How to Read Departmental Webpages (And How to Make Them Readable)

Posted on March 6, 2012 by Timothy Burke

So today I turned my attention to a bit of institutional homework I was assigned, to find out how some of Swarthmore’s peer institutions approach neuroscience, whether it’s a department or a program, how many positions are dedicated to it, etcetera.

Let’s talk about how someone who knows relatively little about academia might view such a page. Let’s say it was a 16-year old high school student who was absolutely certain they wanted to study neuroscience and also absolutely certain they wanted to attend a small liberal-arts college.

Let’s say our aspirant neuroscientist starts with Swarthmore. Unusually, Swarthmore (at the moment) lists its programs of study on its front page. Most colleges bury that listing two or three pages deep. So no digging required in this case: the prospective student will see the following right at www.swarthmore.edu:

No neuroscience. Or so it might seem. Here the classic problem that it takes some knowledge to get some knowledge rears its head. Hopefully the aspirant neuroscientist knows where this discipline is coming from (biology and psychology in the main, though as we’ll see, there are exceptions.) So maybe she’d notice the following at the Psychology Department’s departmental page:

But how to interpret this? There’s a major, but it’s not listed. Worse yet, if the prospective clicks on that link, they’re going to be pointed to a Google doc that you have to have permission to view. Which this person won’t have. So here we see the first problem with departmental webpages at your average college site. They offer an uneven range and quality of information without a clear picture of the multiple audiences that might be seeking information. (Trust me, we’re typical in this respect: I am not singling out my colleagues here.) What should our prospective conclude in this case? That whatever Swarthmore has, it’s new or not a strong part of the institution’s curriculum.

Let’s just say our prospective wants to be absolutely sure and proceeds to look at Psychology’s faculty listing. This kind of listing also varies enormously in formatting. To an outsider, much of the information on a typical listing of faculty will be difficult to decode. Some simple rules:

Faculty described as professor or associate professor are usually tenured faculty. Meaning they have met the requirements for tenure and that they are likely to be around for the foreseeable future until they retire or move to another institution. Faculty described as assistant professor are tenure-track (meaning they will come up for promotion to tenure in the future) but have not been tenured yet. Faculty who have a “named position” (“Dorwin Cartwright Professor of Social Theory and Social Action”) are senior faculty who have been appointed to special “chairs”, often a sign of prestige or accomplishment. (A “chair” in this sense is different from the department chair, who is the current administrative head of an academic department.) All of these faculty occupy regular “lines”: counting them gives you a sense of the stable size of a department relative to others at the same institution. You might get some rough sense of the age or seniority distribution in a department by noting the distribution of ranks within it.

Faculty listed as emeritus or emerita have retired. You can’t tell much from the listing alone of whether they’re an active presence in the department. Faculty listed as visiting assistant/associate professors are generally some kind of experienced temporary faculty. Lecturers are faculty who are often (though not always) temporary who may be hired to address additional subject areas or to address short-term pressures on an existing department. Faculty who are described as none of these terms are also likely to be either temporary or to have institutional responsibilities besides teaching. In some cases, senior administrative officers of a college (such as a president, provost or dean) may be listed in the faculty of a given department. These are sometimes honorary listings, but in any event, these officers are usually not active teachers in that department while they are serving in administration.

Basically, count the tenure-track faculty for a reliable measure of the predictably available teaching resources.

The final thing you might find on a departmental listing is the research and teaching interests of faculty. This also is variable: some departmental webpages treat this information like it is a secret, or put it in a separate layer below the departmental listing. At Swarthmore Psychology’s webpage, you’ll see some concise, clear listings of interests under each faculty member’s name. In our department, you won’t see “neuroscience” as a single word, but if our prospective knew something about the field, they’d probably spot about 2, maybe 3, faculty with interests lying within neuroscience.

Let’s try neuroscience at Williams.

Where do you go? Well, there’s always the expedient trick of Googling “Williams neuroscience”. But let’s do it the old-fashioned way, by drilling down the links. At the Williams main page, you’ll see:

“Academics” is generally going to be the place that you find listings of departments, programs, majors and other curricular items. The next page at Williams has another listing to parse: “Departments and Programs” is what’s wanted. One page deeper and our prospective is eagerly scanning down the list of departments. It’s not there! But wait, look at the second column, under “Programs Offering Concentrations”. Bingo! There’s neuroscience.

