A Discussion With Anthony Grafton
Friday, July 5, at 1 p.m., U.S. Eastern timeRead the transcript of a wide-ranging discussion of scholarship and the humanities -- past, present, and future -- with Anthony Grafton, an intellectual historian at Princeton University.
 (Photograph by Donna Binder) |
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His popular book The Footnote: A Curious History (Harvard University Press, 1997) shows how much passion (and, sometimes, venom) can get squeezed into a few lines at the bottom of a page. And he may be the first academic to have published a thoughtful analysis of the comic strip Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer. His most recent book is a collection of essays, Bring Out Your Dead, published this year by Harvard.
Besides possessing an encyclopedic knowledge of early modern European intellectual history, Mr. Grafton is attuned to recent developments in American university life. Join us for a wide-ranging discussion of scholarship and the humanities -- past, present, and future.
» The Alchemist of Erudition (7/5/2002)
Scott McLemee (Moderator):
Anthony Grafton is certainly an academic prone to indulging what John Donne called "the worst voluptuousness"--namely, "an hydroptic immoderate desire of human learning and languages." His scholarly specialty is the study of scholars who didn't specialize: the great polymaths, Renaissance virtuosos, and early-modern encyclopedists. We'll throw the floor open to a suitably broad range of topics in the humanities. A number of questions have come in already. More are welcome.
Question from Scott McLemee (moderator):
What have you been up this summer? During our interviews, it sometimes sounded if your scholarly work were about to slow down a bit as you take on new administrative responsibilities at Princeton. But you're also finishing up a book on the role of the learned magus, circa 1500. So how are you spending your time?
Anthony Grafton:
In fact, I'm spending this summer on a couple of projects. At the moment, I'm finishing the last bits of research for my book on Faustus. One of the most interesting learned magicians of his time--and the author of a letter which is the earliest testimony about Faustus--was a Benedictine Abbot, book-collector, historian, forger, cryptographer and magician named Johannes Trithemius. The Harzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbuettel--a spectacular library, once a princely collection and now a research center--has a bunch of his manuscripts and an even larger collection of cryptography books, brought together by one of the local princes who was also a cryptographer, and I spent two weeks working on them. Wolfenbuettel is a place out of an old Europe that is hard to find anywhere else: dozens of half-timbered houses, I was given a guest suite in the Lessinghaus, where the great critic and poet lived and worked for some of his time as the librarian in Wolfenbuettel, and I spent from 8 in the morning to 8 at night working in the 19th century library building and the much older armory, which has been converted into the main research center. Now I'm in London, chasing magicians in the Warburg Institute (renaissance magic was one of the preoccupations of its brilliant, haunted founder, the great cultural historian Aby Warburg, and there are treasures here), the British Library, and elsewhere. I'm also reading some articles by friends and students, waiting for a thesis on Renaissance astrology, trying to finsih some book reviews . . . And in August, back in NJ, I'll be working on chapters of a textbook. You're right, in other words, I haven't yet admitted defeat.
Question from A Fellow Intellectual Historian:
Are the economics of publishing killing off the footnote? Do you agree with publishers who say that footnotes cause sales to suffer, and so insist on endnotes, or even page-by-page source summaries instead of notes at all?
Anthony Grafton:
Most publishers, trade and university, do seem to dislike footnotes (though there are clear exceptions; the University of Chicago Press has allowed authors of some of their most visible front-list books to document them in great detail, at the foot of the page). I think they're wrong, though I have no statistics to support my point of view. And I hate the practice that's now cropping up of putting the footnotes to a book not even in the back, but on the web, where we have no certainty that they will remain accessible over the book's whole shelf-life. It's a kind of dumbing down, compaable to magazine editors' collaboration in shortening all pieces and inserting more pictures, and it hurts readers as well as writers.
Question from Scott McLemee (moderator):
As someone who has studied at least a few centuries' worth of material on the life of the scholar, you have a pretty strong baseline for commenting on recent developments in academe. It's hard to imagine somebody like Isaac Casaubon being good at committee work or conference-hopping. Any thoughts on how the American university at dawn of the 21st century has left its imprint on what it means to be a scholar today? Is there a sense in which your work serves as a kind of rescue operation--a reminder of qualities lost under "the way we live now"?
Anthony Grafton:
Todd Gitlin has recently described the way in which we live now--surrounded by, bathed in, a continual buzz of information and impressions, constantly checking email, listening to radio, surfing the web . . . Casaubon loved nothing better than to get up early in the morning (very early, this was the man who once wrote `I rose at 5:00, alas, so late!') and spend several hours of uninterrupted work in his study, annotating a Greek text. For company he preferred his family to distinguished visitors. Joseph Scaliger--who was unmarried, though students boarded with him in his elegant brick house in Leiden, now a karate school--worked 18-hour days for weeks on end, stopping only now and then to catch up with his Latin and French correspondence. Heaven knows, I'm no Casaubon or Scaliger. But I have the sense that the kind of concentration they could muster--and some semblance of which I did manage to bring to bear on their work in my early years, before email, fax machines and the other implements of buzz had taken shape--is now hard for any senior academic in the States to find. We are pushed, pulled, urged, bribed to spend our time traveling, to give talks (or worse, to give the comment after three young, promising folks have given talks), to award prizs and fellowships, to serve on boards, to review books, articles, tenure cases. All of this is important, all of it has to be done--but it also gives us an excuse for not going down the mine any more, with lamp and pick, to see what we can find after a day's hard work at the coal face. From this point of view at least, that of the twenty-first century fox, I envy my protagonists their laborious, erudite, productive, hedgehog lives.
