CLIOPATRIA: A Group Blog
Nominations for the best history blogging will be open through November. Final selections will made by panels of history bloggers and announced at the American Historical Association Annual Meeting in early January. The complete list of past winners is here
Monday, January 31, 2005
"Not a real degree": reflections on an academic autobiography and gender studies
I confess, I did spend some time last week reading through the various Men's Rights forums that were reacting to my appearance on the Glenn Sacks show. Obviously, there was much written that was hurtful, much that was venomous, and a little that was genuinely interesting. Dear Ampersand of Alas, a Blog, ventured into the Stand Your Ground forum, and more than held his own. What I wanted to focus on today was this page of the thread from that forum, on the validity of degrees in women's studies. A couple of samples:
He is an archtypical Women's Studies professor,
which is to say, a person endowed with an academic title that for most
part seems completely undeserved. I work at a major research university
so I have contact with all kinds of professionals, and I'm here to tell
you that among faculty who are honest about the subject, women's
studies departments and the people who work in them are not considered
legitimate from an academic perspective. Women's studies wonks may do a
lot of things, but legitimate scholarship ain't one of them.
Someone else added on:
I don't want to get started on that - and it's probably a topic for a
different thread - but the amount of work that you have to do for a
doctoral degree in molecular biology, or physics, or any of a number of
other "real" degrees absolutely dwarfs "writing about your feelings"
and the like in some areas.
I guess if you get a doctoral degree in electrical engineering, you
earn a salary at a company and really produce something computer-wise
for society.
But if you get a "doctoral degree" in interdisciplinary studies
with a major in sex and gay relations, you go on Oprah, write a book
that nitwits read, and earn far more.
The quoted remarks are typical of the tired old canards that have benn thrown for decades at those who work in Gender Studies. I'm not interested in refuting all of the groundless charges in these comments -- it would take too long. First quick point: at most colleges and universities in the USA, professors who teach gender studies also teach in other disciplines, like history, psychology, sociology,and literature. (Here's a list of many of the programs.) Relatively few universities have "free-standing" departments of Women's Studies staffed by faculty who do not teach outside that department. Second quick point: dissertations in gender studies are never about how one "feels". If you want to find out what most dissertations in the field are written about, I suggest you go here and type in women's studies or gender studies. Not a lot of fluff will come up -- but a lot of world-class scholarship will!
Of course, I don't have a doctoral degree in gender studies. Indeed, my Ph.D. is in English Medieval History, with an emphasis on ecclesiastical and political affairs. Here's the link to the abstract of my doctoral dissertation at UCLA: Arms and the Bishop: the Anglo-Scottish War and the Northeastern Episcopate, 1296-1357. Hint, folks: it's not a page turner. But if you like lengthy footnotes in Latin and Norman French, you're in luck. (I'm not sure I can read Norman French anymore, but in the early to mid-90s, I sure had to learn how.)
As early as my sophomore year of college, I had become interested in doing a degree in Women's Studies. I had come into Berkeley as a history major, but once I took my first class on gender, I was hooked. I'll confess, however, that I allowed myself to be talked out of having women's studies be anything more than a pastime. Family and friends, knowing of my desire to teach, told me that a degree in Women's Studies wouldn't be taken seriously, using some of the same criticisms that the Stand Your Ground fellows used. I argued with them, knowing from my own experience that courses in gender studies were often more demanding in terms of work load than those in more conservative and conventional fields. (This is true in my own classes: ask any of my students who take my Women's History course,and they'll tell you it's much more work than my Western Civ surveys.)
Like most college students, I did want to be taken seriously as a scholar. And though I knew damned well that gender studies was just as demanding as the courses I was taking in church history, I decided to make medieval religious history my primary area of undergraduate interest. (In honor of my father's heritage, I also picked up a minor in German literature. Nothing like stumbling through Schiller in the original, right?)
When I started grad school at UCLA in 1989, I was still fascinated with contemporary gender studies. To the bewilderment of my advisers, I took some women's studies courses along with my classes in paleography, medieval Latin, and the like. I initially hoped to have women's studies be one of my minor fields for my doctorate; at UCLA, one needed expertise in three "minor fields" outside of one dissertation area. My adviser, however, recommended against any formal association with women's studies at all; "It doesn't relate to your real work", he said. I listened to him, I'm sorry to say, and thus completed my three minor fields in:
1. Early Modern European Economic History. (Ask me about proto-industrialization in 17th century Flanders!)
2. The early medieval German church (I've forgotten all those bloody Ottos, but I can still get through the investiture conflict in my sleep.)
3. Medieval English philosophy, particularly Ockham and Duns Scotus. (My adviser in this area was one of the first women ordained to the Anglican priesthood,the marvelous Marilyn Adams,now at Yale. Often, say after a surprisingly interesting discussion of the views of Duns Scotus on the conception of Mary, we turned to contemporary gender issues and the church. She always had great cookies in her office).
Bottom line: the "public face" of my grad work had damn all to do with contemporary gender issues. And yet, even as I was researching that exhausting dissertation, I was doing most of my outside reading in women's studies. The gap between my real interests and my actual work was tremendous, and it was largely a consequence of my own lack of courage. I didn't stand up to those who dismissed my interest in women's studies until it was far too late to change the course of my graduate career. (On a side note, I wonder how much my own sex had to do with the lack of encouragement that I received. If I had been a woman, I might have had more support in doing gender work. Or perhaps not. Many of my female colleagues who teach Women's Studies have reported hearing remarks similar to the ones I heard in my student days).
As a result, today I make a special effort to encourage some of my best and brightest students of both sexes to consider pursuing a Women's or Gender Studies major. My workload makes it clear to them that it's not a discipline for the lazy or the self-indulgent! Sometimes, I tell them of my own years as a reluctant medievalist, secretly more interested in reading Ana Castillo than Hildegard of Bingen, more interested in Anzaldua than Anselm. I'd like to think that times have changed. But there remains little question that for far too many people outside the academic world (and for a few old reprobates within it), Gender Studies work is still dismissed with contempt.
Some Notes and Carnivals ...
My favorite meal at the SHA convention in Memphis last year was one I shared with Leon Litwack of UC, Berkeley, his lovely wife, and Bill Scarborough of the University of Southern Mississippi. You couldn't imagine two more unlikely companions over a meal than Litwack and Scarborough. Litwack is a "red diaper baby" and, into his seniority, remains a stalwart of the academic Left. Scarborough, on the other hand, is a tough old right-winger, who has written admiringly of the slave managers on the old South's plantations. When we first met at the St. George Tucker Society gathering last summer, Scarborough and I sat knee to knee in a limousine and talked about my civil rights activism and his active support of the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission. Well, the old reprobate* has his virtues, including having defended a young Marxist historian in his department when he was under fire. I'm not surprised to read in Robert Campbell's report at Liberty & Power that Scarborough has a 19 point indictment of the administration of the University of Southern Mississippi that will probably lead to a second faculty vote of no confidence in President Shelby Thames in the last year. My hat's off to my friend, Bill Scarborough. You go, Bill!
*Note to Van Hayhow: If I refer to a senior conservative historian as "the old reprobate," is HNN or am I subject to liability claims? Bill knows he's an old reprobate. We're agreed on that and laughed about his condition.
While I'm praising folk on the Right and you're over at Liberty & Power, have a look at Radley Balko's post on California Republican Congressman David Dreier's new bill that will not create national identity cards for all of us. I like libertarians keeping a close eye on Republican congressmen these days. And follow the posts of L & P's newest member, Jason Kuznicki. He's giving our libertarian friends some real historical ballast.
My colleague, Manan Ahmed, suggests that Priya Jain's "When Freedom was ‘the peculiar institution'," at Salon is a must read for us all. It focuses on Adam Hochschild's new book, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves. Manan suggests that we ponder these words:
And then I began to think, what makes people empathize with other people of another color in another part of the world? Because that's what this movement was really about. It was the first time ever that a number of people got outraged and stayed outraged for many years about the plight of other people in a completely different part of the world. I think that's more likely to happen if you have something in common with those people.See also: this interview with Hochschild in Mother Jones and Caleb McDaniel's reflections at Mode for Caleb.
When my colleague, Sharon Howard, hosted the 1st History Carnival (scroll down), she made it a hard act to follow and she's committed me to hosting the 2nd History Carnival this week at Cliopatria. Here are the guidelines for the History Carnival. History bloggers, please send links to your best posts in the last three weeks to me at ralphluker AT mindspring DOT com. If you don't self-nominate, I am free to select something from your blog and you do recall that dreadful thing you posted under Black Jack's influence two weeks ago, don't you? So, send me your best.
There are now two intentional alternatives to the History Carnival. On 3 February, St. Nate will host the Skeptics Circle. Brother Nate is looking for your best post on urban legends and hoaxes, pseudohistory, hysteria, and quackery. The other alternative to the History Carnival is archy's Carnival of Bad History. I leave it for you to decide whether your best post should go to archy or to me.
Sunday, January 30, 2005
Run Arnold Run
I'm in DC this weekend. One thing I always enjoy when coming to the Capitol is to see which group will be staging a weekend protest march. Having just come from Union Station, I noticed a group of around 20, with placards, congregating. The message? "Get Pumped Up" and "Run Arnold Run." The cause? A constitutional amendment to allow foreign-born citizens to run for President.
Speaking of quixotic crusades . . .
My favorite Illinois Republican is back in the news. Alan Keyes has founded an organization, Illinois United, to back a possible gubernatorial bid for the conservative activist (and Maryland resident) in 2006. Best of luck to him.
Thanks to Ralph for the tip.
Kuznicki on Artichokes and States
Jason Kuznicki's first post at L&P is actually a teaser for a longer essay at his own blog in which he argues that the command economies of modernity are more equivalent to the absolutist regimes of early modernity than usually credited (and he's asking for historians to comment, so here goes). A second thesis -- though he recognizes that he's just exorcising a ghost rather than advancing a truly new concept -- is that the study of material culture and social history can and must be carried out in non-Marxist terms. In Japanese historiography, Japanese language scholarship is so thoroughly Marxist that I'm quite used to the disjunction between Marxist and non-Marxist scholarship on the same subjects. I think Marxist historiography deserves some credit for opening up vistas of social and economic history which might have otherwise gone unexplored, but I also don't see in the English-language scholarship in my field strong continuing allegiance to class analysis or other doctrinaire approaches.
Kuznicki's argument reminds me why World History is so much fun. In comments on his blog I wrote:
One of the themes of my World history course (which came out of the Western Civ courses I taught before) is the increasingly intrusive modern liberal state. In a very real sense, the 19th century is a kind of high point of individualism: the absolutist regimes were falling, but the "nanny" states had not yet been developed (except for the French Revolutionary regime, which passed quickly) (note: I'm a modern American liberal, which is to say that I believe the state is a useful community institution, but even I recognize the absurdities and atrocities of its social reformist projects, and willingly use the "nanny state" designation even for some programs which seem like good ideas to me....), so perhaps it is natural that the strongest expressions of classical liberalism belong to that era.There's a great deal to be said for disciplinary rigor and focus. And a great deal to be said for intersecting subfields, chronological sweeps, theoretical syncretism (Kuznicki promises to explain how Foucault and classical liberalism work together in the near future, which I assume has a great deal to do with analysis of power functions; that's one of the reasons I love our libertarian blog neighbors so much: their finely honed sense of the functions of state and social power.) and generalizations that force more thought instead of providing epigrammatic glosses on historical process.
I do have one quibble, though, about his argument. The French anti-littering laws which he cites (that's where the artichokes come in) reminds me a great deal of the sumptuary laws of Tokugawa (1600-1868) Japan: frequently repeated, oft-ignored attempts by the state to intervene in social processes though inconsistently applied state power (because the state didn't have the power to apply consistently). These seem like evidence of a will to command absolutism, but not evidence of the ability to anything resembling totalitarian control. Only with the total public participation of the French Revolution do you get anything like totalitarianism before the early 20th century bureaucratic state reaches its various zeniths (and those only work with broad popular support to bolster their substantial applications of terror; after popular support wanes, so does the state's claim to total command and control). The differences are too real to gloss over, but the theories are indeed interestingly consonant.
Saturday, January 29, 2005
The Vote
I cannot help but be excited about the vote in Iraq. I will try not to sound like a Friedman column but a new social memory is about to be constructed in Iraq. A memory of pollstations, of registers, of lists of names, of celebrations after victory. A memory that will prove a strong tonic against the oppression of the past decades. Amid the violence, amid the chaos, amid the harsh conflict for power, some Iraqis will cast their vote, voice their opinion, and elect someone else to stand as their representative.
The polarization of Sunnis, the power-grab of the Kurds are legitimate venues of concern but perhaps we should seize, for a moment, from looking at Iraqis as congregations of religious sects or ethnicities. I just want to imagine that one Iraqi living somewhere in Baghdad in the middle of the shellings and the raids and the bombings, who will make the brave journey to cast her vote. When she is alone with her ballot, she will become an active citizen of the Iraqi nation. Whatever her choice, she can finally claim to the legitimate right of choosing her leaders.
I am just as unable to help her cast her vote in safety as I was unable to stop the invasion of her country or the dictatorship she endured. Still, I will send a prayer for all Iraqis as they begin to construct their home - from scratch.
Reinterpreting 9/11
Interesting controversy developing at Hamilton College, which invited Ward Churchill, chairman of Colorado's Ethnic Studies Department, to lead off the spring lecture series of the Kirkland Project for the Study of Gender, Society and Culture's spring lecture series. The Kirkland Project touts its commitment to "intellectual inquiry and social justice," seeking "to build a community respectful of difference" so that students can "live and work in an increasingly complex multiracial and multinational world," all while initiating "connections between the Hamilton community and the surrounding area, around the mission of the Project."
The Churchill talk is fostering connections between the Hamilton community and the surrounding area, though perhaps not quite of the type that the "Kirkland Project" folks wanted. Churchill, it turns out, has described the Al-Qaeda perpetrators of the WTC and Pentagon attacks as "combat teams," not terrorists, since "they finally responded in kind to some of what this country has dispensed to their people as a matter of course." The civilians killed inside the Pentagon, Churchill notes, were really "military targets." And "as for those in the World Trade Center, well, really, let's get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break." A better way of describing the victims, he reasons, is to term them "little Eichmanns."
In addition to making me wonder what kind of education students receive in Colorado's Ethnic Studies Department--which, in what could be a caricature of quotas, boasts that its 60 majors and minors are "evenly divided between white students and students of color, male and female students"--the most newsworthy aspect of this affair comes in Hamilton's response. The office of Hamilton president Joan Hinde Stewart issued a statement affirming that Hamilton is committed to "the free exchange of ideas," and to invite those who disagree with Churchill (the father of one of the leaders of the student protest was killed in the WTC attack) to attend the talk.
This response reminds me of the approach followed by Duke after the North Carolina campus hosted a fall 2004 conference of the rabidly anti-Israel Palestine Solidarity Movement. Duke President Richard H. Brodhead claimed that Duke hosted the PSM conference because of the university's commitment to free speech and academic freedom.
In both the PSM Conference and the Churchill speech, however, administrative bodies of the university went out of their way to invite speakers with certain messages. If one of their administrative units invited David Duke to campus to discuss his views on racial progress in the 21st century, it's hard to imagine either Brodhead or the Hamilton administration issuing bland statements celebrating Duke's arrival on their campus as evidence of their commitment to academic freedom. Inviting outside speakers involves the use of college or university resources. It seems perfectly reasonable that trustees at Hamilton or Duke might want to ask whether the institutions could have employed their resources more productively than by inviting Churchill to speak or by hosting the PSM. If Brodhead or Stewart can't find better ways to spend their budgets, perhaps the trustees might want to find more creative chief executives?
Looking Ahead
The other day, a couple of students asked me about the likelihood of a "six-year itch" for the Repubs in 2006. With the occupation of Iraq growing increasingly unpopular yet no signs existing that it will end soon, and as increasing deficits at least raise the possibility of an economic downturn, the Republicans would seem vulnerable. In the last five sixth-year midterm elections (1958, 1966, 1974, 1986, and 1998), only in 1998 did the out-of-power party not score well. And 1998 was clearly a historical anomaly: the Repubs had already made record gains in 1994 House races, and the reaction to impeachment hurt the GOP.
On the surface, the closest parallel to 2006 seems to be 1966--one party in control of all branches of government, and the party in power forced to confront some of the ramifications of policy choices made earlier in the decade. The GOP gained nearly 30 House seats in 1966 and scored some big-name Senate wins as well--Chuck Percy in Illinois, Robert Griffin in Michigan, Edward Brooke in Massachusetts--by running against LBJ's conduct of the war and targeting a theme of "law and order."
For a variety of reasons, though, 2006 seems unlikely to become a Democratic version of 1966. First, of course, redistricting has made House races all but non-competitive nationwide. An extremely talented Democrat--say, newly elected congresswoman Melissa Bean--can oust an extremely vulnerable GOP incumbent such as Phil Crane, but there's little reason to believe that there will be many more competitive House races in 2006 than the handful that were truly in play last year.
That leaves the Senate. Unfortunately for the Dems, 2000 was a first-rate Dem year in Senate elections, and so the weaker Republicans (such as former senators Slade Gorton of Washington, Spencer Abraham of Michigan, and Bill Roth of Delaware) were ousted six years ago. On paper, the most vulnerable Republican incumbent for 2006 is Rick Santorum, who seems far too conservative for his state, but Dems last won a regularly scheduled Pennsylvania Senate race in 1962. Arizona's Jon Kyl also seems like a possible target, as a 1994 freshman who got a pass in 2000 and who represents a state where Dems have fared a bit better lately. But Dems last won an Arizona Senate seat in 1988, and talk that John Kerry might be competitive in Arizona last year proved unfounded. Missouri's Jim Talent could be vulnerable, given his narrow margin of victory in a 2002 special election. On the other side, Nebraska Dem Ben Nelson seems highly vulnerable, given that he barely won in 2000 against a weak GOP challenger.
In the end, as was the case in 2004, the most likely changeovers will occur in open seats. Bill First (TN) and Trent Lott (MS) are expected to retire, but no one thinks the Dems will win a Mississippi Senate race, and the Tennessee Dems still haven't recovered from 1994, when the party lost both of the Volunteer State's Senate seats. The Montana seat held by Conrad Burns is more promising--like Ben Nighthorse Campbell in 2004, Burns seems like the kind of candidate who could announce a late retirement, and there have already been rumors, which he has denied, that the 70yo incumbent might step aside. On the other side, however, this week's Roll Call reported that New Mexico Dem Jeff Bingaman, one of the upper chamber's lowest-profile members, is considering retirement, which would likely yield a wild wide-open race in which all three of the state's House members might run. In Maryland, meanwhile, five-term incumbent Paul Sarbanes is mulling retirement, and a recent poll showed a divided Democratic electorate with the possibility of a racially polarizing promary between Baltimore mayor Martin O'Malley and former NAACP head Kweisi Mfume--this in a state where Repubs won the governorship in 2002 and performed more strongly than expected for much of the 2004 presidential race.
And then there's the case of Robert Byrd, who, from all outward signs, is planning on standing for a ninth term in 2006. Byrd has never been seriously challenged. But WV has drifted considerably to the right in the last eight years. Byrd certainly can't be considered safe.
Political conditions, obviously, can change a lot in 22 months. But as things stand now, it's hard to see a major shift, one way or the other, in midterm Senate elections.
Update, 7.33pm: NCEC is out with its Senate races to watch; it too sees tough sledding ahead for the Dems, especially Minnesota's Mark Dayton. (Dayton is the senator who shut down his Capitol Hill office a couple of weeks before Election Day.) It lists RI as a Dem possibility, but only if Lincoln Chafee loses a primary, which I don't foresee.
Narrowing the Definition of Plagiarism ?...
At my age, the familiar often looks pretty good and the innovative is often suspect. So, I look on the American Historical Association's new Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct with some skepticism. It comes in the wake of headlining scandals several years ago and the decision by the AHA's Professional Division that its energies are better directed at education than at adjudicating charges of professional misconduct.
I'm generally prepared to defer to the expertise of my professional colleagues who probably understand these things better than I do. There have been widespread discussions of these matters and the new Standards were approved by the Professional Division in December 2004 and adopted by the AHA's Council, meeting in Seattle, in January 2005. But I have a question about the new Standards' definition of plagiarism.
The definition of plagiarism with which I am familiar is one close, if not identical, to one found in a standard dictionary. These are from Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary (1988): "plagiarism ... 1: an act or instance of plagiarizing 2: something plagiarized" and plagiarize ... vb 1: to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one's own: use (a created production) without crediting the source ... vi: to commit literary theft: present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source." (p. 898)
What surprises me in the new Statement on Standards, as it surprised me in Peter Charles Hoffer's otherwise fine articles about plagiarism in the AHA's Perspectives (here, here, and here), is that the definition of plagiarism seems to have been narrowed to the theft of words. How, why, when, and where did that happen? More importantly, is this a step in the right direction? Or, is it merely an a further accommodation to the adjudicatory problem?
I understand that, while often time-consuming, the trace of stolen words is considerably more secure evidence of theft than the trace of stolen ideas. But isn't the theft of an idea even more egregious than the uncredited borrowing of a few phrases? Let me cite an example from my own field, American religious history. I published a piece at HNN some time ago which was rather harshly critical of Christine Heyerman's Bancroft Prize winning book, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (1998). Much of Heyerman's argument relied on a point made about 18th and 19th century evangelical preachers in North America by Jon Butler's Awash in a Sea of Faith (1990). Butler observed and demonstrated that they commonly gulled their listeners into believing that they possessed magical shaman-like powers, capable of casting out demons and even controlling the weather. In her book, Heyerman pursued the same theme and, rightly, credited her interest in it to Butler's book. Thus, under a traditional definition of plagiarism, she was clearly on solid ground. Indeed, my criticism of her work was not that she had plagiarized Butler's idea, but in some ways just the reverse -- that she had cherry-picked and misconstrued her primary sources in order to find evidence that sustained the argument she acknowledged borrowing from him.
But, what if she had not cited Butler's Awash in a Sea of Faith as the source of her determination to find evidence of evangelical preachers claiming to be able to cast out demons and control the elements? What if, as I believed then and believe now, Butler's insight had not only found its way into her book, but had actually driven much of her research agenda? Wouldn't a failure to cite Butler's book as the source of her inspiration have been an outrageous breach of good faith?
My concern here is obviously not to berate Christine Heyerman yet one more time. I've already declared her innocent of any charge of the theft of an idea. My concern here is for that busy community college instructor, or graduate school professor, who receives a well argued and well written paper from a student, or even that professional peer reader of a book manuscript or a reviewer of a published work, for that matter, but who recognizes that the primary idea behind the work relies in large part on the insight of an earlier historian. Under the AHA's new definition of plagiarism, what ground does the reader have for saying: this work commits an act of plagiarism? I understand that genuinely new ideas are rare and that tracing their lineage is sometimes a complicated challenge, but if the AHA's new Standards do not preserve our obligation to acknowledge the inspiration and insight of those who've pioneered innovative ideas and inspired our work, they will have done us a disservice.
Addendum: Another case in point would be Diane McWhorter's Pulitzer Prize winning book, Carry Me Home, about the civil rights movement in Birmingham. When it was published, there was considerable back-and-forth among civil rights historians about what appeared to be McWhorter's fairly niggling citations to the work of two earlier historians of the movement there. It seemed fairly obvious that she had made use of their work at key points -- she would have been foolish not to -- but there was little accrediting of it. There was no obvious lifting of language, however. Attorneys were consulted and they made a decision not to press charges. Under the AHA's new standards, there is no adjudicating agency other than the courts, because McWhorter is not employed as a faculty member.
On further reflection, Sharon Howard's comment leads me to think that the new Standards statement may be an improvement on the old "words and ideas" definition of plagiarism. There are many things that one might use without proper attribution, such as research findings, that don't seem to fit comfortably under a definition of "ideas."
Friday, January 28, 2005
The Contract Conspiracy ...
When my colleague, Jonathan Reynolds, posted here about College Attendance and Public Education, both Inside HigherEd and the Little Professor linked to his post. The lively discussion here about attendance policies in the college classroom moved toward a discussion of whether the class syllabus is rightly understood as a contract.
Thinking that the discussion could use some good legal advice, I wrote to both Jonathan's less good looking brother, Glenn, and to Eugene Volokh of The Volokh Conspiracy. Both of them are very busy and smart professors of law, so I was fortunate to get an answer from Volokh. With his permission and his caveat that this is his "quick-and-dirty" take on the issue, here is his answer:
the short answer is that the syllabus almost certainly isn't a contract, because it wouldn't be understood as intending to create a binding promise -- only a general plan that it's understood the instructor can deviate from. Simple analogy: Say that you promise an article for a symposium, and you say you'll say X. Then you realize that X isn't quite right, so you instead say X'. Now the symposium editor might be within his legal rights to refuse your submission; but he surely can't sue you for breaching your contract to write something that says X. And that's because your statement, even if it's in writing and in some detail, is an expression of your plan, not your promise.How that might affect an attendance policy, Volokh does not say. Presumably, however, the syllabus itself and whatever it in particular might say about attendance, would not be considered to have the binding effect of a contract.
More Noted ...
The internet may be getting too close to home. Sepoy tells the story at Chapati Mystery.
Yesterday, I cited misteraitch's alphabets of human figures. At Rhine River, Nathanael Robinson reproduces a 19th century map of Europe in human figures. Fascinating detail.
Wen Stephenson's "The Amazing True Story of the Liberal Evangelical ... and his mission to save the Democrats from themselves" for the Boston Globe features Jim Wallis, the founder of the Sojourners Community. Their website includes his recent appearances on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Terry Gross's Fresh Air. While I'm on the subject, here's another bash at the stereotype that evangelicals can't laugh at themselves: the Wittenburg Door. It's the evangelicals' Mad Magazine.
Congratulations to the folks at Liberty & Power and Jason Kuznicki who's just joined them. We know Jason, who is a graduate student in French intellectual history at Johns Hopkins, from his excellent blog, Positive Liberty. Jason is a smart guy. Like some of our other friends at L & P, he was hit in the head with an Ayn Rand brickbat when he was just a kid, but he's more interested these days in the French and Scottish enlightenments.
Past Tense Echoes
So, what happens when you take a country -- wracked by underfunded central government, armed and disorderly forces, natural disasters, old-regime loyalists, separatists, foreign predation (often under the guise of foreign investment) legitimized by international law and treaty, with no common ideology or civil culture -- out of autocracy and give it a dynamic republican form of government? It's very important to hold elections, obviously, and to have a leader capable of appealing to many constituencies and making tough decisions. Sound familiar?
It should. It's China, 1912.
Yuan Shikai, China's first premier (Sun Yat-sen was elected president nearly simultaneously by his revolutionary friends, but abdicated that position in favor of national unity and actual electoral tactics), a popular military figure who had been involved in the suppression of both the anti-foreign Boxer rebellion and the pro-reform 100 Days clique, was dragged out of retirement to oversee a very substantial set of national reforms: judicial reform, Prison-building and reform, "compulsory and free" primary education including both modern and traditional elements, Agricultural investment including irrigation and flood control, transport and technology investment, currency reform and opium suppression.
Oh, he also was responsible for the assassination of the leader of the largest party in the newly elected National Assembly -- the Guomindang [GMD/Nationalists]'s Song Jiaoren -- following which his troops attacked GMD groups, on charges of treason and rebellion purged GMD members and associates from the assembly, then forced the inquorate body to revise the constitution to give him greater powers. His government, with no domestic revenues to speak of (even import tariffs were out of his control, paying off the interest on foreign debts like the Boxer indemnity) relied almost exclusively on foreign loans for operating revenue, and on bribery and threat of force for legislative support.
Yuan's government was nonetheless recognized as legitimate by most of the foreign powers that mattered -- after he promised each of them significant concessions, mostly in the form of relinquishing Chinese claims to influence over border regions (Britain wanted Tibet; Russia wanted Mongolia; Japan wanted more northern railway rights; the US wanted to Christianize China) in secret agreements.
Yuan barely keeps Chinese sovereignty alive in the face of Japan's attempt in 1915 to turn it into a protectorate ("Twenty-One Demands"), then decides to declare himself Emperor. Anti-imperial generals force him into retirement; pro-Qing dynasty generals attempt a restoration of the old regime; anti-imperial generals force the Qing child emperor back into retirement, and warlordism breaks out. The warlords varied: "the warlord of Shanxi, Yan Xishan... stated proudly, [that] he had constructed a virtually perfect ideology to run Shanxi province, one that combined the best features of 'militarism, nationalism, anarchism, democracy, capitalism, communism, individualism, imperialism, universalism, paternalism and utopianism.'"*
It would be three decades before China was whole again, or nearly so, under Communist rule.
I prefaced my lecture by pointing out that the chapter should be subtitled "how Yuan Shikai ruined everything," but that the preexisting instabilities mitigated against making that conclusion too strongly. It's conceivable that a more honest and humble person could have shepherded China through the sensitive transition, but only barely (it's more likely if the 100 Days reforms hadn't been squashed in 1898, but that's water under the bridge). We finished up class noting that the echoes to Iraq were unmistakable, but that none of us really could say with any certainty that Iraq was on China's path.
Fellow Marylander and new Liberty&Power contributor Jason Kuznicki draws some other very disturbing parallels. Not to Iraq, necessarily, but if I give it away you'll not forgive me. Really.