Only, what’s a “Program Offering Concentrations”? Do NOT expect college webpages to ever explain like this anywhere but about five fathoms deep in their official handbooks. In general, a department is a more stable, longer-established administrative unit that offers a regular course of study and some kind of certification on graduation. “Program” means something a bit more tentative, often newer. “Department” means “discipline”, “Program” often means “interdisciplinary”. But this is not always the case. Swarthmore has programs older than some of its departments, some of its programs think of themselves as offering a discipline, and a few programs have more participating faculty than some of the smallest departments. Students (and faculty) often perceive departments to be more powerful, resource-rich and prestigious, but some programs are deliberately loose or unstructured for some purpose and yet have plenty of resources. In short, it’s hard to say what exactly this means when you see it. As a rule of thumb, you can guess that a “program offering a concentration” or any similar phrase means a course of study that is an institution is trying to do in a more tentative, potentially reversible way by bootstrapping the resources of some existing departments in a new direction.

Let’s click on Williams’ program. Hey, snazzy graphic, but also a pretty clean page in terms of the information navigation it offers. Betcha didn’t know that neural systems came in Williams’ colors.

Before you click on anything in the left-hand menu, take a second to parse what each of those links will likely tell you. “Program” usually means a description of the structure of a major or minor, though that might also be under “Courses”. “People” usually links to faculty and staff, and “Research” will often tell you about what they do but also about what labs or work they’ve been doing with students. Some departmental websites have a listing of additional resources about this area of study, though these are often badly out of date. The “Essel Program” listing tells you that this program has a stable source of external funding–which our aspirant neuroscientist might realize could translate into some sort of support for internships or research fellowships for students.

Let’s say our prospective decides she wants to see what courses the program offers. Here she’ll find a disappointment that is very common to college websites. The course titles are available but they are not linked to anything more detailed. If they are linked, it’ll often just be to a one-paragraph description in the catalog. Very rarely will a departmental website facilitate an information-seeker to drill down into syllabi or any more detailed information about courses. Nor will links to faculty or research typically connect to actual publications by faculty. At best you might find an abbreviated c.v.

Still, the Williams site gives the prospective some sense of what neuroscience at the college is like. Looking at the “People” link, the prospective will find out how many students have chosen the concentration since 2009 (a hint that this is when the program might have started) and will find faculty listed as “Professor of Biology” or “Associate Professor of Psychology”. What does the “of Biology” mean in this kind of listing? That this faculty member’s tenure line is not in Neuroscience, but in that other department. And here we see the most common meaning of “program” versus “department”: departments control tenure lines, programs “borrow” their resources from elsewhere. But this doesn’t tell you anything about what that commitment is like: sometimes faculty in departments are much more strongly committed to a program than their “home” department. It does tell you that faculty might be pulled in two directions, however.

Let’s try two more quickly. How about Pomona? As with Williams, it’s three links deep to the listing of departments. (That Google search is looking better and better all the time.) When you arrive at Neuroscience, you find it’s a bit difficult to tell: is it a department? a program? The language seems to imply it’s a department. Some faculty are listed as “Professor of Neuroscience”, a suggestion that their tenure line is in Neuroscience, not something else. But, if you can navigate the somewhat confusing faculty guide embedded in the department’s webpage to look at faculty profiles (click on the little chess piece icons),

you find that the faculty listed as “of Neuroscience” are in their own profiles listed as “of Biology” and “of Psychology”. (Also, the vaguely conspiratorial notation that these profiles are “External Only” appears.) This is going to take a bit more sleuthing, which means leaving Pomona’s web architecture. Lo and behold, one Google search later, we find that Professor Karen Parfitt has left a presentation up on the web that explains everything. It was a program that started out of student interest, it grew enormously, and in 2010-11 it became a department. Current faculty have tenure lines in both neuroscience and other departments but the “of Neuroscience” presumably means that this is where those tenure lines will be in the future.

This is all information that you’d be able to get pretty quickly if you were at Pomona, I think. But it’s not what college websites are used to communicate, for the most part.

Let me point to a college website that I found frustrating: Bates College. It’s got a strong graphical design that’s consistently held several layers down. Good for them. But when I drill four click layers down to get to neuroscience, here’s what I find:

Still a default to big pictures and words. The superficial admissions-brochure description of neuroscience actually requires me to scroll down at the default display size to even read the whole thing, and the pictures are utterly banal images of happy students, nothing to do with the department, program or whatever. When I click on Faculty and Staff in the mid-page banner, here’s what I get:

To look at the faculty and staff associated with neuroscience, I have to pull down the menu from Faculty & Staff and look at each one of them individually. I can’t call up a page with all four of them. No, it’s worse than that, I need a pull-down menu for each faculty person to separately look at their teaching, research, and so on. (Though I can get a .pdf of syllabi, so that’s nice.) Seriously, this makes clear that Bates doesn’t think I’m going to want to go that deep, or that if I want that information, I’ll find it elsewhere: the webpage is for nice pictures of nice students associated with nice-sounding ad copy.

