This benefits a few students and it’s the best I can do. I have 4 classes now, 2 out of field (it’s 4 different classes, and with cross listings and other stuff like that I’m teaching for 4 departments, too). It is really obvious how much easier the in field courses are, even if they are new ones which they are. So a few majors get mega benefits but: was it really so bad back in the day, with less avant garde profs (I doubt it) … and my research time goes into covering all these many and various courses everywhere and so … the benefit, such as it is, is only to a very few students for whom it makes a difference.

?

That isn’t an alternative explanation–that IS my explanation. It’s the crazy market that has selected for aggressive and successful researchers. I was trying to find something positive to say today, or find some good that’s come out of the situation we’re in. This is as close as I can come to finding good news.

In my experience training changed little over the years.

Ability clearly is constant for the simple reason that there are no measured indications that people have changed much over the years.

I cannot define a scholar, but I am sure it is not somebody who publishes a lot. Sadly, that is a very common semi-definition. A scholar is a person who publishes quality papers or books that the her community values highly. In my opinion, everything else is wasting paper and time.

I tend to think of the humanities in particular (and academe in general) as just burning off the accursed share- it’s books or human sacrifice, so it may as well be books.

Second quibble is on “train” as a reference to what we do with undergraduates. I was never that wholly fond of this term when it replaced “educate” at the graduate level, and I still revel in having arrived in g. school with an undersophisticated and in some ways almost resistant cohort. Those of us who stuck it out in the end got re-fashioned for historiography, analysis, critical reading, and the rest of the professional toolkit. But I think some people now hit graduate school a little too pre-adapted for their own long range good. Just a transient but long-embedded perception of mine in this regard. Can this undergraduate focus on the preparation of students for “advanced work in history” (if it be such a focus) wholly coexist with the broader and often different needs of other students for historical perspective of another sort? Not saying that it can’t, but I think it’s worth some thought. We have these discussions all the time at my dept. If we do/don’t do this or that, curricularly, some say, “our majors” won’t be able to compete when they get to graduate school. Part of my own memory says yes they will too, and maybe emerge more resilient and creative. But beyond this, that’s only a handful of the people we teach, and what would the policy in question do for the rest?