Question from Dan Price, PhD, Union Institute and Universtiy:
From your perspective, did the arrival of print have any influence on the development of the university of the time?
Anthony Grafton:
The arrival of print transformed university cultures in some ways. Universities could already produce systematic, uniform textbooks in large numbers, as Richard Rouse and Mary Rouse have shown in detail. But printing made it possible to print small editions casually, and vastly accelerated the production of textbooks of every kind. It also transformed university business--when Martin Luther wanted to post theses about indulgences, he could have a printer run them off, and they soon became a bestseller all over the Holy Roman Empire instead of an internal university question. But student and faculty life remained centered on oral exercises--lecturing and debating above all--until the rise of research universities in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Scott McLemee (Moderator):
Quite a few interesting questions have come in, addressing astrology, Richard Rorty, and the fate of the liberal arts. (Not all at one time of course.) However, there is time and room for more, so readers should fee free to submit questions for Mr. Grafton.
Question from Antoni EstradŽ, Universitat Aut˜noma de Barcelona:
I am always impressed by your ability in bringing the past alive. Do you think that Eric Cochrane and Arnaldo Momigliano have had an influence not only in the way you read but also, and up to a point, in the way you write? Thank you very much for your attention and for all the intellectual pleasures that you provide us.
Anthony Grafton:
Eric Cochrane and Arnaldo Momigliano both live for me, always, as models--of learning, but also of engaged and brilliant teaching. Eric Cochrane's idea of proper commentary on a thesis chapter was a piece of splenetic, eloquent, sharp prose as long as or longer than the original; Momigliano's ability to spot the weak points in an argument--as well as the lacunae in one's learning--was unique. When I write, I still think about how they would criticize whatI am producing, as I wish they still could. That's as close as I can come to doing something of what they did--but the distance is a long one, and won't be closed.
Question from Chris Keegan, Ph.D. Candidate SUNY Buffalo, and Homewood-Flossmoor High School:
As a graduate student of philosophy, and a teacher of high school humanities, I have found that students (and the public at large) have not only grown tired of the liberal arts, they have become down-right savage in their assessments of the value of the liberal arts, specifically the Humanities. To what do you attribute this trend?
Anthony Grafton:
Students often do look down on the liberal arts. Mostly I attribute this to our own cowardice and conventionality as teachers (and let me say at the start, nostra maxima culpa--we all share the deadness of our generation, as my teacher Arnaldo Momigliano once wrote, and he belonged to a better generation than I do). We don't have the courage, wit and ability to show students that what we do is both intensely moving and pleasurable, and that it matters. If we don't believe this and convey it in our performance of our tasks, why should anyone else see us as more than time-servers, putting in six or nine routine hours in the classroom each week? The widely held idea that teaching is worthless drudgery--and what else can a system convey in which not teaching at all is a sign of privilege and achievement?--doesn't help, since we teach more than our colleagues in technical and professional schools. Nor do the inferior offices, salaries and other symbols with which universities show that the liberal arts matter less than professional studies. Parents of university students these days--even those attending an elite university like the one that I teach at--seem in some cases surprisingly worried that four years spent on the liberal arts will be wasted, or even that they will ruin their childrens' lives by diverting them into unprofitable pursuits. But basically, we have met the enemy, as the great cartoonist Walt Kelly put it, and he is us.
Question from Scott McLemee (moderator):
One hears a great deal nowadays about "professionalization": the process by which young scholars are expected to function as if they were full-fledged members of the guild (giving papers at conferences and so on) beginning at a very early stage of their careers. People in graduate school not only attend conferences but give papers. A promising and ambitious undergraduate might feels the same "publish or perish" demand that once would have bedeviled someone who just started a tenure-track job. Frankly, this sounds like a recipe for disaster. But perhaps there are benefits? Do you see any good coming of it, whether for scholarship or for teaching? If not, what can be done about it?
Anthony Grafton:
I think there is some limited good coming from early professionalization, which the question describes very accurately. The chance to give papers, the chance to publish, the chance to make contact with other scholars, senior and junior, at other universities, all of these opportunities emancipate the graduate student and young assistant professor to some extent. In the 60s and 70s, a graduate student heard only a few voices, those of the professors in a single department. Now, he or she can draw ideas, support, and criticism from a much wider range of individuals, and can score achievements that don't depend on the judgment of local professors. All that seems good to me. But there's a downside. When graduate students focus on the profession, they may pick the subject they study and their paper topics, and even their dissertation areas in the hope of reaching the profession's cutting edge. And the problem with that is that the cutting edge is usually honed by the people who are thinking about their work more than they are thinking about their profession. I worry that graduate students and young faculty members will feel required to package themselves in ways that they think the profession demands. The isolated life of a graduate student or an assistant professor in the old days didn't include that kind of pressure towards conformity.