* material in this post comes from Chapter 12 of Jonathan Spence's The Search for Modern China. The quotation is from page 284.
Thursday, January 27, 2005
Noted Here and There ...
Today is the 60th Anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. At Respectful Insolence, Orac meditates on his own encounters with Holocaust Denial. At Early Modern Notes, Sharon Howard has other appropriate links.
At Mode for Caleb, Caleb McDaniel observes that "we're all abolitionists now." This is the first of his two part series, Antislavery Scripts.
The post-election re-orientation of Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo is a small measure of the importance of the forthcoming struggle over the "privatization" of Social Security in the United States. His excellent liberal political blog has become a single issue blog, relentlessly tracking the paths of members of Congress on the issue. Daily, he tracks Republican members of the Conscience Caucus who have reservations about privatizing Social Security and Democratic members of the Fainthearted Faction who may support it.
College Attendance and Public Ed.
A couple of weeks back, a student here at beautiful, scenic, Northern Kentucky University published a letter to the editor of our campus paper decrying any sort of attendance policy on campus. Yesterday's edition of the paper ran a response by me.
Nowadays, when faced with unapologetically absent students, I often find myself giving a mini-lecture on the subject, the key points of which more or less mirror the letter found above, and I figured that putting it into print might save me some precious time and breath over the next term or two. Notably, in the past, I didn't worry myself about such things. When I first started teaching, I never harassed students about attendance. If they didn't show it was their problem, and I figured it would almost certainly reflect in their final grade. And, in the vast majority of cases, it did.
I have, however, watched with some interest as I have become a bit more demanding about attendance every year. Part of this is because I have come to appreciate what public education means (especially as it gets less public every year), and also because I really hate to see students do poorly, and have seen the toll that the absence-ignorance-guilt-avoidance cycle takes on students who otherwise have no reason to do poorly in my classes. I guess in the end I would rather have them complain about attendance (which I calculate as part of the class participation grade) than about failing exams.
Word and Flesh ...
Misteraitch at Giornale Nuovo has a nice exhibit of alphabets composed of human figures. I learned from him that they are the inverse of calligrams, or pictures formed of words.
The relationship of word and flesh is important to me as a Christian. Our understanding of it, that the Word became uniquely Flesh once in the human experience, is probably the single thing we believe that is most offensive to my Jewish and Muslim colleagues, friends, and neighbors. I don't urge it on them. It is the most unbelievable thing that we believe, an offense to the sensibility of most other monotheists. My secular colleagues must think it quite bizarre, indeed. To know that what I believe is bizarre and offensive to others helps to curb my impulse to Christian triumphalism. There was a time, when I was quite taken with blogospheric triumphalism, represented in its own way by Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit and, quite differently, expounded in Adam Kotsko's memorable "There is Nothing Outside the Blog."
I don't want to write here about the Incarnation or triumphalisms of either sort, however; that can await another time and place. I was interested in two different engagements with word and flesh by my colleagues, Hugo Schwyzer and Tim Burke. Hugo has been having serious discussions with Men's Rights advocates on the west coast. He's written here about his related experience of appearing on a Men's Rights radio program in Los Angeles. He's been under severe personal attack from Men's Rights activists. Among other things, they posted photographs of Hugo, from his website to theirs, with mocking subtitles. Oddly, I had posted links to those same photographs of Hugo, but with an observation about his being perhaps the least inhibited of the Cliopatriarchs. I've felt a certain kinship with Hugo the last few days. It isn't just that we are the two most publicly Christian of the Cliopatriarchs, but also that we've both been under siege. If his critics mocked his flesh, mine mocked my name, my word. The context for flesh and of words makes all the difference.
I'm deeply disappointed by what became of the discussion of Tom Reeves's blogging and his articles at HNN. There really were reasonably interesting questions that might have been considered. First, was Tim Burke's question about proportionality. Was whatever Reeves had done worth much attention, at all; and, if he made mistakes, wouldn't they best be handled quietly and courteously? That would have been a fair point to make. Second, as Julie Kemp asked, in disgust with the barfight that had occurred, is it reasonable to extend questions about a scholar's credibility in one sphere into a question about his credibility in another? The example of Joe Ellis, best explicated so far, I think, by Peter Charles Hoffer, suggests that, while there may be a rather complicated relationship between the spheres, one can't assume that there's a simple carryover. That would be an important point to make. Thirdly, as she suggested, are blogs to be held to the same standards of accountability that print scholarship is? That, it seems to me, is clearly worth discussing. My own inclination is to say that they are, but then I have to start qualifying that because livejournaling is clearly not intended as scholarship and there needs to be room for public airing of half-baked ideas that might become something. Those are serious questions, worth serious discussion, but all the interesting questions got short-circuited by half-baked accusations.
Still, I have hope for the blogosphere and one of the reasons I do is that historians like Tim Burke, Sharon Howard, and Mark Grimsley see it as a new step in scholarship. The virtual words may not yet be quite ready for print/flesh, but they can be a step in that direction. Burke's most recent piece at Easily Distracted, "Burke's Home for Imaginary Friends", grows from a presentation he gave to Swarthmore's faculty members about blogging. I ignore it that my reference to the fact that the Cliopatriarchs gathered in Seattle all had beards gets a "Geez" from him. This is flesh we are talking about here, Burke; not an index to the superficiality of my mind. Of the things we talked of in Seattle, the bearding was the least. More important, even most important, I think, was the enfleshment of virtual friendships and virtual words. I'd been reading Tim Burke for about two years before I met him in person and, apart from a question about his subtle sense of humor, I think the first thing I said to him was something like: "Tim, what you do on the net is so mature that it begs to be in print." The virtual word becomes flesh and dwells among us, full of grace and truth.
Wednesday, January 26, 2005
Rice and Gonzales
Two interesting--and historically significant--votes in the Senate today. Thirteen Dems voted against the confirmation of Condoleeza Rice as Secretary of State--the highest number ever to vote against a nominee for the position during the last 100 years.* And in a straight party-line vote, the Judiciary Committee forwarded Alberto Gonzales' name to the Senate by a 10-8 margin. While Judiciary's Dems are more liberal than the party as a whole, the tally suggests that perhaps 35-40 senators will vote against Gonzalez in the final tally.
Along with Defense and Treasury, State and the AG round out the big four of cabinet offices. To have nominees to both positions attract such strong opposition, simultaneously, is unprecedented.
What criteria is the Senate supposed to use in evaluating cabinet nominees? Article II, Section 2, which addresses the issue, includes cabinet officials with judges and treaties in the "advice and consent" clause, but, in practice, the Senate has tended to give Presidents greater leeway regarding cabinet officials than on judicial appointments or treaties, which are, after all, of a more permanent nature.
The Rice and Gonzales appointments are somewhat unusual in that both have been implicated in what appear to be policy errors--assuming that WMDs existed in Iraq, saying it was OK to not follow the Geneva Convention for the Gitmo prisoners--during the administration's first term. Moreover, as Andrew Sullivan has argued most persuasively, Gonzales' nomination almost certainly will have negative international ramifications, in that it will be interpreted as US confirmation of approving torture. In this respect, the closest historical comparison is Richard Nixon's decision to elevate Henry Kissinger to be secretary of state in 1973; Kissinger attracted seven negative votes, despite intense opposition in the Senate to many of the foreign policy decisions with which Kissinger was associated. On the other hand, Kissinger was perceived as having a more flexible intellect than Rice has demonstrated.
Do these tallies, however, suggest that we'll see a more robust Congress over the next couple of years? I doubt it. Perhaps the most troubling comment of the debate came from John McCain, hardly a Bush lackey. The Arizona senator questioned the need for a debate on Rice, since she was certain of confirmation. "So I wonder why we are starting this new Congress with a protracted debate about a foregone conclusion. I can only conclude that we are doing this for no other reason than because of lingering bitterness over the outcome of the election." Quite possibly so--but the partisanship in both of these votes is on both sides, since it would be hard to make a case that either Rice or Gonzales did particularly good jobs in the positions that they previously occupied.
The theory that the Senate--of all bodies--should bypass debate on issues that enjoy overwhelming support suggests how different Congress has become in recent years, with less and less support in either body, and especially the Senate, for defending the institutional prerogatives that received strong backing (depending on the issue, variously from right and left in the Senate) during the 1960s and 1970s.
*-In the 19th century, Henry Clay attracted more votes against his confirmation (and, as Richard Henry Morgan points out in comments), a much higher percentage of senators voted against Clay. The position of Secretary of State, however, was much different at the time--as much a foreign policy position as a stepping stone to the presidency.
On the Fear of Suits ...
On the wall, next to my desk, hangs a picture of me from Durham, North Carolina's Morning Herald. It's dated Friday, 16 March, 1962. The young fellow in that newspaper clipping is holding open the Exit Door to Durham's Carolina Theater and a group of African American students are shown rushing through that door. Subsequently, about thirty of us were sued by the Carolina Theater's management. $30,000 was the demand, as I recall. More money in those days than it is now. And I had nothing but a B. A. from Duke to pay for it.
We'd been picketing the Carolina and Center theaters in downtown Durham for a year before that picture appeared in the newspaper. We succeeded in closing down the Jim Crow entrance to the segregated balconies to the theaters, but Durham's white residents and, even, some of my fellow Duke students crossed our picket lines to pay for access to the main auditorium. Even some Duke students from the North – even those who scorned Durham as "the armpit of the universe" – even one who later became a Democrat Lieutenant Governor of New York state – even he crossed our picket lines. Finally, we decided to bring our challenge to the segregation in Durham's theaters to a crisis. The Carolina Theater was the more vulnerable of the two theaters because it was housed in a city-owned building. As I recall, it occupied the rear of Durham's city hall.
Student leaders at Durham's North Carolina College organized a mass meeting of their fellow students and, together, we marched from NCC into downtown Durham. Hundreds of them lined up at the white box office to ask for tickets. When each of them was refused, they had a series of questions to ask the ticket agent. The line of African American students waiting to buy tickets and ask questions ran around the entire block on which the Carolina Theater stood – in the process, circling city hall, as well. The Carolina Theater's management moved the sale of tickets into the theater lobby and admitted only white patrons into the lobby.
The movement in Durham had a number of white supporters, like me. So, some of them went into the lobby and purchased tickets. Instead of using the tickets, they left the theater and gave the tickets to about a dozen of the African American students. My appointed task was to stand at the exit door and, when the first of those students in line around the theater, to hold it open for them. When I did, they scattered into the theater and dispersed through the audience. The theater management then had to decide whether to interrupt the movie and close down for the night or let it run, despite the desegregation. They let it run.
It was unusually cool for a March night in Durham and the newspaper picture shows me wearing a jacket and gloves. Kidding me, my friends said that I had the gloves on so that my fingerprints could not be taken from the theater's door. Later, on a related matter, I would be finger-printed by the police in Durham, but the newspaper photograph was probably good enough evidence that I was the one who held the door open for African American students to rush into the Carolina's auditorium. And I was named in the Carolina Theater management's civil suit for $30,000 in damages.
The civil suit was later quashed. The police charges against me that led to my finger printing were for driving an automobile registered in Kentucky with a Kentucky driver's license while living in North Carolina. While I was being finger printed, the officer who was taking my prints asked me why I had gotten involved in the demonstrations at the Carolina Theater. Eventually, on appeal, those charges would be nol prosed. But they were not finally dropped until I had been repeatedly arrested on them and done two short tours of duty in Durham's city jail. I sat up most of one of those nights with a man charged with breaking and entering. He wanted to talk about John Paul Sartre. I didn't much care to go to sleep. Another of my jail mates was charged with repeatedly molesting his daughter.
I've thought about those experiences many times in recent years. I've thought about my vow to go back to jails and help teach their inmates to read. When I was denied tenure at Antioch, I called the federal pen here in Atlanta to volunteer to teach classes of inmates. The telephone tree was so impossible to get through that I finally gave up trying. But, more than that, I've thought about what the fear of suits does to us. I've thought about what it has done to the AHA. It no longer inquires into accusations of violations of professional ethics and the major reason that is usually given is the fear of suits. For a couple of bucks a year on our membership dues, the AHA could insure itself against such suits, but it hasn't done so. A number of us here at HNN have sat in righteous judgment of the AHA for its craven abandon of adjudicating professional behavior. But, when the chips are down, the fear of suits makes cravens of us all. Just be sure you've got your gloves on when the news photographer takes your picture.
Speechwriting 101 ...
Of all the commentaries on President Bush's second inaugural address, David Kipen's "To Quote Bush, Being Original is Hard Work" in the San Francisco Chronicle strikes me as the most interesting.
There was a time, says Kipen, when speechwriters would "strive for the rhythm, cadence and crescendo that would singe a line into everlasting memory." But, in recent years, memorable lines with any hint of originality have had a way of haunting presidents: Bush I's "a kinder, gentler nation" or Bush II's "compassion." Thus, a speechwriter is very likely to create a text that rings with the familiar and unobjectionable. The art of presidential speechwriting has become the art of crafting a text "so inert that we don't even have to forget it, because we hardly hear it the first time."
Like Kipen, I'm not particularly interested in Bush-bashing here. In fact, I've made a somewhat similar point in reference to Martin Luther King's work. King's obviously someone I'm more sympathetic to than Bush. But King's example suggests that, even though we're obliged to call a student's plagiarism, there's a side of us that prefers that their papers ring with the familiar, because we suspect that they're not ready to produce credible originality. And, somehow they know that, and the short cut to credible familiarity is plagiarism.
The canons of public speech are obviously different than the canons of term papers and dissertations. Kipen does a good job of sourcing George Bush's second inaugural address. Its only attributed quote is from Lincoln: "Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and under the rule of a just God cannot long retain it" Lincoln was speaking of American slaveholders, with whom he would soon have a confrontation; Bush was speaking of despots abroad. We'll see what comes of that. The other Lincoln allusion modified the Emancipator's: "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy." Bush's abbreviated version ran: "no one is fit to be a master and no one deserves to be a slave." Who could object to that? No one's likely to fling it back at him, unless you know that mastery and slavery come in many forms.
Bush's "By making every citizen an agent of his or her own destiny we will give our fellow Americans greater freedom from want and fear" obviously relies on Franklin Roosevelt's Four Freedom's – though oddly missing speech and worship – in a pious address that re-iterated the call for freedom 27 times. Bush's "Self-government relies, in the end, on the governing of the self." There, he relies on George Santayana, only secondarily Michael Foucault. I suspect Bush would prefer not to rely on Michael Foucault. "Freedom Now" the movement said and the line about history not running on "wheels of inevitability" -- well, that one comes from Martin Luther King's "Letter from the Birmingham Jail": "human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability." Maybe Condoleezza Rice suggested it. She was born in Birmingham and was nine years old when King went to jail there.
Finally, there's Bush's "When the Declaration of Independence was first read in public and the Liberty Bell was sounded in celebration, a witness said it rang as if it meant something." Kipen gets it wrong in attributing that one to Henry Clay Watson's The Old Bell of Independence; or, Philadelphia in 1776 (1852). Chronological priority credits it to George Lepard's Legends of the American Revolution (1847) and, as my colleague, Jonathan Dresner, pointed out, it didn't happen anyway. But even if it didn't happen, the Liberty Bell rings with the familiar "from every mountainside" and you won't find a memorable original line in George Bush's second inaugural address.
Bring it to the masses
It's nothing new -- hasn't been for decades -- to say that we live in an era of mass consumption. But there keep being new and different variations, which are interesting. David Nishimura, one of my favorite (i.e. most useful) bloggers for his tireless scouring of news sources for historical interest items, notes two new examples, though he hasn't tied them together yet:
- Russia is selling off WWII memorabilia. Not pins and caps, but
Maksim machineguns, 76mm ZiS-3 field guns, PPSH sub-machineguns and T-34 tanks. . . For the more ambitious there are T-54 tanks, built in the immediate post-war period and used to defeat the Hungarian uprising in 1956, and even Soviet-era submarines. . . While it has not yet published a price list, it is likely to sell rifles and pistols for a few hundred pounds each. Tanks in good working order are expected to cost upwards of £10,000. . . The company is also selling German and Allied equipment captured during the war or received as part of the Lend Lease programme.
The materiel is "decomissioned" but Nishimura is concerned about whether that really means "unusable." - CostCo is selling art, but Nishimura notes that it's not very good, nor is it likely to revolutionize the art business, which still limits access to good stuff by personal connections. His tips on buying good art are interesting, if a bit of an abstraction for me.
- Nishimura also notes this story of an archaeological find nearly obliterated by the desire to avoid archaeological delays. We really do need to explain to the public better why history and historical preservation and archives are important. But you'd think a city which survives largely on government and historical tourism would get it.
- And here's a link to one of many stories about the second revelation of a conservative columnist taking money to even more strongly support programs they probably would have supported anyway. For the record, nobody pays me anything to do this. Nothing. I don't get any credit, little glory, and I expose myself to the world, professionally and personally. What do I have to do to change that?
- Jonathan Spence takes a look at the ill fate which befalls so many reformers in Chinese history, and which befalls so many of their malefactors, which is why China's leaders are still nervous about the funeral arrangements for Zhao Ziyang.
- And Paul Starr argues that
Democrats were right to challenge segregation and racism, support the revolution in women's roles in society, to protect rights to abortion and to back the civil rights of gays. But a party can make only so many enemies before it loses the ability to do anything for the people who depend on it. For decades, many liberals thought they could ignore the elementary demand of politics - winning elections - because they could go to court to achieve these goals on constitutional grounds.
In other words, being right is fine. As long as you don't care about being popular. Starr argues that sacrificing right for popular is worth it. I'm not convinced. - US history textbooks too liberal? Facts getting in the way of your neo-conservative or neo-Christian agenda? Try this. Much like Malkin's work, it's being flogged by Fox and related institutions, so it's going to be popular whether or not it's any good.
- Taking it away from the masses: The New York Times no longer includes the "mail full text" option in their e-mail story page. That makes it considerably less useful for me, since their links are only available free for a limited time.
Tuesday, January 25, 2005
More Noted ...
I thought poor Tom Reeves and I were under attack. Then, I read Hugo Schwyzer's incoming e-mail, which begins: "Whether you are an evil man or merely a wretched brainwashed void I do not know." It goes on from there ...
While Derek Catsam was over here at Cliopatria yesterday, dressing the lowest sort of demagoguery as if it were the Queen of Sheba, Naomi Chana announced her engagement at Baraita. Thus ends all hope of happiness for him in Odessa, Texas. Sad, sad. Nothing like a good Texas bar fight to help recover from unrequited love. But, seriously folks, Cliopatria wishes all the best to Naomi Chana and some very lucky man.
In the Jewish and Israeli Blog Awards, Chana's Baraita is nominated for Best Religious Blog (Group A) and Chana's post "In Which I Am Intense" is nominated for Best Post (Group B). Jonathan Edelstein's Head Heeb is nominated for Best Political Blog; and the Velveteen Rabbi is nominated for Best Religious Group Blog, Group B.
Several of my colleagues and many graduate and post-doctoral students across the country are in the midst of their job searches. Caleb McDaniel at Mode for Caleb and Jason Kuznicki at Positive Liberty reflect on that in light of articles in the current issue of the AHA's Perspectives. The news is not good. Beyond Academe comes recommended; and, clearly, if graduate programs in history are to serve their students well, they need to gear up job placement vehicles for the non-academic, as well as the academic worlds.
My colleague, Manan Ahmed, says he thinks the idea of a Cliopatria Tournament of Books would be "gleefully awesome." Perhaps so, if one of my colleagues agrees to arrange it here. Sharon Howard has me down to host the Second History Carnival in the next ten days. That's right, slap some lipstick on that pig of a post, you history geeks, and send me your best. We'll see if Manan wouldn't like to put the Cliopatria Tournament of Books together.
We all owe Jonathan Dresner a big round of applause for imposing some order on Cliopatria's History Blogroll. It was something like trying to cut watermelon with a pizza, I think he said. If you've not yet seen it, do have a look. You could practically move in over there. It grows as we continue to "discover" new history blogs. Ohio State's Mark Grimsley gently chides me for using that expression, as if I'm some European explorer and he's a native American being "discovered." After all, he's been on the net as long as Cliopatria has. So, point taken. Still, there is that awesome moment of mutual discovery. I'll never forget finding Tim Burke's Easily Distracted and trying to figure out what he was about, or Sharon Howard's Early Modern Notes, or Sepoy's Chapati Mystery, or Hugo Schwyzer's Hugo Schwyzer. I remember Sepoy asking "How did you find me?" And the truth was that I couldn't recall, but boy am I glad we did. You can go on your own voyage of discovery at Cliopatria's History Blogroll. And, if you know of some history blogger out there on the net that we aren't yet connected with, please make a note of it in comments at the bottom of the page.
Monday, January 24, 2005
The prof stumbles on the air
As I've posted over at my own blog, I was a guest on Glenn Sacks radio program yesterday. I don't know if any of my fellow Cliopatriarchs or their loyal readers have been guests on radio programs, but it's a most unsatisfying experience.
Most of us who have spent much time in the classroom are adept at timing our lectures. For example, if I'm lecturing on the French Revolution in a class that lasts 75 minutes, I'm pretty darned clear on how to pace things so that by the time the dismissal time arrives, I've made my main points and given the students a (it is to be hoped) tantalizing hint of where the next meeting's lecture will go. Similarly, when asked a question by a student, I don't expect him or her to cut me off, telling me that we've got to head to a comercial break. In the classroom, I get to dictate the pace (and like so many of my colleagues -- you know exactly who you are --I tend to go off on some fairly odd and lengthy tangents!)
It's absolutely maddening to not be able to say everything one would like to say in the way one would like to say it. Yesterday, on the radio show, I was reduced to offering up desperate soundbites that I hoped would be memorable and accurate. I haven't felt under such pressure since my oral qualifiying exams a dozen years ago! In a way, it reminded me of how exceptionally privileged those of us who teach truly are. Though we've all surely had experiences with difficult and combative students, it's rare that we are not the ones controlling the rhythm, the tempo and the end time of our lectures. In that sense, it's refreshingly humbling to be "brought low" at the hands of a deft and argumentative talk show host!
Anyone else have any experiences along this line?
Noted Here and There ...
Shola Adeneken's "Academics Give Lessons on Blogs" for the BBC News features Esther Maccallum-Stewart of Sussex University and her blog, Break of Day in the Trenches or What a Lovely War.
Ohio State's Mark Grimsley finds that blogging is a new step in scholarship. Not only does he have a first rate military history blog, War Historian, but he's launched a new group venture, Civil Warriors, with some of his graduate students. His posts are fascinating material: a frank discussion about publications and the professional stuggle upwards; and how blogging on Counterfactuals and Contingency led to an article on "Second-Guessing Bobby Lee: A Counterfactual Assessment of Lee's Generalship During the Overland Campaign."
Update at 4:37 p.m.: I want it known that I was up all night last night reading page proofs of "Murder and Biblical Memory: The Legend of Vernon Johns" against this morning's deadline. It will be the lead article in the Spring issue of the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography. And the great Reeves debate has kept me up all day, too. If I've been grumpy, that's part of the reason, and I apologize for my grumpiness. This evening, I expect to go to bed; but, just between you and me, the article is brilliant.
Sunday, January 23, 2005
Why You Aren't Being Misled by Thomas C. Reeves ...
Well, the main reason, obviously, is that you are not reading him. Although he has at least one admirer, most reasonable people stopped doing that quite some time ago. I was the first person to welcome him to the "HNN roster of blogs", but, after this, I'll join them.
Let it be said that Tom Reeves is the author of nearly a dozen books. They include biographies of Chester A. Arthur, John Kennedy, Joseph McCarthy, and Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, a twentieth century American history textbook, and studies of religion in America. That publication record might justify HNN in giving him a platform. I understand that HNN's Rick Shenkman wanted a conservative American political historian to blog here in the 2004 election year to balance Alan Lichtman's liberal political commentary.
But consider this: After teaching at the University of Wisconsin, Parkside, for 31 years, Tom Reeves retired in 2001. He marked his retirement with this bitter diatribe against his institution and his former students. HNN might have taken note when his six former colleagues signed a reply which said, in part, "Every paragraph [of his article] is replete with false, erroneous, misleading or outdated information."
In Rick's defense, even I had forgotten that exchange, until I came across this comment by Michael Meo on Tom Reeves's HNN blog. Michael wrote:
I am aghast to record here that the reference this writer provides to ‘solid studies' to support his encomium of school uniforms turns out to be dominated by authors and studies that find no correlation between school uniforms and any of the wonderful things this author claims they promote.How many times does a historian have to be accused publicly by his colleagues and peers of lying about how many subjects before his credibility on every subject is suspect? Reeves never replied to his former colleagues' accusations. He systemically ignores comments on his blog and probably still doesn't even realize that he's been corrected by Michael Meo.*
In other words, Mr. Reeves says, for supporting evidence look here, and when you do you find it says he's wrong.
Is there any reason to believe that Tom Reeves did credible work in his books, when he has misrepresented primary and secondary sources repeatedly at HNN? Since 2002, HNN has refused to publish Michael Bellesiles's op-eds circulated by History News Service because Bellesiles's credibility had been destroyed. I don't know whether HNN would publish an op-ed by John Lott. But in repeatedly publishing articles by Tom Reeves and then giving him a blog, HNN has raised up its own credibility problem. The problem isn't that Tom Reeves is a conservative. ....
*My kinder, gentler [and, what the heck, smarter] colleague, Tim Burke, suggests that I simply send Tom Reeves a careful, courteous e-mail, pointing out Michael Meo's corrective to his post. Reeves is retired and has no published e-mail address. From my point of view, Reeves has already been told in comments on his blog. It is only his arrogant ignorance of his audience that may prevent his knowing it.
Update: Subsequent to posting this, I have received an e-mail address for Tom Reeves from a private source. I have sent a link to this post to that e-mail address.
Kikuyu Revisionism
It's not often that a history dissertation makes national news, but a book which came out of a Ph.D. thesis was featured on Weekend All Things Considered yesterday. Caroline Elkins, assistant professor at my alma mater department (which has hired and even tenured some fantastic female historians in the last few years), did her research on the last decades of British rule in Kenya (that's the 1950s and 1960s, for those of us not up on African decolonization), particularly on their treatment of Kikuyu peoples after the radical Mau Mau attacks on white settlers. Among the points made in her interview:
- The Mau Mau attacks, while vicious, were grossly overstated in the British press, which based their reportage on British government sources, resulting in a popular image of the Mau Mau attacks as much more widespread and damaging than they actually were
- The British response was to screen 1.2 million Kikuyu people for Mau Mau sympathies, which involved dislocating them -- sometimes for years -- and interrogating them.
- British claims of "civilizing mission" were grossly contradicted by their treatment of Kikuyu moderates, including Jomo Kenyatta, and the long-term damage done to the population by the heavy-handed, decade-long "state of emergency."
The road to stardom is not direct, though: Prof. Elkins' research was also the subject of a BBC documentary. So you might still need a good publicist if you want to make it on to NPR.
[They also had a story on composer Philip Glass's attempt at Ancient Mesoamerican Music. Maybe the Toltecs would have enjoyed it. But they're dead now.]
Non Sequitur: The World Economic Forum in Davos has a blog which is apparently for use by some/all/many? of the participants. [via Rebecca MacKinnon]
Blogging: Community and Consciousness ...
I'm obviously intrigued by the virtual community and communities created in the blogosphere. I think that I found one here. For others, it appears to offer the opportunity to extend real community into a virtual future. Two small examples of blogs that seem to serve that function are Big Tent and Outside Report. In both cases, a group of friends near the end of their time together in school and begin to disperse across the country. A shared blog allows them, amidst increasingly complex and pre-occupied lives, to extend their community into the future in ways that letters, telephone calls, and, even, e-mail don't do quite as well anymore. The fascinating thing about blogs, however, is that the shared community of earlier experience together is then opened to strangers. No doubt, when that happens, there may be unwelcome intrusions. But, more importantly, it makes possible the meeting of interesting people with common interests.
Some years ago, when I was still in the classroom, one of my favorite books to read with students was Robert Wiebe's The Search for Order, 1877-1920. It's a brilliant work, I think, about American history in the period, but its sense of far-reaching social change has implications that range far beyond the borders of the United States and beyond the scope of its period. Wiebe argues, essentially, that the coming of the railroad to "island communities" scattered across the American countryside foretold vast social change of unforeseen consequence. It both put those isolated communities in vital touch with larger worlds beyond them and made them dependent upon its scheduling and its economic requirements. One consequence of that was to create virtual communities of professional interest that in many ways displaced communities of geographical propinquity.
Wiebe is one of those historians, like Garry Wills, whose work so profoundly influenced me that there've been times when I thought I needed to exorcize his influence over me. And, yet, when I think about how my life is lived, I cannot help but think that Wiebe understood it profoundly. I barely know the names of some people who live on the same block with me here in Atlanta. We have the occasional block party, but they repeat their names to me every year and I immediately forget them, because we have little in common besides geographical propinquity. Beyond my immediate family, my community of interest is with those of shared professional or vocational interest.
It's no coincidence that American professional organizations like the American Bar Association, the American Historical Association, the American Medical Association, and many others all began in the period about which Wiebe writes. I'm sure that an Early Modern historian or an Asian historian might frame the discussion in slightly different terms. The creation of print media or of ocean-worthy ships might be the focal social changing innovation of choice for other historians. Even so, the pattern of things seems almost inexorable. If our communities are increasingly virtual ones, they might even challenge the divisions of race or nation or religion.