—————-

A few modest proposals:

It wouldn’t hurt anyone if college webpages had an archival or curatorial function, particularly at the departmental level. I keep a Twitter window open to the keyword Swarthmore: I get a pretty interesting picture of what’s being said about the college that way. I should be able to find Karen Parfitt’s slides from inside Pomona’s web architecture. Most importantly: I should be able to go straight from faculty directories to syllabi and at least some online publications. That should be standard within the next decade. Honestly, it should be standard now.

It wouldn’t hurt anyone if the descriptions of programs were punchier, more engaging, more real. Faculty love to complain about administrative-speak, committee-speak, but I’d make a guess that many of the deadliest, most abstract descriptions of departments, disciplines and programs were written by faculty.

College webpages in general should very quickly yield in their architecture to different kinds of searchers. The prospective who is exploring, the colleague who is doing institutional research, the outsider who is looking for a directory, the alumni who is trying to find out what’s up back at the alma mater, the journalist who wants to know what “Cultural Studies” is, the community member looking for a class to audit, should within three clicks find themselves in an architecture of link structures and discovery that is friendly to their intent.

Colleges should provide a clear lexicon both of terms and concepts common to higher education as a whole and specific to their curricula and it should be one click away at all times.

Listings of programmatic resources (faculty or otherwise) that obscure the quantity or stability of those resources are at the least confusing, at the worst deceptive. I’m not linking to the worst I saw in this search, but there’s a couple of institutions that struck me as actively puffing their programs up to two or three times their real size.

Links that lead to dead, old, or private pages are bad and yet are also surprisingly common.

Posted in Academia, Information Technology and Information Literacy, Swarthmore | 4 Comments

On How Not to be Foxhog College

Posted on February 22, 2012 by Timothy Burke

Let’s try a thought-experiment.

Imagine a college which goes well beyond St. John’s College, Hampshire or the College of the Atlantic in the experimental premise of its design. Call it Vulpine College. It has a faculty of 100, a student body of 1000. Every semester, the 1000 students write down four separate courses of study that they’d like to embark upon in the coming term. The faculty sit down and read the requests. Those that are identical or nearly so are sorted into piles: everyone who wrote “Discrete Mathematics” or “The History of the Civil War”, for example. Courses of study that are fairly close to or contained within an existing pile are added to that, say, someone who listed three or more topics belonging in a discrete mathematics class, or someone who wanted to study US history from the Jackson Administration to Reconstruction put with the Civil War bunch. Those requests that are completely idiosyncratic would be kept on their own.

Then you’d match up faculty to the student selections. Maybe you’d try some rough matching to expertise, but the central conceit here would be that Vulpine’s faculty are highly adaptable, widely experienced liberal arts intellectuals whose job it is to facilitate student learning and not to be “sages on the stage” who hold forth about a fixed body of knowledge that they believe students ought to have. They would impose no restrictions: what the students want, the students get, whether that leads to a host of one-person tutorials or one thousand people studying how to program in Python.

At this most radical extreme, what would not work? For one, no matter how much you prefer the Fox to the Hedgehog, let’s get real. Some specialization of knowledge is necessary. There can’t be many people out there who would be equally comfortable teaching Farsi, C++, ethnographic method, inorganic chemistry, Chaucer and the military history of World War I. You can teach people to think critically no matter what the topic, but no single person can teach people to think well through or within any subject. You have to know something to be a good teacher even if you redefine that role as facilitation. In a small-scale, face-to-face, intimately-scaled college, you will never have the critical mass of faculty to sustain anything this open-ended, even if you had some sort of creative “backend” solution for linking students to crowdsourced knowledge networks.

For another, even the best autodidact at the age of 18 is limited in two crucial ways. First, unless they were home-schooled or attended one of a handful of equally experimental private schools, this kind of radical agency over your own learning would be substantially alien. If Vulpine College didn’t spend time preparing its students for this kind of openness, most of them wouldn’t know what to do with it. That preparation might arguably take up one, two, or more years of study. At which point, Vulpine College has become a fairly standard liberal-arts college with an exotic culminating exercise.

Second, even skilled autodidacts need to have a certain amount of fuel shoveled into them in order to jump-start their own engines. You have to know something to know something more. A late colleague of mine tried to approach the teaching of college biology partially by asking students to recapitulate the history of inquiry that generated contemporary biological science, but even he started at a baseline at which “biological science” was already the conceptual banner under which the class convened, in which much was already known. At least some knowledge requires deferred gratification or indirect routes. An 18-year old Vulpine student who had done a bit of algebra but wrote “stochastic calculus” as a course of study would have to be told that there were some intermediary steps that just couldn’t be skipped. Once Vulpine’s faculty were in the business of saying that to students, a more standard curriculum would inevitably come into view.

