Historiann

The weather here in Potterville is gorgeous–Historiann’s roses, irises, lupines, poppies, and bachelor’s buttons are blooming–it’s almost too perfect, so let’s have a little bad news today to wash down with our daily cup o’brimstone, shall we?

• Bad news:  Frank Donoghue says that as much as we bitch and moan about our jobs (if we have them) and the job market in academia, we’re living in the not-so-golden age as The Last Professors.  He makes the daring prediction that we’re on the slippery slope to hell, and that the corporitization of the university can’t be reversed.  Says Donoghue:  “The tenure-track professoriate will never be restored. . . . [T]he hiring of adjuncts continues to outpace the hiring of tenure-track professors by a rate of three to one. It’s silly to think we can reverse the trend toward casualization when, despite a great deal of attention and effort, we can’t even slow it down. . . . Much as it pains me to say it, I never considered putting a question mark at the end of my title, The Last Professors.”
• Good news:  Via Inside Higher Ed, the Big Dog says he won’t speak at UCLA’s commencement, out of respect for AFSCME’s unresolved contract with the university. 
• Bad news:  Student newspaper shuttered after publishing photo of a buring U.S. flag.  Oh, grow up, school administrators!  What’s the point of student newspapers, if not to publish occasionally stupid and juvenile stories and photos?  Giving students a publication and then getting all hopped up because they publish something dumb is like handing kids a firecracker and then getting angry when they light it up.  Guess what?  By shutting down the paper, you’re making this story a bigger issue than it would have been had you ignored it!  Did it not occur to you that the people who write for major U.S. dailies are the kinds of people who used to work on their high school newspaper, and that they might find an otherwise silly local story like this newsworthy?  Jackasses.
• Good news: the later week/weekend forecast for Minnapolis is improving, with only 20-30 percent ”chances” of showers and thunderstorms Thursday through the rest of the weekend.  Still, those of you who will be at the Berkshire Conference are well advised to be prepared for anything–so bring your raincoat and sunscreen, too.  (For a few years after moving to Colorado, I drove around with an umbrella in my car, which made me an eccentric; after living here for a while now, I completely forget that it rains anywhere else in the world, which makes me an idiot!)

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Go read “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower,” a sadly provocative essay in The Atlantic by “Professor X,” who is an adjunct instructor at a private college and at a community college.  (H/t to Lance Mannion, via Suburban Guerilla.)  The article is a report from the front lines by an instructor who teaches introductory composition and literature courses to people who frequently don’t have the skills it takes to pass hir class, let alone earn a college degree.  It’s not snarky at all–ze is a compassionate person who truly dislikes failing hir students, but ze dislikes even more the falsely egalitarian notion that college is the only path to success.  I sheepishly identify with this:

The full-time, tenured professors at the colleges where I teach may likewise feel comfortably separated from those whom they instruct. Their students, the ones who attend class during daylight hours, tend to be younger than mine. Many of them are in school on their parents’ dime. Professors can fail these young people with emotional impunity because many such failures are the students’ own fault: too much time spent texting, too little time with the textbooks.

There are some returning students and other students with more complex lives taking courses in the daylight hours, but I agree with Professor X’s point about “daylight” versus nighttime students and faculty.   There is a large class and status divide between those of us for whom teaching and learning are our “day jobs,” and those for whom teaching and learning are pursued in the second shift.  To those students and faculty, our day shift must look like beer and skittles.  Professor X continues: 

But my students and I are of a piece. I could not be aloof, even if I wanted to be. Our presence together in these evening classes is evidence that we all have screwed up. I’m working a second job; they’re trying desperately to get to a place where they don’t have to. All any of us wants is a free evening. Many of my students are in the vicinity of my own age. Whatever our chronological ages, we are all adults, by which I mean thoroughly saddled with children and mortgages and sputtering careers. We all show up for class exhausted from working our full-time jobs. We carry knapsacks and briefcases overspilling with the contents of our hectic lives. We smell of the food we have eaten that day, and of the food we carry with us for the evening. We reek of coffee and tuna oil. The rooms in which we study have been used all day, and are filthy. Candy wrappers litter the aisles. We pile our trash daintily atop filled garbage cans.

That’s right–not only are they pursuing their second jobs and educations after hours, without the company of colleagues or even the minimal courtesy of the department office having the door open and a staff member to help with the copier, or to lend a stapler or a dry-erase marker.  These faculty and students are literally working amidst the refuse that the day faculty and day students have left behind:  the overflowing trash cans, the chalkboards already hopelessly smeared with dust. 

Professor X is the George Orwell of adjunct faculty and night school students.  Ze should write a book:  Down and Out in Amherst and Madison?

