Piracy Begins at Home

I think (and I’m in the process of writing a post on exactly this) that some of it has to do with institutional policies (as in, collaboration isn’t rewarded, tenure is earned by you and you alone; we’ve all heard the horror stories of a publication not counting because you weren’t listed as first author, for example), but I also think it is because of the academic job market. In the hyper-competitive quest for the TT job (and then tenure), helping someone might hurt your career chances. Also, when there is a high level of inequity between those who do and do not have tt positions, both in terms of the job security and financial inequity, it breeds an environment where it becomes difficult to collaborate (or even be collegial). 

I think it’s important to show humanists (be they historians, literary scholars, or philosophers) that there are jobs out there outside of academia, but I also think that we risk losing the best and the brightest to other work. There needs to be some sort of balance doesn’t there? But these are problems that aren’t going away soon. 

You should pick up Now You See It by Cathy Davidson. The book calls for more collaboration in schools as this is how our students will be working as they move through their lives. It really inspired me to do more collaborative projects (don’t call it group work!) in my classes. 

I think your post here is revolutionary in the good sense of the term, in that, as that pamphlet from Occupy Wall Street notes, the bourgeois model of individual competition and achievement is not only self-limiting, it is also a fundamentally dangerous mindset to maintain in the twenty-first century. (It was dangerous in the 20th as well, of course, but that’s all in the past.) 

And yet…when I was an undergraduate student, I hated collaborative exercises of all kinds. Working in groups, putting together a paper as a member of a team, I positively despised it. The social dynamics of it were often awkward, and somebody usually ended up having to do more than their fair share of the work. Thus, as a teacher now, I never do collaborative exercises, simply because I did not like them myself and I tend to avoid teaching in ways that I didn’t appreciate as a student. 

Also, as someone who once edited a book with many different contributors, I can say that the process was extremely painful. Every edit, every change, was protested as if I had broken into their house and pissed on the furniture. This particular project involved a high number of collaborators working together towards a common goal, but the problem was that, unlike in an academic collection of essays for instance, writing style and historical method had to be fairly consistent throughout the book. This was extremely difficult to achieve and came at a very high cost.

I’ve long believed that historians need to engage the public more than they currently do, so I’m glad to see you mention that here. But I think one of the consequences of moving the discipline away from the scholar/academic model is that it will make much of the current work done for the doctorate irrelevant. I mean, the current model of studying for comprehensive exams followed by original research followed by a dissertation is the very thing that is supposed to prepare people to be academics. If instead we want to prepare them for something else, such as serving the public more openly, then suddenly I think that some of those features don’t really pertain anymore. In that scenario, producing an original piece of research (dissertation) that makes an original argument while being theoretically rigorous will perhaps become less important than developing skills designed to help historians adapt their ideas to the public sphere. And if that’s the case, then we can perhaps ask the question of how relevant a Ph.D is at all, if the end result is not academia. Right now the doctorate serves as a kind of gatekeeper, but if the goal is no longer to get inside the institution of academia, then maybe we don’t need gatekeepers anymore. History as an academic discipline was a historically contingent development that arose in a particular time and place. I could see how changes in historical context could make it irrelevant again. 

Sorry for the long post.

I applaud Professor Potter’s thoughtful article.

As historians wrestle with how and whether to forsake the traditional model of the solitary scholar thinking great thoughts in the upper reaches of the Ivory Tower, they might find it useful to consider the situation in other academic fields.  In my own field, physics, collaboration has been customary and pervasive for a long time.  In some cases that has been forced by circumstances.  For example, conducting an experiment (like the searches for the Higgs boson) on a major accelerator requires a team of hundreds if not thousands of people, not to mention hundreds of millions of dollars.  It’s common for the paper announcing an important result to run no more than a couple of pages but to have a hundred or more authors.  But the practice of testing one’s physics ideas among colleagues before publication is common throughout the field.  An old adage is that “Physics is a social science.”

Of course, successful collaboration among the members of a team, large or small, requires learning certain behavioral practices, and is not always smooth and easy.  Another adage is, “Physics is a contact sport!”  However, those practices are very useful both within and without the academic world, and can be recommended to historians as well as physicists.

I’m an amateur historian (with some graduate training in historiography), and an avid consumer of historians’ intellectual output. My own discipline is the social and administrative sciences in pharmacy. I’m not sure that it is appropriate to characterize historians as canaries in the academic mine, but I do know that my colleagues in pharmaceutical sciences are just as resistant to recognizing collaboration as other disciplines. Your prescription for historians is fully valid for almost all other disciplines within academe.

I wonder about your examples.  Why didn’t you use historians such as Marc Bloch? Or what about Howard Zin?  They would fit so much better with Occupy since you mention the movement.

Collaboration is great, but how about pursuing historical knowledge even under difficult circumstances and sometimes without a job.  I still think often think of Marc Bloch participating in the Resistance (and eventually being killed by the German occupiers) writing his slim volume about the purpose of studying history.  The opening sentence (I paraphrase) states that number one purpose is that the study of history gives pleasure to the historian.

Well he certainly was not ensconced in an academic position at the time.  He was one of the prominent scholars and scientists with Jewish background who were offered asylum in the US during WWII (Claude Levi Strauss being one of them).  He refused, preferring to fight at home.  His historical knowledge made him well aware of what fate might await him.

I do agree with your argument that collaboration is great.  Actually, whether we formally collaborate or not, we are always in fact collaborating as knowledge is always transmitted and shared. 

What concerns me  in your article and others about the humanities is that scholars in those fields seem reluctant to state how exciting and interesting and worthwhile their fields of study are regardless of their popularity or lack of it. (aren’t these the reasons why PhDs labor as adjuncts: for the love of their field and learning and teaching?). 

It is possible to write scholarly well researched books with plenty of references that are also popular. Recent examples are The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein (which is actually a pivotal history book, even though written by a journalist, or The Emperor of All Maladies: a Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee which is both a history book of cancer and an outstanding work in the history of science written by an MD. So these are definitely interedisciplinary words but rooted in deep historical research going well beyond (or rather beneath!) the history of events that so many people find boring. I do hope historians take notice of the historical scholarship in these books and share it with their students).