F’s until the end of his junior year, when all of a sudden he became a reliable member of Briarcrest’s honor roll. He was going to finish with a grade-point average of 2.05. Amazing as that was, however, it wasn’t enough to get him past the N.C.A.A. He needed a 2.65. And with no more classes to take, he obviously would not get it.

Now it was Sean’s turn to intervene.

From a friend, Sean learned about the Internet courses offered by Brigham Young University. The B.Y.U. courses had magical properties: a grade took a mere 10 days to obtain and could be used to replace a grade from an entire semester on a high-school transcript. Pick the courses shrewdly and work quickly, and the most tawdry academic record could be renovated in a single summer. Sean scanned the B.Y.U. catalog and found a promising series. It was called “Character Education.” All you had to do in such a “character course” was to read a few brief passages from famous works — a speech by Lou Gehrig here, a letter by Abraham Lincoln there — and then answer five questions about it. How hard could it be? The A’s earned from character courses could be used to replace F’s earned in high-school English classes. And Michael never needed to leave the house!

Thus began the great Mormon grade-grab. Mainly it involved [advisor]Sue Mitchell grinding through the character courses with Michael. Every week or so, they replaced a Memphis public school F with an A from B.Y.U. Every assignment needed to be read aloud and decoded. Here he was, late in his senior year in high school, and he had never heard of a right angle or the Civil War or “I Love Lucy.” But getting the grades was far easier than generating in Michael any sort of pleasure in learning. When Briarcrest gave him a list of choices of books to write a report on, Mitchell, thinking it might spark Michael’s interest, picked “Great Expectations.” “Because of the character of Pip,” she says. “He was poor and an orphan. And someone sort of found him. I just thought Michael might be able to relate.” He couldn’t. She tried “Pygmalion.” Again, he hadn’t the faintest interest in the thing. They got through it by performing the work aloud, with Michael assigned to the role of Freddie. “He does wonderful memory work,” Mitchell says. “It’s a survival technique. You can give him anything, and he’ll memorize it.” But that’s all he did. Engaging with the material in any deeper way seemed impossible. He was as isolated from the great works of Western literature as he was from other people. “If you asked him why we’re doing all this,” she says, “he’d say, ‘I got to do it to get to the [National Football] league.”’

As the article indicates, with a tremendous amount of love and support, Michael accomplished a great deal. However, although he and those who helped him deserve tremendous credit, when he faced the final obstacle to his admission to the University of Mississippi, instead of overcoming it, he was not only allowed to but encouraged to go around it. One might well argue that the final verdict in the case lies in Michael's classroom performance at Ole Miss. However, continuing evidence of widespread willingness to help college athletes beat the academic system surely justify concerns that Michael may get through college the same way he got in.

Grammaticks Department: The first thing that baffled me in elementary school was diagraming sentences. I never understood why it was important to know how to bracket"See Dick, Jane, and Spot run." And, yet, its lesson – that words play specific roles in coherent sentences – remains with me. Scheiss Weekly and elementaryhistoryteacher may be on to something, however. Take a sentence of historical importance and, even if it is more complex, the experience of close analysis cuts across fields of study and highlights major themes and subordinate ideas. Thanks to Jonathan Dresner for the tip.

Free Speech Department:"Conservative UGA Student Mag Trashed," AJC, 23 September, is further evidence that freedom of speech and the press on campus are at risk.

Gun Control Department: After Ohio State's Saul Cornell appeared in Minneapolis-St. Paul recently, the Star-Tribune's editorial,"The Constitution's Gun-Control Pledge," 23 September, generated a detailed response from our friend, Clayton Cramer. Clayton's finished reviewing the page proofs of his book, btw, which will appear anon by a Thomas Nelson imprint. Nelson needs to clean up its online biography of Clayton, however. It's been two and a half years since he last taught at Boisie State and George Fox's website has never heard of him. We wouldn't want Michael Bellesiles catching Clayton guilty of false advertising or anything.

Mass-Observation Department: Caleb Crain,"Surveillance Society: The Mass-Observation Movement and the Meaning of Everyday Life," New Yorker, 11 September, is a nicely crafted essay about the eccentric mass-observation movement in World War II-era England."Mysteries reside in the humblest everyday things," [said one of its founders];"they are a kind of legacy, and the poet, by examining them, can extract 'an idea of"what I am" from the past.'" For more, see Crain's Steamboats Are Ruining Everything. Thanks to Brian Sholis, In Search of the Miraculous, 22 September, for the tip.*
*See also: Sharon Howard's Early Modern Notes, which has lots of good links.

Radical History Department: Christopher Phelps,"Morris Slavin: 1913-2006," Against the Current, September/ October, marks the passing of a historian of the French revolution and one of the last American Trotskyists.

I will admit that my first thought when I started this blog in my head was to say this: “If anyone wants to know why I don’t think Republican moderates matter, here’s the proof.” And that is true. However, standing alone that statement is a distortion of a more complex, and infinitely sadder reality.

First of all there are the Democrats. Really, they exist. And a few, most consistently Russ Feingold of my fair state, have actually taken a stand on this issue that mattered. Most happily ducked this debate, just as they have ducked in the past. Oh, it made strategic sense to do so. The Republican division was convenient politically, and it gave political cover for opposing America’s use of torture for a bit. That way they could hold on to voters like me.

“Political cover for opposing . . . torture.” That is why the surrender of McCain and company and the cravenness of most Democrats are not the whole story. The politicians and research wonks of both parties have put their fingers to the wind and decided that torture helps the president and the Republicans. And I guess they are right.

Oh, it can’t be called torture. And there are still limits. The CIA can’t boil people alive. Barring rendition, of course.

I live in a country in which a majority of citizens are willing to torture to secure a slightly greater illusion of safety. The majority of our national politicians accept this. I guess that way they all can settle back in peace and watch 24.

So that is why I am sad.