Third, the infrastructure of Vulpine would either be parsimoniously reliant on digital sources or it would be improbably expensive. Even in the latter case, there’s no way Vulpine could support hands-on or experiential learning to match the potential range of student interests. You can’t have an infinite number of laboratories ready to roll out at a moment’s notice, you can’t support students looking to do situated or ethnographic work in all possible sites, you can’t have all the artistic or performing resources students might ask for.

Fourth, Vulpine could make no representations whatsoever about what its students know, do or are capable of, except that they know how to decide what they want to learn next. That’s important, but the world is not and will not be Vulpine, no matter how crowdsourced and networked it might become. Vulpine could certify almost nothing about its students, and would have almost no ‘view from above’ of their learning experiences. A corollary: individual faculty would also have a hell of a time assessing the work of students in any given course or tutorial. If you have highly individual motivations for wanting to learn something, who’s to say that you’re not meeting your goals? If I decide that learning C was the wrong language for my goals after a bad semester full of failure and switch to Python, or even abandon computer programming altogether, isn’t that a very good example of the kind of learning that Vulpine is committed to?

I could go on: Vulpine in this extreme formulation is as impossible as Borges’ Library of Babel. Like the Library, however, the act of imagining it raises the more fundamental question: if we could have it, would we want it? Entropy is a precondition of life; boundaries and limits, natural or invented, are a precondition of knowledge. Vulpine’s radical concession to the agency of learners might well end up being the antithesis of the liberal arts: saying that we should always choose what we want to know next implies that there should always be some utility to our choices. At least some of the time, we learn best through accidents and serendipities, through what other people choose for us. Vulpine is also radically amnesiac, completely ephemeral: there is no sense that it is helping to produce knowledge, only consume it. It depends on a world that approaches education and scholarship in a more traditional mode. In a way, Vulpine would be like the one family that refuses to get vaccinated for anything, hoping to free-ride off of the community’s immunizations.

Vulpine isn’t just impossible, in some sense, it’s a bad idea.

———–

Let’s look at the opposite thought-experiment, Hedgehog College. At Hedgehog, with 1000 students and 100 faculty, all the professors are deep specialists in a single area of scholarly knowledge. Hedgehog has decided that what they have now is exactly what they will have forever: that every existing allocation of resources to every existing discipline is precisely as it ought to be. Each specialist will of course be responsive to how their field changes over time as knowledge accumulates or shifts in that field, but each specialist will also be completely autonomous in their command over their field and over the portion of the curriculum assigned to that field. In essence, every faculty member is a department of one, and is exclusively in charge of hiring their replacement. Continuity and tradition are Hedgehog’s watchword. Hedgehog is well-endowed: each member of the faculty has adequate resources to support their area of instruction and research. It has spared itself the burden of ever having to decide the comparative worth of different areas of knowledge or to make difficult judgments about resource allocation.

So what wouldn’t work in this case? Hedgehog would run into a mirror of Vulpine’s problem with its first-year students. Even in 2012, the curriculum they encounter is likely not to be the same as the education they’ve had up to that point. By 2030, 2040, 2050, that problem will be more and more acute each passing year, no matter how responsibly each faculty member represents the changing status of their own field. Just as Vulpine can’t easily create a sequence of required classes designed to prepare autodidacts, Hedgehog will have difficulty creating an integrated or shared introduction to its fixed fields of study.

Vulpine’s faculty would face the nightmare of having nothing to call their own, of having to redefine themselves every six months. Hedgehog’s faculty would seem to own their own domains, but in truth, the domains would own them. If in the course of a thirty-year career, a Hedgehog faculty member decided that they were more interested in a new field of specialization than the one they were hired to teach and study, they would in some sense be following a love that dare not speak its name: the college itself would have no way to recognize or institutionally benefit from the growth or evolution of that faculty member. No research at Hedgehog could argue for a fundamentally new field of study, or argue against an old one. At retirement, the position would go back to Go and not collect $200. At some point, it might become nearly impossible to find a replacement, or for a person practicing something like a fixed field to recognize Hedgehog’s job advertisement as something they were qualified to teach.

Hedgehog might have enough resources to deal with changes in what faculty require to carry out their research and teaching. Equity in teaching labor would be a different problem, however. Hedgehog has no way to deal with or even acknowledge evolving student demand for its offered subjects. It might well have to adopt strict quotas, caps or some other traffic control. But since it doesn’t have any way to discuss connections between subjects or overall courses of study in a coherent, evolving way, it couldn’t adjust some kind of required course sequence over time to adapt to changing student demand. That would take believing that the relations between areas of study are dynamic and having some way to describe and imagine that dynamism that is both structural and intellectual.

