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Iraq: Sudarsan Raghavan,"An Archive of Despair," Washington Post, 7 April, tells of Saad Eskander's struggle to preserve Iraq's historical record. It's a story he's also told at the Diary of Saad Eskander.
Undergrad: Madeline M. G. Haas,"Profs Call for Study of the Past in Gen Ed," Harvard Crimson, 6 April. Harvard's FAS will consider an amendment with a history requirement in the general education program it may adopt by the end of the year. A second proposed amendment would include a non-English language requirement. The FAS will consider the amendments on Tuesday.
Carnivals: Four Stone Hearth, the anthropology/archaeology festival, goes up at Tim Jones's remote central on Wednesday 11 April. Send nominations of the best in anthropology/ archaeology blogging since 28 March to submit*at* fourstonehearth*dot*net or use the form. The first Military History Carnival goes up at Gavin Robinson's Investigations of a Dog on Thursday 12 April. Send your nominations of the best in military history blogging since 1 March to him at mhc1*at*4-lom*dot*com or use the mailform or the carnival form.
Dear Ralph,
Fair comment. Still not sure whether I agree with your larger point about the necessity to abolish certain doctoral programmes, but that's already the subject of a much longer thread.
Best,
David
Ralph E. Luker -
4/8/2007
Indeed, Hala! Good people often do remarkable things -- even in the face of tragedy.
Hala Fattah -
4/8/2007
Dear Ralph,
I read the piece on the Iraqi National Library. One of the most heartening things in the article is the para on how the staff members are resurrecting older mss deemed unredeemable in 2003 because they'd been flooded by broken pipes in an underground chamber. Who says that remarkable things are not happening in strife-torn Baghdad under the very noses of marauders? The director and staff of the National Library should be recognized with Iraqi medals of valor.
Best,
Hala
Ralph E. Luker -
4/8/2007
Professor MacDonald, I hesitated to comment on your thoughtful observations, hoping that others would respond to them. I suspect that your comments about internal pressures to shift resources from history and the humanities toward the sciences are well taken. So, while I think that closing down marginal doctoral programs in history is a good idea, I regret the way in which that may have been achieved at Kent State.
I appreciated your pointing to Isolde Thyret as an exceptional scholar in Russian Studies prior to 1861, but history departments in secondary or tertiary state institutions are peculiarly likely to have a very mixed group of tenured faculty members. Recently at Cliopatria, our attention was drawn to Kent State's department because of Julio Cesar Pino's apparent affiliation with and contributions to a terrorist website. His one book was published by Greenwood ten years ago. Frankly, I can't imagine that he should be directing doctoral candidates in Latin American History or that a student of his, boasting a doctorate in Latin American History from Kent State University, is likely to be significantly placed in a job.
If Kent State's doctoral program in history is forced to close down, it can concentrate its attention on offering the best Master's program it's capable of mustering.
David M Fahey -
4/7/2007
Two points: (1) Even people who enjoy reading history and biography may question the value of subsidizing specialized research through low teaching loads. Convincing them that history ought to be taught doesn't necessarily persuade them to endorse light teaching schedules. (2) The availability of cheap part-time and temporary history staff, perhaps supplemented by distance learning, may have made TAs less important for teaching (or at least providing credits for) large numbers of students than once was true. I haven't made up my own mind.
David J Merkowitz -
4/7/2007
Ralph your power never ceases to amaze.
On the Toledo debacle, I am pretty sure that the current interim chair is actually a German professor. She may be a historian as well, but the fact that they needed an outsider to run the department can't be a good sign.
Maybe we should just create a 'ohio' PhD program that includes everyone but the Buckeyes. We'd have them surrounded. We can consult Univ of Florida on how to bring down OSU. I hear they do a pretty good job of it.
I find both of the above comments to be useful in this larger debate.
As a TA there are all sorts of trade-offs that come with the elimination of grad programs. If any of these departments actually had a full complement of faculty they could have smaller classes and not overwhelm the faculty, and still get adequate FTE's to make the department self-sustaining. However, without those, the departments go in for the big lecture classes, 130-200 students or more. This is where the TA does a lot of the grunt work, especially when the department bans any sort of multiple choice exams. No scantron means you need TAs to grading realistic.
david maclaren mcdonald -
4/7/2007
Whatever the merits of your larger campaign to right-size graduate history programmes, your focus on that issue alone obscures another more troubling and more systemic issue raised in the Kent State piece--namely, that universities are now asking history departments, among other programmes in the "liberal arts," to self-eviscerate so as to permit greater investment in the sciences. The Kent State example stands out only for the fact that the administration has made the request so explicit, but I would wager that this is only the most visible manifestation of a nation-wide trend, one that certainly holds at my home institution, the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
As state funding dries up for land-grant institutions, administrators cast about for means to make up the budgetary shortfalls and bet like railbirds at Aqueduct on the sciences or on applied disciplines that promise short-term yields. In the meantime, the best arguments we can come up with are bleats about fostering "critical thinking."
Here, two different lines of thought occur to me. First, in the context of paring down bloat in graduate education--do science departments at Kent State have some sort of intrinsic claim to greater viability than the History Department. In this vein, Isolde Thyret, quoted in the article, is one of a handful of scholars in this country who know anything about Russia before 1861--don't we have a means to value her excellent work beyond the bottom line? If that latter measure prevails, we're all lost, unless we teach and study the Civil War and narcissism in the USA since 1945.
The second path leads to more effective arguments on behalf of the liberal arts, beyond the nebulous claims to foster broader thinking. To ground these claims, we might well remind administrators and scientists themselves of several facts. Many scientists and mathematicians experience creative "burnout" quite early in their careers. In a different vein, I'd argue that a corollary of Moore's Law holds for applied knowledge, as attested by the career paths of many professional engineers, who often segue into management after a brief stint of real practice. Likewise, to filch from a historiographical hero of mine, "paradigm shift" occurs, often in unpredictable fashion, but frequently as a consequence of new ideas from the realm associated with the liberal arts or social sciences. Thus, could Darwin have come up with natural selection without Malthus or Smith? Discreteness as a concept arose in philosophy and literature long before it became a key for understanding atomic structure. We have to show our audiences that our ways of knowing and speculating about the relationships among causes and effects teach a flexibility and, ideally, openness to considering new relationships that the lawbound sciences too often lack I could go on, but it's Saturday, and the Master's beckons . . .
Dave Stone -
4/7/2007
Money quote from the Kent State story:
"The department would no longer be able to feasibly administer and grade essay exams and communicate with students on a more personal level without teaching assistants."
I've been misquoted by lots of undergrad journalists, but if this is accurate, it seems to suggest a certain distance from undergraduate education on the part of the faculty.