But I want to return to my earlier point about blogging and the virtual community of history blogging. There's a fascinating point at which Cliopatria's and, then, Big Tent's, chez Nadezhda's and Early Modern Notes's discovery of Mark Grimsley's War Historian becomes known to all four of us. At Big Tent, Tom Bruscino's prior interest in military history means that he knows something about what Grimsley is about, but Cliopatria's and chez Nadezhda's finding his blog and Early Modern Notes's featuring it in the History Carnival causes Grimsley's readership to spike and for good reason.
What kind of military historian features pictures of Robert E. Lee and Che Guevara on his blog's masthead; and what kind of military historian talks about a "post-colonial military history"? This is intriguing stuff! Even to those of us not ordinarily moved by guns and battles. Here's a military historian asking big, interesting questions of his special field; and answering them in ways that would interest all of us. Here's the kind of military historian who even the University of Michigan might want to lure. And he freely and generously shares of himself at War Historian. I'm making copies of his "‘Thieves, Murderers, and Trespassers': The Mythology of Sherman's March" and passing them out to all my neighbors here in Atlanta. Maybe I'll get to know them better. As Ben Wolfson said at The Weblog on Friday, "I confess that life is awesome."
Saturday, January 22, 2005
For your convenience
Cliopatria's History Blogroll has now been divided into categories. Roughly. This means that I have now read, at least once, every blog on our blogroll. Comments, suggestions (and we're always looking for new blogs), complaints and compliments may be registered here. They may be ignored.
A thought, after cataloging: I was struck, actually, by the very large number of "academic lives" (which is, I grant you, a catch-all category), "commentary" and "historians who write about many things" (into which category Cliopatria would also surely fall), and the relative paucity of strong regional and "epochal" and event-focused blogs. Some of that is a function of our decision (so far) to leave off blogs on our main blogroll, but I do think it speaks to the relative weakness, so far, of the blogosphere as a professional venue for historians. This is not yet the venue of choice for serious discussions. I think that can, and should, and will change, but we're not there yet.
Conservatives on Bush's Inaugural ...
On Richard Jensen's Conservativenet, there's been considerable comment about Bush's inaugural address and reactions to it. Matthew Richter, a graduate student in comparative literature and intellectual history at Columbia, was most critical. "Given that his 1st Inaugural was so good," said Richer, "I was surprised that this speech was so bad, even occasionally inscrutable. Its religiosity lacked any sense of modesty. It was messianic, almost megalomaniacal. Does our livelihood really depend on our ability to spread liberty to the backwaters of Asia and Africa? Hard to believe he had just sworn an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution."
Ken Heineman, a Contributing Editor at Cliopatria, was positively euphoric:
I was deeply moved by President Bush's address. Its beautiful language and soft-spoken, heart-felt delivery, seemed to me to be on a par with the second inaugural address of Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt's first, and John F. Kennedy's.The comment by Alonzo Hamby of Ohio University, was more measured, but it strikes me as the best positive reading of the inaugural address that I've seen.President Bush made it clear that the work he set out for us will be one spanning generations. He exhorted us to look inside ourselves for our better natures and to form communities of hope and freedom for all, regardless of nationality, race, and religion. President Bush did not declare his intention to make the world perfect--contra Noonan--but for all of us to strive to struggle against fear in an effort to make life a little better, a little freer.
I believe, as Ben Wattenberg has written, that we are the "first universal nation." Universal not just because we have within our borders people from every corner of the globe, but because our ideals are universal. And we are defined by ideals, not by race and blood. American ideals, President Bush is arguing, are worth defending, even as we struggle to live up--not always successfully--to those very same ideals.
Quite honestly, there has within my own lifetime (born in 1962) a President that I can remember who moved me as much as President Bush has, in the past and especially yesterday.
Much of the comment thus far on the inaugural could use a little perspective. Bush is hardly the first American president to proclaim the virtues of democracy. And it seems clear that he uses the word, as Americans invariably do, in the sense of liberal democracy, a creed that reconciles majority rule with individual rights. The proclamation of an American mission to spread liberal democracy in the world is often connected with Democrats such as Wilson, FDR, Truman, and Kennedy (did Bush really outbid "pay any price, bear any burden"?), but Reagan staked a Republican claim to it. Bush needs to be understood as the latest comer to a long-established rhetorical tradition.Correction and Update: I have corrected an error in my original post. Kenneth Heineman is not a former student of Alonzo Hamby. Ken's doctorate is from the University of Pittsburgh. Responding to Hamby's remarks, Cliopatria's Contributing Editor, Michael Kazin, asked:As for operational meaning, does anyone out there really think that he is going to try to overthrow the government of Pakistan? There is no reason to think that he and Condoleezza Rice do not understand the meaning of such terms as "lesser evil" or that the US in the next four years will rampage around the world. In fact, a "senior official" has identified a hit-list of the world's six most repugnant regimes that we would do well to try to change and have a clear interest in changing. No one can deny that doing something about these six is a big order that probably will not be achieved in Bush's second term, but what is the argument for ignoring them?
The realist tradition in American foreign policy has a long and honorable tradition. I happen to think that it served us pretty well during most of the Cold War, when we faced a nuclear-armed foe. But in today's world, the promotion of liberal democracy seems a pretty good strategy against Islamic terrorism. It won't be easy, but neither was nearly a half-century of containment. And, of course, we need to avoid moralistic hubris.
Let us also remember that realism has its own dark side. If asked to name the most shameful act of American foreign policy in my lifetime, I probably would refer to the decision of Brent Scowcroft and Bush 41 at the end of the Gulf War to encourage the Shia and Kurds to revolt against Saddam Hussein, then to do nothing as Saddam slaughtered them in horrific numbers. It was all about "stability," we later learned, after some embarrassing dissembling.
At this juncture, I'd rather see American foreign policy tied to the banner of liberal democracy, and I'm willing to bet that the administration can manage it intelligently.
On what evidence does Prof. Hamby base his "bet" that Bush and co. will handle an idealistic foreign policy "responsibly"? They certainly failed that test in Iraq and could easily do the same in Iran, if they follow what seems to be Cheney's desire and bomb the nuclear facilities in that nation without winning approval first from our NATO allies.For other reactions by historians, see these on HNN's mainpage.And, in my opinion, the most shameless act of US foreign policy in my lifetime was the Clinton administration's failure to intervene in Rwanda in 1994, when doing so would probably have spared hundreds of thousands of lives. And I say that as a liberal Democrat.
Keepin' My Lefties straight and My Righties honest ...
So, Tim Burke and I are walking up the street from the 2nd Annual Banquet of Cliopatriarchs toward the Convention Center in Seattle. And there's this person pamphleting the passers-by – most of whom, at that point, are historians rushing to their next session. Burke dismisses him with one of those Swattie moves. "LaRouchite," he says to me. Sounded likely, because the LaRouchies were working the corner across the street. But, being the gentle soul that I am, I take the man's leaflet and fold it into my convention program. So, today, I'm clearing out all my AHA convention stuff and I come across the man's leaflet. It promoted – not Lyndon LaRouche – but Bob Avakian's Revolutionary Communist Party, USA.
Well, you know me. I'm a Southern, white, evangelical Protestant Republican, myself. I don't have much truck with either LaRouchies or Avakinoids. But the incident reminded me of two things. The first is that Tim Burke is capable of error, except perhaps when speaking ex cathedra. Still, he's always to be read and he's got a good piece on "Liberal Life Stories" over at Easily Distracted. It responds to Errol Morris's op-ed in the New York Times, "Where's The Rest of Him." The other thing it reminded me of was that Scott McLemee would just be shocked and horrified that anyone, much less a Cliopatriarch with Burke's credentials on the Left, would mistake an Avakinoid for a LaRouchie. I don't doubt but that we'll get some learned rant from McLemee about that soon. But when we do, it's likely to appear in Inside Higher Ed, rather than in the Chronicle of Higher Ed. And, remember, you heard that here first.
I was interested in the responses of my former colleague, Michael Tinkler, and my colleagues, Tim Burke and Sharon Howard, to the Ooops Alert that I posted two days ago. I alluded to a historian/blogger's making claims about a social issue and citing, in support of his claims, studies that concluded exactly the opposite of what he said they did. Both opinionated and arrogant, this historian/blogger doesn't bother to notice his readers' comments, so he probably still does not know that he's been corrected in comments. What interested me about the comments of Michael, Sharon, Tim and others is that they were, properly speaking, blind, because I had not identified who the historian/blogger was.
It's fair to say that Michael has some pretty conservative political and professional instincts; and, essentially, he recommended that I go after this other historian/blogger. Why not go after him? On the other hand, a minor theme in my friendship with Tim Burke is his belief that I should be a nice guy. So, my friend on the Left urges me to send the historian/blogger an e-mail calling attention to his mistake. I like it that these recommendations by my peers were blind peer recommendations. As it happens, the historian/blogger in question is a prominent Right Wing historian and blind peer review worked as it should. My colleagues responded from their own understanding of how one should treat the serious error of one's peer, regardless of his or their politics.
I'm still not going to name the historian/blogger in question. But I owe you an explanation of why I've made an issue of this. The error in question was made on 12 January. It was corrected in comments three days later and I didn't notice it until four days after that. It still stands uncorrected over on his blog as I write this. I might not have made an issue of it, except that this historian is the loudest voice among HNN bloggers decrying the deterioration of standards among us. HNN, itself, and I have made much of the history scandals over the last two years. In some ways, they've been HNN's bread and butter. I want to know why this scandal continues on HNN's platform. I want to know why HNN continues to give it a platform, instead of putting this historian on its "hot seat" where he belongs.
Friday, January 21, 2005
Numbers Aren't My Strength ...
I managed to avoid college math by taking a course in logic. Like Maureen Dowd says of Condoleezza Rice, numbers aren't my strength. Dowd concludes:
It is puzzling that if you add X (no exit strategy) to Y (Why are we there?) you get W²: George Bush's second inauguration.I do better with history. But even I understand that these numbers, cited by Numeralist, are troubling:
At Condi's hearing, she justified the Bush administration's misadventures by saying history would prove it right. "I know enough about history to stand back and to recognize that you judge decisions not at the moment, but in how it all adds up," she told a skeptical Senator Biden.
Problem is, she's calculating, but she can't add. For now, Sam Cooke is right about the Bushies. They don't know much about history.
By the Numbers: The U.S. After 4 Years of BushThanks to Eric Alterman at Altercation for the tip.Poverty Rate
2000: 11.3% or 31.6 million Americans
2003: 12.5% or 35.9 million AmericansStock market
Dow Jones Industrial Average
1/19/01: 10,587.59
1/19/05: 10,539.97NASDAQ
1/19/01: 2,770.38
1/19/05: 2,073.59S&P 500
1/19/01: 1,342.54
1/19/05: 1,184.63Value of the Dollar
1/19/01: 1 Dollar = 1.06 Euros
1/19/05: 1 Dollar = 0.77 EurosBudget
2000 budget surplus $236.4 billion
2004 budget deficit $412.6 billion
That's a shift of $649 billion and doesn't include the cost of the Iraq war.Cost of the war in Iraq
$150.8 billionAmerican Casualties in Iraq
Deaths: 1,369
Wounded: 10,252The Debt
End of 2000: $5.7 trillion
Today: $7.6 trillion
That's a 4 year increase of 33%.
On some other numbers, Oliver Willis suggests that you watch this clip of Vanity Fair's Judy Bachrach trying to tell FOX News's Bridgitte Quinn how an appropriate Inaugural celebration in wartime might look.
Pardon My Fore! ...
On 24 March 1892, a Scotch golfer by the name of Alexander J. Gibson fell into a deep sleep. He didn't wake up until 25 March 2000. The world into which he woke was transformed by flat-screened television, bullet trains, women's liberation, digital watches, and a world of leisure for golf. At least, that's the story told in Golf in the Year 2000; or What We Are Coming To. The Victorian science fiction novel was written by Jay McCullough in 1892 and published under the pseudonym J.A.C.K. The rare book is being auctioned off in Scotland. Actually, McCullough's version of an under-the-ocean bullet train that reduced travel time between New York and London to three hours was a little optimistic and his notion of women's liberation that has women taking over men's jobs and, thus, freeing them to spend their leisure at golf seems, well, a little less than liberating. The Scotsman's own version of what McCullough got right about the future and what he got wrong is itself a little quaint:
WHAT J.A.C.K. GOT RIGHTThanks to MobyLives for the tip.• Flat-screen television
• Bullet trains
• Mini digital watches
• Driverless golf carts
• Unisex clothing
• Women in men's jobs
• International golf competitionsWHAT HE GOT WRONG
• Control of the weather to ensure good sporting conditions
• The exchange of dinner dress for scarlet breeches
• A society of leisure where people work less than ever
• Parliament half female (currently 18 per cent)
• A world obsessed by golf
Thursday, January 20, 2005
In Memorium
George Edward Chamberlain (b. 11 July 1917; d. 19 January 2005)
My father died yesterday. He was 88. The probable cause of death was an aneurism. He owned a rare bookstore in Scottsdale AZ called The Antiquarian (which will continue, by the way. He arranged for that.). He had been at work yesterday, in good spirits. He was having dinner with a companion. Had a bit of stomach pain. And died.
This is a history blog, so I justify my highly personal intrusion by mingling his life with his times. He was born to a ranching and banking family in the Texas panhandle. They believed in education, and a good part of the tuition for him, his brothers, and his sister came from a small cherry orchard that his mother tended. They were horrible, sour cherries, but in an age before year-round fruit, people bought them (and a lot of sugar).
Dad went to the University of Texas in the early depression. He had planned to graduate and become a lawyer, but he met my mother, Lucile Bruce, and love intervened.
They married despite her family’s objections and lived for a time in southeast Texas, where he managed an oil well unit. When World War II came, he volunteered. He went though OCS and became a lieutenant. He was stateside for most of the war, but eventually he worked his way into a combat unit. He was in a troop transport on the Pacific in early August 1945. When the Bomb’s fell, his unit was diverted to the Philippines. I believe he returned home in 1946.
His reaction to the Bomb was interesting. One time he told me that when they got the news he was disappointed that he never got a chance to be a hero. Another time he told me that he and everyone else were ecstatically happy. I’m sure both were true.
In an extremely frank moment, he told me something else. He told me that he hoped that if he became a hero that everyone would forgive his drinking. Alcoholism ran though the family. He told me he knew he was in trouble with the first sip that he ever took. The sensation he described was very different from what most people (including me, thank goodness) feel when they take a sip.
He joined AA in the late 1940s in Dallas, and with their help he quit. When I was very little, he even took me to AA meetings. (I don’t remember this clearly; I wish I did). At any rate, I was born in 1952, and I never saw him take a drink.
Unfortunately the rest of his life in the 1950s and 60s did not mirror that success. He went through a series of businesses that were increasingly unsuccessful. His best was an insurance agency. Money problems, bad relations with my mother’s family, the dynamics of an alcoholic household that don’t always stop with the drinking, these took a toll on my parent’s marriage.
By the early 1960s, Dad hit bottom in terms of how he viewed himself. His brother Kelly suggested that he start a used book store in Scottsdale. At the time it was a resort in winter and a sleepy desert town in the summer, but Kelly saw potential. Dad decided to try. He moved out there in 1963. My parents’ marriage collapsed soon after. He remarried, and Roberta turned out to be the love of his life. I remained with mother in Dallas.
Building the new store was hard. It was 1972 before he felt they had firmly turned a corner. By the 1980s, the rare books became, in terms of money, the dominant part of his store. He had become well known in book circles and was well-regarded in his community. He had finally achieved success, and he kept that for the rest of his life.
The store kept him pretty close to home, but he liked coming to Rice Lake. He liked the trees and the water. He even came up in winter a couple of times, because he liked to see the snow and the frozen lake.
His last visit in winter was at the turn of the Millennium. When I was little, I had once written something that said that I hoped that my family (or those who were still alive) would get together for that New Year’s Eve. So Dad flew up, and we spent that time together.
So many changes in his lifetime. He was born while men were fighting in trenches. His father took his family on car trips from Texas to Canada in the 1920s, and he remembered their stopping at farms and paying for a chance to wash clothes and maybe for some milk or some eggs. He was in the Texas oil business, when it was at its height. He remained an unrepentant New Deal Wallace Democrat (though he voted for Truman in 1948), and he did not like the recent trend of politics. (I’m sure he did not mind missing today’s inauguration.) Of course, the shift to the Sunbelt that has helped conservatism so much also helped to fuel his business and his success, but I’m glad I never pointed that out.
I fly down tomorrow. I’ll miss him badly, but I will always love and admire him. He was a good man, a flawed person (as we all are) who worked hard to make himself a better human being. That the major success of his life occurred after he was 45 I still take as a source of hope for myself.
I will miss his voice. We talked yesterday. I am glad that he told me the weather was beautiful.
Inaugural Zombie Error
There are myths which can't be killed: Zombie Errors. One of them made it into the President's second Inaugural address:
When the Declaration of Independence was first read in public and the Liberty Bell was sounded in celebration, a witness said, It rang as if it meant something.The problem with this, of course, is that the Liberty Bell wasn't involved and the story is just that, a 19th century storybook invention.
Otherwise, it was a pretty good speech, with the usual mix of good things I very much doubt he means (sounded like he was running for UN Sec-Gen in the early sections) and horrific ideas I'm quite sure he'll (try to) implement. But that's partisanship; let's try to get the history right, first.
What a Cliopatriarch Looks Like ...
Cliopatriarchs generally hold to a doctrine of transblogrification, so we know that appearances can be deceiving. But Scott McLemee (scroll down/17 January) got me to thinking about that again. He's been skinhead bald; now, he's got Extravagant Academic Hair; and he's gonna have it cut back. (Actually, that may have been a veiled reference to the fact that he's leaving the Chronicle of Higher Education for Inside Higher Ed, but how was I supposed to know that?)
Anyway, Fontana Labs's notion of Extravagant Academic Hair amused me so much that I wondered if a group of Cliopatriarchs at the AHA convention would recognize each other because one or all of us had Extravagant Academic Hair. As it turned out, none of us did. Greg Robinson has what you might generously call Thin Academic Hair. Tim Burke has what you might call Thick Academic Hair, but none of us, that I know of, have Extravagant Academic Hair, except on our faces. Including Jonathan Reynolds, at least five Cliopatriarchs have Extravagent Academic Facial Hair.
Cliopatriarchs come in different colors and genders. Manan Ahmed, for instance, simply identified himself to us as "the brown guy" and Extravagant Academic Facial Hair is not an obligation of group membership. To my knowledge, none of the female Cliopatriarchs have beards or mustaches. See, for example: Miriam Burstein and Wendy Anderson. There are even male Cliopatriarchs who are believed not to have Extravagant Academic Facial Hair. See: Nathanael Robinson (scroll down) and Hugo Schwyzer. Rob MacDougall, on the other hand, looks ..., well, he looks a little Robotic.
Hugo is probably the least inhibited of the Cliopatriarchs. He has (gasp!) tatoos. Here are pictures of him sitting on his official Cliopatriarchal throne and, with his brother, a Pretender, in their mitres. Good lord, Hugo, what is that other thing on your head? Think of your Cliopatriarchal dignity!
Noted Here and There ...
Belle's Pony: On this inauguration day and on most days, I am a democrat. But some authoritative voices have, well, more authority than others. If John Holbo, Jacob T. Levy, Ralph Luker, and P. Z. Meyers all say that Belle Waring's "If Wishes Were Horses, Beggars Would Ride" is the most humorous post, who's to say otherwise? But we need votes! Where are Tim Burke, Adam Kotsko, and Scott McLemee? You know what happens when some people don't vote! Go over to the Koufax Awards and support la Belle! [Update: Kotsko has voted. Where are the other Cliopatriarchs? We need votes.]
Sontag: At last, for Susan Sontag, a fit farewell. Scott McLemee's "The Mind as Passion" at American Prospect is getting appropriate notice from: Crooked Timber, Maud Newton, MobyLives, and, well, Scott McLemee.
Common-Place: The new Common-Place is up! This issue emphasizes trans-Pacific trade. Edward Gray and Alan Taylor survey the possibilities in the Introduction. Particularly interesting looking: Peter Coclanis, "Pacific Overtures: The Spanish Lake and the global economy, 1500-1800" and John Demos, "Viewpoints on the China Trade: A Young Nation Looks to the Pacific."
Ooops Alert: What should happen when an academic blogger delivers himself of opinionated pieces of his mind, but ignores everything said by readers of his blog? He has the option of disabling comments, but he ignores both it and the comments posted there. Consider further: what if said blogger has a well established reputation as a historian and feels himself qualified to deliver himself of opinions on a whole range of social issues? You are re-assured if, in support of his opinions, he offers sources that confirm them. But, what if one of his readers actually bothers to look at the sources said historian/blogger cites? And what if the reader in question notes in comments that the sources he cites actually say the opposite of what the historian/blogger claims they say? Do you: a) rush to the library to check the endnotes in his books and articles, perhaps thinking that you've got the next Michael Bellesiles or John Lott expose? or b) do you suggest that the blogger's platform should be dismantled? I'm not sure, but we have a case at hand. Is an apology to readers sufficient?
Wednesday, January 19, 2005
New Republic Rebuttal
Needed correctives to the strange take on the Columbia story from the Times come in the most recent New Republic and Village Voice.
TNR correctly notes (scroll down) that "a university with ideologically uniform appointments on a subject as controversial as Middle Eastern history and politics itself threatens scholarly standards and intellectual liberty. And it is those who bludgeon students into silence or conformity who are the true little dictators of the moment."
The journal also calls into question the continued presence on the investigating committee of Dean Lisa Anderson, dissertation advisor to one of the central figures in the case, Prof. Joseph Massad, and someone who has deemed pro-Israel students questioning professors' comments in publications such as Campus Watch as a threat to academic freedom.
In the Voice, meanwhile, Nat Hentoff has little trouble disposing of the NYCLU's contention that academic fredom means that students can challenged biased in-class presentations of professors only when the biased professor gives the students express permission to do so. Perhaps, Hentoff notes, this bizarre theory of academic discourse explains why NYCLU officials refused repeated opportunities to screen the David Project film before writing their letter. Certainly wouldn't want to let a few inconvenient facts get in the way of an intellectually indefensible argument.
What Inauguration? ...
If you enjoyed JibJab's edgy cartoons during the election campaign, you'll want to see their "Second Term! Starring George W. Bush" for the inauguration.
Try out Mr. Sun's "Make Your Own Inauguration Speech!" You may like your version better than the one we'll get.
Oh, and don't miss Jared Sinclair's "Hoblein's Dead Kerry at The Weblog."
Rick Perlstein's "The Eve of Destruction" in the Village Voice is a more important read for those who voted for George Bush than for those of us who voted against him. If you don't recall Barry McGuire's lyrics from which the title for Rick's piece comes, they're here.
I'm determined not to get my knickers in a twist about this inauguration. What happens when a respectable history blogger innocently asks about the origin of "knickers"? Well, somebody mentions the expression "Don't get your knickers in a twist" and, then, some of those anonymous [female] bloggers get into the act. Warning: this is not work safe. Now we know why some bloggers love their anonymity.
The Rice Hearings
Institutionally, the congressional response to foreign policy issues changed dramatically during the Cold War. Immediately following World War II, the Senate possessed far greater influence on international matters than did the House; and within the Senate, the Foreign Relations Committee was the dominant force on foreign policy issues. By the end of the Cold War, the House had become at least equal to the Senate in importance when handling international issues. And the Foreign Relations Committee had seen its power and prestige decline dramatically. As FRC member Paul Tsongas (D-Massachusetts) publicly conceded in 1981, “We are not known among our colleagues apparently for being a very strong committee."
Throughout the 1960s, the power of the Armed Services Committee expanded dramatically--partly because of the prestige of its chair, Richard Russell; partly because of the Vietnam War; partly because, for the first time, it started making authorizations on the whole Defense budget rather than just a small part. Yet Foreign Relations also retained considerable power--partly because of the prestige of its chair, J. William Fulbright, and a few key members, such as Stuart Symington; partly because of the committee's role in opposing the Vietnam War and then Cold War foreign policy in general.
The tipping point in the struggle between the two committees probably came with the SALT II hearings, where a treaty strongly supported by the FRC was cut to shreds by Scoop Jackson and his allies on the Armed Services Committee. Then, in 1980, FRC chairman Frank Church was defeated, and the committee suffered through a decade-plus of weak leadership--first under Republican Chuck Percy, then under Democrat Claiborne Pell. By the end of the 1990s, FRC had been eclipsed in influence not only by the Armed Services Committee but also by the Intelligence Committee. Virtually the only time it gets noticed any more is in high-profile confirmation hearings such as what we witnessed over the past two days.
Like its early Cold War predecessor, the current Foreign Relations Committee is committed to bipartisanship (or at least the closest thing to bipartisanship in the current Congress): its chair is the widely respected Dick Lugar; its GOP membership includes mavericks such as Chuck Hagel and Lincoln Chafee as well as comparative moderates such as Norm Coleman, George Voinovich, and Lisa Murkowski. This ideological coloration perhaps explains the rather testy confirmation hearing that Rice experienced.
The last national security advisor elevated to Secretary of State was Henry Kissinger, who attracted seven negative votes on confirmation. Based on her committee performance, Rice probably deserves to have a higher total of senators vote against her, though I doubt that will happen. (The transcript of yesterday's hearing is here; that of today is here.) She tended to confine herself to vague remarks--troubling vagueness at times, as Fred Kaplan of Slate observed--with the sole exception of her sharp criticism of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, criticism that seems to me well deserved.
As Barack Obama noted in his comments at this morning's hearings, on critical national security issues, Rice essentially was asking the committee to look forward and trust her to make wise foreign policy decisions, even as she steadfastly denied--especially in heated exchanges with Joe Biden and Barbara Boxer--that any of the foreign policy decisions made over the previous four years were unwise. But the only way the Senate should trust the administration to make wise foreign policy decisions in the future is to examine the merits of its past foreign policy decisions: in this respect, Rice wants it both ways, not having to spell out the implications of future decisions while avoiding any discussion of past controversial ones, on the grounds that doing so would be dwelling in the past and not "looking forward." Perhaps her attitude will help reinvigorate a long-slumbering FRC, and produce some effective oversight of the administration's foreign policy over the next four years.
That was The Conference that Was
Ten days ago, our conference on Iraqi history and identity came to an end. It was full of surprises. I had asked two journalists from internationally renowned papers not to attend because I was worried that our Iraqi participants would feel threatened by Western exposure which might reflect badly on them on their return. Instead, the opening session, chaired by His Royal Highness Prince Hassan bin Talal, attracted a frenzy of television reporters, and at least one Arab satellite channel. I was sitting at the main table feeling completely bewildered when a friendly conference participant pointed out that some of our Iraqi guests were happily being interviewed! Holy Smoke! Serves me right for being such a sap.
Then there was the meeting of minds thing. The mixture of Iraqi academics and Western scholars was meant to produce a collegial exchange between academicians involved in researching Iraq, and its culture, society and state. Instead there were sharp altercations between theoretically inclined historians from the US who rubbished some Iraqis’ empirical research, as well as a collective shudder of disdain on the part of the Iraqis for some of the more arcane flights of fancy produced by Western historians of Iraq. There was also a complete collapse of civility after one Iraqi historian implied that Shi’ism was primarily an Iranian phenomenon in Iraq; the rebuke to his statement was so severe and so sarcastic that it completely went over the Iraqi historian’s head. Meanwhile, a paper on the role of women in Baathist Iraq was completely savaged by the Iraqis because it dared to touch on the very real phenomenon of prostitution under the sanctions regime. “Our women are virtous!” thundered an Iraqi participant, completely misunderstanding the import of the panelist’s findings. Finally, a panel on the famous coup d’etat of the late politician Rashid Ali al-Gaylani in 1941 produced impassioned first-hand testimonies from some of the older Iraqis in the audience, which met with a bemused silence from some of the Western contingent of historians. The conference was turning into street theater, which did not please everyone.
On the whole, however, it went well. There was a great deal of interest on the part of some Western historians to strike up communication with the Iraqis and I believe some promising initiatives were introduced. Books were exchanged, umpteen cups of coffee were drunk, and late at night, the Iraqis were able to recount their plight to friendly and receptive ears. For some of the Iraqi scholars, it was a mind-blowing experience : they could hardly believe that there were so many Western scholars interested in their history. For American, European and Japanese historians, archaeologists, sociologist and anthropologists, it was a chance to practice their fluent Arabic and receive hearty congratulations for mastering such a “difficult” language.
As the Chinese sage said: “ The longest journey begins with the first step”. I’m glad that we held the conference, and I know that more of these meetings will reduce the journey’s length considerably.
A HistoryKeeping Matter ...
If you look over to Cliopatria's righthand column, just under our list of Contributing Editors, you'll see a new tab for Cliopatria's History Blog Roll. We had kept the History Blog Roll on our mainpage, below the regular Blog Roll, but the numbers of History Blogs have grown far more rapidly than we anticipated. When we finally listed 65 history blogs and still had 15 more to add, we realized that we needed to make some other arrangement. So, we've established a separate page for Cliopatria's History Blog Roll and placed the tab for it in a more conspicuous place in our righthand column.
