I read Henry Adams before I read Gore Vidal, but I liked Vidal better. Both were funny, but only Vidal was having fun. Which is not something everyone understands, that you can have great fun at the apocalypse. It was perhaps his least American trait.
A critic complained about the versions of Henry Adams and Henry James that Vidal made up. Vidal responded, but they made me up. He shared with Adams an apparent sense that American politics ought to have belonged to him, and as it didn’t, American history would. As motives to write history go, it isn’t the worst. He knew that the affairs of the republic were run by a small group of people who wanted to protect its property. He judged each faction of the group more or less by its tendency to agree with him.
In consequence, he had mixed feelings about FDR, who employed his father and disagreed with his grandfather; he held enduringly…
On Friday, UC Davis Provost Ralph Hexter issued this statement on academic freedom:
In March, 1953 the Association of American Universities (AAU) adopted a statement articulating “The Rights and Responsibilities of Universities and Their Faculties.” It includes these words: “A university must … be hospitable to an infinite variety of skills and viewpoints, relying upon open competition among them as the surest safeguard of truth. Its whole spirit requires investigation, criticism, and presentation of ideas in an atmosphere of freedom and mutual confidence. This is the real meaning of ‘academic’ freedom.”
A committee of our campus’s Academic Senate has devoted considerable time and effort to examining an assertion by a faculty member of the UC Davis School of Medicine that his academic freedoms were compromised by school administrators. Our Senate’s Representative Assembly earlier…
(Much of this came in my comments on Eric’s post, but I wanted to highlight it on the front page)
The California Association of Scholars’ report that Eric so ably dissects in the previous post is particularly misleading in another way. The report makes a big issue of the fact that neither history department it cites looks at the broad sweep of American history, instead choosing to focus on marginalized and oppressed groups. To steal Eric’s quotes:
For example, at UC San Diego in the fall of 2010 nine upper division courses in American History were offered, but one looks in vain for any course that provides a connected view of the sweep of American history, and of how it came to develop so rapidly from an insignificant cluster of colonies to the nation which is economically, militarily, and culturally the most powerful and influential in the world…and…UC Santa Cruz’s American his…
“A Crisis of Competence,” which bills itself as “A Report Prepared for the Regents of the University of California by the California Association of Scholars, A Division of the National Association of Scholars,” (hereafter CAS, for short) has garnered a great deal of attention. It was, apparently, the basis for Rick Santorum’s laughably false claims that California’s universities do not teach US history – though to be fair to the report, Santorum evidently misunderstood what was in it. It was the subject of an April 1 news story (no, not an April Fool’s) in the Los Angeles Times. And it was the basis for a May 20 op-ed in the LA Times. To be fair to the LA Times, its own editorial, on April 7, was skeptical of the report, describing it as “a mélange of anecdotes.”
This is correct: the paper’s methodology is highly suspect,…
Any conference report that includes “but the mere public showing of his erection from the podium was not sufficient” is worth an extended read. The presenter–one Professor Brindley–was experimenting with cures for erectile dysfunction. His strategy involved the wince-inducing method of direct penile injection. He was not content with merely showing slides:
He paused, and seemed to ponder his next move. The sense of drama in the room was palpable. He then said, with gravity, ‘I’d like to give some of the audience the opportunity to confirm the degree of tumescence’. With his pants at his knees, he waddled down the stairs, approaching (to their horror) the urologists and their partners in the front row. As he approached them, erection waggling before him, four or five of the women in the front rows threw their arms up in the air, seemingly in unison, and screamed loudly. The…
From the web edition of Jobs for Philosophers, put out by the American Philosophical Association:
306. SAINT MARY’S COLLEGE OF CALIFORNIA, MORAGA, CA. POSTDOCTORAL RESIDENT, COUNSELING CENTER. Saint Mary’s College of California – Moraga, CA. For the 2010-2011 academic year. The Residency requires a 9.5 month, 5 day per week commitment in order to meet California licensing requirements of 1500 hours supervised postdoctoral experience. Qualifications: Psy.D, Ph. D. in Clinical/Counseling Psychology. College/University Counseling Center experience at practicum and/or internship level (desired). Fluency in Spanish (desired). Salary and benefits are competitive and subject to the availability of funding sources. Complete details are available at http://jobs.stmarys-ca.edu. Preferred deadline is 01/18/10. Open until filled. EOE. www.stmarys-ca.edu. (184W), posted 1/11/10
The “traditional forms of history are dying” meme is strong within conservative precincts, and, oddly, the New York Times. “Traditional” in this case usually means one of a choice of political, diplomatic, economic or military history. The regular story is that these important kinds of history are being excluded from academia by (unstated but usually implied) less important forms of history that involve politically correct topics like race and gender. The articles are written from the viewpoint of the traditional forms of history, and those quoted represent those forms. Input from those historians practicing the PC forms are largely ignored.
A canonical example of this came a few years ago, in the National Review. John Miller wrote “Sounding Taps: Why Military History is being retired,” which took as its starting point the inability of the University of Wisconsin to fill the…
Is it absolutely necessary for the image gracing the cover of the most recent issue of the official mouthpiece of my professional organization to depict something that, when seen on my desk by a colleague from another department, compelled her to ask where a viper fish would even get a detachable penis to whack off against a shrimp-wielding toucan? Do other departments not laugh at us literary folk enough already?