Question from Scott Jaschik, The Chronicle of Higher Education:
Do you think it would be possible for a new Ph.D. in academe today to have a career like yours? What would be your advice to such a person?
Anthony Grafton:
I would love to see new Ph.D.'s have careers like mine. One thing they need is a department staffed by endlessly patient colleagues who are willing to read an unfinished manuscript and vote for tenure on the basis of it. More seriously, though, I don't know whether junior faculty nowadays get the sheer uninterrupted time to work that I enjoyed as an assistant and beginning associate professor. In the 70s, there were few conferences. Speaking invitations were rare. E-mail didn't exist. When you went to your archives in the summer, you were gone for 2 or 3 months to be reached only if a fortunately directed letter came across your travels. My junior colleagues don't live and work in a world like that.
Question from Ken Ronkowitz, NJIT:
In Cardano's time, 16th-century thinkers seemed to look to astrology for what we might term psychology, philosophy or even economics. Is there anything in astrology that we might still find useful today?
Anthony Grafton:
Good question. What fascinates me in astrology is the way a system based on what we now know to have been wrong assumptions and data could sustain profound inquiry into the self and the larger society it inhabited. I'm not sure we can really draw much of current interest from astrology, though, except some fascinating instances of confirmation bias and other familiar problems of the testing of dearly beloved theories. But I should say that some of the most profound students I know of the history of astrology are also practicing astrologers. They firmly believe that traditional astrology, brought up-to-date with modern astronomical data, is the most profound tool we have for character analysis and much more.
Question from Michael L. Monheit, Univ. of South Alabama:
Would Prof. Grafton comment on the relevance of Renaissance and post-Renaissance innovations in textual criticism for religious movements in our own time which claim to base their legitimacy on the authority and inerrancy of a sacred text?
Anthony Grafton:
One of the most fascinating religious developments of recent decades has been the spread of a belief in scriptual inerrancy. We find this in many forms of Christianity, in some forms of Judaism, and in other religions. It seems to me to mark a fundamental rebellion against modernity. For one of the most characteristic features of modernity was the rise, which began in the Renaissance and culminated in the 19th century, of the historical understanding of how texts and traditions develop. In the years around 1900, liberal theologians, historians of religion, and anthropologists were all struggling to develop the insights of Renaissance humanists into a comprehensive study of the ways that religion and cannonical scriptures take shape. Believers in inerrancy, sometimes deliberately, sometimes without reflection, reject all of these developments. Naturally, one can find individuals in every religious tradition who are doing their best to maintain theological orthodoxy while accepting the validity of the historical method and its results. But they often seemed somewhat beleaguered, at least to an outsider. To that extent, it seems to me that we're still struggling with the problems that Lorenzo Valla and Erasmus first raised.
Question from Scott McLemee (moderator):
Your most recent book gathers a number of your scholarly papers as well as some long reviews that appeared in general-interest magazines. But you have also written quite a few essays that so far remain uncollected -- pieces that are learned, certainly, though not exactly scholarship, footnoted or otherwise. I'm curious how you understand the relation between your professional work and these more popular articles, and what literary models you have in mind, if any in particular. In an memoir that appeared in The American Scholar, you talk about your father's immersion in the great British essayists, who he took as models for his own journalism. Is that tradition part of your literary genome?
Anthony Grafton:
My efforts as a writer, such as they are (one British reviewer, sadly anonymous, compared my prose to the formal Grek written in Byzantium), have been blessed by sympathetic and critical editors. They started by encouraging me to write for a large public about work in my field. But then they went on to push for articles on a vast range of other subjects, some of them connected to my specialized work but not my formal specialty (Renaissance art, for example), and others simply because it seemed like fun. The chance to write for quarterlies--especially American Scholar, where Joseph Epstein started me in this kind of writing twenty years ago, and Anne Fadiman continues a great tradition in a very individual and effective way--and to write long reviews has meant an enormous amount to me. I have had to read my way into new fields, to think about a wide range of artistic media, from comics to tapestries, and to try to write for a public that doesn't want too much detail. My father taught me a great deal about writing, and I loved to talk about my reviews with him. But they're not his kind of journalism. He was a columnist who reached a national audience. What I write is far more academic, and my real models are the learned journalists and stylish professors who wrote unsigned pieces for the TLS and signed ones for the New York Review of Books in the 1960s, when I was a student.
Question from Scott McLemee (moderator):
Right--back in the day when "public intellectual" would have been an obvious redundancy.
Anthony Grafton:
Incidentally: one thing that matters a lot to me is encouraging young writers to try to produce prose that isn't simply academic or totally pop, and I've seen a couple of them do better at it than I can, which is a great joy to any teacher. But it's not easy. Not long ago ago, a number of publications, like the Baffler, the now defunct Boston Book Review and Hermenaut, and web sites, like the early Salon, Suck, and Feed, gave me the sense that younger writers were creating new forms of journalism. These continued the tradition of general intellectual essay-writing, but with a new emphasis on images, a new range of interests and a new flair. Most of my favorites have disappeared, however, with the happy exception of McSweeny's, and as a card-carrying, New York raised Jewish intellectual who requires a rich diet of periodicals to keep a glossy coat and pink tongue, I worry about what there will be to read a few years on.