We'll link to blogs on our History Blog Roll with some regularity, but let me mention a few that you may not yet know about. Blitztoire is the first non-English language history blog we identified, but Dutchblog Israel and Memoria Volatilis make history blogging increasingly cosmopolitan. Bert de Brun, at the former, posts in Dutch and English; Jussi at the latter posts in Finnish and English. Dennis Hidalgo is an Assistant Professor at Adelphia University, who posts on Atlantic World History at Hidalgo; and Seth Sanders, who is on a post doc at the University of Chicago, posts on ancient Hebrew and modern criticism at Serving the Word. Of course, we know who "Kelly in Kansas" is. We even know what she had for dinner one night in Seattle, but Kelly in Kansas and New Kid on the Hallway join Another Damned Medievalist and Dr. History among the growing number of anonymous or pseudonymous female history bloggers. We welcome them all to Cliopatria's World.
"Mississippi, God Damn ..."
There's long been a contrast in the national perceptions of deep South states like Alabama and Mississippi. The contrasts have often not been to the credit of either of them. With its major urban centers and stronger black middle class, Alabama won the spotlight, headlines, and national media attention during the years of the civil rights movement. Only the grossest of abuses, whether in the murder of civil rights workers or the notoriety of its state prison at Parchman, drew national attention to Mississippi. We've long known that the lack of major urban centers, the high concentrations of African American population, and the relative weakness of the black middle class gave the movement in Mississippi different contours than it had elsewhere in the South or, rather, contours more like those of the rural than the urban South.
Perhaps for that very reason, Mississippi has recently had the attention of much of the best work on the civil rights movement. John Dittmer's Local People and Charles Payne's I've Got the Light of Freedom re-directed our attention to Mississippi, opening a floodgate of new biographies and local studies. In Sunday's Chicago-Tribune, David Garrow reviewed two of the best of these new books, Todd Moye's Let the People Decide, on the movement in Sunflower County, and Mark Newman's Divine Agitators, on the National Council of Church's Delta Ministry. Moye's subject is especially effective in highlighting the fragility of the early movement in a rural county and the extraordinary strength ordinary people can have, once they are energized. I'm cautious about commenting on the Delta Ministry because its founder, Art Thomas, was my god-father in the movement. It would be painful to say anything critical of Art or his work, but Newman sees the limited possibilities for even a major national alliance of denominations to intervene locally, when its black affiliates in the area are suspicious and its local white affiliates are openly hostile.
We've known, too, for a long time that Mississippi needed economic development. My own moralism doesn't know what to make of the fact that legalized gambling has increased standards of living in the Delta where voluntary programs, philanthropy, and government initiatives previously failed. But with legalized gambling, as Moye points out, has come drug trafficking and crack cocaine to re-enslave the great-grandchildren of freedmen in chains that emancipation proclamations and, even, constitutional amendments cannot break.
It's all the more disheartening and outraging, then, to read Robert Campbell's excellent accounts of the on-going saga at the University of Southern Mississippi over at Liberty & Power. Here are our middle-class, academic peers, harassing and driving out responsible faculty members, in ham-fisted and autocratic ways, and exploiting the hope to address Mississippi's greatest need with fraudulent programs in "economic development" for their own little imperial purposes. In the process, they jeopardize the accreditation of the kind of institution to which we have plighted our troth. As Nina Simone used to sing: "Mississippi, God Damn!"
Tuesday, January 18, 2005
The Times Chimes In
Over the past two months, publications ranging from the left-of-center Village Voice and New York Daily News to the non-ideological New York to the right-of-center New York Sun and New York Post have explored events in Columbia’s MEALAC Department. While they have disagreed on some minor factual details about the case, and have differed on points of interpretation, they all have generally portrayed this case as one of a rogue department that has, for years, hired faculty on an ideological fringe of their field, some of whom have been accused of intimidating students—accusations bolstered by the previous public responses to criticism of the very professors now under scrutiny.
Alas, as we discover in this morning’s New York Times, all of these publications got the story wrong. The real story: the personal suffering of the MEALAC faculty (one received an abusive email from an assistant professor in the Med School, another developed shingles, and a third cancelled appearances at unrevealed public events) caused by complaints from a handful of students about “alleged” events, and the outpouring of disgust from faculty that Columbia president Lee Bollinger has failed to defend the academic freedom of the MEALAC professors.
Well, I’m glad that we can now move on to other matters. Before we do, however, a few little questions about the Times piece.
--1.) Reporter N.R. Kleinfield should be commended for placing the Columbia controversy in the context of broader debates within the academy. After all, over the past couple of years, we’ve had the chairman of Duke’s philosophy department speculate that the reason his school’s History Department had 32 registered Democrats and zero registered Republicans is because most conservatives are “stupid.” And we’ve seen the recent study showing 96.8% of new faculty hired by Cal and Stanford who have party registrations are registered Democrats. And we’ve witnessed the case of Cal-Berkeley re-writing its academic freedom policy to cover the behavior of an English instructor who, in a course on Palestinian literature, wrote in his syllabus that conservative students should take another section.
Kleinfield didn’t mention any of those cases, all of which seem to get at the questions of intellectual diversity and academic bias at the heart of the MEALAC controversy. Instead, the MEALAC debate is framed in terms of a University of Chicago case from 2002, in which a student filed a complaint against an (unnamed) professor over an (unnamed) issue that was proven to be fraudulent when it was discovered that the professor was in Mongolia at the time. Hmm.
--2.) Kleinfield notes that President Bollinger found (unnamed) viewpoints of Professor Dabashi "deeply personally offensive,” to which Dabashi responded: "I find him 10 times more outrageous. What sort of president is he?"
It’s peculiar that, in an article of nearly 2500 words, Kleinfield couldn’t find the space to mention that Bollinger was asked about one, specific, comment of Dabashi’s, about Israeli Jews, to wit, “Half a century of systematic maiming and murdering of another people has left its deep marks on the faces of these people. The way they talk, the way they walk, the way they handle objects, the way they greet each other, the way they look at the world. There is an endemic prevarication to this machinery, a vulgarity of character that is bone-deep and structural to the skeletal vertebrae of its culture.”
Just a guess: while most people probably would say that a college president shouldn’t publicly condemn a professor’s “viewpoints,” most also would consider Dabashi’s comments worthy of condemnation by any administrator with common sense and courage. I wonder if that’s why Kleinfeld couldn’t spare the 72 words to include Dabashi’s specific quote? By not including it, the story left, at best, a deeply misleading impression.
--3.) In a piece structured in an apparent attempt at balance, with quotes from both sides, there is one glaring absence of balance: all remarks from non-MEALAC Columbia faculty are critical of Bollinger and dismissive of the students’ allegations.
It appears as if that Kleinfield didn’t look very hard to get quotes from the other side, especially since the New York piece had no trouble getting comments from historian Richard Bulliet critical of MEALAC’s handling of the case. But perhaps Bulliet is a minority of one, and every other Columbia faculty member willing to speak publicly agrees with the professors quoted in the Times story that, in the words of Robert Pollack, a professor of biological sciences, "There has been an administrative silence, when there should be a ringing endorsement of academic freedom."
If, in fact, Pollack represents the overwhelming majority of Columbia professors, then the Times has buried its lede. It is conceded by all sides that Dabashi, in violation of college policy, cancelled a class at the last minute and subtly pressured students to attend an anti-Israel rally; and that Joseph Massad states on his syllabus that he will offer a “biased” course and that students who disagree with his opinions shouldn’t enroll. Is Kleinfield really saying that the overwhelming majority of Columbia faculty considers this type of teaching representative of their institution?
In the end, though, I guess that the Times considers its story appropriately balanced simply because it published anything at all. After all, Rashid Khalidi, fresh from informing New York readers that Arab-American and only Arab-American students know the truth about the Middle East, noted, “It's particularly piquant to me to hear people who have never taken a Mealac course talking about this. It's like me talking about the astrophysics department.”
So, a department can make a string of hires from the ideological fringe of its field. It can then structure a curriculum to exclude any pretense of balance in the courses that these professors offer. It can, finally, develop a grievance procedure where students concerned about indoctrination can appeal to the department chair—until this past September, none other than Hamid Dabashi. And, according to Khalidi, the only people appropriate for “talking about this” are the very same professors whose conduct created the controversy in the first place. How convenient.
A Couple of Notes on the HNN Mainpage ...
In a revision of an article that first appeared in Counterpunch, John H. Summers of Harvard asks "Why Do Historians Ignore Noam Chomsky?" David Salmonson rightly suggests, I think, that Summers ought to have read our colleague, Tim Burke's "Readings and Re-Readings." His arbitrary dismissal of norms of facticity, his lack of primary research, his invoking of "world public opinion" as if he, uniquely, is attuned to it, and his idiosyncratic generalizations about the gap between theory and practice generally leave historians unimpressed with Chomsky's work.
Another of our colleagues, KC Johnson, explains "Why an Academic Freedom Movement Is Flourishing at Brooklyn College." This fine essay first appeared in David Horowitz's FrontPageRag.com. I regard that as vaguely analogous to having finally married the rake with whom one had a one night stand.
Rehashing....
Orac has taken note of our carnival. He regularly posts links to the Grand Rounds which is what passes for a carnival in the medical blogosphere. It's worth noting the very high frequency of anonymous/pseudonymous bloggers, presumably for confidentiality/liability reasons (the Grand Rounds is all about errors this week, after all), but it's a fascinating look inside another profession... one which matters to all of us. Real life is so much more interesting than staged drama. He's also got an interest in Holocaust history (the difference between Holocaust denial/diminution and quackery isn't that great, is it?) and takes note of the 60th anniversary of the evacuation of Auschwitz, including a link to an upcoming PBS series about the camp.
Speaking of atrocities and errors, a judicial inquiry in the world's largest democracy has determined that accident and rumor led to over a thousand deaths. Gujarat, India was a nasty place to be in 2002: a train fire killed almost 60 people, mostly Hindu, and rumors that the train was firebombed by a Muslim mob led to days of "communal violence" [ed. - mob riots] which resulted in between 1000 and 2000 deaths, mostly of Muslims. Scores of Muslims (but no Hindus) are still in state jails in connection with the incident. The judicial inquiry concluded that the fires were accidental, most likely the result of in-train cooking, and that no evidence existed to support the extant arrests. There are political overtones to this, as the BJP which was in power when the riots happened is not in power any longer, so they can't squelch the results, though they are sticking by their story.
The Magazine of History has dedicated its current issue to Martin Luther King, Jr. The editor and nearly sole author of the issue was King Papers editor and Ralph Luker collaborator Clayborne Carson. My favorite article was the discussion of the King-Malcolm X relationship: were it not for their deaths, there's a distinct possibility that they might have developed a long-term fruitful (but likely tense) working relationship as their views matured and appreciation for each others' successes deepened. Clayborne Carson is no relation to Rev. Betty Claiborne [it was on radio, I couldn't tell until I looked it up], who was pardoned by the governor of Louisiana this week, clearing her 41 year-old swimming-pool integration arrest and conviction off her record at long last.
Finally, though we don't really need a reminder this year of the capricious and devastating power of nature, it is the tenth anniversary of the Great Kobe Quake. I was nearby.
Noted Here and There ...
Seymour Hirsch's "The Coming Wars: What the Pentagon Can Now Do In Secret" in the New Yorker is a must read. Apparently, the Pentagon rather than the CIA is conducting operations in Iran because the administration has little confidence in the CIA which must operate with congressional oversight. See also: Josh Trevino and thanks to Brian Ulrich for the tip.
On Sunday, Wilbert Rideau was released from Louisiana's Angola Prison after serving 44 years for a murder he committed when he was 19. In the interval, he became an important prison journalist and his film documentary was nominated for an Oscar. Here is some of his published work.
David Beito at Liberty & Power has just returned from a conference on civil liberties in war-time. Increasingly, historians like Cliopatria's Greg Robinson have put the record of Franklin Roosevelt's administration during World War II under closer and more critical scrutiny. Beito highlights the Great Sedition Trial of 1944, which attempted to suppress dissent on the Right and anticipated in many ways the post-war suppression of dissent on the Left.
Evan Roberts at Coffee Grounds takes David Brooks to task for his latest column in the NYTimes, "Empty Nests, and Hearts." I disagree with both of them, but on grounds that are potentially treacherous. Whatever Evan claims, society does have an interest in social reproduction, so Brooks's "pro-natalism" isn't merely just so much nostalgia. But, more importantly, the expansion of employment opportunities for women has come at the expense of middle-class households. As corporate executives' (mostly men) compensation has sky-rocketed, middle-class families have become increasingly dependent on two incomes to yield a standard of living commensurate with one a generation or two ago. You tell me who are the primary beneficiaries of these changes: employed women? employed men? corporate America? I'd say the last of these, because it's gained, in effect, the production of two workers for the cost of one. That's not an argument against women's liberation. It's a suggestion that we have to look beneath the surface of things to see what's going on.
Monday, January 17, 2005
In the Awards Competitions ...
In the Brass Crescent Awards, congratulations to Sepoy's Chapati Mystery for being chosen as the Blog Most Worthy of Wider Recognition and to Juan Cole's Informed Comment for winning and Abu Aardvark for winning honorable mention for the Best Non-Muslim Blog.
Several of Cliopatria's friends are nominated for the Koufax Awards for Best Single Issue Blog. They include
Abu AardvarkGo over and vote for your favorite.
Alas, A Blog
Brad DeLong
Deltoid
EduWonk
Informed Comment
IntelDump
Orcinus
Panda's Thumb
and others.
Ukraine Follow-up
A great piece of reporting in today's New York Times, detailing the behind-the-scenes struggle between the intelligence agencies, the Interior Ministry, and the Army as Ukraine's Orange Revolution unfolded. Reporter C.J. Chivers makes a convincing case for the importance of the intelligence agencies--who, in a remarkable break of tradition, did all they could to undermine the government's position and prevent a crackdown against pro-democracy protesters in Kiev.
Wrong Side of the Pond
Only slightly less vexing than the Why do they hate us? scholarship is the Why don't they like us? scholarship. Tackling the latter issue with regards to Europe is Niall Ferguson. Since 1989, says Ferguson in the latest Atlantic, Europe and America have drifted apart and are unlikely to unite anytime soon. The reason is that the end of Cold War finished off the impending (and unifying) threat of Communism. Europe sees no reason to continue to stand with America in the aftermath. However, for the Americans, the Green Menace has replaced the Red Menace. They would like the world to be "with us" but Europe cannot make that choice.
Why not? Because the Europeans have 2-5% Muslim population that is likely to grown leading to the eventuality of a Muslim Europe. Not only that, the Muslim population is allied to radical Islamicists who intimidate Europe. On top of the ageing population and mullahs in the piazza, is that Europeans are losing their religion:
So Europe is not only demographically vulnerable to Islamic penetration; it is also politically vulnerable. And perhaps even more important, Europe is religiously vulnerable too.
Europe is getting more secular while America is getting more vigorously Christian. Hence, Europe sees no common ground with an aggressive, Christian America, something unlikely to change. Ferguson hints that he would like to deny Turkey and stop all immigration from the 1slamic countries and that would stop the buildup of Islamic fifth columns inside Europe.
I find it hard to explain the rampant alarmism and Islamophobia in his short piece. I guess, he wanted to justify George W. Bush's "lower expectations of transatlantic relations" by trumpeting the Islamic menace (if Turkey enters in 2015, "there would be more Muslims than Protestants in Europe!" - no matter what brand of secular madness they bring with them).
First of all, why is it a rift whenever free countries disagree with American foreign policy? I don't see Germany condemning US in the UN or cancelling trade agreements. I don't see France denouncing Fallujah and proclaiming the evilness of US. They don't agree with what US is doing in one particular instance and under the guidance of one particular President. There is no indication that this will continue if there is a change in the tone and content of this administration's foreign policy.
Secondly, there must be some particularly nasty bacteria in Harvard waters which breeds paranoia. Just recently Sam Huntington came out with the screed against the brownization of America and now Ferguson is warning about the greenization of Europe. I would urge him to go read up about the perfidious Turks of the early 16th century and how immediate and supreme the menace of Islam has been to Europe - for five centuries.
Zhao Ziyang and Victor Hugo
As we have said, the great city resembles a piece of artillery; when it is loaded, it suffices for a spark to fall, and the shot is discharged. In June, 1832, the spark was the death of General Lamarque."Lamarque is dead." With the notice of the passing of this beloved, heroic figure, the musical goes into high gear (in the book his funeral takes place first, and honor guard troops fire on agitated crowds, then barricades are invoked, but that takes several chapters and way too many extras). The call to revolution goes out, barricades are erected, and the students take up arms expecting that "the people" will hear their call to virtue and freedom and join them. Ultimately, though they are spirited and pretty numerous, considering, the government crushes their little uprising and the status quo returns. We've been listening to that this week, and the echo of the 1989 Tiananmen uprising is somewhat ironic, given the news from China.
-- Victor Hugo, Les Miserables
Zhao Ziyang is dead (in Asian fashion, the surname goes first, and personal name goes second), and the government is concerned that his death might be cause for popular protests, or even another 1989-style standoff. Zhao was a nearly charter member of the CCP, a cagey survivor of the Maoist era excesses, an economic technocrat and a Deng Xiaoping protégé who rose to the CCP Sec-Gen in the mid-80s. He was a pioneer of economic liberalization in his regional postings, and he brought that policy with him to the central committees when his star rose: he's considered one of the primary architects of China's economic policy through the 1980s, and his fundamental market-oriented reforms live on today. This made him immensely popular ("If you want to eat, go and look for [zhou] Ziyang" went a late '70s aphorism) and powerful (he implemented bureaucratic cuts). But he ran afoul of Deng in 1989, and has been out of power ever since. Zhao Ziyang was widely and correctly perceived to be sympathetic to the goals of the 1989 protesters -- meritocracy and loosening of some party controls -- and opposed to the use of force against them. The actual crushing of the protests was followed by Zhao's dismissal and the rise of the relatively unknown Jiang Zemin to the position of Deng's right hand. His very existence, the potential that he could be a rallying point for anti-government protest, has been something of a thorn in the side of the Chinese oligarchy. Now he's dead, and they're really worried.
Why? Well, there have been a number of funerals in recent Chinese history which turned into counter-oligarchic political events. The 1989 Tiananmen square protests were sparked by the death of Hu Yaobang, who had been removed from power after allowing the 1986-7 pro-democracy protests to gain momentum. The death of Zhou Enlai in 1976 had sparked demonstrations in Tiananmen square as well as elsewhere, including criticism of Mao and the Cultural Revolution that resulted in the (ultimately short-term) purging of Mao-critic Deng Xiaoping from power.
One aspect of totalitarian states, into which category China would certainly like to fall, is their desire to control and plan everything to the benefit of the state. But the vagaries of Chinese politics over the last half century have left a number of Zhao-like figures in limbo: good, even popular, servants of people and party, who get tossed aside due to political shifts or perceived failures. The government can keep them out of office, in the country, out of the public view... until they die. They can't schedule death. Nor can they entirely make people forget the service, or the abandonment, of these figures. [update: They're gonna try hard, though.]
Dear Chris ...
My friend, Chris, is a remarkable man. As a young African American, he grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, one of the South's most race conscious cities. But his mother married a white man when Chris was a child and, as a result, he moves with an ease and grace between race cultures in the region that few others of us achieve. At a major private university in the South, he was elected student body president and, after spending the summer as a counselor at a camp for handicapped children, is now in his first year of law school at my alma mater. It thrills me to know that he is there, because I recall a time when his race would have barred his admission. Chris seems to live up to the promise of his name as well as any of us ever do. Recently, he wrote "Let's Get Rid of Martin Luther King Day" at Outside Report. I'm responding to him at Cliopatria.
I read your suggestion that we abolish the Martin Luther King holiday with interest. Your points – that no single American deserves a special holiday, that it insufficiently recognizes a long history of struggle by unknown and lesser known heroes and heroines in the civil rights cause, and that Americans neither know nor care why the holiday exists – are well taken. I suppose that most Americans will take today off, without any greater dedication to the struggle than they had yesterday.
There is, I think, a sort of provisional justification for the King holiday. Its establishment in the Reagan era seemed like a mere symbolic gesture amidst a sea of reactionary developments that many historians saw as analogous to the retreat from the first Reconstruction. Even so, symbolic gestures are important.
Consider this: In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson appointed Louis D. Brandeis to the Supreme Court. Wilson was, himself, no great cosmopolitan in ethnic relations and massive immigration from eastern and southern Europe would soon lead to severe immigration restrictions. But Brandeis's appointment to the Court was an important symbolic gesture. In 1932, President Hoover appointed Benjamin Cardozo to the Court, its second Jewish member. Cardozo served until his death in 1938 and Brandeis retired in 1939. When President Roosevelt appointed Felix Frankforter to succeed Brandeis, it created a public myth that there was a "Jewish seat" on the Supreme Court. So, in turn, Frankforter was succeeded, first, by Arthur Goldberg and , second, by Abe Fortas.
But, then, an interesting thing happened: In 1969, President Nixon deviated from the public myth and appointed a gentile to succeed Fortas. For the next 24 years, there were no Jewish justices of the Supreme Court. Things changed again in 1993 and 1994, when President Clinton nominated, first, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and, then, Stephen Breyer to the Court. Ginsburg's appointment as the second female justice was particularly interesting because it undermined the myth that there was a female seat on the Court. Just as there is no female seat, there is no "Jewish seat" on the Court; neither would Jews or women be excluded from it; and there might be more than one Jewish or more than one female member of the Court. But, through the last fifty years, what is most interesting is that Jewish representation on the Court has drawn little public comment one way or the other.
That wasn't always the case. Justice James McReynolds was probably Wilson's worst appointment to the Court. There is no official photograph of its 1923-24 session because he refused to be photographed next to Justice Brandeis and, in 1932, McReynolds begged Hoover not "to afflict the Court with another Jew." In fact, Cardozo's appointment was one of Hoover's great acts of statesmanship. Cardozo was not only a Jew, would not only be a second Jewish member of the Court, but he was also a Democrat and had actively opposed Hoover's election as President in 1928. If only George Bush were Herbert Hoover! Cardozo was a brilliant jurist and Republican Senator William Borah of Idaho, fg's, urged the appointment "to strike a blow at anti-Semitism." Cardozo was confirmed without any opposition in the Senate.
My point in all this, I suppose, is that the nation works its way slowly, but inexorably, to the day when Dr. King's dream that we would all one day be judged and be judges, not by the color of our skin or condition of our gender, but by the content of our character. When I was a child, the celebrations of George Washington's Birthday and Abraham Lincoln's Birthday seemed to be fixtures on our national calendar. And, now, temporarily, there seems, in the succession of Thurgood Marshall by Clarence Thomas, to be an African American seat on the Supreme Court. But one day soon, there may be more than one African American on the Court; and, then, there may be none and, again, more than one. When we no longer take much notice of that fact, Dr. King's dream will be closer to reality and we won't have to remember him in a national holiday.
Best wishes always,
Ralph
Sunday, January 16, 2005
More Noted ...
Michael Berube says that the Modern Language Association will not be withdrawing its troops from Iraq. [Ed: craven, left-wing toadies that they are.]
If you had an interview with Armstrong Williams about the possibility of becoming his ghost writer, it might be a really weird experience and you might just be glad that you didn't take the job offer.
Andrew Sullivan has been courageously, insistently holding the Bush administration and us responsible on the torture of detainees. His "Atrocities in Plain Sight" in the New York Times is a must read.
I'm still working my way through the links Sharon Howard gathered for the History Carnival #1 at Early Modern Notes. How far along in them have you gotten?
You can aid the tsunami victims just by going over to John Quiggins blog and adding a comment.
Barista understands exactly why Crooked Timber correctly recommended that we in the secular/Christian/Jewish West ought to explore the blogs nominated for the Brass Crescent Awards. Park your provincialism outside its classroom and enter worlds you do not know.
Saturday, January 15, 2005
Drag Blogging?
It just seems that I don't have enough time to think deep (historical) blog thoughts these days... so to keep my hat in the ring, I'll go with yet another automotive theme: Drag Racing.
Drag racing is unusual in that it is both among the most technologically complex of motorsports and also has the most extensive level of grassroots participation. Thanks to John Mason, a brilliant Historian at UVA, we have some remarkable insights into how the sport also manages to break through color lines in rural/red America. Visit his excellent photo exposé The Democracy of Speed and enjoy.
Noted Here and There ...
Cliopatria and all history bloggers are deeply indebted to Sharon Howard for hosting and launching History Carnival #1 at Early Modern Notes. We also thank Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds for noticing and promoting it. Go, feast, enjoy.
You know what? It just doesn't get much better than reading Tim Burke's "Production and Overproduction" and following that with Caleb McDaniel's response in "Brief Notices."
In "The Gay Emancipator? What's Wrong with The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln" at Slate and "What Stuff!" in The New Republic, David Greenberg of Rutgers and Christine Stancell of Princeton subject C. A. Tripp's book to the tough review that it deserves. Philip Nobile's scathing attack on the book originally appeared in the Weekly Standard. It is encouraging that, when Nobile's attack reappeared at History News Network, the discussion of it was more responsible than yesterday's HNN bar-fights. As historians like Barry Bergen of Gallaudette join HNN's discussions, they become increasingly worthy public debate of historical issues.
Speaking of HNN bar-fights, have a look at what's been going on among our friends over at Liberty & Power. Begin with Rod Long's post and the 64 comments it generated. Of course, that's no where near my record 165 slug-fest with HNN's gun lovers. Jeez, the recollection of it almost makes me nostalgic for the good old days at HNN. But a bar-fight is highly unusual for our libertarian neighbors. Best of all, then scroll up through the subsequent posts and watch mature adults resolve the issues among themselves. Here's to Liberty & Power!
I've said it before and I'll say it again: If you need a good laugh, there is no better place than a visit with Mr. Sun. Some of my political friends disagree. They think Fafblog is the cat's meow. I like it in small doses. Mr. Sun's my healthy addiction.
Finally, given the odd reactions in the Provincial Left at Crooked Timber to the Brass Crescent Awards for Muslim blogs, we may have to relent (I almost said "repent") and establish a separate award competition for the Blog Most Expert in That Which Does Not Exist.
Friday, January 14, 2005
Grading is Academic Freedom?
Why do we consider grading policy a component of academic freedom? It's fundamental to our job, or it should be, to fairly and competently judge the work of our students, but I don't see how academic freedom plays into it. Quite the opposite, actually: this is an area where informal norms already sharply limit instructors and in which formal norms often do exist.
Generally speaking, the definition of assignments is up to the instructor, yes. Though there are exceptions: many schools, for example, have "writing intensive" definitions in which a course must meet certain minimum standards to qualify and which students must take a certain number of to graduate; there are departments which require certain kinds of assignments; and less formal systems of expectations, as well, which serve to keep faculty from over- or under-working their students too egregiously. The rubrics under which grading is done should be under their control -- as long as they do not politicize or otherwise distort the process with non-performance factors -- and most schools (I think) have at least an informal system by which grades may be questioned or challenged. But there are exceptions to that control as well: departments sometimes set standards for grades and assignments in multi-section courses, and the use of outside readers on projects like theses (and much more extensively in the British system) suggests that grading is supposed to conform to some general norm.
I'm not convinced, from my own experience, that faculty really are free with regard to grading. Nor that they are really free with regard to curricular and pedagogical matters: there is a range of acceptable activities, within which we are free, but there is also a substantial range of unacceptable ones. Grading is a professional obligation, not a right.
I'm not going to defend Benedict college, but I think that we need to clarify what we mean by academic freedom, as well as reconsidering the idea that grading belongs firmly within that category.
History Carnival #1
But Is There a Curve?
A good friend of mine says that he has stopped reading academic novels because the truth about the academy is far more entertaining. How else to explain the story in today’s Chronicle about Benedict College?
The South Carolina four-year, accredited, institution describes its mission as training graduates who are “committed to making the world a better place,” while acting as “powers for good in society”; and continuing “our historic emphasis on providing educational opportunities which will prepare African American students for full and complete participation in American society.”
It's chosen to fulfill this mission in some unusual ways. Benedict recently dismissed two untenured science professors who refused to follow a college policy requiring that 60% (that’s not a typo) of the grades for freshmen be based on effort. (As part of Benedict’s commitment to academic rigor, sophomore grades are only required to be 50% based on effort.) Benedict defends the policy on the grounds that it is the only way to serve the college’s underprepared student body.
As reporter Scott Smallwood points out, the college’s policy “means that students who get an A in the effort categories can pass a course even if their academic work merits an F.”
Leaving aside the utterly bizarre nature of the policy—and the deeply unfair fate of the two dismissed professors—the issue has attracted the attention of the AAUP, which has censured Benedict for it. The AAUP contends that the college’s rigid formula violates professors’ academic freedom to develop their own grading policies. And apparently the Benedict administration is aiming for an additional censure from the AAUP: after the release of the report, the college stripped the two AAUP representatives on campus from their department chairmanships, meaning a $15,000 salary reduction. Perhaps they can ask to recoup their lost money by being paid on the basis of their effort?
(Hat tip to Steve Jervis for this story.)
Higher Education and World....