Why does this same issue contain a write-up of a forum from the 2007 MLA convention? Did it really take two years and change to transform that panel into something print-worthy? So I take it the first sentence is supposed to read:
In contributions to this 2007 panel of the division on Comparative Studies in Romanticism and the Nineteenth Century, titled “Untiming the Nineteenth-Century: Temporality and Periodization,” periodization, a venerable mainstay of comparative…
Teaching composition exclusively leads to (1) a greater appreciation for the pedestrian complexity of correctly subordinated clauses and (2) a bone-tiredness for the unmerited praise of student peer reviews. As someone with a penchant for paragraph-length sentences, I find (1) wholly salutary; but (2) irks me endlessly. Why? In one of my undergraduate History of the English Language course, the professor handed out slips of paper on which he had written a single sentence and told everyone to decipher what it meant, because he wanted us to present the sentence and the paraphrase to the class in ten minutes. My sentence read:
Another thing there is that fixeth a grievous scandal upon that nation in matter of philargyrie, or love of money, and it is this: There hath been in London, and repairing to it, for these many years together, a knot of Scotish bankers, collybists, or…
Elizabeth Alexander’s inaugural poem has drawn generally negative reviews (though the Facebook fan club has attracted 500-some members). My feelings about it are mixed — but reading the discussion at Ta-Nehisi Coates’ place here and here I felt torn, defensive, even protective. So many readers seem to be beating up on Alexander almost personally, rather than trying to read the poems well. (Adam Kirsch and Rudolph Delson address broader tendencies which they see or imagine in Alexander. Margaret Soltan attacks from the aesthetic right, and Ron Silliman indirectly from the left. Etc.) She hardly needs my defense (being not only a grownup but a lit professor), but I still want to try to draw out the virtues of the poem, to show it’s worth not scorning.
To begin with, I’ll acknowledge that the poem was written for the eye. The verse is syllabic, composed in lines of about 10 syllables each…
Following up on the discussion of teaching evaluations, I thought I’d mention courses that tend, in my experience, to be more prone to getting bad course evaluations. By “prone to getting bad course evaluations,” I mean that these courses, independent of how well they are taught, or how well the students retain the information, are nonetheless likely to be low-rated for other reasons. Today, I’d like to introduce gateway courses
There are more undergraduates planning to go to medical school than there are openings in said medical schools. Institutions don’t want to graduate a lot of pre-med majors who will never be able to get into an onshore medical school. The result, at many undergraduate institutions, is the gateway course. This is a course, coming early on in the student’s undergraduate existence, that is designed to weed out people who aren’t really committed to becoming…
Even granting for the sake of argument*, both of Klein’s premises, viz., that university professors do not care about teaching, and that universities are structured not to reward good teaching, this proposal strikes me as a bad idea. It’s not that it’s unfair; it’s that student evaluations reflect not the quality of instruction, but factors such as easy grading, and whether the professor is attractive.
Providing a handsome reward for good student evaluations isn’t going to give professors an incentive to care about teaching; it’s going to give them an incentive to care about whether they get good student evaluations. There is not necessarily a lot of overlap. See: NCLB, call center metrics, etc.
*I’d agree with the second, but not the first. Plenty of professors care about teaching and do a good job; it’s just that it won’t matter a hill of beans when it comes time for tenure …
So a few weeks back, a small package arrived in my department mailbox.
“Willikers!” I thought. “Another interesting book I won’t ever have time to read!”
Sure enough, I discovered this catchy little fellow tucked inside the envelope. Figuring I’d ordered it as a desk copy because (a) everyone knows you have to suck up to Rauchway on this blog, and (b) I’m too cheap to fork over the $6.87 for a used copy, I placed it on top of the “I’d Read You if I Didn’t Have a Toddler, Seriously I Would” pile, superseding Leon Litwack’s Been in the Storm So Long, which is much, much longer and written by someone who, to my knowledge, was never photographed in a wetsuit.
Earlier this week, as fate would have it, I received a phone call from one of my favorite students. He’s planning to take my historiography and methods course next semester, and he was wondering which of the books we’d be reading …
… good luck to all of you on the various academic job markets this year. This sums it up nicely, except on the academic markets, there are fewer coins.
It is not generally true that one is required to dance at the interviews, however, if that comes up, stay in unison.
First: I have to write some comments for a session at the Central APA. The paper I’m commenting on is by a much smarter guy, but I’m pretty sure he’s wrong. So this puts me in a weird position: I confidently predict I’ll make my objections and then he’ll respond in a smart and convincing way. So at some future moment I’ll believe that he’s right. But I don’t know the content of his reply, so I’m stuck with my current belief that he’s wrong. I’m reminded of al-Ghazali’s discussion of taqlid (more or less beliefs held out of uncritical emulation rather than reasonable enquiry) in Deliverance from Error: it seems that continued belief is incompatible with the recognition that your belief is of this sort. And yet reading this guy’s paper, I can’t but think that he’s not correct. Ah, the epistemology of everyday life. (Fine, I know about the al-Ghazali discussion only because Gideon…
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This blog is a blog about history, Yiddishkeit, and the Muppets, neither exclusively nor necessarily in that order. And as William Gibson said about this very blog (no, really), “History can save your ass.” Yiddishkeit and the Muppets are just extras.
is the associate director of the Cornell in Washington program and a senior lecturer at Cornell University. He teaches courses on European history, modern military history, guerrilla war, and the role of popular will in waging war.
is an associate professor of history at UC Davis. He is the author of A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans, which won the Abbott Lowell Cummings Prize in 2004, and his new book, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek, will be published by Harvard University Press in fall 2012.
is a professor of history at UC Davis, and the author of several books on US history including The Great Depression and the New Deal: A Very Short Introduction, and Murdering McKinley, among others.
is a professor of history at UC Davis. She is the author of Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11 (Oxford, 2009); Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley (North Carolina, 2002); and Challenging the Secret Government: The Post-Watergate Investigations of the CIA and FBI (North Carolina, 1996).
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