Hedgehog’s individual faculty could readily certify that individual students had progressed in their specialized command of the subjects offered by the college. But they couldn’t easily collectively attest to a student’s general competency, or to learning outcomes that trumped or bypassed those areas of study. The faculty would have very little way to accommodate or support a student who was engaged in a unique recombination of several areas of specialized learning because they would only be able to evaluate or advise the portion that related uniquely to their own field.

The problem for Hedgehog is that even though its individual faculty might have tremendous dynamism in their own practice and be involved in all sorts of conversations about shared or connected problems, the curricular and organizational structure of the college could never acknowledge or benefit from that dynamism and connection. Nor could that structure ever deal with or even officially recognize changes in the interests of students and the world at large. Vulpine is all driven by student agency, Hedgehog is never driven by student agency.

I think even the most erinaceinaedic intellectuals can see why Hedgehog would be more unpleasant in many ways than Vulpine. You can see Hedgehog actually existing for a while, it’s just that it would become useless and reactionary very quickly. The only way to hold the line this hard is the way that St. John’s does it: not in terms of disciplinarity and specialization, but in terms of a core body of knowledge and inquiry that you believe has eternal or unchanging value. And even St. John’s periodically tinkers with their definition of the Western tradition: it’s fairly hard to celebrate an intellectual tradition that exalts innovation, progress and skepticism while permanently rejecting any possible change in how you study and practice that tradition.

——–

All I have to do is recite the fields of study that Hedgehog wouldn’t have if it had frozen in place in 1960 in order to properly horrify most academics. I sometimes feel there is a disconnect between the way in which many academics welcome those changes and their willingness to countenance or imagine a similar array of changes from this point forward. Part of the reason for that is that most of the changes in academia between 1960 and 2012 took place through institutional growth, whether we’re talking Swarthmore or UCLA, so new fields rarely seem to have been included at the cost of old fields. But some were, and more will be in the zero-sum future.

Excessive hedgehoggery makes it impossible to talk of change except as loss and violation, makes all planning into trauma. But a blithe fox, in love with his or her own humbuggery, tramples on the passions that sustain scholarly research and focused teaching, and doesn’t seem to understand the fineness of the line between a cosmopolitan jack-of-all-trades and a dispossessed vagabond. So how do we all stay open to the future in planning, stay provisional about our practices, without risking that dispossession? How to institutionalize restlessness and prevent rootlessness?

Here’s what I’d suggest:

1) Demand, enrollment, popularity are not sufficient reasons to shift resources, but they’re always relevant. It’s not just about giving students what they want. What students (and parents and wider publics) believe that they need from higher education is a fantastically useful map of what they already know or think they know. Every teacher should want to constantly refresh their view of that map: it’s the best way to avoid becoming an ossified hedgehog, to speak persuasively about what you know to people that you believe ought to know it.

2) “Coverage” is a weak rationale by itself in curricular planning, especially at small liberal-arts institutions. Here I skew pretty hard to Vulpine’s side of the spectrum. If the goal of a liberal arts education is improving intellectual flexibility, adaptability, open-ended problem-solving, creativity, critical thought, then any subject and all classes should work towards those goals. Coverage without very strong beliefs about canons, core knowledges, and essential traditions is just an alibi covering over “you do your thing and I’ll do mine, tend to your knitting and leave me alone”. A lot of the time contemporary faculty at many institutions want to have it both ways, rising in defense of disciplinary traditions which are subverted, discarded or harshly critiqued as soon as the venue shifts. Any assertion of the essential character of one subject ought to always require a comprehensive vision of the total universe of essential and elective subjects, but that burden is usually subcontracted out to some vague academic geist or put off as a luxuriously difficult problem that will be discussed at some always-deferred future moment.

3) Instead of coverage, what I prefer is something like heterogeneity. I am in love with the metaphor of ecological diversity to describe what the goal should be: filling all the observable intellectual niches; having a rich range of methods, epistemologies, temperaments, experiences represented within a faculty; insisting that every course of study is related or connected but in more flexible ways than a core curriculum or fixed canon allows. What you get if this is your guiding view is an institution which I think has an intrinsic beauty (as with biodiversity) but also robustly adaptable to changing circumstances.

The difference between trying to maintain a diverse intellectual ecosystem and trying to achieve coverage can be subtle, but it is sometimes pronounced. Coverage asks, “What must we have?”, and when denied, maintains that the resulting curriculum is inadequate, failed, weak. For a small institution, being driven by coverage usually means thinking of yourself as a shitty little university rather than a productively intimate college. Ecological diversity asks, “What’s another way to think about this problem?” or “What would be interesting, what would be generatively different from what we have already?”. Coverage doesn’t scale, but diversity does: it can guide decisions about a faculty of ten or ten thousand.