Tomorrow's Professor just forwarded a list of the top 500 universities in the world. As the introduction says
Attempting to rank universities world-wide is no easy task [which is why very few organizations have tried to do it] and it is easy enough to take exception to the various criteria used. That said, here is a list of the top 500 universities in the world by rank as determined in a study from the Institute of Higher Education, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China. A much more detailed description of the criteria used, rankings by geographic area, FAQ's and the questionnaire itself can be found at: http://ed.sjtu.edu.cn/rank/2004/2004Main.htmMy almae materi did well, so I'm not quibbling (HNN host George Mason was in the 200s, too, probably thanks to its extraordinary history programs and vision), though the methodology is heavily weighted towards technical and scientific achievement. But what I did think was interesting was a quick-and-dirty breakdown I did (my nerd score was 50; my geek score is much higher) by country:
- USA, 170
- Germany, 43 ; UK, 42 ; Japan, 36
- Canada, 23 ; Italy, 23 ; France, 22
- Australia, 14 ; Netherlands, 12 ; Sweden, 10 ; Spain, 9
- 8: China, South Korea, Switzerland,
- 7: Belgium, Israel
- 5: Austria, Hong Kong, Denmark, Finland
- 4: Brazil, Norway, South Africa
- 3: Taiwan, Hungary, India, Ireland, New Zealand
- 2: Greece, Poland, Russia, Singapore
- 1: Argentina, Chile, Czech, Mexico, Portugal
- There's a pretty good correlation between GDP per capita and education. Not perfect, unless you correct for natural resource extraction income....
- What's missing? Natural Resource Extraction (i.e. oil) economies, with a very few exceptions (US, Mexico, Russia) which clearly have more mixed and developed economies on top of those natural resources. This overlaps with the Arab and Muslim worlds, neither of which are represented on this list at all.
- Legacies of the past: Italy's high ranking has got to be a legacy of the Renaissance. And the British Empire (USA, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, South Africa) is very well represented.
- Signs of the Future: South Korea, which ranks with Israel as the youngest nation to rank so high on the list. If they're this good already, what are they going to do in the future? Japan's good showing has a great deal to do with post-WWII education reforms as well. And on a per-capita basis, don't count out the smaller Euro-economies (Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Netherlands, Sweden) which could easily be high-quality innovators or exporters of valued expertise.
- Signs of the future II: on a per-capita basis, Russia and China are grossly underrepresented, and that will clearly be a drag on their development. Except, of course, that China's students are getting top-flight educations overseas -- mostly in Japan, Germany and the US -- and there's a very high return rate for Chinese students. The same may well be true for the Arab/Muslim spheres, though it's harder to tell about either overseas study rates or return rates. Russia, on the other hand....
- Signs of the present: US higher education is in an extraordinary position, one of its most valuable industries, and most profitable and high-return exports. Whatever our problems -- and they are real -- we clearly participate in one of the most dynamic and interesting educational cultures in the world.
Some Recommended Reading ...
Jonathan Rose's essay, "The Classics in the Slums" in City Journal is an inspiring read for those of us who believe that the masses, too, ought to have access to great literature. Thanks to Erin O'Connor's Critical Mass and Miriam Burstein, the Little Professor, for the tip.
Rob MacDougall has an amazing post up, "Turk 182," about the bewonderment of 18th century automata and robots. Really, I can't do justice to it. Tim Burke and Sharon Howard could and they ought to talk with each other about these things. MacDougall leaves me wanting to know more and that's as it should be -- a sign of good teaching.
Amardeep Singh complains that there wasn't enough metacommentary on the condition of history coming out of the AHA convention and recommends Rebecca Zorach's "Theory of Every Thing" in the Boston Globe. Amardeep's primary complaint about our reports from the convention is basically correct, though. It's very difficult to stand back from the this and that of things. See, for example, Dr. History's report of her experience. It didn't help any that the one session on the history scandals was delayed until the very last slot at the convention, when most historians had already left Seattle.
My colleague, KC Johnson, has gone slumming again with a piece called "Academic Freedom on the Front Lines" in David Horowitz's FrontPageRag. We may have to have an regular conclave about all this. KC's gettin' to be a regular over there; Greg's appearing on FOX. Think about Cliopatria's good reputation, fellahs!
Thursday, January 13, 2005
More Noted ...
Greg Robinson will be on FOX television's "War Stories with Oliver North" on Sunday evening at 8:00 p.m. est to discuss the experience of Japanese-Americans in World War II. Before he posts again at Cliopatria, some of our colleagues may want Greg to go through decontamination after appearing on FOX, but think of it this way: he's doing missionary work. Thanks to Eric Muller's "Is That Legal?" for the tip.
The competition for the Koufax Award to the Blog Most Deserving of Wider Recognition includes four of Cliopatria's friends:
Laura's 11DIn truth, of course, they all deserve wider recognition, but go over and vote for one of them.
A Fistfulof Euros
Russell Arben Fox's In Media Res
Caleb McDaniel's Mode for Caleb
Finally, congratulations to Hugo Schwyzer on the first anniversary of his blog. It is just a month younger than Cliopatria and it took a while for us to find each other, but Hugo has established an important presence in the 'sphere.
Noted Here and There ...
Our friends over at Rebunk are recruiting a few additional members of their group blog. If you enjoy discussing current events in historical perspective, think you know something about sports, and like butting heads a little harder than we usually do over here at Cliopatria, consider the possibility of becoming a Rebunker.
I'm a big fan of Caleb McDaniel's Mode for Caleb and I've been remiss in not linking to his blog enough recently. If it's not part of your regular fare, read his "Hint for Future Historians". Then scroll down. You'll come across Caleb's end of a wide-ranging and intelligent discussion of the problem of theodicy with Positive Liberty's Jason Kuznicki, Brandon Watson of Siris and others. At Cliopatria, Oscar Chamberlain entered the discussion, as well. The issue was recently made urgent by the earthquake and tsunami in the Indian Ocean. Western monotheistic religions all want to affirm that: G_d is omnipotent, G_d is good, and evil is real. Put simply, those three propositions cannot all be true. You could write a history of Judaic, Christian, and Muslim thought by tracing the ways in which major intellectuals in each of those communities have grappled with the problem. Inevitably, the grapple means modifying one or the other of those three claims in some significant way. Our secular colleagues suggest that we cut to the chase by admitting that: G_d is not real.
Wednesday, January 12, 2005
My King Yada Yada ...
It's that time of year, folks. There was a call from the Washington Post this morning and a request from Minnesota Public Radio yesterday. The questions are almost always the same: "What would Dr. King say about ...?" Iraq? the Bush administration? the tsunami crisis? My sense is that it's not that anyone cares deeply about what King would say or that I have exclusive insight on what King would say. Given what I know, I can speculate that he would have been opposed to the invasion of Iraq, that he'd be a critic of Bush administration policies, and that he'd be in the forefront of efforts at relief for southeast Asia. But the man's been dead for 36 years now. Get used to it. The world is your responsibility now, not his.
As the years pass, I mourn the death of Martin Luther King less and less because I experience and mourn more and more deaths of our other comrades in the civil rights movement. Just this week alone, 91 year old Rosa Parks was found to be suffering from dementia and Jim Forman and Joanne Grant have died. Virtually everyone has some superficial sense of who Martin Luther King was. Many people have heard something about Mrs. Parks, but mention Jim's and Joanne's names and you'll get vague looks of non-recognition. Jim was the executive secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee from 1961 to 1966. Joanne began her career in 1959 as an assistant to W. E. B. Du Bois, published Black Protest in 1968, and was biographer and filmographer of Ella Baker. So, the questions about what would King say also bother me because those who gave substance to and occasionally challenged his leadership of the movement are passing from us, even as we give superficial deference to his influence.
This Martin Luther King holiday, I'll be mourning the deaths of Jim Forman and Joanne Grant and the fact that dear Mrs. Parks has slipped beyond us. This Martin Luther King holiday, I'll be asking those around me to read what Dr. King said and make the connections for themselves. If George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld dare pay tribute to his memory, my middle finger will fly up in righteous contempt for their meaningless gestures. As George said on Seinfeld: "I gotta tell you, I am loving this yada yada thing. I can gloss over my whole life story." The world is your responsibility now. The only thing I ask is that you not demean our movement by grotesque distortions of its promise.
Is Cuba's infant mortality rate really better than ours?
Maybe. In today's NYT, Nicholas Kristof cites that as fact from a CDC report.
But I have two follow-up questions:
1) What reason do we have to believe Cuban (and Chinese) statistics? Authoritarian governments are notorious liars, especially in raw data presentation.
2) Are the comparative data controlled for what I presume to be much higher premie survival rates in the United States?
U.S. infant mortality rates are indeed shamefully high. I'm not sure they're really trending higher, though, or whether that's function of premie survival. But before we start lauding Castro and Hu, a little skepticism would be ... well, healthy.
Carnival reminder
Don't forget the first History Carnival will appear on Early Modern Notes sometime Friday (or possibly Saturday depending on busy-ness) and I'm looking for entries.
I'd especially like to hear from you if you've read - or written - something historical that isn't on the usual well-trodden history blog track: in new blogs (or ones that aren't yet well known), and in blogs that aren't usually focused on history.
You can email me at: sharon AT earlymodernweb.org.uk
Crooked Timber Symposium ...
Crooked Timber presents a symposium of posts on China Mieville's latest novel, Iron Council. Henry Farrell introduces the symposium here. John Holbo, Belle Waring, , Henry Farrell, Cliopatria's Miriam Elizabeth Burstein, and John Quiggen each contribute essays to the symposium and Mieville responds to them here, in a post with very substantial footnotes. Although the primary discussion takes place at Mievall's response, comments are enabled at each post and the discussion is of a very high quality. All of this is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
I don't know enough about the history and geography of blogging to claim that this symposium format is unprecedented, but it does strike me as an interesting experiment in the uses of the medium. Farrell and Daniel Drezner have been two of the keenest contributors to discussions about blogging and scholarship; and, now, Farrell and Crooked Timber make a concerted effort at it. I can think of all kinds of possibilities for it being done by historians: reflections on the work of a single major historian, essays in comparative regional or area studies, a period symposium, etc. For such a symposium, a blog might invite special contributions from historians who are not members of the group, as the Crooked Timberites have done.
Symposia always involve concentrated work and it would not do for them simply to scroll rapidly down the screen when I post some scattered links to varieties of other interesting things on the net. Maybe, if Cliopatria were to sponsor such an event, we could ask History News Network to reserve a special page for it and feature the link on the mainpage for a week or so. Crooked Timber suspended regular posting for a day or so, when it was doing fund raising for the tsunami victims and I imagine that it will suspend ordinary posting to give this symposium due attention. There is much to think about here.
Tuesday, January 11, 2005
Proper Grooming in Pyongyang
It's refreshing to see that the always bizarre government of Kim Jong Il is dealing with the important issues facing North Korea today. Those outside the DPRK can contribute to the cause by purchasing state-sanctioned trinkets.
Two Sentences from Rashid Khalidi
Most advocates of intellectual diversity (myself included) support the concept because we believe that a pattern of ideological bias in hiring has adversely affected the quality of college curricula. Making the link between hard evidence suggesting bias, however, and precisely what or how students are taught isn’t easy.
The easiest to obtain, and most concrete, evidence is professors’ voter registration patterns. But no direct link exists between such figures and what goes on in the classroom; at most, figures such as those of Duke’s History Department (32/0 Democrats) or recent hires at Cal and Stanford (96% Democratic of those who identified by party) suggest that ideological screening is occurring in recent hires or in designing recent lines.
The next level of evidence comes from examining hiring patterns within departments, as I have done regarding larger departments and US history. This approach, too, is at best imperfect. Certainly something’s wrong in a department like Michigan’s, which has balanced its 11 specialists in race in America and eight women’s historians with no U.S. diplomatic historians and only two active Americanists who research in political history. But answering abstract questions about how many political historians and how many social historians a department should have is difficult.
The next level centers on course websites or syllabi. Individuals (such as Vinay Lal’s American Democracy class) or entire institutions (Evergreen State) that offer transparently biased offerings frequently do so in the open, since they operate in such a one-dimensional ideological environment that they assume no challenge. Still, however, it’s hard to get a sense of exactly what goes in the classroom unless you’re actually there.
The search for concrete evidence of in-class bias is what makes Rashid Khalidi’s two sentences so interesting. From all accounts, Khalidi, whose endowed chair was partially funded by a grant from the government of the United Arab Emirates, is extraordinarily intelligent. His public face is also rather unlike some of his MEALAC colleagues, who Martin Kramer has tartly described as “garden-variety extremists.” Commenting on allegations of bias in Columbia’s MEALAC courses, Khalidi ruminated, “Most kids who come to Columbia come from environments where almost everything they’ve ever thought [about the Middle East] was shared by everybody around them. And this is not true, incidentally, of Arab-Americans, who know that the ideas spouted by the major newspapers, television stations, and politicians are completely at odds with everything they know to be true.”
What, exactly, are the assumptions behind this breathtaking statement?
--1.) The perspectives in the mainstream media and by politicians about the Middle East are untrue.
--2.) Arab-American students know the “truth” about the Middle East.
--3.) All Arab-American students essentially have common beliefs about the Middle East.
--4.) Most students who come to Columbia have never seen their beliefs about the Middle East challenged. This probably exists for Arab-American students as well, but since they know the “truth” about the Middle East, it’s OK.
Operating from these assumptions, it’s easy to see how MEALAC professors could teach a wholly biased course. Indeed, they would view it as their responsibility to expose the “truth” about the Middle East to all of Columbia’s non-Arab students, who have been brainwashed by “the ideas spouted by the major newspapers, television stations, and politicians.”
Here’s an alternative scenario for Khalidi:
--1.) The comments in the mainstream media and by politicians about the Middle East are sometimes true and sometimes untrue.
--2.) Arab-American students are no more likely than any of their colleagues to know the “truth” about the Middle East, and the small percentage that get their version of events from the Arab media are probably less likely to know the “truth.”
--3.) All Arab-American students do not have common beliefs about the Middle East.
--4.) Most students who come to Columbia probably don’t know very much about the history of the Middle East, or about any area outside of the United States (or even, arguably, about the history of the United States). They don’t need to be de-brainwashed: they need to be taught.
All four of the above statements are assumptions on my part. But I think they’re more intellectually defensible than Khalidi’s two sentences.
Khalidi’s interview revealed one other interesting assumption: that this controversy has been caused by an “idiot wind” blown by people determined “to shut down Middle East studies.” Claims by Jewish students about unfair treatment need to be examined closely, since there is, he claims, “no reason for a person who’s Jewish at Columbia to feel persecuted.”
I can think of a few reasons why Jewish students might feel uncomfortable:
--More than 100 professors signing a petition demanding that Columbia divest from Israel, a move the institution’s own president termed “grotesque”;
--A department chairman, Hamid Dabashi, describing all Jewish citizens of Israel in crude anti-Semitic stereotypes;
--A professor, Joseph Massad, defended by dozens of colleagues, publicly labeling Zionism a racist ideology.
Why does Khalidi disagree? Columbia has a campus Hillel—and its Hillel has “ten, twelve paid employees.” He ascertained this fact by looking, in the presence of a reporter, at Hillel’s website, which, he reports, “blew my mind.” CU’s Hillel (which, like all branches of Hillel, is affiliated with Columbia but is a private organization with no say in how the university is run) actually only has seven employees. But what’s an incorrect fact among those who know the “truth” about the Middle East?
Pointless Little Countries
I actually enjoyed this year’s American Historical Association meeting. Normally the sight of pained and anxious job candidates produces a flash of remembered trauma, but this time I just managed to have fun seeing friends and colleagues, including some of my fellow Cliopatria bloggers.
On the plane ride home, in an aircraft stuffed to the gills with historians, I did happen to overhear the conversation of three historians in the aisle next to me. At least two of them were Americanists; I’m not sure what the specialization of the woman next to me was, as she was rather quiet while they were talking.
One of them said, “Well, at least I won’t have to think about African history any more.” Sympathetic murmur from her colleague. “Reading all those letters and dossiers! All those pointless little countries!”
I had to pinch myself to avoid saying something. I sometimes think every Africanist begins their career in a midnight ritual where they burn Hugh Trevor-Roper’s infamous declaration, “There is only the history of Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness and darkness is not a subject of history,” into their memory. In some ways, the entire field of African history is imagined as a sustained answer to Trevor-Roper.
Almost any practicing Africanist nurtures an exquisitely fine-tuned sense of their own exclusions, both imaginary and real, from the larger discipline. Almost any AHA meeting I’ve been at, I’ll bump into an Africanist colleague who will mope about their perception of Africa’s exclusion from the program.
This is partly why I bit my lip, because I generally don’t share in the complaining by my colleagues. Sure, that overheard lament does make me roll my eyes a little, and makes me feel a little bit sorry for whomever the future colleague of the historian on the plane might be. Still, there’s something to it. Not that Africa’s history is the history of a bunch of pointless little countries, but that clamoring for an equal place at the disciplinary table is something best done within the intellectual marketplace, not by guilt-tripping the incurious and smug.
Sometimes African history really is written as the history of little places, and the only answer it provides to the question, “So what?” is “Because it is there”. Africanists have themselves to blame some of the time: like all area studies scholars in history, they have a tendency to lock themselves up inside their geographical and temporal box and assume that its relevance is self-evident. This is true of course even in European or U.S. history: both fields boast many monographs about topics whose significance is evident only to a small handful of fellow specialists, if even to them.
Not everyone should have to write history to answer the most compelling, marketable and wide-ranging kinds claims of significance. Somebody has to write careful scholarship about the detailed empirical history of places like the Central African Republic in order for wider or more expansive interpretations of that history to exist. But I think Africanists often neglect the second task and regard the value of the first as self-evident. Written too much and too self-centeredly in that way, African history really does amount to the pointless history of many little countries.
To matter, any field of historical writing has to eventually lodge meaningful claims about why it matters with a wider range of historians, intellectuals and various publics. I suspect many of us work in fields where eavesdropping on planes or in bars at AHA meetings could be irritating. My Cliopatria colleague KC Johnson seems to suspect, for example, that he would overhear social historians and others dismissing diplomatic and political history as boring and reactionary. His suspicions are correct. I haven’t just overheard such conversations, but I’ve nodded neutrally at others making such remarks.
All casual remarks about our own specializations made by others bear some truth to them. The reaction to older modes of writing in diplomatic and political history isn’t entirely unfair: some of it really was unusually sterile and formal in the way it defined its subjects of legitimate interest. Some military history really has been written with a kind of breathlessly boys-own-adventure celebration of battle minutia. Some social history of Annales variety really does act as if quantifying something is tantamount to analyzing it. Some history-from-below ends up disfigured by its own presumptions of radical achievement. Some cultural history wallows in the hopelessly trivial and prattles on expansively about transgressiveness. Name a field, and there’s a stereotype to match that a pair of well-tuned ears can pick up out of the background noise in the hotel restaurant at any given annual meeting.
Some of the stereotypes amount to well-honed secret weapons in the ceaseless turf wars between specialists, the war to claim positions, journals, grants and so on. Some of them are honest reactions to the actual content of a field. Whichever it is, the only answer is to write history as if every word, every idea, every argument has to earn its own keep with the widest possible legitimate audience, to not rely on the in-built crutches and alibis that our fellow specialists provide us. That’s really why I didn’t say anything: it would amount to nothing more than a self-conscious scolding reservation of my own team’s place at the table, not a persuasive argument about why particular African histories matter to more than those who lived them.
More from Columbia
The latest on Columbia’s MEALAC controversy:
First, a long article in New York that offers a persuasive interpretation of events. The most important points put forth by New York reporter Jennifer Senior:
--1.) As occurred in the Jerusalem Post story, the public comments of Columbia president Lee Bollinger suggest that he understands the basics of the problem—a sharp contrast with the “see-no-evil/hear-no-evil” approach followed by administrators at other institutions, such as Duke or Cal-Berkeley, that have faced similar issues.
When asked about Professor Joseph Massad’s strategy of stating in his syllabus that he offers a biased course, and that students who want a complete view of Middle Eastern affairs should not take his offering, Bollinger argued, “I believe a disclaimer before starting your course is insufficient. It doesn’t inoculate you from criticism for being one-sided or intolerant in the classroom . . . If you’re asking, in the abstract, ‘Can a faculty member satisfy the ideal of good teaching by simply saying at the beginning, I’m going to teach one side of a controversy and I don’t want to hear any other side and if you don’t like this, please don’t take my course,’ my view is, that’s irresponsible teaching.”
And when asked about former MEALAC chairman Hamid Dabashi’s written statement, about Israeli Jews, that “half a century of systematic maiming and murdering of another people has left its deep marks on the faces of these people. The way they talk, the way they walk, the way they handle objects, the way they greet each other, the way they look at the world. There is an endemic prevarication to this machinery, a vulgarity of character that is bone-deep and structural to the skeletal vertebrae of its culture,” Bollinger replied that Dabashi is free to say or write whatever he wants outside of the classroom. But, he added, “I want to completely disassociate myself from those ideas. They’re outrageous things to say, in my view.” Administrators can and should use their moral power to set the intellectual tone of the university; Bollinger’s willingness to condemn Dabashi’s ill-concealed anti-Semitic remarks is a commendable use of his authority.
--2.) Senior argues that a lack of intellectual diversity—rather than intimidation of students—is the key issue in the MEALAC controversy. Remarkably, both the department’s critics and its supporters concede that its recent hiring patterns and administrative leadership have demonstrated little regard for creating an intellectually diverse climate. They disagree only on whether an area studies program should attempt to accomplish this goal.
Zachary Lockman, chairman of the Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies department at New York University, sees little wrong with MEALAC skewing in an Arabist direction. (Makes you wonder what sort of education NYU students in his field are getting.) “I think you can see this the other way,” he argues. “That universities or these departments are very much in the minority in the larger American setting. What you get from the media or government officials on the Middle East, the whole way the debate is framed, is very different.” This, of course, assumes that most undergraduates are: (a) aware of how “the media or government officials on the Middle East” frame the debate; and (b) it is the job of a university department to offer a diametrically opposed perspective. Those are pretty big assumptions.
Columbia professor Richard Bulliet more realistically argues that “the university should have looked at MEALAC five or ten years ago. It’s become locked into a postmodernist, postcolonialist point of view, one that wasn’t necessarily well adapted to giving students instruction about the Middle East.” More pointedly, Martin Kramer, the most effective critic of Middle Eastern studies programs around, laments that “at Columbia, Middle East studies became a rogue department, a friend-brings-a-friend department, and the guys who came in on Said’s coattails didn’t have his finesse. They were just garden-variety extremists.” As a result, the tendency was “to reinforce their ranks with like-minded people. Which may make the faculty meetings and sherry parties more pleasant. But the students lose.”
On another front, FIRE president David French has publicly urged Columbia president Lee Bollinger to dismiss the New York Civil Liberties Union’s defending the behavior of MEALAC professors. In a bizarre letter, the NYCLU affirmed its commitment to “ideological diversity, pluralism and tolerance in the campus community”—and then dismissed criticism of the MEALAC professors as part of an "assault" on academic freedom, accepted at face value Joseph Massad’s highly dubious characterization of his critics as engaging in a “witch hunt,” and contended that students could challenge the viewpoints of professors in the classroom only “if invited to do so by the professor.”
The NYCLU letter, French noted, “understates the appropriate levels of academic freedom and overstates the primacy of professors in the academic process,” especially in its argument that students may advance criticism in the classroom only if permitted by the professor. French added that "according to the NYCLU's reasoning, if a professor had not given permission for in-class dissent, a student could be forced to sit through a professor's defense of racial segregation - and even through a classroom discussion in support of segregation - without protest."
Academic freedom is primarily a right given to professors, but students possess in it a more limited form, and so the NYCLU’s idea that professors can tell students who disagree with them that the students can’t ask questions is absurd. Meanwhile, Bollinger’s frank defense of intellectual diversity suggests that this crisis might have a happy resolution.
Two Distractions and More Awards ...
If you had something more important to do, like finishing your syllabi, doing that book review, or working on the book, you'd be doing that instead of reading blogs. Right? Well, maybe not. But since you are reading blogs, here are two distractions that Elfin Ethicist and Rebunk recommend:
1) The Historic Tale Construction Kit challenges you to create your own Bayeux tapestry; but
2) So far as I can tell, Die Wagenschenke has no redeeming social value. Call it a test of your fine motor skills.
The Brass Crescent Awards are presented to Muslim blogs and blogs interested in the Muslim world. Friends of Cliopatria are nominated in several categories.
From A Fist Full of Euros, Scott Martens' "Daniel Pipes on Tariq Ramadan: Why French Literacy Still Matters" is nominated for Best Single Post.
From Chapati Mystery, Sepoy's "Religion in America" is nominated for Best Series.
Sepoy's Chapati Mystery is also nominated for Most Deserving of Wider Recognition.*
The nominees for Best Non-Muslim Blog include a number of Cliopatria's friends: Abu Aardvark, American Amnesia, Amygdala, Angry Arab, Brian's Study Breaks, Head Heeb, and Juan Cole's Informed Comment.
Abu Aardvark is also nominated for Best Thinker.
Don't forget to vote!
* That Sepoy, he's something else. Chapati Mystery was chosen Best Pakistani Blog in the Asian Blog Awards 2004, you recall. I wonder if he'd be interested in being a Cliopatriarch? Nah, probably not.
Monday, January 10, 2005
Non-Conventional ...
All kidding aside, my colleagues at Cliopatria had serious business at the American Historical Association convention. Tim Burke discussed funding and grant writing for graduate students, Jon Dresner presented a paper on "Early Meiji Reforms in Yamaguchi Prefecture" and Greg Robinson presented a paper on "Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and the Black Freedom Struggle." While reporting on a session about the history scandals for History News Network was my heaviest duty, meeting with other members of History News Service's advisory board, other history bloggers, and other Cliopatriarchs at the AHA convention were its highlights for me. Next year, I hope we meet more of us in Philadelphia. In the meantime, I am grateful to Oscar Chamberlain, Sharon Howard, Jon Dresner, and KC Johnson who generously put in overtime at Cliopatria during my AHA sabbatical.
The weekend sabbatical leaves me with some catching up to do. Cliopatria's History Blogroll continues to grow. I want to call attention to a recent addition to it, War Historian by Mark Grimsley, a prize-winning historian at Ohio State, and to another blog we've not yet had a chance to add, Serving the Word by Seth L. Sanders, a post-doctoral scholar at the University of Chicago. Grimsley and Sanders are especially effective bloggers in their fields of military history and ancient near eastern studies. You are sure to hear more from both of them.
In turn, many thanks to Kevin Drum at Political Animal for including Cliopatria on his list of Blogs for the New Year! We are in very worthy company on Kevin's list. Cliopatria welcomes all political animals!
God, the Tsunami, and the Open Boat
The Tsunami has caused some people to ask God “why?” Of course, Green Bay Packer fans are asking the same question today. A tacky juxtaposition? Darn right it is, but it is one that is a constant in Christianity and probably in all religion.
Prayers rise up to heaven like incense. They rise up from the just and the unjust alike. They rise up from quarterbacks when they throw the big pass, from children during exams, from the guilty and the innocent in prisons around the world. They rise up from victims of torture who die surrounded by laughter. They rise up from the torturers when someone they love is ill. A prayer is implicit, even if unintended, in every “damn” that has been uttered. Maybe there’s a bit of one with every coin that gets tossed in a Salvation Army can, that this money will do some good.
William Safire in his column “Where Was God?” reminds us of Voltaire and the Lisbon Earthquake (though he misreads Voltaire I think). He reminds us of Job. He concludes in a manner that affirms the right to ask God why but not the right to abandon faith, but, for the life of me, I see nothing in what Safire says that encourages faith in the decency of any Almighty who might be out there.
You would think that means that I like this column by Heather MacDonald, when she suggests boycotting worship until God does a better job. Perhaps it is simply that the idea of the column is a bit better than the execution. Or perhaps flip atheism seems as superficial as most affirmations of deity in the face of disaster.
I do not speak here of personal faith of people caught up in calamity. One does not need faith to see the power of faith to buoy up those in pain. But I see no explanatory power in faith, nothing that explains in a way that I find satisfactory the movement of tectonic plates and the consequences of that motion.
Stephen Crane’s short story, “The Open Boat,” is one of those much anthologized short stories that deserves its prominence. Men shipwrecked in an open boat struggle to survive. Faith does not save them. God does not save them. By helping each other, most live, but the man who does most to help dies in the last frantic swim to shore.
The response to the Tsunami reminds us that human beings can do something well. That many who respond do so out of love of what they call God reminds us that religion inspires good acts every day. But for me, as for Voltaire, or Crane, it seems more of a confirmation of the fundamental indifference to the individual of the forces that permeate the universe, even as we strive to carve out an enclave where caring matters.
Echoes of History
A number of bloggers have been drawing attention to the grotesque piece of proposed legislation in Virginia, which would have required all 'fetal deaths' to be reported to authorities within three days (the medical certificate had to be completed within 24 hours; in the case of a death without medical attendance the woman would have to report to law enforcement agencies within twelve hours), with a penalty of a fine of up to $2500 or up to a year in prison.
These bloggers and their commenters have discussed various implications of this proposal. I just want to explain why, as an early modernist who studies crime, and women's history, it sent a particularly nasty shiver down my spine.
In 1624, the English Parliament passed an 'Act to prevent the destroying and murthering of bastard children', which remained in force until the early 19th century (its replacement was not, however, greatly different). It wasn't just English law: there were similar laws passed in other European countries around this time. This particular statute expressed concern that 'lewd women' who bore bastards, 'to avoid their shame, and to excape punishment', secretly buried or hid their children's deaths, afterwards claiming, if the body were found, that the child had been still-born.