Question from Scott Jaschik, The Chronicle of Higher Education:
In one of your American Scholar pieces, your wrote about Robert Lovett as an example of someone who was truly a public intellectual -- engaging the public in debate while maintaining his intellectual roots in academe, in his case at the University of Chicago. These days, that combination seems harder to pull off. We cover tenure cases in which scholars are penalized for publishing in serious, but non-scholarly publications. Cornel West was the subject of criticism at Harvard for his non-scholarly commitments. Do you have any thoughts on how public intellectuals can maintain their academic credibility while seeking wider audiences?
Anthony Grafton:
I think academics who want to function as public intellectuals need first of all to remain good academics. What fascinated me about Robert Lovett was his ability to continue doing scholarly work and devoted teaching alongside the literary work that made him famous in wider circles. And it seems to me that universities have every right to ask all members of their faculty to meet high scholarly and scientific standards, and to continue meeting them throughout their careers. Probably the best way to be a public intellectual is precisely to take one's expertise into the wider public sphere, as scientists have, for example, in dealing with environmental questions. But I don't think anyone should ever be penalized for producing prose or poetry that's accessible. And it's depressing when small-minded critics use the success of someone's writing for a larger public as evidence that he or she is no longer a serious academic. Some of the most serious scholars and scientists I know also devote much energy to keeping discussion alive in such public sphere as we have.
Question from Michael E. Nelson, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse:
Collaboration between faculty and undergraduates in the research laboratory is a common occurrence in the basic sciences. Should we encourage faculty in the humanities to strengthen undergraduate education by supporting faculty-student collaborative research? Do faculty in the humanities feel comfortable working with undergraduates in a collaborative environment?
Anthony Grafton:
Yes, we should encourage collaboration in the humanities: between faculty members and between faculty members and graduate and undergraduate students. The sciences and the world of business have realized, for decades now, that collaboration promotes new forms of thinking, allows new technical practices to develop, and gives those involved a kind of enthusiasm and sociability that the "loneliness and freedom" of traditional humanistic scholarship don't allow. It also makes young students see the fun and the human interest of research, in a way that most assignments can't. I think we're one to two generations behind our colleagues in the natural sciences here (and I write as one who has written three collaborative books, edited several more, and produced anumber of collaborative articles, working with my own teachers, colleagues, and most recently with students; I am currently engaged in very exciting collaborative research with a recent PhD from Princeton. But I was lucky, my department has been very generous about encouraging me and others to collaborate).
There are really no limits to the kinds of research that the best undergraduates can do; every year, undergraduate scientists and engineers at Princeton, almost always after summers spent collaborating with older scientists in labs, produce publishable discoveries in many fields. Our humanities students are equally able, and some of them reach this level of engagement with our subjects. But we could do infinitely more, and should. Issues of credit and the like are real, but can, I am sure, be dealt with. What matters is making research in the humanities a social enterprise while
not depriving it of its rigor, and that can be done.
Question from Paul S. Atkins, University of Washington, Seattle:
The terror attacks of 9/11 have been characterized, rightly or wrongly, as symptomatic of a "clash of civilizations." What can the scholar of the premodern humanities--which is synonymous with civilization in many aspects--contribute, if anything, to a just, peaceful, and lasting resolution to this problem?
Anthony Grafton:
Scholars of premodern civilizations can certainly offer many examples of societies and cultures locked in conflict, from the Crusades to the conquest of the New World. But we can also offer studies of periods of coexistence, as in medieval Iberia, and of the creativity that resulted when previously separate societies met, as in early modern New World. And we have a great deal of information to offer about the origins of ethnography, in antiquity, and its transformation in the Middle Ages and the early modern period. These subjects play a major role in the study of early modern Europe--the work of Antony Pagden, Fernando Cervantes, Kenneth Mills, Walter Mignolo, Thomas Cummins and Jorge Canizares, for example, on the early modern New World and European ways of understanding it, is a massive and rich body of relevant work from which many ontemporary lessons could be drawn.
Question from Karen Pena, University of Glasgow:
A question for the Oracle: Given your vast amount of historical knowledge, what can be the future of Modern Languages and Literatures? How can "separate" fields/nationalities/cultures find common space when there are clear divisions that prevent them from "co-existing"?
Anthony Grafton:
Ouch, that's a really hard question. Separate departments for each modern language and literature are suffering, in the States, from lack of student demand for degrees (not, however, for language training), and combined courses have to compete with programs in Comparative Literature. In some areas--most prominently German--some departments reveal a growing worry about whether the classics are teachable at all. Combined courses can help. But departments in which all the languages muck in together have problems as well--and each language can end up starving. I would like to see modern linguists establish or reestablish connection with schools (something friends in clasics have done very successfully), urge the value of language and literature as a good basic training in thinking and writing, and convince the kids to come back--but I have no easy way of achieving all that in practice.