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No matter how much academics in the blogosphere bitch and moan amongst themselves, those crazy, cockeyed, optimistic kids keep signing up for graduate school in ever greater numbers!  According to this report at Inside Higher Ed, ”More Historians on the Way,” based on this report by the American Historical Association, applications and enrollment in Ph.D. programs are up, but so is attrition from said programs.  Only 49 percent of graduate students have finished their degrees in under 10 years.

Historiann could have told you this was going to happen, as it has in every economic downturn over the past 20 years.  I started graduate school just before the 1990-91 recession drove up applications in my graduate department (Après moi, le deluge!), and I’m sure that the current recession is a good part of what drove applications up this year.  Twenty-two year-olds with liberal arts degrees look around and say, “whereas we used to be able to count on working at Whole Foods or Barnes and Noble with our B.A.’s while we decided what we wanted to do in life, now we can’t even count on getting a boring retail job.”  (Well, that was Historiann’s choice, anyway–while most of the rest of her generation became slacker baristas ca. 1990-94, and then became internet millionaires in 1998-99, she got a Ph.D. instead.)  Compared to unemployment, working in a library for five to ten years looks pretty good, and I’m sure most will stay long enough to get their Master’s degrees, and maybe even figure out their true calling.  And there are worse things than spending a year or two achieving a greater knowledge of history, even if you don’t become a professional historian, so long as you’re not racking up too much debt.  You’ll lower your lifetime risk of skin cancer, at the very least, and learn how to pronounce “Michel Foucault” the fancy French way.  (The only downside of graduate history education is that every U.S. Civil War buff at every party you’ll attend for the rest of your lives will find you and want to get your opinion on his pet theory on the Battle of Waxahatchmo Crick, even if you studied monastic communities in medieval Flanders.)

The author of the AHA report, Robert Townsend, will appear at the 2008 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women at our opening night plenary session, “The Changing (?) Status of Women in the Historical Profession,” Thursday June 12 at 7 p.m. at the Ted Mann Concert Hall on the campus of the University of Minnesota.  Along with Noralee Frankel (also from the AHA), he will provide the statistics, Paula Sanders will speak to best practices, Elizabeth Lunbeck will speak about women’s experiences in the academy over the past 40 years, and Muriel McClendon will address the experiences of faculty of color.  The session will be chaired by Mary Maples Dunn, a longtime member of the Berkshire Conference and whose professional interest in this issue over a nearly 50 year career as a faculty member and administrator is legendary.  Stop by to ask them some tough questions.  I’m not sure they’ll necessarily have all the answers–or the answers you’ll want to hear–but it should make for a lively conversation.  (See the links on the left sidebar for conference details and a PDF of the program.)

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Last week, I was invited to talk to a class of third- and fourth-graders about what it’s like to be a historian.  I was pretty sure I and my line of work would be about as exciting to these kids as a lecture on tort reform, or monetary policy, or the line-item veto.  But, these kids were into history–my 30-minute guest spot lurched closer to 60 minutes, and many hands were still in the air when I stopped taking questions.  (That’s just a random photo of a classroom–it’s not Historiann at the head of the class.)

According to the questions I got that day, and the thank-you notes they all wrote me, here are the things that really impressed them about being a historian:

• The opportunity for glamorous travel!  (Seriously.)  This was really exciting for them–to think that I had to travel as far away as Boston, Maine, Chicago, Los Angeles, and even across an international border to Quebec to do my research.  I told them that I wanted to do research in Paris, and one of the children wrote sweetly, “I hope you get to Paris someday!”  Their excitement about travel struck me because for me, being a historian is not about movement, but about being stationary–that is, spending a lot of time sitting indoors in a library, archive, or my own desk, albeit sometimes at libraries in Chicago and Los Angeles, and archives in Boston, Maine, and Quebec.
• There are historians writing books about every place in the world!  (Related to opportunities for glamorous travel.)  African history really got a few of the children excited.  I think this was a revelation for them because the hook for my visit is that they’d been doing a class unit on local history, so the teachers hadn’t connected the dots yet to world history.
• In colonial America, girls and boys were taught to read but only boys were taught to write, and enslaved children were forbidden to achieve any form of literacy.  That blew their minds, as people who were still very close to the achievement of literacy, and who were taught literacy in a way that made learning reading and writing inseparable.  Most of them mentioned that in their thank-you notes as the most interesting thing I had taught them.
• One kid even worked himself up to an epistemological crisis!  Toward the end of the questions, he asked, “But, how do we know that history is, you know, the truth?”  His classmates started to ridicule him for complicating something that to them seemed pretty straightforward–historians read the sources and tell us what they say, right?  I shushed them and he perservered:  “I mean, how do you know that your sources are true?”  That blew me away–he got to a place in 45 minutes at the age of nine that many of my undergraduate university students will never go. 