There was indeed a problem for law-enforcers in such cases, of proving that the death of a new-born infant was the result of violence rather than natural causes. It was just as much of a problem, though, with babies born to married women as unmarried ones (and frequently almost as difficult with older infants too, in a period of high levels of infant mortality, when natural death could come suddenly from many only half-understood sources). It was the 'lewd women' concealing their 'shame', not anxieties about cruelty and violence towards babies and small children, that was the primary issue with the law-makers.
So, the statute enacted that any woman who secretly gave birth to a illegitimate child and killed it, or procured its death, or attempted to conceal its death, 'whether it were born alive or not' (my emphasis), should 'suffer death as in case of murther'. That is: the Act did not, quite, presume murder in such cases; it simply made the concealment of a death in itself a hanging crime.
In practice, as it turns out, right from the start (but increasingly so in the 18th century) courts and juries interpreted the evidence in cases brought before them with considerably leniency; sometimes they subverted the intent of the law altogether.* Most defendants were acquitted; many of those convicted were pardoned; they were rarely (though I wouldn't go so far as to say never) executed unless there was clear evidence of severe violence committed on the body of a child - in other words, where they'd probably have been convicted of common law homicide in any case.
But even if acquitted they still had to go through the trial; and given the hostile reactions of neighbours expressed in pre-trial depositions (it was those neighbours, mostly married women, whose efforts brought cases to trial in the first place), it might be wondered what happened to them after they were freed. Even if they escaped the worst penalties of the law, they had been publicly exposed and humiliated. Some historians have seen the trials as intended to warn all other unmarried women of the perils of unchastity as much as to punish those on trial. If so, it mattered little if there were few hangings and the law was in essence operating as its creators intended: to help control and discipline the sexual behaviour of unmarried women. (Whether the 'warnings' in fact deterred any women from extra-marital sexual activity is, of course, another matter.)**
I'm not suggesting that the 1624 infanticide statute directly resembles the recent Virginia proposal. But I can't get away from the echoes in my head. This was the rationale given by the politician primarily responsible for the proposal, when explaining that they hadn't really intended it to cover what it seemed to cover (and stating that it would be redrafted to make it clearer):
This bill was requested by the Chesapeake Police Department in its legislative package due to instances of full term babies who were abandoned shortly after birth. These poor children died horrible deaths. If a coroner could not determine if the child was born alive, the person responsible for abandoning the child could only be charged with is the improper disposal of a human body.
Back in the early seventeenth century, by the way, there was considerable suspicion (not to say panic) that there were many 'lewd' women getting away with their promiscuity, by means of murder, and that the known instances were probably just the tip of an iceberg. Hence the need for such drastic action. We'll never know if they were right about the numbers. But they were certainly wrong about what kinds of women were likely to be desperate to conceal their 'shame': not disreputable 'lewd' ones - why would they care? - but women who had a reputation to lose, and whose livelihood depended on maintaining that reputation (a high proportion of women accused under the 1624 statute were servants).
Why do women perceive this new proposal as primarily an attempt to control them, their bodies and their sexual activity? Because the criminal law is not the way to solve a problem like this, any more than it was in the 17th century: if you're really concerned to prevent the abandonment and death of newborn babies, what's needed are not punishments but places where women can leave them safely and without stigma: the principle of Thomas Coram's Foundling Hospital in the 18th century. A law that penalises concealment in this way achieves little except to make women in those circumstances even more isolated and put them and their babies alike at even greater risk: if a woman is already desperate enough to hide her pregnancy, give birth alone and abandon (or kill) her child afterwards, a law like the one that was proposed in Virginia is irrelevant except that it'll make her even more desperate to cover up what's happened to her. Ask more historians like me:*** this is old, old territory. We shouldn't need to be going over it again in the 21st century.
* By the 18th century, for example, women on trial often presented linen and other items as evidence that they had prepared for a live birth - therefore, they had not intended to kill their babies - and this was routinely accepted to produce acquittals. But, strictly speaking, it was entirely irrelevent to the wording of the statute.
** Despite the images of lewdness and promiscuity, it seems that many early modern single women who engaged in sexual intercourse did so in the context of established relationships, often only after promises of marriage; there is a good deal of statistical evidence that, while rates of illegitimacy were quite low during the period, rates of pre-marital pregnancy were much higher.
*** This is not, these days, a neglected historical subject: a couple of bibliographies. (Not to mention a good deal of modern criminological research on neonaticide and infanticide.)
Civil War Maps
For geography buffs or military historians, the Library of Congress has just made available over 2000 Civil War maps, from its American Memory site.
Scattershooting while wondering about the eternal sexiness of the Beard.
I’m not that fond of Samuel Huntington these days. His vision of the world strikes me as a touch too Manichean, and his definition of American culture too narrow and too static when compared with the stew that it has always been.
However, he is an intelligent man and at times a keen observer, as this short interview in Japan Today reminded me. This wasn’t precisely his point, but his comments caused me to see internationally oriented secularists not as a wave of the future, nor as an endangered species but as a sort of intellectual specialty to be used or ignored as needed by the politicians of a more religious majority.
William Saletan has started a Blog called Human Nature: Science, Culture, and Politics. It is posted as a permanent column at Slate. So far it looks pretty interesting, though his format may tempt him into glibness on occasion.
Also at Slate, the daily summary of the morning papers notes that most papers don’t give front page attention to the treaty that may end the war in the Sudan. I guess Tsunamis are a better fit to the Storm Stories mentality of Americans and the American media.
Perhaps the Bush Administration thinks the same. At the blog NathanNerman.org is the suggestion that the Administration is going to pay for the aid to Tsunami victims by reducing other humanitarian aid. This is not fully documented, and I hope it’s wrong. But would anyone who knows this administration be surprised?
Banned in Mississippi
Libraries in Jackson and George counties in Mississippi have banned Jon Stewart's America--The Book, on the grounds of indecency. I'm sure this decision won't do anything to hurt Stewart's sales.
AHA Diversions ...
I just got into Atlanta on the red-eye from Seattle. If I had any sense, I'd be in bed trying to recover, but I just realized that someone may have scheduled the AHA convention to divert historians' attention from the competition for the Koufax Awards. Let the votes of historians for historians be counted! And let no chads be left behind! May I offer some recommendations?
Best Group Blog*
Cliopatria
Best New Blog Choose one from among the following:
Chapati Mystery
Early Modern Notes
Hugo Schwyzer
Best Writing* Is there any doubt in your mind? Rid yourself of unworthy thoughts.
Tim Burke**
** John Holbo is conducting a shameless campaign based on the claim that Size, i.e., Grotesque Length, Matters. I submit that Holbo has been taking advantage of too many spam promos lately. Natural endowment should count for something.***
*** In light of envious, petulant, and skeptical comments here, I should note that Burke refused to pose for the camera in full Cliopatriarchal regalia. The robes, the mitres and scepters, and the gold rings had to be removed. The man won't even wear a tie for an AHA convention.
AHA Day Four: Start Early, End Strong
I don't teach classes before 9am: I just don't function at that level that early. I haven't taken a class that started before 9am since I was a first year college student. Conferences are high-energy affairs, requiring concentration in the sessions (yes, lecture has its flaws as a teaching method), constant movement in the book exhibits (and, in Seattle, shuttling back and forth between the main sites), and high-intensity social relations (old friends, new connections, mentors and mentees, interviews, etc). So by the last day, everyone is a bit tired. Instead of the leisurely breakfast-panel-lunch-panel-dinner schedule of days two and three, day four's first panel starts an hour earlier, and the second panel comes only a half-hour after the first one ends. Four hours of panel presentations and discussions in four and a half hours. I'm not entirely unfamiliar with this: the Asian Studies Annual runs panels through the lunch hour, and there's way too much good material being presented for me to skip a session without really good reason; US historians probably feel that way at the AHA and OAH, but I'm an Asianist.
Anyway, I went to the panel on Marginal Japanese Voices. The paper on discourses of whiteness in interwar Hawaii Japanese communities was interesting and had some good visuals, but would have benefitted from a clearer distinction between whiteness as Caucasianality and whiteness as a traditional Japanese marker of beauty (by traditional, I mean a thousand years or more). To be fair, anytime you tackle Hawaiian race relations it gets complicated quickly. Most interesting point: criticisms of middle-class Hawaii Japanese as "haole-fied" (haole being the Hawaiian term for Caucasians, particularly ones who aren't very much like Hawaiians) very much resemble the attacks on African Americans who pursue education and upward mobility as "acting white." The second paper addressed a late 18c catalog of "eccentrics" and the variants and followups it engendered: again, there are precedents in the classical and medieval era for similar collections of extraordinary individuals, so it was hard to accept the idea that this collection tells us something distinctive about the late-18/early-19c. The final paper, introducing us to a diary of an anti-colonial, Christian Socialist Japanese teacher in colonial Korea, would have benefitted from less discussion of the physical and organizational details of the diary and much more of the content promised in the talk title. Based on the discussant's comments, the actual paper starts with the teacher's arrest in 1930, the culmination of his rapid radicalization from 1928 on, leading to an attempt to organize an anti-colonial teacher's union. The first eight years of the diary are apparently quite apolitical, so a good analysis of the politicization could be worth looking forward to.
The second session was also about margins, this time the borders of acceptable behavior for historians. Ron Robin and Jon Weiner, both authors of books on what Robin called "deviancy" among historians, both gave stripped-down versions of their work. Robin went first, starting with a discussion of the ways in which cyberspace serves as a powerful tool for the unethical, the discovery of the unethical, discussion of ethics and behavior and cataloging past discussions of unethical behavior. Interestingly, as Robin pointed out, often the discussions of transgressions slip away from specific acts toward more general critiques of actors (e.g., the way the discussion of Ambrose turned his plagiarism into an example of the problems that come with slippage from professionalism to popularism); conversely, attacking writers' ideas by focusing hypercritical attention on details is a powerful diversionary tactic. Robin offered two conventional interpretations of the scandals as crisis -- the ironic postmodern challenge to "fussy" realism; the "disease" model of academia as socially corrupt -- but also proffered his interpretation of the scandals as necessary, healthy, didactic moments of the enforcement of norms. Jon Weiner offered a more political analysis of the scandals, concluding that the retreat of professional societies from investigation and enforcement has left the field open for political activists and irresponsible media.
Peter Hoffer, who also has a book on the scandals, wasn't on the panel, largely because the eleven month-long lead time from panel proposal to conference predated publication of his book. But David Hollinger, a member of the AAUP Academic Freedom Committee, stepped into the breach, offering a vigorous analysis of the "political balance" problem, which David Horowitz and others have cast in the language of scandal. He drew on Bernard Wilson's Truth and Truthfulness to provide a definition of professional discourse which is within a credentialed and professionally accountable community, with "concentric circles" of involvement and expertise drawing in the public without surrendering authority. Hollinger used Economics and Philosophy as examples of fields with high levels of discipline and very low levels of engagement with outsider interests: this is dysfunctional, in Hollinger's opinion, but worth considering as proof that, while academia should not be a "fortress" for scholars to retreat from engagement with broader discourses, it should nonetheless be capable of protecting autonomous departments from outside pressure when it so chooses. Neologism alert: "provostial" courage or cowardice are crucial components of the level of engagement, as academic leaders can both hold departments accountable and allow them to police themselves. Carla Rahn Philips, former VP of the AHA Professional Division, finished up with a discussion of the importance of "intellectual border control" to keep the adjudication of transgression out of the hands of irresponsible media and "loose cannons" of the internet (that's us, I think). She cited Eugene Genovese's comments on the founding of the Historical Society
reorienting the historical profession toward an accessible, integrated history free from fragmentation and over-specialization. The Society promotes frank debate in an atmosphere of civility, mutual respect, and common courtesy. All we require is that participants lay down plausible premises, reason logically, appeal to evidence, and prepare for exchanges with those who hold different points of view.as a definition of functional and accountable professionalism, but the HS isn't going to get into the business of investigating charges of malfeasance anytime soon, either.
Then Ralph and I had lunch and wandered over to Chinatown, wandered back and parted. I picked up the traditional "what did you bring me?", went back to the hotel, talked to my wife, wrote this, and that's it.
Sunday, January 9, 2005
The History Carnival is opening for business
OK, everyone, here goes.
The first issue of the History Carnival will be posted at Early Modern Notes sometime on or around Friday 14 January. Submissions will be taken right up till Friday, which gives you time to decide on your favourite history posts to submit (and to write the ones you've been meaning to get around to, for that matter...).
Firstly, Check out the Carnival homepage for general guidelines. Please note the following points in particular:
It must be stressed that it's not just for academics and specialists, that entries certainly don't have to be heavyweight scholarship. But they do have to uphold certain standards of factual accuracy and critical use of evidence... They may be focused on a historical topic, on the author's particular research interests or, alternatively, on the particular challenges and rewards of studying, researching and teaching history. Other examples of possible candidates for inclusion could include reviews of history books or web resources, discussions of 'popular' histories (films, dramas and documentaries, novels, etc).
NB, however, two important points:
1. Entries should go beyond posts that consist only of web links or of quotes from other sources with no (or very little) discussion;
2. Although they may be controversial (because good history often is), please don't submit posts that are simply polemics on current issues or partisan politics. (Writing that engages with the past to discuss present issues will be considered, but should involve significant historical content and analysis.) ...
If you're unsure about a post, send the link to me anyway and I'll look at it and decide.
How to submit entries
To submit a blog post for inclusion, please send the following information to me at: sharon AT earlymodernweb DOT org DOT uk (replace AT with @ and DOT with . and close up the spaces), and put 'History Carnival' clearly in the title of your email. (Just in case my email software dumps messages from unfamiliar senders in the spam folder.)
1. The title and permalink URL of the blog post you wish to nominate and the author's name (or pseudonym).
2. The title of the blog on which it appears (please note if it is a group blog).
You can submit your own work or that of others, but please do not submit more than one post per author (except in cases where an author has posted on the same subject in multiple instalments).
Because this is the first Carnival, and because of the lull over Christmas, I'll consider posts from the beginning of December onwards. (In subsequent Carnivals, if things go well, the usual aim will be to exclude anything more than about a month old, and to concentrate on posts published since the previous Carnival.)
Finally, the host of the second Carnival is likely to be Ralph Luker here at Cliopatria, but I'll give him a chance to recover from the AHA meeting before that's finalised. Others who volunteered last week should also be hearing from me soon to discuss dates for their tour of duty. (I'll be looking for further volunteers some time in February, I hope.)
Cliopatriarchs at the AHA
From left to right: Greg Robinson, Ralph Luker, Tim Burke, Jonathan Dresner. Picture by Rick Shenkman.
AHA Day Three: Oligarchs and Patriarchs
"There are not enough jails, not enough policemen, not enough courts to enforce a law not supported by the people." -- Hubert H. HumphreyAt lunch today I attributed that to Herbert Hoover.... I had the great pleasure of lunching with some of my favorite people whom I've never met. Well, technically, I met Ralph yesterday, but it's still a new experience, and great fun. Tim Burke is as smart in person as he is in cyberspace: it's hard to keep up, but fun to try. Greg Robinson has only just begun to blog with us, and I am even more convinced now that he belongs in this group: wide-ranging interests and experiences, and I'll always look forward to hearing what he has to say. And technically this isn't the first time I've met Rick Shenkman, but it has been three (or four?) years: I remembered him looking more like Ralph and he remembered me without the beard which I've had since 1988. Between them, I think they know something about everyone doing American history today. You've been warned.
That would be the highlight of my day, if it weren't for the fact that my panel was this morning, so I'm going to have to call it a tie. It may be true, as my father says, that anything worth doing is worth doing at the last minute... but the next time I give a paper I'm going to try to have a thesis and a structure, not just "a confused heap of facts," more than 24 hours before the panel presentation. (Note to self: Just because the neon sign says "24 Hours" doesn't mean that the copy shop is open after midnight Friday. Check the actual hours on the door in small print.) That said, once I realized that chronology wasn't getting me anywhere and went to a functional organization, the paper took shape quite naturally and the presentation went pretty well: by which I mean that only the people who had read my draft knew how different it was from the presentation (OK, you know now, too). Our discussant was very kind to me in his comments, nonetheless.
My copanelists gave very interesting papers. Marnie Anderson's research is on a discussion of women's voting rights in the early Meiji (1870s, for the purposes of this panel) which hinged on the question of whether female heads of household could have voting rights to go along with the economic and legal privileges of household headship: political rights for men were also bound up with property, and there were serious proposals that the equation of property and political rights be consistently applied to both genders. The proposals were not adopted (except perhaps in some small localities), but it points to great complications in undestanding what Meiji Japanese meant when they used languages of rights and equality: my favorite odd fact from her talk was the Japanese writer who argued that men and women were equal, but husband and wife were not.
Abby Schweber's paper was, as she said it, something like a French farce: incomplete translations, secret policy meetings, and educational reforms modeled on French laws that were thirty years out of date and which actually missed the point of the originals. In 1872, when the oligarchic leaders of Meiji Japan went on a tour of the West known as the Iwakura mission, the "caretaker" government went ahead and made some fundamental law, including an educational law that was supposed to wait until the educational study mission returned from overseas. The law they wrote was based on a partial translation of an outdated French legal code (instead of the "best practice" we usually associate with Japanese borrowings) which resulted in a highly centralized and expensive compulsory attendance primary education system instead of the low-cost, decentralized compulsory availability primary system of France. Best odd moment: when two leaders of the Iwakura mission returned mid-trip to consult about some treaty matters, the committee drafting the law stopped meeting so as to avoid tipping their hand; when word finally got back to the Iwakura mission, the men responsible for education studies were genuinely surprised and horrified.
My own paper also had a connection to the Meiji oligarchs: one of the odd facts about Yamaguchi prefecture is that it was Chōshū before it was Yamaguchi, and a goodly portion of the Meiji oligarchs were born and came to power there. But after they moved to the central government, they abandoned their ties to the hometown (one actually moved his parents to Tokyo, and most of the rest only show up in Yamaguchi histories when passing through on their way to somewhere else), quite in contrast with the traditional image of Japanese as loyal to "blood and soil" (as our discussant put it). Only a few -- Kido Takayoshi and Inoue Kaoru -- played a role in Yamaguchi affairs, and the former was using Yamaguchi as leverage for national policy at least as much as he was giving Yamaguchi special attention. One of our audience (which would probably have been larger had we not been up against a Presidential Panel including papers on Japanese gardens and anime, but the turnout was solid, and clearly interested) was Sidney Brown, who translated Kido's diary, so we had some lively discussions of his role in our several papers.
I also went to the Marshall Lecture by Ronald Spector: normally I'm not much for military history, but this was about the post-1945 occupations and demobilization of Japanese territories. This was a huge and complex challenge, as the Japanese Empire had been huge and complex, complicated by the fact that we went into the job with too few troops and no clue about most of the societies we were occupying. Spector didn't make direct comparisons to Iraq, but he did say that we could draw our own conclusions.....
One of the fundamental problems faced by US military authorities is that they had a variety of what Spector described as contradictory jobs to accomplish:
- disarm Japanese soldiers and repatriate military and civilian Japanese to their homeland
- maintaining law and order in liberated territories
- locate and release Allied POWs
- reestablish civil governments, including colonial rules
- avoiding conflict with local nationalist movements
- another priority he listed elsewhere in the talk was the Cold War priority of resisting local communist movements.
- our failures of planning and resources
- our belief that we were acting as apolitical neutrals when we were in fact taking sides
- using Japanese as anti-communist forces and regional experts, which belied our role as liberators and their role as defeated and demobilized
- British and French colonial beliefs that their former subjects would be sufficiently tired of Japanese rule that previous masters would be welcomed back with open arms.
There were a few questions, then the talk adjourned before the allotted time had elapsed. In fact, every panel and event I've gone to so far has run out of discussion and questions before the allotted time (two hours for most panels; the lecture was only scheduled for 90 minutes). Not sure why. Two more panels tomorrow: marginal Japanese and scandalous historians. Then this conference is.... history.
Here and There, In Absentia
Yesterday was the funeral for Congressman Robert Matsui (D-California), who died suddenly of a blood illness last week. The LA Times, quite correctly, remembered him as having "epitomized an ideal of public service that has largely vanished in a partisan Congress." In a Congress becoming less and less known for individual initiative, Matsui's loss is particularly hard.
Nice to see that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist has his priorities straight: on a "fact-finding" mission to Sri Lanka, he and his staff took up two of the five military helicopters available for relief efforts; he then concluded his visit by having staffers photo him, with the following advice: "Get some devastation in the back."
An on-line petition supporting academic freedom at Columbia now has over 800 signatures (including mine). An effort of the newly established group Columbians for Academic Freedom, the petition supports "a zero-tolerance policy toward any harassment and abuse of professorial power in the classroom and on campus, with clear and effective consequences for those who violate the policy" and "diversification of the Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures department for the sake of academic integrity and intellectual diversity." It's worth a signature.
The New York Times wonders why everyone suddenly wants to go to Bhutan.
The Arab media is offering its version of fair and balanced coverage of the tsunami.
The BBC went ahead with its Jerry Springer--The Opera broadcast, to the anticipated protests.
Several of her readers (this one included) want more from Erin O'Connor on her argument that "academe is one microculture whose inner workings [Tom Wolfe, in his latest novel] badly bungled."
And, for those needing a lesson in overcoming discouragement, give a thought to the Hartford Hawks basketball team. Earlier this week, Hartford fell to BU 73-22. They had more turnovers (24) than points, and didn't have a basket in the last 15 minutes, scoring the lowest point total in the history of the conference. Yet Saturday they came back with not only a win but a comfortable one, over Maryland-Baltimore County. Of course, I don't think we'll be seeing UMBC in the NCAA tournament this spring.
Saturday, January 8, 2005
Remembering Wilson
Eighty-six years ago today was arguably the single most important speech in the history of American foreign policy: Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points Address. The basic principles it enunciated--self-determination, open diplomacy, freedom of the seas, free trade, disarmament--have remained the central tenets of American liberals and foreign policy ever since. And, as Wilson's own experience with the use of force to promote these goals demonstrated, articulating idealistic goals often is easier than accomplishing them.
AHA Day Two: Medieval, Early Modern, Very Modern
What can I say, everything I did today had a premodern feel about it. Except for the futuristic stuff....
The Conference on Asian History luncheon speaker was Mary Elizabeth Berry, who gave us a preview of her soon-to-be published book on 17th century Japanese knowledge: production, organization and consumption of public information and public sphere, and the implications of this Early Modernity for thinking about Modernity. She started out with maps, and went on, appprently, to encyclopedia, gazetteers, travel guides and what she refered to as public, verifiable, useful information. There was a baseline of knowledge -- political, economic, geographic, cultural -- which was expected of moderately educated people and which these books organized in interesting and creative ways. This shared cultural heritage (I'm blanking on the term she used, but it was more concise and effective) was formed mostly in the mid/late-1600s, starting with the rise of commercial printing in the 1640s, and by the turn of the century was pretty well fixed. It's the best description of the stagnation of 18th century Japan I've ever heard, in a sense, or of stagnation anywhere: a culture is stagnant if it is not producing new landmarks, new forms of organizing information and activity. Not that nothing was happening -- there's some really great literature from the period, and some interesting intellectual history -- but the basic shape of this culture was rather static. This book is going to reorganize our thinking on 17c Japan, for sure.
The table discussion was mostly about scholarship and scholars of modern education, but there were some interesting forays into the realm of the rising scholarship on childhood. This is an area which is very exciting: childhood is a basic formative experience, and the fact that we've gotten this far without attempting serious studies of childhood is a shame which we are only slowly rectifying.
My afternoon panel was on Hui Muslims in China, and I was there for two reasons: first, I'm teaching modern China and second, an old friend (anthropologist, actually) was the discussant. Two of the papers were on the Tang-era stories about the founding of the Muslim community in China: apparently, the story goes, the Tang Emperor had a dream of being chased by a devil, and was rescued by a dark, turbaned man. Consulting his experts upon awakening, they concluded that the devil was a disaster coming to China and the turbaned man was a Muslim. In order to protect China, the emperor sent a request to the Prophet Muhammed, which was answered by an authorized expedition of Muslim men who settled in China to protect it from whatever the trouble was. This is the origin of the Hui people, according to a medieval myth that is, curiously, no longer current. In the modern age, anti-Hui sentiment has been common among Han (the majority ethnicity) Chinese, resulting in both vicious attacks on the community and rebellions by Hui (which were usually answered with vicious supression); there are regular clashes and conflicts to this day.
After the panel I ended up chatting with a very smart gentleman who does Chinese history, and was very pleasantly suprised to hear that he approved of my China course structure. I also ended up talking about it with one of the book acquisitions folks.... most places divide up Asian history into modern and premodern (if they divide it at all), but that rubric is getting kind of weak. Worse, the dividing lines are usually dramatic modern historical moments, like the end of WWII or Meiji Restoration (1868) or founding of the CCCP (1949): I never understood ending (or starting) a course in the middle of a transition. So when I had the chance, here, I made both the China and Japan courses into three-semester sequences, breaking roughly around 1600 and 1900, and that gives all six courses much tighter narratives, with less teleological structures. I stole the structure from UC-Berkeley, with some modification (Berkeley uses a long 20th century starting in 1890, but I prefer to break it in the 1910s, at least this time). It also means that it's damned near impossible to find good textbooks: sometimes I use the Encylopedia Britannica Online, sometimes I stretch a text across two courses, sometimes I only use 2/3rds of a text; I rely much more heavily on primary sources, literature and really good secondary material about specific historical moments than I used to, which is also good. If there was more than one asianist here, I might consider dividing it up even more narrowly, but there's a good reason to have survey courses, too, so teaching it that way and doing more narrowly defined seminars is fine for now.
Dinner was with bloggers, mostly, including our own Ralph Luker, and a few historically minded pseudonymous non-Cliopatriots. We talked about all kinds of things, including food (fish was the order of the day. Really good fish), feudalism, flamewars, hiring, historians, hyperlinks and a few non-alliterative topics as well. The great thing about blogging (and e-mail, etc.) is that the conversation does not have to stop just because the check came. Conferences can go on and on, but it's really nice to have sat down with a few folks in person.
Here and There, In Absentia
Chris Sullentrop of Slate does a well-deserved critique of Alberto Gonzalez’s performance before the Senate Judiciary Committee. It certainly wasn’t a good news day for the administration: how can providing government funds to a sympathetic columnist for the purposes of promoting his commentary about government programs not produce a major scandal?
Perhaps the day’s biggest political news, however, came from Michigan, where the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative has assembled more than half a million signatures (well over the required amount) to place a referendum on the 2006 Michigan ballot that would prohibit the University of Michigan and other state universities, the state, and all other state entities from discriminating or granting preferential treatment based on race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin. A group called Citizens for a United Michigan has organized against the measure, which it claims, according to its website, would “be divisive and have a number of consequences.” Those certainly are compelling arguments to vote no.
In light of Manan’s post from a couple of days ago regarding the peculiar hiring criteria at Geneva College—which is asking applicants to “articulate a personal faith commitment to Jesus Christ and be supportive of a Reformed worldview” while also providing “a statement of faith, and a statement of the relationship between Christianity and History”—perhaps the movement toward celebrating religious institutions needs to be reconsidered. For every one Yeshiva, are there ten Geneva Colleges in the ranks of religious colleges? By the way, it doesn’t surprise me, as the Journal article points out, that a pro-Israel, politically conscious student body would take issue with the version of the recent past presented by someone like Yeshiva faculty member Ellen Schrecker.
Bad news for those of us who long ago gave up reading newspapers in anything but their on-line form: the New York Times is studying the question of whether to impose subscription fees for the Times on the web.
The former “diversity manager” of Eugene, Oregon, has has resigned her position, stating that community denial around issues of racism accounted for her decision. One of her supporters asserts that Eugene “is as racist, it is as hostile, it is as unwelcoming for people of color as anywhere else.” Eugene has to be among the top ten most progressive cities in the country: such statements lead me to wonder exactly how “diversity managers” define a “welcoming” environment for people of color.
Finally, an uplifting story from the tsunami disaster: in Kenya, the tsunami separated a one year-old baby hippopotamus from his parents. He couldn’t be re-released into the wild, since, as an orphan, he apparently would be vulnerable to attack. So he was placed in a wildlife preserve in Kenya, Haller Park. With no adult hippos, he has been inseparable from an adopted “mother”—a 120-year-old male giant tortoise. Photos are here.
Friday, January 7, 2005
A Valuable Baseball
Just when you think pro athletes can't get any more selfish: from today's Boston Globe, the Red Sox backup first baseman, Doug Mientkiewicz, is refusing club requests that he return the baseball that was part of the final out in the 2004 World Series. (The ball was tossed to him to make the final out.) The Red Sox want to place the ball on display, along with other souvenirs of their championship season. Mientkiewicz has described the baseball as his retirement fund.
His 2004 salary? According to USA Today, it was $2.8 million.
Here and There, In Absentia
Great column in today's Washington Post offering a "profile in courage" to Colorado Republican Joel Hefley--chair of the Ethics Committee and among the few Repubs to take on Tom DeLay.
As the bodies of 7000 more of its victims were discovered in Indonesia, a list of the 12 most inane public comments related to the tsunami.
The Economist asks a good question: what the United States abandoned any pretense toward meritocracy?
The latest from Columbia: a new student organziation, Columbians for Academic Freedom, has been recently established. Among its first findings: Hamid Dabashi did, in fact, violate a Columbia rule when he cancelled his class to attend an anti-Israel political protest and informed the students not in advance but by sending his TFs, who were wearing black armbands, to inform the students who were operating under the pretense that when they showed up for their class, their professor would be there to teach them.