Question from Virgil Strohmeyer, adjunct, Cleveland State University:
I have been studying Renaissance language teaching manuals of the Oriental Christian languages (Armenian, Syriac, Georgian and Coptic), especially those of Ambrogio Teseo, Postel and Rivola. The first was an early Polyhistor of Linguistics and is the primary focus of my dissertation. Are there others pursuing the study of language learning methods in the early 16th century and how does one get in contact with them? I was doing my work in Armenia among a small circle of scholars and upon my return to the States find myself very much out of touch.
Anthony Grafton:
There are people very much interested in this world of polyglot scholars. Professor Alastair Hamilton of the University of Leiden, for example, has just published a major study of Arabic studies in reaissance Antwerp, and knows a great deal about the spread of interest in and knowledge of Ethiopic, Armenian, and other languages. Professor Peter Miller of the Bard Graduate Center in New York has done important work on the rise of Coptic studies. And many scholars--I think especially of professor Stephen Burnett at Nebraska--have worked on the rise of Hebrew studies in this period. If you contact them, I am sure you will find common interests and receive useful advice.
Question from Jon, graduate student:
If you agree, How is intellectual history interdepartmental?
Anthony Grafton:
I think intellectual history really does have to be interdepartmental. A good intellectual historian needs to learn from literary scholars, philosophers, art historians, and architects. One is perpetually parachuting in intellectual history into intellectual domains one didn't know before and perpetually wrestling with texts and genres that have their own complex and intricate histories. I think anybody embarking on this field would do well to take advanced courses in other areas of the humanities and to collaborate, if possible, with scholars from other disciplines. Otherwise, intellectual history risks becoming a long, drawn-out summary of texts rather than a sharp, rigorous analysis. A.O. Lovejoy, one of the founders of our discipline, thought that intellectual historians could really develop an independent specialty. To me, it seems that we do our best work in continual interaction with scholars from other fields.
Question from Brian Fleming, University of Rochester:
In what ways has or can the "neo-pragmatism" of Richard Rorty help or harm the study of the humanities? In what ways can the presumption of American exceptionalism stimulate or inhibit insight into the humanities?
Anthony Grafton:
On Rorty, ignorance prevents me from saying anything useful, though I enjoyed, and disagreed with parts of, his recent Harvard book. On American exceptionalism: we have to acknowledge how strange we are, as a republic that has lasted two and a quarter centuries without a military coup or the fall of the government and a population that comes from every corner of the globe. Of course we'll all disagree about the consequences of this situation for education. But for me, the answer is easy in theory, if hard in practice: we need to find ways of making old Europe (and old Asia, and old Latin America) accessible to our very mixed population, knowing that some of our students will find deep meaning in one segment of it, others in another, often with no reference to their own ancestry or other personal characteristics. European countries--where the population on the city streets is more and more often as varied as ours, or more so--have not yet realized that this is what they have to do in schools and universities. But we have, at least to some extent, and now that the embers of the campus culture wars are pretty cold we can get busy about doing this in our many different ways.
Question from Scott McLemee (moderator):
That reference to the "culture wars" raises an interesting question about your own work. How is it situated with respect to that conflict? Or rather, how is it that you have managed to avoid being drafted by either combatant? Your emphasis on the concept of "tradition" looks (to a former English major anyway) sort of T.S. Eliot-esque. And your sense of "culture" more closely resembles Matthew Arnold's than that of a young cultural-studies professor with a complicated haircut. (One effect of reading your work in bulk is that any reference to a current of thought emerging after about 1840 starts to soung almost nerve-wrackingly avant garde.) At the same time, there's nothing polemical about your neo-classicism, and there's not been any rush by cultural conservatives to carry you aloft on their shoulders as a hero. So just where do you fit?
Anthony Grafton:
Hmm--I don't think I fit anywhere very comfortably, and that makes me think I'm about where I want to be. I certainly believe that traditions--those dense, irreducible things, that precede analytical reason,orient us to life, the universe, and everything, and foster literature, art music, religion--know a lot, more than we do or can, and the talents that appeal most to me in the arts are often those that most clearly work inside or struggle with a tradition. I guess I also believe, to quote the late Frank Zappa, that there have been, and are, "real guys" (and "real girls") who do the kind of work that really matters, and lasts, and sometimes makes itself felt long after the creator is gone. And |I think great traditions and great artists have meaning for anyone who wants it--though none of them has this for everyone. But I don't think you can make people see traditions this way by, for example, forcing bits of one of them down their throats (much less by proclaiming the importance of doing that while hiring young adjuncts or instructors to do the actual Strasbourg-goose filling part). And I love a lot of what is being done around me right now, in theatre, in novels, in poetry. So: I guess I think we should let as many flowers as possible bloom, fight it out for the souls of the next generation--and assume they'll make their own choices, in the end, whatever we say. This certainly isn't the program of any group I know, though I have close friends whose ideals and practices seem to me pretty much like mine.