In a lot of places, institutional decision-making ends up producing a sort of ungainly Frankensteinian jumble of fox parts and hedgehog parts. I think there’s a different middle possible.

Posted in Academia | 6 Comments

UnConference or MutateConference?

Posted on February 9, 2012 by Timothy Burke

This morning I was drawn to a post by Mitch Joel claiming that the “unconference movement” is dead.

I hadn’t encountered Joel’s blog before, so I hope I’m not reading this piece out of the context of his usual commentary. In any event, my response isn’t entirely about this one entry. I’ve only been to two events that were trying to be “unconferences” in some sense, and I’ve never been involved in trying to facilitate one, so there’s nothing about his critique that strikes too close to home, no wound it inflicts on me.

But there is something in the response that frustrates me, and it’s not just about unconferencing. There’s a pattern here that extends across a much vaster terrain. As I said in my Twitter feed, “Do as thou wilt” and “Ur doing it wrong” don’t add up. Joel is hardly the first person to try and say both of them at once.

Let’s take unconferencing. The idea here, as I see it, is to not just systematically question everything that doesn’t work about an existing model of conferencing, collaboration, and meetings but to invent new forms and practices that act on that critique. That alone makes the movement or whatever you want to call it a great thing: there’s nothing worse than endlessly circling around an awareness of how broken or stale existing practices are while feeling condemned to repeat them indefinitely. The one time I sat on a major professional association’s program committee a decade ago, I suggested that it would be a great idea if we just dropped virtually all of the standard paper-presentation sessions in favor of roundtables, workshops and spontaneous discussions, a sort of proto-unconferencing move. But there wasn’t any space in business-as-usual to entertain that idea. It was clear that if I were serious about it, I’d have to make it a crusade. My colleagues weren’t against a change exactly, but they felt there were reasons why we had a lot of small, boring sessions attended by six or seven people who passively listened to papers being read to them and changing that would cause serious problems for many members. Crusading on this subject struck me as a bit lower on my priority list than getting an unnecessary root canal. Smarter by far to just do an end run and invent new practices under new banners, as unconferencers have.

It’s the new practices part that seems to me to be the point: that unconferencing opens up what had been a closed, ritualistic and expensive domain that put very high transaction costs on collaboration, discovery and conversation between people with shared interests and projects.

It sticks in my craw when a move to openness becomes an occasion for a new closure. Which is how I read Joel’s complaint: that the unconference should have a purity test, its own Dogme 95 policed by dour adherents, that it has to be the dialectical opposite of the conference in every respect. In that case, you do not mean UN, you mean ANTI. Which will require the perpetual zombie reification of an ancien regime mode of conferencing as well. Every anti- needs its pro-, every post- needs its unhyphenated Other. To “un” something seems to me not to commit to a perfect opposite but to seek a massive radial evolution of new forms, to open a space, to emancipate.

What I hear in Joel I hear a bit of when #Occupy meetings insist dogmatically on human mics, circles and so on. Or the way that I can remember student activist meetings I participated in the 1980s mandatorily concluding with a sort of offbrand pseudo-Maoist self-crit session. Moves intended to criticize the rigidity and hierarchy of some other form of group or collaboration sometimes harden quickly into their own form of exclusionary orthodoxy, their own fetishized manners. To me a perfect unconference or rally or online collaboration or what have you would be a jam session, a moveable feast. Improvisation has signal, it has pattern, it has structure, it has plans, but it also has the freedom to say or play what it seems right to say or play at that moment. Whatever works is what I want to be free to do, what the work of the “un” ought to accomplish, to make working an always-provisional, always-scrutinized, always-open value. Let a thousand models bloom, and then cross-pollinate.

This isn’t just about one mode or tradition of collaborative practice. Ultimately this distinction, this different sense of what it means to “UN-” something, strikes right to the heart of the most extravagant and exciting promises that congregants gathered in the house of Shirky try to uphold. I really believe you cannot set yourself against attempts to protect worn-out traditions through enclosure and monopoly with your own enclosures, your own moves to exclusive ownership. Otherwise it just comes off like an attempt to evict the old sheep farmers so that you can breed goats on the same fenced-in pastures, a casting of one brand name against another, a strategy of transfer-seeking.

Openness is a sensibility long before it is found expressed in anything more concrete, and it requires a delight in the mutations and adaptations that follow from an intervention into a closed space. It rests on a gentleness of regard towards the practical and imaginary moves made by others, an encouragement of remixing and reinvention.

Posted in Digital Humanities, Information Technology and Information Literacy, Intellectual Property | 5 Comments

The Work of Criticism

Posted on January 20, 2012 by Timothy Burke

Jumping straight out of my Twitter feed about THATCamp Games, I want to work a bit more on a reaction I had to a morning panel on teaching games in a higher ed class.

