This academic year is turning out to be deeply drenched in committee work for me, but I’m not going to grouse about that as per the professorial norm. The stuff I’m involved in this year feels substantial, interesting, and consequential.
One side effect, though, is that I’m getting a new retrospective perspective on my own career. The deeper I get into the machinery of higher education, the more data and background I see, the more I understand the full picture of what other disciplines do, the more I know about what my colleagues here and elsewhere think, the more cases and controversies I read about or encounter, the more I get a sense of how accidental and aberrant some of my own practices are. When I think about my really traumatically bad oral exam in graduate school, it occurs to me that at least one of my tormentors may well have grasped completely perfectly what kind of academic I was likely to be, and was doing his best by hook or by crook to stop me before I got started. Lately I’ve been stitching together little fragments of conversation and asides from early in my teaching career and realizing that some of the decisions I made about teaching and some of the intellectual interests I pursued may have been far more provocative to some colleagues than I ever guessed. There is something to be said for cultivating a blithe deafness to those kinds of attempts at prior restraint when you’re a junior faculty member, though not to the point that you outright ignore serious danger to your career.
Quite a few academics, tenure-track and otherwise, have a professional practice composed of accidents. Many scholars develop research programs through small, steady acts of transgression against the considered advice of gatekeepers; many courses are taught against the grain of a discipline’s common sense. This is particularly so when you put the specific social identities and circumstances of academics into consideration: junior women who have to struggle through a thicket of barriers put up by male colleagues (and sometimes, to be honest, by senior women); faculty of color through white-dominated institutions, and so on.
This only occasionally breaks into the public transcript of academic life, however, often in those spectacular cases where an entire career built on defiance of controlling norms produces a transformative breakthrough that vindicates the researcher or teacher, as in the case of Barbara McClintock. (Though as in that case, painfully, this often does not happen while that researcher is still actually working.)
There’s a serious risk of narcissistic delusion, of egotistical infantilism, in over-emphasizing your own originality or transgression. Academics who too wholly embrace that self-image are almost compelled to the aggressive pursuit of more and more individually tailored forms of administratively sanctioned internal exile, to become a university of one and therefore responsive to nothing but the beat of their own internal drummer.
In my own case, whatever I do that’s different, it’s a minor variation on a theme, a contrapuntal solo that is still very much within the orchestra’s overall performance. And much of what I do as a teacher is modest, sloppy, rough-edged, not really anything that I’d argue is a model. As a scholar, I’m so unproductive and slow-paced at this point that I deserve nothing but brickbats, not compliments.
But my teaching works for me, and maybe thus at times works for my students, and that seems maybe enough. What works for students and thus maybe for the liberal arts, not necessarily what works for my discipline.
One of the asides that kicked off this bout of reflection and light paranoia for me (tenure being less of a protection from that feeling than non-academics think) was a colleague making it not-too-subtly clear that they thought my selection of texts and themes in courses habitually trespassed onto other specializations in history and onto other disciplines.
I think that’s completely true: it’s just that I don’t like the choice of verb in that characterization, because I don’t think there’s anything wrong about this practice. In fact, this is one place that I’d argue what I’m doing ought to be closer to the norm, the answer to what Gerald Graff has called “courseocentrism”.
My colleague suggested to me that I had to be responsible first (and last) to my discipline and my specialization in my teaching, that there was something unseemly about the heavy admixture of literature and popular culture and journalistic reportage and anthropology that populates some of my syllabi. I’ve heard similar sentiments expressed as an overall view of higher education in some recent meetings. At a small liberal-arts college and maybe even at a large research university, this strikes me as substantially off the mark. Or at least we need some faculty who are irresponsible to their disciplines and responsible first to integrating and connecting knowledge.
The discipline of history provides a reasonable enough foundation for general thinking about the past, thinking about the present, even thinking about the human future. It’s also a great discipline for skill development, particularly for thinking about how to do research, how to convert information into evidence and then into knowledge.
Foundations aren’t whole buildings, though, and creating the entire foundation that you’d need for a skyscraper when all you’re going to build in the site is a modest ranch home is a wasteful and stupid thing to do.
Faculty need to work for students who are really certain that they’re going to need the deepest foundation. But it’s more important to offer the smaller footprints for the larger group of students, or maybe even just to provide some building materials from your discipline that are an accompaniment to work in a completely different field or profession or to a well-lived life. So that’s why I often do teach materials from other specializations and other disciplines and from outside academia, with relatively careless regard for the deep foundations that generated some of that material.
I think you need to gently remind your colleague that there is a reason universities and colleges have history departments with multiple historians, instead of just one all-purpose historian. No one class or one professor can possibly give a satisfactory foundation for history as a field of knowledge. If your job is to ‘teach the discipline’ then that is as part of a collective mission.
If its a collective goal to inform students about what history is, and how to do it, then they probably need to be exposed to a wide variety of approaches to historical thinking and not just a stock textbook, or consensus, view of the field. So any class that a student takes is a snapshot of a diverse set of practices, rather than an authoritative statement. There is room for both social history and political history; economic history and cultural history. The students should get a chance to try it all out from the wildly interdisciplinary to the bugle and drum school of military history.
If thats not the objective, and we just need to cram their heads full of facts, then we might as well go ahead and build an animatronic Leopold von Ranke doll to hold forth on European History and an automaton Charles Beard to teach US History. This should be sufficient to give the students the history component of their four year cultural suntan. The rest of us can close up shop and go do other things that are better remunerated while pursuing our research as an eccentric hobby.