Frank Rich on why popular culture seems to be paying more attention to Al Qaeda than is the administration.
From the other side of the popular culture spectrum, Daniel Henninger wonders why so many among New York's Left intelligentsia celebrate the 1970s as the heyday of the city.
A representative of this line of thinking, Richard Gere, is appearing in a TV ad (in English) running on Palestinian TV, urging Palestinians to vote. Most Palestinians don't seem to know who Gere is; one Palestinian worker remarked, "We don't need the Americans' intervention. We know who to elect. Not like them -- they elected a moron."
For the second day in a row (first Iowa, then Wisconsin), a kangaroo was discovered wandering around the upper Midwest. Authorities were baffled.
AHA Day One: books and jobs
I split my time on the first day of the conference between blogs and books. After working my way through about half of the book room, I ran into Rebunk/Big Tent bloggers Tom Bruscino and Stephen Tootle, and ended up having dinner with them and a half-dozen other friends and acquaintances of theirs. As so often happens when bloggers get together, we didn't actually talk about blogging much; mostly we talked about hiring, interviews, historians we know and admire (which does include a few bloggers), books, jobs, places we've lived.... historians' lives.
There's a lot of memories at a conference. My most unexpected meeting today was with a woman who was my host when I went up to visit grad school. It was a day trip, so I didn't get to see what grad students do at night until I was one, but I got to meet with a few faculty and have lunch with a bunch of grad students. I didn't know what questions to ask, to be honest, but I had the sense that they were working hard and enjoying themselves. So I went.
My guess is that well over half of the people who come to this conference are here because of jobs: interviewing or being interviewed. Most of the rest are presenting papers or selling books. I've been interviewed a few times and I've been on what seems like a lot of hiring committees (about one a year, not all in History, since I started full-time work), so I feel as though I should have some insight into the process. Perhaps if I thought about it more I would, but the one thing which sticks out most when someone asks me "anything I should know" and I have to come up with something that not every other "Getting a Job in the Academy" seminar covers is this: answer the question. Whether its in a cover letter or in an interview, make sure you understand what's being asked and answer it. Sure, you can hedge and digress and talk about what you want to talk about, but if you want to get the job, make sure that you've answered the question. One of the worst things that can happen after an interview is for interviewers to look at each other and say "did you get an answer to that question?" You can't be sure that your answer is what they're looking for, but at least if they don't pick you, it's because they don't want you rather than because they don't understand you. You can't control the agendas and issues the interviewers bring to the table, but you can be clear.
Not to be discouraging to my interviewing friends, but I've never had an AHA interview pan out in the end: both of my jobs started as phone interviews (on the other hand, every job I didn't get went to someone). One was actually a whole series of phone interviews, instead of a conference call: In the end I talked to someone on the phone every day for a week (two of them were conversations arranging phone calls for the following day) before they invited me out for the campus visit. The interviews I've conducted have all been phone interviews as well, so I have no basis for comparison from that side. The stakes are the same: a short interview for screening out purposes, but I've always felt much less tense about presenting myself by phone. It would be very interesting (and very difficult) to do a study about the relative success of hires done by phone v. conference interview.
The book exhibits were, as usual, rich and varied. Reading over the ads in the conference program and wandering through the exhibits I was reminded of just how rich a field we work in. Most intriguing book out of my field title for the day probably has to go to "Corrupt History" which is actually not about our current scandals or even about corrupt historians, but is an attempt at a comparative and theoretical history of official corruption. The historiographical challenges boggle the imagination. Book I will almost certainly end up buying award goes to Daniel Botsman's study of 19th century Japanese penology, which combines legal and social history in some really interesting ways. Ask and ye shall recieve (eventually) award goes to Houghton Mifflin, which has finally assembled a new team of scholars to produce an entirely new comprehensive textbook for East Asian History, replacing the venerable... very venerable... the first edition was in the 1950s... East Asia: Tradition and Transformation by Fairbank, Reischauer and Craig. I've had this conversation with HM reps at every AHA and AAS I've been to for years: the old book is well-written and sound, but age does show after a while, and it can't be revised much, now that two of the authors are deceased. The new team -- Walthall, Embry and Palais -- are first-rate scholars and writers, and the new book has a great deal more Korean history and more of the interactions within East Asia, both of which were shortages of the older book. However HM is not planning to produce a stand-alone Korean history text from this, to go along with the China and Japan texts, and I really want a good basic Korean history text in the market.
I'm not looking for textbooks at the moment, except for my upcoming Historiography course; I did pick up a few books in that vein, including the very intriguing "Historians on History" anthology edited by John Tosh. (At the very least that'll be good for pithy quotations about the work we do) I also put in for an exam copy of an essay collection called (I think) "What is History NOW?" which includes essays on the state of a variety of subfields and issues. I was thinking that, as an exercise, I would have students read through the book review section of AHR for at least one area and talk about what that tells us (and what it doesn't) about the issues and methods and state of the field.
OK, it's been long enough since the beer, and the coffee is running through my veins again. Time to get back to my paper.
Update: For other perspectives on the Conference, see Another Damned Medievalist and HNN's Rick Shenkman. No overlap today between any of us. If anyone else is liveblogging the conference, let me know and I'll add links.
Look out for Kelly in Kansas who will be presenting on blogging and may be reporting back.
Thursday, January 6, 2005
When I Hate to Apologize ...
Once, when I was a teenager, a young lady and I were parked out in front of her house fairly late into the night. We were doing what a young man and a young lady sometimes do at the end of a pleasant evening together. Apparently, we were so pre-occupied that we missed it when her mother flashed the porch light off and on several times and several times again. But we came up for air when her mother came out to the car and knocked on the window. Fast end to long night. My mother made me call the young lady's mother the next day and apologize. Mother did things like that. I hated to apologize, but was good for me.
Any way, a couple of tsunami-related things reminded me of that incident, unlikely as it may seem. One of them is that I wish I could say that the young lady was Diane Sawyer. It could have been, because Diane and I went to church together when we were teenagers and our parents were good friends. Say what you will, for a sixty year old woman, Diane Sawyer is hot. No offense intended, Mike, but she is. Now, Diane has pulled hard duty in reporting on the tsunami and I love her dedication to the story. I'm sorry that Diane Sawyer and I were not intimately embraced one night so long ago. I am sorry, but that is so.
There are two other things that I have to apologize for. The one that really galls me is that I owe an apology to Myanmar's military dictators. Like a half-dozen other bloggers, I doubted that the official reports from Burma that only 90 people had died there as a result of the tsunami in the Indian Ocean. It was reasonable to doubt it because the numbers reported there were so low and damage in nearby areas was so high. But United Nations officials now report that the reports from Burma were accurate.* I hate it when I have to apologize to military dictators. The other thing that I need to apologize for is that I may have unintentionally misled my colleagues about my schedule for the AHA convention. But I promise you that I am scheduled to leave Atlanta early tomorrow morning and I expect to be in Seattle through the weekend. I wonder if Diane Sawyer will be there.
*Update: My source for this was Melissa Block's interview with Charles Petrie, the UN's resident coordinator in Myanmar on NPR's "All Things Considered" this afternoon, but I may have spoken too soon here. Patrick Belton at Oxblog cites a report by a Thai missioner near the Myanmar border who claims that there were about 600 deaths on and near the Mergui archipelago on Burma's southern coast. Consider that apology on hold.
Torture, Rape, and American Delight
Here’s one article, about what FBI agents witnessed, from the Washington Post. Here are lots and lots of government memos, care of the ACLU. Here is a nominee for U.S. Attorney General, saying really nice things about obeying the law and treaties, and, for no extra clicking, you also get Senators, even some who oppose him, who consider his rise through government confirmation of the American Dream.
Facts.
1. Torture on a widespread basis has been the policy of the United States government for the last three years. To some extent this has been accomplished by stealth. To some extent—and I find this far scarier—it has been accomplished by redefining torture in ridiculous ways, as if it’s only torture if you break knee caps or if you have to perform surgery to save the guy’s life.
2. The only reason we have to think that this policy has been changed is that the people who created and approved torture claim they were misunderstood and they will never ever do it in the future.
3. The majority of Americans lose no sleep of over this because, “Hey, it’s war.” Or, “Besides what can I do?”
4. The majority of the Senate (and this includes Democrats like my state’s noxious and cowardly Herb Kohl) will approve Bush’s nominee for Attorney General. “He’s in my party.” “He’s the President’s choice.” “Why lose a vote or two because some Arabs got their minds broken?”
There is decency in the world.
1. There are people in the FBI who are appalled and, at some risk, reported this.
2. Likewise with the military. We should honor these people, which is more than our government will do. If this actually stops, they should get the lion’s share of the credit.
3. There is my colleague, a Physicist, who reminded me of all this yesterday when I didn’t want to hear it. Except for losing a little sleep, I’m not all that different from the majority I denounced above.
Torture and Rape: A Thought Experiment that you can try at home.
I would argue that rape is a form of torture. I think most people would agree. So, let’s ask ourselves this, if one of our prisoners had been raped at gunpoint, perhaps tied up, but was not permanently damaged physically, would that have been a violation (so to speak) of our policy?
Would that have been torture?
Delight?
No one that we know have has been raped—though the abuses at Abu Ghraib look designed to produce the same effect-- so where’s the delight?
You don’t have torture this widespread without some of the torturers getting off on it. Maybe they were that way before; maybe they learn to like it . Either way, they’re on the payroll, and we are footing the bill.
My thanks to Mark Danner, whose piece for the NY Times motivated this entry. And to everyone else, including several members of Cliopatria, who have kept this issue alive.
Pre-Conference Thoughts from Seattle
Reading over the conference program on the plane, I was struck by a few thoughts:
- There are a lot of panels on religion. If you include the affiliated sessions on church and religious history, there is a really substantial and active scholarship on American religious history. Not much on Islam or Judaism (though there's at least one panel which includes papers on both which looks interesting) though there is one must-see (for me: I'm teaching 20c China this semester) panel on Chinese Muslims on Friday.
- aside: I just heard a radio ad calling for a Washington State gubenatorial revote, paid for by the state Republican party. I also heard AHA director Arnita Jones on the NPR station this morning, talking about the conference (a little) and some of the basics of modern problems of history teaching, citizenship and digital archiving.
- Two of the three critics of history scandals reviewed by Ralph Luker will be presenting a panel on "Historians, the Media and the Politics of Academic Scandal", but it's scheduled for the final Sunday session. Please tell me the AHA didn't think they could bury it? No offense to the other folks scheduled for that time (last time I presented at the AAS I had that slot), but it's not prime time and there's no time for people to talk about the issues after: everyone just goes home. If it were me, I'd have put it up front. At least a lot closer to it.
- Teaching Idea: I used to teach at a school with a January Term. I'd love to have been able to organize a bunch of upper division history majors to take a study trip to the AHA. Have them split up the panels, take notes, and spend the next two weeks of the term swapping summaries and talking about historiography. Wasn't there long enough, but I offer the idea to anyone who has the opportunity. There's some really neat stuff being presented here, and a really wide range.
Here and There, In Absentia
My colleague Ralph Luker is much more widely read on the web than I am, but as he and most of the Cliopatriarchs are in Seattle for the AHA, a pale substitute for his daily briefing:
--The day's biggest political news comes from California, where Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has called for the state to move to a non-partisan redictricting format, though by a panel of judges rather than a commission. As he pointed out, a system that in 2004 yielded no party changes in any House or state legislative races is broken. The problem: as long as Texas engages in gerrymandering, having a Dem state like California go nonpartisan means the biggest winner from the governor's proposal would be Tom DeLay. If I were advising the state Dems, I'd offer to support the Schwarzenegger proposal if he could get Rick Perry to push a similar initiative through the Texas legislature.
--Another day, another denunciation of Columbia's handling of the MEALAC controversy. The national director of the Anti-Defamation League, Abraham Foxman, told the New York Sun that Columbia University is failing to protect its Jewish students from harassment by anti-Israel professors. Foxman is sometimes too quick to claim anti-semitism, but I'd say that a committee whose majority consists of two professors who signed what President Bollinger himself termed the "grotesque" petition calling for Columbia to divest from Israel and a third who was dissertation adviser to a key figure in the controversy gives Foxman grounds for complaint.
--CNN has declined to rehire Crossfire host Tucker Carlson. The most amazing quote: CNN president Jonathan Klein, citing comedian Jon Stewart's famous appearance on Crossfire from this past fall, in which Stewart said that shows like Crossfire were "hurting America," remarked, "I agree wholeheartedly with Jon Stewart's overall premise." Crossfire itself is going to be cancelled.
My take: there would be a great dissertation in mediia studies or political science in the "history of Crossfire," and what its evolution (or devolution) says about the changing nature of political discourse in the US. In its 1980s version, with Bob Novak and Michael Kinsley as hosts, it frequently featured high-level, if sharp, political exchanges. In recent years, it seemed as if everyone, including the hosts, was simply spouting political talking points. But, of course, that's about all that politicians seem to do any more.
--A very interesting exchange at Legal Affairs over whether Clarence Thomas has the qualifications to be chief justice. Personally, I've seen nothing in his performance to suggest that he does.
--My favorite academic organization, FIRE, has just released its Guide to Free Speech on Campus. Worth reading for all.
--Oliver Stone yesterday blamed American "fundamentalism" for the poor box office sales of his biopic on Alexnader the Great, saying the American public didn't want to see a movie suggesting that Alexander might have been gay. I'm not sure I'd call American movie critics "fundamentalist," and yet according to the Rotten Tomatoes website, only 14% of the 168 polled gave the movie a positive review.
--Finally, in the truth is stranger than fiction category, the chairman of the BBC is under fire for his plans to screen "Jerry Springer--The Opera" on the British network. ("Jerry Springer--The Opera"??!!) The opera, apparently trying to stay true to form to its subject, contains more than 8,000 obscenities, includes tap-dancing Ku Klux Klan members, and features a scene in which Jesus states that he is “a bit gay." Remarkable.
Cliopatria Nominated for Best Group Blog ...
Cliopatria has been nominated to receive the Koufax Award for Best Group Blog. We'd appreciate it if you were to go over here and vote for us. I know I did.
Wednesday, January 5, 2005
Hiring Criteria
Could someone explain the following to me in reference to this job posting:
1. Can you selectively hire on the basis of religion?
2. As a candidate, how does one write an essay on the relationship between Christianity and History? I keep imagining it as an essay assignment in an intro class.
And, please don't think that my question is facitious. I really want to know how one can "not discriminate against applicants on the basis of race, color, gender, handicap, or national or ethnic origin in the selection of employees" but require that "faculty must be able to articulate a personal faith commitment to Jesus Christ and be supportive of a Reformed worldview."
How does that work?
A Popular History of the United States ...
In comments below, Van Hayhow asks for recommendations of a popular history of the United States. As I said, I wouldn't recommend Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States or Larry Schweikart's and Michael Allen's A Patriot's History of the United States. I've used and liked Carl Degler's Out of Our Past in conjunction with Richard Hofstadter's The American Political Tradition. All three of us are a little shop-worn, of course. The third edition of Out of Our Past is now 20 years old. Yet, Boston's Bruce Shulman sees it as a classic, too neglected. How about it, American historians? Have the past two decades produced a popular survey of American history that is Degler's equal? We're open for your recommendations in comments.
Update: We have a credible nominee: Hugh Brogan, The Penguin History of the United States of America. Second edition, 2001. A conservative alternative to it might be Paul Johnson's A History of the American People, though it's a hefty 1100 pages and the post-1960's coverage is highly polemical. Both Brogan and Johnson are British, of course, but it's no surprise that some of the most perceptive historians of the United States are from abroad. Still, there's a market for the new, single volume interpretation of American history by a major American historian.
Norming the grades
I'm home from England (thanks, Ralph, for the link), where I spent some time talking with my brother (a lecturer in English Lit at Exeter) about the differences between American and English universities.
One difference that struck me as remarkable was the lack of autonomy my brother and his colleagues have over grading. In order to make sure that there is a uniform (or near uniform) standard of grading, my brother and his colleagues read samples of each other's students' papers. The objective is to ensure that all professors are giving similar marks for the same sort of work; in other words, it is expected that there will be widespread agreement about what constitutes a "first" or a "second" (in this country, an A or a B are the rough equivalents.)
When I was a teaching assistant at UCLA in the early 90s, I had one professor who asked her TAs to swap graded exams in the hopes of achieving a normative standard of what constituted an A. I can remember this leading to some real arguments! Most of the disagreements were over slight differences (such as a B- or a C+); in a few instances, however, we had TAs who disagreed as to the merit of a given paper by well over a whole grade's difference.
In my eleven years of community college teaching, I've never reviewed a colleague's grading, or had my own examined. I admitI would bristle if I were asked to have my grading supervised!
I'm curious to know if any of my American colleagues, particularly those who have been teaching for a while, "norm" their grades with other faculty in their same discipline. If so, is this voluntary, or, as at Exeter, mandated by the institution? Does this sound like a useful practice?
Noted Here and There ...
In 1934 and 1935, Shotaro Shimomura (1883-1944), a Japanese businessman and photographer, toured the world and took beautiful photographs. You can see them on-line here.
You may not think that there's a natural alliance in the United States between evangelicals and intellectuals. Harvard Law Professor William Stuntz does and he writes about it in "Faculty Clubs and Church Pews" and "The Academic Left and the Christian Right."
Several of my colleagues are settling back into normal routines:
In his latest post, Hugo Schwyzer plays pitiful on his return flight from England and brings out the solicitous mother in several women. Having done that number, myself, on occasion, I'm in no position to chastise him, but the thought of an older woman carrying his luggage and wheeling our heroic long distance runner around LA Airport in a wheelchair is a bit much. Welcome home, Hugo.
Sharon Howard at Early Modern Notes has some very helpful recommendations on "Grantsmanship."
Santa Claus brought Tim Burke's family their own home for the first time, but he left the heavy lifting to the Swarthmore professor. Despite the lower back pain, his "On the Occasion of Your Catastrophe" is vintage Burke. We are moved by the catastrophe in the Indian Ocean, he suggests, not because it is unprecedented, but because of a shift of consciousness.
Manan Ahmed, Tim Burke, Jon Dresner, Greg Robinson, and I will be in Seattle for the AHA convention and more or less without access to the net from 6-9 January. I trust that our other colleagues will continue the discussions at Cliopatria in our absence.
Visual Deaths: Freas and Eisner
Two men who shaped our visual environments have passed away. Will Eisner and Frank Kelly Freas. If you don't recognize either of those names, you are a passive victim of your graphical environment, because you almost certainly have been exposed to and most probably affected by their work. For starters, check out their home websites: Will Eisner and Kelly Freas.
I am a great devotee of graphical novels, pioneered by Eisner, and deeply grateful for his mentorship of Jules Feiffer. I also got to see Freas once, at a science fiction convention panel on art and artists, and his SF/F magazine cover art and book cover art was ubiquitous (I had no idea he'd worked on Mad Magazine, or for the Catholic Church, though). I didn't really understand at the time who or what I was seeing, I'm afraid. I've always appreciated and loved the visual imagination necessary to create humor and story and very realistic unreality. Both men had that and we live in a richer world for it.
A violation of privacy?
A friend of mine, thrown into the academic job market whirlwind, has reported to me an experience that strikes me as outrageous. My friend applied for a post at a certain university (I will not name the institution, but it is located in Middletown, Connecticut). My friend did not get the job. To its credit, rather than ignoring the application or issuing a belated rejection notice, as is too often the case, the department in question sent an e-mail form letter turning my friend down. However, listed on the recipient list were the email addresses of all the other applicants for the post.
It seems to me a terrible violation of privacy for the university to reveal through its actions who had applied for this job (the owners of the other addresses, largely graduate students and young professors, were generally identifiable from them). This action appears all the more cruel since it is so easy to suppress a recipient list. I do not know if there is any way to censure the department in question. I wonder what all you Cliopatricians think of this.
Tuesday, January 4, 2005
Popular History Left and Right ...
Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present, which presents a fairly superficial reading of American history from a perspective on the Left, has been through five editions and sold more than a million copies. One of its ironies, of course, was that the market so fulsomely rewarded a historian who was so contemptuous of "free markets." Many of us, Left and Right, were uncomfortable with its influence. I used to have to explain to my students at Antioch why we were not reading it in my classes, but Michael Kazin's "Howard Zinn's Disappointing History of the United States" in Dissent explains its shortcomings more fully.
Now we have a Right-wing knock-off of Zinn's book: A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror by Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen. Schweikart is a professor of American economic history at the University of Dayton and Allen specializes in the history of the American west at the University of Washington, Tacoma. A Patriot's History of the United States has been named book-of-the-month for February in Laissez-Faire Books annual competition for the Lysander Spooner Award (scroll down). Its authors are touting it at FreeRepublic.com, conservativerepublican.com, and on other distinguished sites.
I don't know Michael Allen, but Conservativenet's Richard Jensen would tell you that I've disagreed with virtually everything that Larry Schweikart has ever said on its private list. More than once, Richard has refused to publish my responses to Schweikart or his responses to me. I wandered over to the Freepers' website today and it reminded me that I've written before about Schweikart at Cliopatria: "I've read and refuted enough of Schweikart's opinions on Conservativenet to believe that the University of Dayton gave tenure and promoted to full professor a genuine wacko." Hmm. I'm usually more temperate than that. Don't get me wrong. Larry has his charms. A former drummer for a rock'nroll band, he still plays drums for his Pentecostal congregation in Dayton. It's just that, so far as I can tell, being a Christian doesn't help Larry distinguish between G_d and Uncle Sam. Don't tell me about diversity in history departments. We've got our fair share of kooks and nuts. But you'd better prepare to tell your students why you're not using A Patriot's History of the United States in your history class.
More from Columbia
Jacob Gershman, higher education reporter for the New York Sun, continues to be one step ahead of the rest of the New York media on the Columbia MEALAC Department’s continuing scandal. In this morning’s paper, Gershman reveals how former MEALAC chairman Hamid Dabashi responds to criticism, and also raises troubling questions about the degree of student intimidation that has been tolerated in MEALAC classrooms.
It turns out that three years ago, one of Dabashi’s classes coincided with a major anti-Israel protest at Columbia. As students filed into the classroom for Dabashi’s lecture, they were greeted by teaching assistants wearing black armbands who told them that Dabashi would be speaking at the protest, and therefore no class would occur. The implied message, of course: students should attend the protest to hear Dabashi speak. The next day, Dabashi e-mailed the students: "Let me assert categorically that if there is another occasion when performing my moral duty prevents me from being in my class I will repeat what I did yesterday.”
Another member of MEALAC, Professor George Saliba, did the same. Saliba noted that it was OK to cancel classes for “attendance at a political rally where both students and faculty could benefit from access to accurate information on the Middle East that is never reported by the newspapers 'of record' nor is it even allowed to be reported by any member of the press as Ariel Sharon's army prohibited access to the press when he was committing his massacres in Jenin and for days, now weeks, after that.” (As we now know, no “massacre” occurred at Jenin.) Under Saliba's theory, perhaps MEALAC classes should never meet, and students should simply attend anti-Israel protests twice a week.
In response, the longtime Jewish chaplain at Columbia, Rabbi Charles Sheer, wrote an op-ed criticizing the MEALAC professors’ decision. On this issue, I would say that Sheer was pretty clearly in the right: professors are paid to teach, not to engage in anti-Israel protests. And if Dabashi felt that performing his moral duty compelled him to cancel class, then at least he could have informed the students in advance, rather than doing so in a way that suggested that students would be well advised to attend the protest.
So how did Dabashi respond? In a letter to the Columbia newspaper, Dabashi accused Sheer of engaging in the “astonishingly degenerate development in the American academy” of interfering “with the cornerstone of academic freedom at a university.” Sheer, according to Dabashi, was “mobilizing and spearheading a crusade of fear and intimidation against members of the Columbia faculty and students who have dared to speak against the slaughter of innocent Palestinians,” a “campaign of terror and disinformation reminiscent of the Spanish Inquisition.” Dabashi promised to continue to oppose Sheer’s “crusade against those of us who believe Zionism is a ghastly racist ideology,” since “we have received repeated and unequivocal assurances from our recognized administrators that we have done absolutely nothing wrong in defending the rights of voiceless victims of the massacres in Palestine.”
This is a breathtaking statement. If Dabashi was willing to make such allegations in print, imagine what would happen if a pro-Israel student disagreed with him in class?
Perhaps even more problematic, today’s Gershman article revealed another troubling incident regarding the committee President Bollinger set up to inquire into the classroom conduct of figures like Dabashi. At the time, Sheer complained about the class cancellation to Dean Lisa Anderson, but Anderson told him that there was nothing wrong with Dabashi’s behavior, and that if students wanted to complain about it, they should talk with the dean of academic affairs.
Anderson’s presence on the committee already has been cause for comment, since she served as faculty advisor to perhaps the most extreme member of MEALAC, Joseph Massad.
At the time, Bollinger defended Anderson’s selection, noting, “Someone can take a position that I strongly disagree with and they can still be ... capable of looking into something like this objectively.” This remark, however, avoids the issue: is it reasonable to expect a dissertation advisor to be impartial when examining the conduct of one of her students? There at least is the appearance of bias, made far stronger by today’s article. If Anderson didn’t find anything troubling in Dabashi’s conduct, is she really the right person to be investigating the current matter? Perhaps if Columbia administrators had taken a stronger line in 2001, when the Dabashi class cancellation occurred, perhaps the current controversy could have been avoided.
Anderson’s written record, moreover, suggests someone ill-disposed to approach this issue fairly. In her generally balanced 2003 address as MESA president, she lamented that because of “self-appointed guardians of the academy” organized by “websites like Campus Watch” meant that protecting academic freedom “is no longer beyond doubt.” These “policy advocates and polemicists,” she continued, “wish to dictate the range of respectable political conclusions,” and therefore “pose a serious threat to our scholarly integrity.” Anderson detected a “plan to monitor and evaluate the universities and their area studies programs [that] is not about diversity, or even about truth, but about the conviction of conservative political activists that the American university community is insufficiently patriotic, or perhaps simply insufficiently conservative.”
If we didn’t have professors behaving like Dabashi and Massad, I might sympathize more with Anderson’s evaluation of Campus Watch and proposals to establish a Title VI oversight board. That, however, is not the relevant issue to the Columbia inquiry. Does Anderson also consider the David Project a “self-appointed guardian of the academy,” filled with “policy advocates and polemicists,” and thereby a threat to academic freedom? If not, how does she distinguish between the David Project and Campus Watch? And if so, how can she possibly be objective in evaluating evidence that was presented to the Columbia administration by the type of group that she has branded a threat to academic freedom?
Universities in Pakistan
When the subject of education in Pakistan comes up in western media, the attention is focused entirely on the madrasa-system. However, there is a more acute problem in Pakistan - the higher education system - which has to produce scientists, researchers and teachers of the present and future.
Pervez Hoodbhoy, who currently teaches Physics at the Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad - the flagship university of Pakistan has just written the clearest denouncement of Pakistan's higher education in the highest circulation English daily in Pakistan, Dawn. I cannot urge you more strongly to click here and here and read.
His message is clear. Pakistan has no framework of higher education that can match up to the rest of the world. The universities are a quagmire of despotic clerks and professors. The PhDs cannot function in the real world. There is no standard of research in the country in hard sciences or social sciences. There are more mosques on campuses than bookstores. Knowledge is passed by rote and memorization in an endless loop from teacher to student to teacher. Teachers do not engage in or tolerate critical thinking. Any old place can slap a university sign on the door and become an accredited institution to qualify for govt. subsidy. JNU? IIT? forget it, they cannot even match Tehran University in a country cut off from the world for 25 years.
Hoodbhoy has some excellent suggestions. Requiring all graduate applicants to take the GRE; instituting tenure review and administrative review; re-starting student unions on campus; invigorating cultural and social discourse and, most intriguingly, attracting Indian teachers.
There is one bright spot in Pakistani HigherEd. Lahore University of Management Sciences [LUMS] has attracted foreign capital, foreign teachers and a higher caliber of students by adhering to international standards. It should act as a model just as Hoodbhoy's op-ed should act as a declaration for reforms.
On September 23, 2004, Congress passed HR 4818 which mandates the State Dept. to submit a report within 90 days on:
(1) describing the strategy of the Government of Pakistan to implement education reform in Pakistan, and the strategy of the Government of the United States to assist Pakistan to achieve that objective; (2) providing information on the amount of funding— (A) obligated and expended by the Government of Pakistan and the Government of the United States, respectively, for education reform in Pakistan, since January 1, 2002Let's see what comes out there.
While We're Out...
Blogging will be sporadic this week, for obvious reasons. I shouldn't even be doing this.....
But Danny Loss has finally delivered his catalog of errors in Dan Brown's Angels and Demons [as noted in comments, I had the wrong book here], possibly the first to be produced out of non-sectarian pique. I read the book [both books] myself, and found the coded mysteries tiresome, the history tendentious and the writing terribly typical (typically terrible?) of modern mystery/thriller writing in that it not only witholds crucial information from the reader, but it doesn't even attempt to hide the fact that it's doing so in order to provide "twists" later rather than earlier. Not a bad read, though, much like Last Samurai was a good film while being culturally and historically abysmal.
And, after hearing this round sung for years, I finally sat down at a computer and looked it up: it really happened though the water hyacinths may be slightly anachronistic.
Finally, www.kiddierecords.com is reproducing old children's story records digitally. Just in time, for my family.