I heard a pretty strong strain of thought that naturalized the proposition that the first thing to do with games in a class is to interrupt the activity of play, to stop the fun, to compel students to a critical attentiveness to the content and experience of a game. The student who knows how to play video games well was taken to be a sort of pedagogical enemy, both because they ‘split’ the instructors’ attention between the skilled player and the students who have never played and because the expert gamer was taken as a figure who actually has few or no critical thoughts about their consumption of games.

The problem of a class with split levels of preparation, competency, or cultural capital is a real one that comes up in much of higher education, so I don’t mean to belittle it. But because it’s so common, it might be a good thing to not see as specific or special to games except in who has that expertise or cultural capital within a classroom.

But the idea of the expert gamer as a sort of idiot savant who doesn’t want to talk about games, doesn’t think about games as a critical subject, and who is having altogether too much fun with games to be trusted as a practicioner of criticism worries me. Here too I don’t think this construct is limited to games as a cultural form. There’s a mirroring construction in film and television studies, indeed, in the relation of most bodies and pedagogies of academic cultural criticism and communities formed around and through cultural consumption. Literature professors often encounter and complain about the student who arrives in their classes with a professed ‘love of literature’. We sometimes come to see our job as grimly breaking those blithe spirits on the wheel of the hard labor of criticism and dismissing them from our company when they refuse to come into the quarry and break stone.

We set our teeth to this bit first because we hold dear the notion that criticism is work because it has work to do, that criticism has a function which requires training to perform, which is desperately needed as a part of the critical transformation (or preservation) of some wider sociocultural project, and towards which there will be opposition. A labor to learn, a labor to enact, a labor to endure.

We also do it because something which is fun, pleasurable or passionate seems an easy target for elimination within the academy, or indeed any contemporary institution with limited resources and a productivist sensibility. Yet it is against this sentiment particularly that humanists so often howl in protest in other ways, resisting the idea that what they do should ever be reduced to its naked, barren utilities. Why then it should be so urgent to disrupt, prevent or spoil the experience of culture when it seems passionate, pleasurable or fun is something of a mystery.

Nor do I think there is much sense in making the expert gamer, the romantic reader, the artist who creates for personal satisfaction, either an enemy of criticism or absent of a critical faculty. “Expert gamers” engage in a great deal of criticism: it simply isn’t expressed in terms that are native to scholarly enterprise, nor is it often concerned with the things that earn academic critics their reputation capital. But there’s a lot of value in the discourse of expert gamers for academic critics, and I think academic critics would find that this door swings both ways: there are things expert gamers want to know that they would gladly look to scholarship to engage.

Posted in Academia, Digital Humanities, Games and Gaming | 5 Comments

A Way To Think About Online Courses (By Apple, For Example)

Posted on January 19, 2012 by Timothy Burke

So Apple’s big education-oriented product announcement has come and gone.

I’m going to tread softly here about what it might lead to, because I’ve been wrong before on tech rollouts (both overestimating and underestimating impacts). In general, most of what was discussed in this announcement seems to follow Apple’s established pattern of looking at what other companies and institutions have been trying to do and doing some redesigns of the hardware and delivery channels for those services or products.

Back in the middle of the first dot-com boom, I was asked with some other Swarthmore faculty to attend a presentation by a tech company trying to sell us on digitizing courses and moving to some kind of online delivery of a portion of our curriculum. The main argument they offered was that if we didn’t get on board right now, with their company, we’d be out of business tomorrow because everyone else would be on board with them and we’d be the last analog dinosaurs left on an Earth for small, nimble mammals. For a residential liberal-arts college that emphasizes high-quality teaching in a small, intimate community, that seemed like roughly the Stupidest Idea Ever. It was like an undertaker showing up and trying to convince you that you could save a lot on a funeral plan if you’d just commit suicide right now.

One thing that struck me during the meeting, though, was that if you created a really rich body of materials that looked somewhat like an “online course”, what you really might be doing was crafting a completely novel form of publication. Imagine a work of historical scholarship that included video of the author giving an explanatory lecture at the beginning of a section of the reading; that had direct links to a huge body of archival pictures, audio recordings, maps, and other supporting materials; that extensively linked to relevant (or competing) analyses available in digital collections like JSTOR; and where the author would appear live once every week to take questions from students reading the book in a class.

If you think about it, some “online courses”, whether the Khan Academy or the AI class at Stanford or maybe what Apple’s putting forth, are beginning to converge on something like this design: publications which incorporate materials that have a pedagogical or instructive dimension to them. As a straight-up replacement for an actual small, focused face-to-face class, it’s pretty clear that any online course is going to fall seriously short. But as a kind of publication that works alongside of classes, or that imports some of the substance of classroom pedagogy into their multimedia mix, and which are a guide to self-guided learning or a supplement to a course led by a teacher? I think there’s some real potential.