Once again, I was humbled by the work that schoolteachers do.  This class was incredibly well-prepared for my visit, and it’s amazing to think that teachers do that every day not just in one subject, but in five or six of them, in addition to dealing with learning disabilities and any social or family problems the students might have.  The children were all unfailingly polite, although some were clearly more interested than others.  One of the things that took a few minutes to get used to was the constant fidgeting in the students–in an adult audience, fidgeting is a major sign that you’re losing them and it’s time to wrap things up.  But in an audience of eight- to ten-year olds, they all fidgeted, even the ones who were clearly very interested and asked me lots of questions. 

At the end of the class, the teacher said to the children, “Now when you heard we would have a historian come to our class, you probably got a picture in your mind about what a historian might look like.  Does Dr. Historiann look like the picture in your mind?”  Immediately, all the heads started shaking violently–I was a little taken aback.  When I asked them what was so different about me, one little boy half jumped out of his seat and waved his hands consolingly, “You’re different–but in a GOOD way!” I think they knew I was a woman before I visited–I got the impression that they thought I would be older, more serious, and more formally dressed.  (I wasn’t slovenly, but I wasn’t wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase.)  I’m just wondering where their ideas about historians have come from that already by the ages of 8, 9, or 10, they have a picture in their minds about what we look like.  But, some of them may have seen a documentary with the usual, not terribly diverse array of talking heads on PBS or The History Channel.

One boy, whose mother works with a Historiann family member, told his mother that the kids thought that I was prettier than they thought a historian would be.  (I was flattered until I remembered that kids that age all think their mothers are pretty, so consider the source.)

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Lumpenprofessoriat recently offered some interesting comments on my post last week on book buy-back schemes (and on Ortho’s comments on that post, too.)  Hir post inspired me to write about something that’s been on my mind for several years now, even if it does threaten to out me as a young fogey complaining about “kids these days…and their music, it’s just noise!“  Well, actually, I don’t mind the music so much, but I do have questions about the kids these days. 

LumpenProf writes, “Right now, every cut in student aid and every increase in tuition, fees, parking, textbooks, housing, and food creates a cadre of students who can only afford to look at the bottom line and will approach higher education with the same eye towards cost savings they use in a trip to Wal-mart.”  Ze argues (like Ortho) that students are just responding rationally when they sell their books, although ze disagrees with Ortho’s notion that cooperating in book buyback schemes will bring on the Revolution faster.  “Students are behaving like poorly paid workers. They want payday to get here as soon as possible,” says LumpenProf.  I get this–and don’t entirely disagree–but I want to address the costs of higher education in this post.  There is a lot of money being spent, but I’m afraid it’s not just state legislatures and university administrations that are making bad decisions about investing in higher education.  (The following comments apply only to my university–I realize that there are all kinds of different institutions and all kinds of different college students these days, so your mileage may vary.  I’ll be interested to get your opinions vis-a-vis what you see at your institutions of higher learning, whether you’re a faculty member, a student, or simply an informed and interested member of your community.

A few years ago, when I was fairly new at my current university (my one and only experience with a large, public university), I commented on how many of my students seemed to have full-time or nearly full-time jobs, and how that inevitably interfered with their educations.  Jobs, not their educational needs or personal interests, seemed to dictate their schedules (as in, “I can’t take any afternoon MWF classes because of my job.”  “I have to take all Tuesday-Thursday classes because of my job.”  What if the senior seminar you need is Wednesday at 2 p.m.?  Guess we’ll be seeing you semester after next, too.)  I commented sympathetically about this, saying that I felt sorry that so many of our students had to work so hard, until a senior colleague of mine (who’s a hard-edged libertarian) said, “I don’t feel sorry for them at all.”  I was shocked by what I heard as his callousness–we teach at a large, public university.  Many of our students who seem like traditional, full-time college-aged students have children already, in addition to jobs, and are enmeshed in webs of responsibilities that I (like most of my colleagues) was largely free of until my early thirties.  Many other of our students are in their late twenties to mid-forties, trying to earn that B.A. that eluded them when they partied too hard/got married/had a child/ran out of money the first time around.  My colleague continued, “When I was in college [in the late 1970s] we lived in a dorm.  We didn’t have apartments, we didn’t have cars, we didn’t go out.  We had a an appropriately simple lifestyle.  Most of our students are working to support an adult lifestyle, not to put themselves through school.”

More after the flip… Continue Reading »

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