See you in Seattle!
If ...
If at 5:30-ish p.m. on Friday, 7 January 2005, you are at the AHA convention, standing near the registration desk in the lobby of the Sheraton Seattle Hotel, in Seattle, Washington, and you
a) have extravagant academic hair;we will assume that you intend to join us for a history blogfest at a nearby establishment. Bloggers, blog readers, and their guests are invited. Drinks and intelligent chatter are the order of the hour. Those who wish to may continue on to dinner. The only requirement is that you agree to honor the anonymity of pseudonymous bloggers. Another Damned Medievalist is calling the shots on this one. Oh, and if all of the above are true of you, I'm calling House Security.
b) are wearing a mouse pad instead of a name tag;
c) appear to be chanting "Sharon Howard is a goddess";
d) have a cup of coffee in one hand and a little stack of cookies in the other; or
e) are wearing pajamas instead of your usual conventioneering get-up,
Last time I looked, it appeared that Sepoy at Chapati Mystery has won the Asia Blog Award 2004 for best Pakistani blog (scroll down). Congratulations!
Finally, C. A. Tripp's much anticipated book, The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, has just been published by the Free Press. It surveys the evidence and makes the case that Lincoln had considerable homosexual experience. As I've said before, I am a skeptic about this one. Yet, so reputable a historian as Goucher's Jean H. Baker has done the introduction to the book, which will cause some of us to take notice. At Vanity Fair.com, Gore Vidal has a fascinating web-only essay about it, "Was Lincoln Bi-sexual."
Monday, January 3, 2005
Blogs and the Tsunami
For those who missed it, a good article in today's Wall Street Journal on the role of video blogging and the tsunami. I've been following this for several days on what's pretty clearly the best such site, waveofdestruction.org. As the Journal piece points out, the tsunami is only the latest of a series examples in which video blogs have broken aspects of the story in the way that text blogs have been doing for some time.
How About Some Support Over Here? ...
While you're at it, go over to the Asia Blog Awards 2004. Cliopatria has a couple of favorites in the running. Chapati Mystery is currently leading in the voting for Best Pakistani Blog and Amardeep Singh is competing for the Best Indian Blog. Today is the last day for voting.
The Flag of Eternal Mourning
The flag at the Post Office was at half mast this morning. When I got to my office, I looked up the reason why. It turned out that President Bush ordered this in response to the dead from the Tsunami last week.
I have no problem with that. Horror on this scale deserves some ceremonial mourning. But it led me to look for an answer to a question that has nagged at me this past year. How often have we had the flag at half mast in the past year?
The President, governors, mayors, and county administrators can each order their respective facilities to fly flags at half mast. In Wisconsin, the governor has ordered flags at half mast every time a Wisconsin soldier has been killed. The governor’s orders also apply to local government, but local governments have some power here too. As an example, the mayor or Rice Lake ordered that city flags be flown at half mast after those hunters were killed just before Thanksgiving.
Happily, Wisconsin Governor Doyle’s web site did have some nice search results. It listed 34 times that the governor ordered flags at state facilities lowered in 2004 and 2005. The first was on February 3. As he (and I assume other governors) also issued orders to state facilities to comply with presidential proclamations (see this one as an example) I think I can safely assume that these orders include all the presidential proclamations as well as state ones. Thus, with the exception of the occasional local order, such as the deer hunter one mentioned above, this should be a complete list for Wisconsin.
They have not all been about the war. There is always an order for Memorial Day. Several concerned Wisconsin police and fire personnel who lost their lives in the line of duty. Ronald Reagan’s death and the Discovery crash combined to lower the flag for 35 days, which surpassed the number of days it was lowered to honor Wisconsin’s dead soldiers.
So, not including local tragedies, Wisconsin’s flags were at half mast for roughly 68 days out of 368. That result surprised me. It has seemed more like every second or third day that I have seen a flag lowered and wondered what had happened; not one out of every six days.
Still, that’s an average of just over a day a week in mourning.
That’s a lot of pain.
Academic Freedom Update: Columbia and Southern Utah
At Columbia, the lead editorial in today's New York Post focuses on the issue, suggesting that the matter isn't going away anytime soon. In the words of the Post, "Academic freedom and honesty are on the line — as is the reputation of a great university."
The issue has even attracted attention in the Israeli media: the Jerusalem Post had an exclusive interview with Columbia president Lee Bollinger as well as a thoughtful summary of the entire controversy. The article is worth reading in its entirety, but the key quotes come near the end, from Bollinger:
--"In the case of intimidation and abuse of students, it is so much a violation about what we believe in, it is so destructive to the mission of the university, that it really is the only path we can take. We cannot stand by and let that behavior go by."
--"How are we doing and how can we improve our teaching and research on subjects involving the Middle East and Israel-Palestinian issues in particular? I see that as the most important outcome of this."
--"We will not allow intimidation of students, but we must also defend academic freedom. Pursuing one can put stress on the other. I think it's inevitable."
It's hard to see how these quotes could justify anything short of a significant reform of how MEALAC operates.
At SUU, meanwhile, among the first somewhat neutral observers on the Steven Roberds issue, a widely published SUU professor named David Tufte, has provided his commentary.
Tufte says that, based on the record, he would have supported Roberds' tenure, but also notes that many faculty members found Roberds difficult to deal with. He also downplays the teaching award that Roberds received, since it was student-only. On the latter point, the award strikes me as highly relevant nonetheless, since a main allegation against Roberds is that he had treated students badly. It's hard to reconcile a picture of any professor popular enough to win a university-wide teaching award with the college's portrayal of someone who's out of control in the classroom.
Tufte raises two points with which I strongly disagree. First, he notes that "as a personnel matter, the administration here can't say anything publically." But while the administration (the president or provost, for instance) hasn't gone public, Roberds' former chairman (Lamar Jordan) and the president of the SUU faculty senate (David Rees) have done so. Their justifications, to put it mildly, were less than convincing. And, as I've noted before, when colleges break the rules (as Jordan did by summoning Roberds' students in under false pretenses and then, according to their claims, not recording the positive things they had to say about Roberds), it's rather hard for the college to hide behind claims of personnel confidentiality necessary to a process that functions as it should.
Second, Tufte notes that "tenure decisions are often about whether you want to work with someone for the rest of your career," and that there are many nasty rumors about Roberds floating around campus (which he doesn't repeat).
First, any institution with a claim to academic quality should make personnel decisions on the basis of academic quality, and not likability. And while Tufte notes, correctly, that faculty members don't always vote in this manner, it's the job of an administration to cultivate a campus atmosphere in which quality comes first. Second, I'm dubious about rumors--and here I speak from first-hand experience in my own case. At one point, just before my tenure was granted, a supportive colleague came to me to report back that he had heard the "real" reason I was denied tenure. There were six alleged events, none of which were ever mentioned in my file. Five never occurred, and the sixth was a fairly blatant distortion.
This may not be what's occurring in the Roberds case. However, I doubt that the SUU administrators who made the decision to terminate Roberds expected any sort of outcry. Speaking from personal experience, college administrators, when cornered, can be pretty creative in coming up with "off the record" justifications for actions they can't publicly defend.
Three Brief Announcements ...
At Education News.org, Jonathan Dresner has published "Towards a Unified Theory of Grading." It's a form of communication, he says, but all the participants in the conversation need to understand what is expected of it.
Over on the HNN mainpage, I have a review essay about "The Crisis in History." The University of Georgia's Peter Charles Hoffer, Ron Robin at Israel's University of Haifa, and Jon Wiener of the University of California at Irvine disagree with each other about the Ambrose, Ellis, Goodwin, and Bellesiles controversies. In a related matter, Northwestern's Jim Lindgren reports that, in a CNN2 interview, Garry Wills places Bellesiles among "very good con men."
Francis Fukuyama's "How Academia Failed the Nation: The Decline of Regional Studies" in Saisphere is well worth a read.
Groups of Interest
From the WP came news that the Bush administration is trying to figure out what to do with enemy-combatants who cannot be tried due to lack of evidence but cannot be set free because we have no clue who or what they are and what they might do to us in the future. A possibility on the discussion table is lifetime imprisonment in an US built jail in a host country like Afghanistan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and Afghanistan. Rumor has it that these places are not as nice to their prisoners as the US ones - which are bound by laws and such - and can be persuaded to tighten the not-so-proverbial screws.
Let us assume that everyone in detention at Gitmo or in a naval brig is guilty. Let us further assume that the US never uses torture as an interrogative or retributional technique. If our assumptions, based on our adherence to moral and legal doctrines, are true, how can we send these prisoners to camps (or prisons or gulags) in countries where we know that they will be treated in inhumane and torturous ways for the rest of their lives? Not just for the short-term "investigations" as is the case currently. And who is to say that these prisoners, back on their soil, won't bribe the guards (baksheesh is a BIG problem in the Orient, let me tell you) and manage to escape? Or that the despot in charge at the moment in Egypt or Pakistan won't be overthrown and the prisons become the latest staging of Bastille Day? Isn't it in the best interest of our nation's security to keep these dangerous people within our control? But hey, far be it for me to defend the people in Gitmo. Whatever happens to them, I am sure they deserve it. I have my own hide to worry about.
In a New York Sun piece, reproduced on his site [http://www.danielpipes.org/article/2309], Daniel Pipes says that if one is "searching for rapists, one looks only at the male population. Similarly, if searching for Islamists (adherents of radical Islam), one looks at the Muslim population." Using the recent survey done by Cornell which shows that 44% of Americans can live with some curtailing of civil rights for Muslims in America, he praises Malkin's work on Japanese internments and hopes that the Muslims in America can be "observed, registered, profiled, monitored".
Feeling unequal to the task of re-writing the Gulag Archipelago, I went and looked up the dissent opinions in the Supreme Court decision that upheld Japanese American internments in 1944. It is a fascinating read. Justice Murphy writes:
The main reasons relied upon by those responsible for the forced evacuation, therefore, do not prove a reasonable relation between the group characteristics of Japanese Americans and the dangers of invasion, sabotage and espionage. The reasons appear, instead, to be largely an accumulation of much of the misinformation, half-truths and insinuations that for years have been directed against Japanese Americans by people with racial and economic prejudices-the same people who have been among the foremost advocates of the evacuation. A military judgment [323 U.S. 214, 240] based upon such racial and sociological considerations is not entitled to the great weight ordinarily given the judgments based upon strictly military considerations. Especially is this so when every charge relative to race, religion, culture, geographical location, and legal and economic status has been substantially discredited by independent studies made by experts in these matters.
The military necessity which is essential to the validity of the evacuation order thus resolves itself into a few intimations that certain individuals actively aided the enemy, from which it is inferred that the entire group of Japanese Americans could not be trusted to be or remain loyal to the United States. No one denies, of course, that there were some disloyal persons of Japanese descent on the Pacific Coast who did all in their power to aid their ancestral land. Similar disloyal activities have been engaged in by many persons of German, Italian and even more pioneer stock in our country. But to infer that examples of individual disloyalty prove group disloyalty and justify discriminatory action against the entire group is to deny that under our system of law individual guilt is the sole basis for deprivation of rights. Moreover, this inference, which is at the very heart of the evacuation orders, has been used in support of the abhorrent and despicable treatment of minority groups by the dictatorial tyrannies which this nation is now pledged to destroy. To give constitutional sanction to that inference in this case, however well- intentioned may have been the military command on the Pacific Coast, is to adopt one of the cruelest of the rationales used by our enemies to destroy the dignity of the individual and to encourage and open the door to discriminatory actions against other minority groups in the passions of tomorrow[emphasis added]
Surely, we shall not see a serious discussion of Muslim civilian internments in the public sphere unless another attack occurs on US soil. Still, as a group, the Muslim-Americas have to be less-opaque, less-other, less-foreign, to those who pay "a lot of attention to television news". This can be achieved with a clear and public leadership that can articulate their rights in their own country. A veiled sister on Real World Houston might also be good.
Sunday, January 2, 2005
History Carnivals!
As Ralph has noted, Claire has posted the latest issue of Carnivalesque, the Early Modern Blog Carnival here and here. But something this tasty won't spoil for a second mention.
Now, wearing my other occasional hat as the Carnival's Mistress of Misrule, would anyone like to volunteer to host a future issue? All that's required is an interest in early modern history - ie, the period c.1500-1800 (C.E.), and your own blog (well, preferably - we could find somewhere for you to guest at a pinch). It comes out about every 2 months and the next will be in early March. Check out the Carnivalesque link above for the previous issues and examples of other blog carnivals if you want to see what's involved. You can contact me at sharon@earlymodernweb.org.uk
And the success of the early modern version suggests to me that it's high time to inaugurate a broader
Scientists do it, philosophers do it, Christians do it, even cat-bloggers do it... so why not us? Right now we're all recovering from the holidays - and that includes me - so I'm thinking fortnightly-ish from mid-January. I will take on the first instalment (either here or at one of my other places), with a formal request for submissions in about a week's time. So, start thinking about your favourite history blog posts from the last few weeks and looking out for the best of the new year. They won't have to be long or scholarly; the only rules I'll impose are that they should contain your own writing (rather than just lists of links, say) and substantially historical, or historiographical, content.
Secondly, in order to work, this will also need future hosts. As many as possible. It's up to you, blogging historians, to make it work. I don't have time to keep doing it (although I'm happy to set up a co-ordinating page), and besides a large part of the idea is that a carnival should circulate among a variety of hosts.
Thirdly, can anyone think of a more interesting name? 'History Carnival' is fine really, but if you have any other ideas...
Update: I have three volunteer hosts so far, which gets us at least to the end of February (if it runs fortnightly), and one suggested name - Historivale - which I like (but there's still time for anyone who thinks they can do better to come up with suggestions...). I have also set up a page at http://historycarnival.blogspot.com/ to carry the news and information once we get things going. (Don't get excited, there's really nothing there yet. And it won't be as pretty as the Tangled Bank page either.)
Noted Here and There ...
At his best, Christopher Hitchens is just an extraordinarily good writer and he's at his best in "Susan Sontag: Remembering an Intellectual Heroine," at Slate. For a predictably negative reprise on Sontag, see Roger Kimball's "Susan Sontag: a Prediction" at the New Criterion's blog.
Joseph Ellis has a good op-ed in today's Los Angeles Times, "From George W. to George W." Second term presidencies, says Ellis, "are seldom as successful as first, often disappointing, sometimes disastrous."
At Ghost in the Machine, Kevin Murphy has a roundup of the best and the worst in 2004 film. This "elder statesman" among history bloggers has just turned thirty, btw. Belated happy birthday, Kevin.
At Early Modern Material Culture, Claire is hosting the Early Modern Carnival, Part I and Part II. It features both Cliopatriarchs and some of our best friends: Jonathan Dresner, Sharon Howard, Rob MacDougall, Nathanael Robinson, Sepoy, Claire, Greg, Natalie Bennett, Scribbling Woman, and Brandon Watson. Oh, and if you've been tempted to tell Claire off, here's your invitation. Temptation, get thee behind me!
All or Nothing? Wine and Justice
I am struck by the way in which reasonably functional but non-static systems are cast in discourse as "death struggles" between components of the system which could, in fact, coexist perfectly well if they stopped to think just a bit. Politics is like that. So is wine, as a new documentary has brought to the fore contrasts between 'artisanal' and 'global' winemaking. One thing which is distinctly lacking in the movie, at least as reviewed here, is the issue of consumption. Yes, that would complicate things, but since you're talking about markets, particularly markets for a food product, it seems like a bit of a hole. It is silly, it seems to me, to talk about production principles if you don't have a clear idea what the actual final product is supposed to achieve. The approach of the movie seems tautologically circular: artisanal, small-scale winemaking is better because it is artisanal and small-scale. Of course, the other side of the debate is at least as illogical, but that's an exercise for the reader.
I am also struck at the contortions people will go through to fix something, but without actually admitting that something is wrong or bearing the consequences of the fix themselves. Corporate consultants are like that. So is Supreme Court Reform [via the law.com ad at Volokh Conspiracy], at least this version thereof. These folks want to switch Supreme Court tenure to an eighteen year term -- this has the advantage of being both the current average for tenure and allows for replacing one judge every two years -- after which appointees would devolve back to Appeal Circuit duties. This would give all presidents a fair shot at naming people to the court (which seems reasonable) but keep Justices from overstaying their usefulness (which is highly questionable). Of course, to be fair to the current seat-holders, this won't kick in until they leave (how you get them to leave at two-year intervals escapes me), whether or not their usefulness has been overstayed. It could be interesting, having a discussion which matters about the Supreme Court on a biannual basis instead of the crapshoot we've got now. Would it depoliticize the process by routinizing it, or would it draw it more firmly into the partisan fray by making it an issue every Congressional term? This particular proposal probably won't make much of a splash before it sinks (they can't even figure out if a consitutional amendment would be necessary), but the proponents have a whole campaign of discussions and scholarship planned, so expect to be hearing about it for a while. But remember, you heard it hear first (unless you didn't, of course).
Violent Archives
Via HNN's Breaking News comes a story of municipal governments taking archives much more seriously than usual: Spanish authorities have ruled that documents seized by Franco's forces should be returned to their original municipalities; Salamancan leaders, pro-Franco still, have barricaded the streets and vowed to fight for their right to maintain those archives [emphasis added]:
"We are on the alert and we will mobilise because this is a subject that is lodged deep in our heart ... We will raise our cudgels to prevent this unprecedented cultural villainy," Mr Lanzarote said, using an ancient discourse of confrontation that precedes the Civil War by several centuries. He declined to elaborate on how the city's authorities planned to prevent the archives being removed.Even fascists (he's pro-Franco; I'm not projecting) sometimes get it right, or at least partly right. Some fields are richer in pillage than others: Chinese historians, in particular, have to contend with sources that were mostly
...
If Catalonia reclaimed its files, other regions would want theirs too, Mr Lanzarote said, and Salamanca's archive would be violently dismembered, "because there's no collection in the world, neither in Spain or any European country [ed. -- that's not the whole world, is it?], that has been won peacefully, not even a miserable stamp collection."
- looted from China by Japan
- dragged from China to Taiwan by the Nationalists
- purchased at fire-sale prices by Westeners during China's decades of disorder and poverty
- collected forcibly by Communist Chinese institutions, what they didn't burn as anti-proletarian (which is why we forgive -- even give thanks for -- the previous categories)
Before that, conquerers' transfer of wealth, including knowledge and art, was a part of the process of historical change: Gregory Guzman, in "Were the Barbarians a Negative or Positive Factor in Ancient and Medieval History?" argues that they were mostly positive historical actors, sweeping away defunct institutions, reinvigorating decadent societies and transfering technology and wealth from stagnating regions to underdeveloped ones. I think he understates the destructive aspect of these conquests, and overstates the importance of the difference between sudden, violent technology transfers and gradual, peaceful knowledge spread. But anyone who studies early societies has to contend with the fact that a notable portion of the cultural heritage is probably the result of pillage, in both directions. Japan's rich pottery tradition and early modern Confucianism, for example, are a direct result of Japan's invasions of Korea in the 1590s: Hideyoshi failed to conquer China, which was his aim, but his samurai armies brought back valuable slaves and sources.
Now, though, we are engaged in a massive rectification campaign. World-wide, archivists and curators are reexamining their collections (sometimes under intense pressure) and trying to distinguish those items which are of known and dubious or illegitimate provenance, and things are trickling back to Holocaust victims' families, indigenous groups, etc. This raises very tricky questions of property rights, individual and group inheritances, evidence and who presumptions favor. There is a loss, sometimes, in public or scholarly access, in preservation quality, etc.
I admit that, as an historian, my first inclination is to preserve collections over breaking them up, preserve access instead of reversions to private (or tribal) ownership, to emphasize preservation over risking degradation (e.g. the Elgin Marbles) through transport. That a bad act sometimes has a decent result ... well, I'll let the ethicists puzzle it out; that rectifying a bad act can have negative consequences.... never mind.
Saturday, January 1, 2005
Tsunami Facts of Interest
O.K., facts and commentary. Readers might find the facts interesting, and this is my first try on the technology. It will be a few weeks before I can dedicate the small amount of time to improving links and formatting, and to posting more frequently.
The Tamil rebels in northern Sri Lanka are making relief efforts there more difficult by insisting that everything pass on roads controlled by them. Then they have the gall to turn around and blame the Sri Lankan (ethnic Singhalese) government for neglecting Tamil areas.
(To be sure, this decades-old insurrection has something to do with longstanding Singhalese discrimination against Tamils. A blue-collar Tamil worker in Europe once told me that on university entrance exams, Tamils had to score a 36 in order to pass, whereas Singhalese needed only a 24, out of what I don’t know.)
My scientific curiosity has had me spending hours searching for good photos of an actual tsunami. Then suddenly the NYT online had one briefly on the front page. I can’t find it on the NYT anymore, but here are three photos and the accompanying story elsewhere:
First read (and see one photo at):
http://www.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,11834513%255E1702,00.html
Then go to:
http://expressen.se/index.jsp?a=224696
and click on "Bild-Special: Herregud . . . ," and forward through the three photos in the pop-up.
Fear the Turtle!
Critics sometimes suggest that the office of lieutenant governor should be abolished, especially in a state like Illinois, which has a very powerful governorship. Adlai Stevenson, III certainly thought so--the office almost certainly cost him the governorship in 1986, when a Larouchite upset the slated candidated for lieutenant governor in the Democratic primary. Illinois voters were certainly not going to elect a ticket that would place a Larouchite a heartbeat away from controlling the state's National Guard, and so Stevenson resigned as Democratic nominee (the Dems technically ran no one for governor in 1986), and stood instead as the candidate of the newly created Solidarity Party. The resulting confusion, coupled with his losing the ability to obtain straight-ticket Democratic voters, robbed Stevenson of any chance of winning.
The Land of Lincoln's current lieutenant governor, Pat Quinn, has "vowed to use the office to be an advocate for taxpayers and consumers": no one should mistake his office as a mere dispenser of patronage or trivial initiatives.
Among his recent initiatives: presiding over a statewide internet ballot . . . to select the official state reptile and official state amphibian. Winners were the painted turtle and the eastern tiger salamander. (The latter, which captured an impressive 19,217 votes in the amphibian contest, is the "largest of all Illinois terrestrial salamanders," and it "has a voracious appetite for any invertebrate it can overpower and swallow.")
It's nice to see Quinn has devoted himself to the important tasks of the people. How could anyone possibly say lieutenant governors are irrelevant?
Cliopatria at the MLA ...
Several Cliopatriarchs will be at the American Historical Association convention in Seattle this week. We'll probably confer there about doctrinal matters and enjoy our meal together. Scott Jaschik at Inside Higher Ed scoops us with a report on "Bloggers in the Flesh." That's what happens when bloggers meet at the Modern Language Association convention and a reporter listens in. Cliopatria's Miriam Burstein, the Little Professor, of SUNY, Brockport; Erin O'Connor of Critical Mass; MGK's Matthew G. Kirschenbaum of the University of Maryland; Charles Tryon of The Chutry Experiment and Georgia State University; the University of Pennsylvania's Nick Montfort who blogs with the Grand Text Auto group blog; dave e of the University of Maryland, and the anonymous blogger at Thanks for Not Being a Zombie are featured.
But, in her forthright way, Bitch Ph.D., who is threatening to publish pseudonymously as "Dr. Bitch," shifts the whole discussion of blogging and gender. "Why don't men keep academic blogs?" asks Dr. B. "Is it that their verbal skills are less developed, so they are less likely to write as a hobby? Is it that their natural hunting instincts make them less interested in forming communities? Is it that their competitive nature means they are less likely to put their thoughts out in a public forum?" Take that, Crooked Timber. Thanks to the Little Professor for the tip.
Latest from Columbia
The continuing crisis regarding Columbia's Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures department recently reached a new level: in a two-part series, Nat Hentoff, the First Amendment specialist at the Village Voice and an occasional professor himself (at NYU), offers some of the most thoughtful commentary I have seen on the tensions between protecting professors’ academic freedom and the more limited academic freedom rights enjoyed by students.
Columbia University president Lee Bollinger recently appointed a five-person panel to look into allegations of intimidation of students in MEALAC classes. The New York Sun, which has done the best reporting on this story (as they generally do on New York City higher education matters), was sharply critical of Bollinger’s move, contending that the president seemed to have “truckled to his employees in the faculty, permitting them, in effect, to investigate themselves.” Since the committee seems transparently biased (one of its members was a dissertation advisor to Professor Joseph Massad, another signed the petition demanding that Columbia divest from Israel, and a third is in charge of “diversity initiatives” at Morningside Heights), my guess is that it will ratify decisions that Bollinger has already made. If he wanted to whitewash the matter, it’s hard to believe that he would have selected a committee whose objectivity could be so easily challenged.
The Sun also, correctly, chastises Bollinger for limiting the scope of the inquiry’s purview to "classroom experiences,” with a committee not to “review departments or curricula,” raising what Hentoff terms a basic “dilemma": as the department’s “curricula reflect the views and interpretations of the professors, and the evident biases of some of them," how can the basic problem be addressed without looking into the curricular structure of MEALAC?
The answer, according to Hentoff, is intellectual diversity. “It’s not,” he notes, “about bringing in pro-Israel professors, but scholars who teach—not inculcate.” In the academic setting, he reasons,
free speech, free inquiry, and academic freedom are linked together, and all of these First Amendment protections work in two ways. Professors are entitled to their interpretations, however dogmatic. And students have the right to question professors' evidence or proof of their doctrines—and the right to make counter- assertions without being bullied and treated as if their only function as students is to be dutifully indoctrinated. Academic freedom in, of all places, a university based on free inquiry belongs to both professors and students.
Too often, as Hentoff comments, in MEALAC classes, “’academic freedom’ has been transmogrified into naked authoritarianism.”
Bollinger, of course, is not responsible for this problem: MEALAC hiring strategy for years was devoted to bringing in professors ideologically compatible with Edward Said, and so the roots of this controversy were established before Bollinger’s arrival as president. And, obviously, he has limited ability to rein in tenured professors.
Beyond establishing an effective university policy against using the classroom for indoctrination, Bollinger can and should make two other moves. First, he should take steps to closely oversee the personnel process within MEALAC, to ensure that applicants reflecting all legitimate scholarly interpretations are considered for positions. Secondly, he should demand that Joseph Massad provide proof for his wild allegations responding to the inquiry; and, if Massad cannot do so, the president should take appropriate action.
Academic Hair Association ...
The American Historical Association will meet from 6-9 January in Seattle and some of the Cliopatriarchs will be there. In fact, some of us expect to meet for the 2nd Annual Cliopatria Banquet at the convention. The 1st Annual Banquet at last year's AHA convention was canceled at the last minute, when I was struck with a humiliating illness and had to cancel out on the convention. But this year, we're doing it. The major problem is that we've never actually met each other, so how will we recognize fellow Cliopatriarchs among all the mere mortal historians at the AHA convention?
I was thinking about that when I read Fontana Labs' account of his experience at the Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association in Boston. He wasn't actually there,* but his account of it rang so true of all academic conventions that I'm just plagiarizing his whole thing over here at Cliopatria:
I couldn't liveblog it, sadly, but here's what it would have been like if I did:Note to all the other Cliopatriarchs: I'm the one with the extravagant academic hair.Tuesday night: arrive in Boston, find the hotel, run into some old friends, have dinner. I see Cornel West back in the lobby, but I resist the temptation to ask him if he lists his CD on his CV. I stop by the reception ("the smoker" if you're old-school) and run into at least three people who are demonstrably smarter than me and have either no jobs at all or really bad jobs. I resolve to be a less terrible person in the new year. I drink several cups of the bad (but free) beer the APA hands out at this thing while resenting that I'm one of the only people tipping the bartenders.
I make this solemn vow: I will never have extravagant academic hair, the kind of hair that makes you look like you're trying too hard to look eccentric and brilliant, the kind of hair that everyone who knows better laughs at.
Later Tuesday night: hit a nearby bar with the old grad school cronies. Some of these guys are as-yet unemployed, so I put everyone on my tab. Suddenly my friends start drinking Chivas.
Wednesday morning: I wake up around 10 hating myself for having too much to drink. I console myself with "Dawson's Creek"-- Joey finally gets laid! Dawson handles euthanasia! I wonder just how pleasurable it would be to punch James Vanderbeek in the face.
Wednesday afternoon: I make it to the gay marriage session. I'm a little scared by Cheshire Calhoun's hair, but her paper is mildly interesting, if not really philosophical. Claudia Card: still hatin' on marriage. I notice that Richard Mohr, professional homosexual, is wearing a leather tie. I resist the temptation to ask if he's still getting royalties for "My Sharona." Ralph (say "Rafe") Wedgwood is there, and, as usual, looks resplendent and contemptuous at the same time. I admire his pants in a heterosexual sort of way.
Overheard in an elevator. Civilian: "is there some kind of convention here?" APA guy: "it's the American Philosophical Association-- mostly philosophy professors." Civilian: "Oh, that explains all the beards."
Wednesday night: a nice dinner with friends, then another round at the reception. I make some attempts to schmooze, but my heart's not in it. I see one prominent philosopher grab the ass of another during a hello embrace. Sweet. We head to a bar, have trouble finding one, and make it just before last call. Fortunate: this lets me catch my train the next morning without any problem.
*Correction: Ogged tells me that Fontana Labs actually was at the eastern division meeting of the APA. He just wasn't liveblogging. It sounded pretty much like most academic conventions I've attended.
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