I’m a great believer in the idea of “ecodiversity” in terms of pedagogical styles, course designs, and modes or styles of producing knowledge. I think my more disciplinary colleague believes also in variety: but variety of specializations, offered in tandem. In that, they would endorse your point that no one class offers a comprehensive introduction to the discipline, but that a more consistent vision of discipline is what produces that introduction.
First, an animatronic Ranke is a *great* idea.
Second, I think it’s about being careful to specify the limits of one’s knowledge in the classroom. I’ve said it before: I am always coming across confident generalizations about classical antiquity made by non-classicists that make me wince.
And what makes me wince most of all is the confidence, the absolute black-and-white certainty that it must have been that simple, often in the context of discussions that show that the person in question is quite capable of dealing nuance and complexity if it concerns their own specialism.
I assume people with other specializations have equivalent experiences. So your colleague’s wariness may not be completely unjustified – especially if s/he’s something like an Americanist. (Which must be tiring.)
But the proper response, IMO, is to insist that one should make it clear to students when one is outside one’s comfort zone, rather than try to prevent one going outside one’s comfort zone in the classroom at all.
How – hypothetically – would your colleague have reacted if you said that you were incorporating approaches inspired by work in his/her specialism in your next publication? Most of us, after all, are rather flattered by that sort of tribute to the soundness and brilliance of our favorite lines of inquiry.
Soooo…this is a good point and yet it is also a sentiment that sort of worries me sometimes. I completely, completely understand the aggravation of specialists at flat-out misstatements, misuses and distortions of specialist work by generalists out to make a point. I have the same feeling myself many times when I catch someone out saying something that’s just wrong, or where I know bloody damn well that they chose to read one branch of specialists who confirmed some huge generalist thesis they have and deliberately ignored another branch who would mess it up.
Generalists will frequently plead that this is a necessary precondition of generalizing. About which they are correct. But there is no requirement that a generalist be trying to sell some huge goddamn universalizing thesis about the nature of everything. And that, not generalization itself, is often what creates the problem. Generalization + humility = win. There *are* generalists who keep that firmly in mind. Oliver Sacks, since I heard him on the radio this morning, doesn’t strike me as peddling some huge theory of Neurobiological Everything. He’s just sampling from a big range of things he’s interested in that he hopes his readers will also find interesting.
So I guess what I’d see myself as is absolutely not someone with a big Theory of Everything, but instead, as someone with an interest in the connections between things. If nothing else, that interest instructs you that there are surprising synchronicities across fields of knowledge that present as separate. For example, I understand fully that quantum physics and postmodernism are not the same thing, but there are some curious subtle family resemblances about their stance in relationship to preceding paradigms of knowledge. I think if you’re paying attention to the overall zeitgeist, you see that and wonder about it.
Being interested in connections, or as I put it today in a meeting, being a person who knows “a little about a lot”, should be enough to keep the lid on making huge, bold statements about knowledge from other disciplinary perspectives. But this too is a separate problem: that academia mostly does not encourage or reward modest or integrative conclusions. I think I want to take a hack at that problem separately in a subsequent post.
Interesting. I’ve always considered myself a person who knows a little about a lot, which I’ve always thought of as a benefit. I can connect literature to science, science to sociology, sociology to the latest YouTube craze. That seems valuable to me, and it’s often how, as a student, I was able to grasp deeper concepts. Being able to map my existing knowledge in say, English, onto Biology (a stretch, I know) helps me grasp new concepts. If I recall, there’s a whole theory about learning that involves this very thing. It happened very rarely in college that faculty would cross disciplines. I clearly remember when I realized that my philosophy class and my literature class had a lot it common. It was a paradigm-shifting moment for me because neither professor made the connection for me. I really saw disciplines in a completely different way after that. They were arbitrary distinctions made for convenience.
On the other hand, I’ve found it sometimes disadvantageous to not have the deep knowledge I might need to get across important points. I’m currently teaching an art class that has me grasping for tidbits of information just in time for the class. If I get asked a question, I’m sunk. Of course, I have no qualms about saying, “I have no idea.” And, frankly, I’m having fun learning about things–right now the history of print advertising–just because I think my students should know it. And, I’m digging into my own liberal arts education, remembering my two art classes. Thank goodness for that.
And still on the other hand, I, too, have had the experience of cringing when someone gets it wrong about something I do have deep knowledge of.
I look forward to the subsequent post as I’ve always been frustrated by academia’s need to reward only deep knowledge.
There is no requirement that generalists be trying to offer a big universalizing thesis. But the reverse is true: a person with a big universal thesis must aim to be a generalist. It colors things.
Oh, OK I think I get it. Is this one of those Isaiah Berlin Hedgehog and Fox moments? The hedgehog is giving you a hard time?
I think the colleague also has forgotten that the current specializations, periodizations and methodologies have not all been handed down from Herodotus, Sima Qian and Thucydides. All those great specializations and especially the methodologies often times were borrowed from other disciplines.
Are we more prone to error when we stray off of the disciplinary or specialist reservation? Quite possibly. But if you didn’t make mistakes, then you wouldn’t really learn anything. Not taking risks and playing it safe so you are never wrong would be a pretty bad lesson for a humanist to learn. Its not a bad lesson for future bureaucrats.
I am working on my general humanistic theory of everything. But I will not reveal anything, before I finish building the Animatronic Ranke. I am waiting to see if Bela Lugosi will do the voice over. His agent hasn’t gotten back to me.