Question from Dr. James C. Schaap, Dordt College, Sioux Center, IA:
In a recent Writer's Chronicle interview, Jane Anne Phillips described contemporary students as being "emotionally illiterate." That sounds like an indictment, but I'm not sure she meant it that way. But I think I understand her, and I think I agree. After 25 years of college teaching, I'm starting to feel as if some kind of change has definitively taken place in my students' psyches. I'm not sure that I'd label it "emotional illiteracy," but it seems to me that they appear to be less and less capable of "reading" literature. That they have other wonderful skills and talents goes without saying, but I'm still trying to decide just what it is about today's students that make them seem so different than their predecessors of even a dozen years ago or so. Or is it just intimations of my own mortality? Heal me.
Anthony Grafton:
"Emotional illiteracy" is not at all the term I'd choose to evoke the differences between students now and students when I started out teaching in 1974. But there are some big differences, on many levels. Most of the students I teach are less geopolitically aware, and much less politically engaged, than their parents were. They seem to have less formal training in close reading, scansion, and other technical ways of examining texts. And they certainly respond differently to the supposedly authoritative persona of the professor, even at conservative Princeton, and much more so elsewhere, to judge from what I have heard and read. Virginia Woolf once wrote that at a certain point, parents lost authority over children, masters over servants, bosses over employees. Well, I can certainly attest that I never had the authority my teachers enjoyed--and what I had has long since vanished. OK, so it's true: it seems harder than it used to be to get the sort of polished work, week by week, that I remember receiving a generation ago in seminars and even in the discussion sections of lecture courses, or to arouse and maintain the sorts of engaged, lucid discussions that my first students at Cornell and then at princeton regularly sustained.
On the emotional level, however, the students I meet are often very appealing, really wonderful to work with. They often respond to social problems, for example, much more on the level of individual engagement than on that of large-scale political planning (dozens of them work with poor kids, long after doing so will matter for college entrance or other pragmatic purposes). They have friendships across barriers of gender and sexuality, to a far greater extent than they used to. They express affection in a comfortable and easy way, but not as something trivial. I certainly don't mourn for the stiff, traditional norms of a past era.
My own sense is that students these days (students always?) connect with you most when you push them to do more than they think they can. Some of my colleagues do this very effectively, by cracking the whip, grading fiercely and making demands. I find it easier to catch flies with honey, myself. But my experience is that when you make everybody feel comfortable, show them that the object of inquiry really matters even if no social issue is involved, and push them to use those excellent brains, wonderful things can
happen--as wonderful as, more wonderful than, anything that went on in the old days. Our best upperclass history students regularly produce work that I, and most of their other teachers, couldn't possibly have done at their
age. It's their work, too--all you have to do is find a way to open the bottle, and the genie comes right out and does the magic.
Question from Chris Geyer - soon to be Syracuse University:
I wanted to ask you to comment more on how you think teachers can "show" their students the appreciation for, value of and pleasure in the humanities. I certainly have all of that, but I often wonder if my enthusiasm is just so much noise, and if there are better ways to demonstrate the value humanities learning. Have you additional thoughts on that?
Anthony Grafton:
You can never make it too clear how much you care about what you're teaching. We all have our own ways of doing this, or should. But I think anybody who is serious about teaching, in the way you clearly are, should be willing to court failure and ridicule (I've encountered both) by showing that the things we study provoke powerful emotions: can chill, can horrify, can frighten, can sadden. I don't want to get hokey here, but I don't know another way to convey these things than by feeling them. Often, it doesn't work. But sometimes, you see a room full of people who are moved. Why not try for that?
Question from S.Sherman, Columbia Journalism Review:
If I am not mistaken, several years ago you were quoted as saying that undergraduates in the 1990s were very poorly read compared to the students you taught in the 1960s and 1970s. Is that your view? In any case, please comment on the reading habits of your students. Has there been a shift away from serious reading?
Anthony Grafton:
Thanks for that question. Years ago, Time quoted me as saying that students nowadays don't have as much formal literary training as older generations. I think this is true, on the whole. When I went to college, everyone in my high school could scan verse, often in more than one language. Some years ago, at a Princeton symposium on Edmund Wilson, a number of critics argued that he paid little attention to the formal qualities of literature. I pointed out that he was an expert on meter, both as a practicing poet and as a critic. Everyone looked at me as if I had aken leave of my senses, and the discussion passed over me without a pause. Only later did I realize that scansion is a dead craft . . . Years of bad decisions about high school curricula and the etaching of literature are at work here, and the consequences are real. But I also think my comment was out of line. OK, it's true, calling one's students dunces is a minor pleasure that all teachers enjoy (as one of my teachers once pointed out). But really, a better working hypothesis is that we are at least in part to blame for the problems in institutions that we run. remember what Brecht wrote when the East German writers' union denounced those who had risen in 1953: The government is dissatisfied with its people. Well, it had better find another people, then, hadn't it? Here are, as I see it, some of the problems that afflict us most: Students are simply madly busier, far more so than a generation ago. The default student at my university takes four or five demanding courses (well, maybe one of them a term isn't so hard), plays a sport, works out, dances or writes or acts, is a big sister/brother to a kid in a nearby town, plays computer games (if male, and sometimes if female as well), writes email and instant messages, calls people constantly on a cell phone and has a social life. This is the middle class american program, which crystallizes around kids like a vast panopticon in middle school, if not before, and persists in college. And it's not a life that leaves quiet time for reading--especially reading not assigned for a given class. Faculty are just as busy, of course, and just as distracted by the buzz. And we find it harder and harder to pay attention to our own campus--as opposed to the other places where we give lectures, the colleagues at other schools with whom we collaborate or share interests that we don't share with colleagues at home, and so on. So we're not in the best of positions to do what little teachers ever can to promote serious reading. School English doesn't push kids to do precise readings, any more--and neither does school French, which used to center on the formal exercise of explicating texts, or school Latin. Drudgery at school laid the foundations for better things; when the drudgery goes, do the upper floors collapse? Despite these real systemic problems, serious reading seems to go on--try any big Barnes and Noble run college bookstore, at a good school, and you'll find kids in the armchairs, some of them highlighting textbooks and others, their eye-blink rate fallen to nil, reading the unexpected (Kipling's Kim! Lawrence Wechsler's Calamities of Exile! Middlemarch! John Bayley's memoir of Iris Murdoch! all seen by me, clutched in undergraduate hands, during recent visits to university stores). One of our jobs--if we could just stop exercising our vanity and greed off campus for a moment--might be to water these seeds and see if we could help them to grow.
Question from Scott McLemee (moderator):
In May, you hosted a panel at the New York Institute for the Humanities devoted to Athanasius Kircher, a 17th century Jesuit polymath who knew many languages, wrote books on every imaginable subject, invented a computer, and built an incredible museum known throughout Europe (indeed, the world). Or so it is alleged--because, frankly, the whole thing is not quite plausible. Why not just admit that this is all an elaborate hoax? Did Umberto Eco put you up to it?
Anthony Grafton:
Kircher is a magnificent invention, isn't he? The ultimate theatrical academic, the Morris Zapp of 17th-century Rome, theatrical, daring, endlessly mocking much that others hold dear--and always ending up with a better job and more support for another mad project, like a stone elephant holding up an Egyptian obelisk and pointing its bottom at the house where the Dominicans live . . . An entrepreneur second to none, he received subsidies enough from only one of his patrons, the Protestant Herzog August in Wolfenbuettel, that in modern terms he could have bought a very glitzy Mercedes; and yet he still found time to write immense scholarly works of riveting interest . . . I only wish I had made him up.
In fact, though, I'm one of a group of scholars around the world who have been rediscovering him. Modern Kircher studies started with great individualists of an older generation, like the American literary historian Don Cameron Allen and the Danish Egyptologist Erik Iversen; continued when Italian scholars like Dino Pastine and Valerio Rivosecchi went to work; and have now attracted scholars from a great many different disciplines and countries. In America alone, Joscelyn Godwin has written a very helpful
synthesis, the Germanist Gerhard Strasser has studied Kircher's work on universal languages (he also just staged a superb Kircher exhibit at Wolfenbuettel, complete with a model Mercedes to show exactly how big the grants were that Kircher received to publish his big books (and in one
case, to misappropriate for the shrine of his favorie saint, S. Eustachio, in Mentorella)); Paula Findlen has recreated his museum, studied the imaguinative stimulus he provided for Sor Juana, and found the means that enabled two younger scholars, Michael John Gorman and Nick Wilding, to build a permanent, massive web archive of his correspondence and study his work in natural magic and other areas; Ingrid Rowland has followed his physical and mental voyages down into the craters of volcanos and up into the heavens; and still younger scholars like Daniel Stolzenberg are pushing
even deeper (in his case, into the secrets and mysteries of Kircher's Egyptology). More conferences and exhibits will be taking place this year (the anniversary of his birth year in 1602), from Wuerzburg to Rome and beyond. It's wonderful to see so many telescopes trained on this forgotten dark star, that shone so brightly in mid-17th century Rome.
Question from Sean Scally, Vanderbilt University in Nashville TN:
I'm very interested in your observation of the worth of a "great books" type program such as that offered by St. John's College, Annapolis MD/Sante Fe NM. Is this the type of rigorous no-electives/no-grade type approach to liberal arts that retains its worth in this day of "politically correct" values that tends to influence university/college coursework/curricula?
Anthony Grafton:
The only true general statement I've ever heard about curricula came from a great emigre historian of science, Otto Neugebauer. He was a product of the gymnausium system in pre-World War I Vienna, which he'd hated (and he taught at Brown, which he really liked). And he used to say, "No system of education known to man is capable of ruining everybody." I think great-books courses are wonderful for some students, especially when, as at St. John's, the whole faculty is actively involved in teaching them. (In some research universities, courses based on cannonical texts are staged with great fanfare, but adjuncts and instructors do all the face-to-face teaching. I have less faith in that version of western civ than in a faculty-ddriven one.) It's wonderful that major universities like Columbia and Chicago, and liberal arts colleges like St. John's and Reed, make this kind of study available. Many students who have taken our intensive western civilization course at Princeton have told me that it genuinely changed their lives. Nonetheless, there are a lot of students who simply won't find much of meaning in courses like this. And the courses themselves, like elementary science courses, require us to gloss over a lot of problems that advanced courses should come back to. As for me, I love teaching western civilization, ideally to freshmen, and I'd love to see such courses expand, not as a universal requirement, but as a really valuable resource.
Question from Charles Harlich:
Please describe what unique qualities Princeton University has accorded you as a scholar?
Anthony Grafton:
Princeton has supplied me with everything a scholar could ask for: a terrific library, research support for trips to other libraries in the United States and abroad, sabbatical leave, and a challenging environment. But the best thing it's done is to insist that I and my colleagues never stop teaching undergraduate courses and working with seniors as they do their theses. As long as you have to work with undergraduates, you resist the temptation to become only interested in your specialty, and you're always exposed to gentle mockery. Both have been essential for me.
Question from Denis N. O'Storrs, U of CT:
How do you organize your time?
Anthony Grafton:
I get up very early, normally between 5:00 and 5:30, and I try to do some reading and writing every day before I go into the university. When I'm there, I'm there. I can't say that my door is open, because I believe in keeping it shut when talking to colleagues or students to preserve their privacy. But people bang on it all day long. So, I try to reserve Sundays and longer holidays for writing and in the summer I spend as much time as I can in archives and libraries refilling my depleted tank of knowledge.
Question from Scott McLemee (moderator):
That's one of the striking things about some of the scholars of previous centuries you describe--the way they organized their time, indeed their whole lives, around reading. It's an odd trade-off of modern life, scholarly and otherwise. Professionalism has its benefits, but it cuts into the spirit of vocation somehow--of intellectual work as a calling, rather than a "profession."
Anthony Grafton:
Professionalization: this is a big and edgy issue right now. Graduate students at the schools I know best will be more integrated into the professional life of their discipline than members of my generation were after years as assistant professors. Consider: as prospective graduate students, they have a brief season as something like stars, being wooed by departments that fly them to town and wine and dine them. Within a year or two after entering grad school, they are giving papers, at local seminars, graduate student conferences, and sometimes regional and national association conferences. They publish before they have finished their dissertations. And they network--thanks to the web, thanks to their active lives of travel, thanks to visits to their university by outside scholas in their fields--very effectively.I feel very ambivalent about this--and so do many friends. On the one hand, all of this gives them an independence from local authority that graduate students lacked in the old days, or at least in my old days. The era of the professor who kept a card file of thesis topics and gave them out arbitrarily is over, and no one is sorry. To the extent that professionalization emancipates, it's welcome. Just call me Ozymandias--I'm happy to see as much as possible of my professorial persona lying in ruins. In the same vein, unlike many of my friends, I believe in unions for teaching assistants. They have worked well for many years at some of our greatest universities, and in so far as they make the system more transparent and fairer, they seem to me a good thing. But professionalization also seems to me to have other, more worrying effects. It pushes people to choose topics that look good now, are supposedly will in a few years--which can be about as good an idea as buying tech stocks at the height of the last boom. It also pushes people to package themselves in a uniform and constricting way. One of the wonderful things about most graduate students is how much they care about teaching, even as they're learning how to do it: over and over again, I've seen them give far more than they needed to, and earn the respect and affection of cynical undergraduates. But now every graduate student knows that he or she must compile a teaching portfolio, one that explains their goals in teaching and documents their successes. This routinizes something that used to be much more individual, and couches individual aspirations and achievements in a uniform and somewhat depressing rhetoric. Finally, professionalization worries me because it pushes people to develop faster than they may naturally wish to, or should. If everyone has to be giving talks and publishing papers, what becomes of the deep thinker who needs more time just because he or she thinks so hard about the work? Too much, too fast, for all its benefits--I think that's where I come out.
Question from Scott McLemee (moderator):
Thinkers are sometimes divided up according to the distinction between the fox and the hedgehog. "The fox knows many things, the hedgehog knows one big thing." So it seems natural to wonder -- Anthony Grafton, fox or hedgehog?
Anthony Grafton:
I think I'm a hybrid. Possibly without hybrid vigor. Someone who's interested in a great many things, and ranges over periods and places, naturally tends to look like a fox. But I'd like to think that I'm something of a hedgehog, too. The big thing for me is how people use the tools that tradition puts in their hands, sometimes to write a lyric, sometimes to deal with the threat of death and worse. When I see a humanist imprisoned using a classical morality to rise above threats and torture, I feel I'm seeing the kind of work I do yield big and profound knowledge.
Scott McLemee (Moderator):
Once again, I'm struck by the fact that Mr. Grafton is not just a foxy hedgehog (or vice versa) but a person of marked generosity, both in disposing of his time and knowledge and in his normal manner of treating other people. Thanks to him for participating, and to everyone who sent in questions or otherwise came along for the ride.
Anthony Grafton:
I'd like to express my thank to everyone at The Chronicle. I've never been involved in anything like this before, and it's been very enjoyable and instructive.
Copyright © 2008 by The Chronicle of Higher Education