Posted in Academia, Digital Humanities, Information Technology and Information Literacy, Swarthmore | 3 Comments

There Is Nothing You Possess That Power Cannot Take Away

Posted on January 18, 2012 by Timothy Burke

…to paraphrase what Belloq says to Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark. The problem with a rights-based liberalism is precisely that it is not and never can be the end of history, that it is never secure or stable, that every liberty claimed through toil and protest, no matter how acclaimed and cherished and generative, is one day away from the firing line when some powerful interest decides that some right or practice is inconvenient.

It doesn’t even matter if the end of a right, a freedom, a possibility will ultimately hurt that powerful interest. The contemporary businesses who have registered a powerful stake in exceptionally restrictive monopolies over intellectual property have themselves been enormous beneficiaries of a conception of the public domain as a fundamental and irreversible right of a free society. No matter: they would now see it ended. Better to kill the future than live in a present where you can only have two Ferraris in the driveway.

Hollywood and the music industry have tried repeatedly to kill media technologies and practices which ultimately have returned them enormous profits. I have in my basement industry-produced videotapes that if Jack Valenti had had his way would never have been sold to me. There was money that left my pocket and went to the businesses he represented. And yes, I have videotapes I recorded off of television. Many of those I purchased in another media format later precisely because having videotapes sustained my desire to have those films and shows available for viewing. Videotaping (or making audio tapes) was the precondition of the explosive growth of a market for older visual culture as a consumer commodity. Think back to the early years of television: it never occurred to any of the people producing and owning that intellectual property that it might have value in the future. The more that we have been able to buy and copy, the more that we want. And much of the time, the more that we will pay for.

Enclosures don’t just hurt the commons, they ultimately hurt the new lords of the manor. This is part of the point of rights, of limited government, of checks and balances: that to safeguard the future even of the powerful, you have to restrain everyone from getting everything they think they want right here, right now.

What’s increasingly apparent about law, rights and liberties in the United States is that we have lived in our times in a bubble, an interregnum, a moment where some agencies and operations of the U.S. government, most particularly the Supreme Court of the United States, have moved to align the operations of law and authority with a properly expansive vision of human freedoms and Constitutionally-protected rights. That moment is passing, the pendulum swinging to more Gilded Age norms of brutalist law enforcement, oligarchic license, and an open sanction to the use of military power at the whim of the executive.

Nowhere is this clearer than with intellectual property and the public domain. The Court’s majority in the Golan v. Holder decision are only the stone that seals the tomb, not the murderers who slit its throat. Which means what it has always meant: that those of us who believe in a public domain, whose professions are defined by a sacred commitment to its existence, whose lives were enriched by its existence, will have to fight every day forever to bring it into resurrected glory and then to hold dear its life when we do so. Waiting for the Court, the Congress, the President, the government, the powers-that-be, to live up to the trust they hold, or even to recognize where their own long-term self-interests lie, isn’t good enough. It was comforting for a time to see justice and freedom advance from those precincts, but that led to leaving the door unlocked for burglars.

Posted in Intellectual Property, Politics | 4 Comments

Just Because You’re Paranoid

Posted on January 17, 2012 by Timothy Burke

Last month, I had a really interesting opportunity to participate in an open peer review for the project Writing History in a Digital Age. Somewhat to my dismay, I found myself falling into old-fartism in various ways as I made my comments.

One of the responses I had at various points, though, isn’t just limited to that project. Thomas Malaby and I wrote an introductory essay for Game Studies a while back that got an interesting reading from Alex Golub over at Savage Minds. One of the things that we suggested is that disciplinary enclosure of most areas of conceivable study will happen sooner or later, with an accompanying loss of generative, imaginative ways to think about that subject matter.

There are signs of that at times in work that self-identifies as digital humanities, and it’s something of the same split move we saw in game studies, between those that would like to create a new, separate disciplinary project and those that would like to safely domesticate “frontier” subject matter for incorporation into the safe metropole of an existing discipline. Digital humanists, however, are both consciously fretful about those possibilities and in many cases ideologically committed to avoiding them. This is one of the main sources of the “meta-ness” and self-referentiality of much DH discussion, which sparked a good deal of tweeting and blogging in the last week, of how to avoid, disrupt or defer moves towards enclosure by disciplines or towards splitting digital humanities off as its own discipline and keeping alive an insurgent challenge to business as usual.

One of the dangers to that commitment is a tendency to invest too much in an abstract imagining of the Other of digital humanism, a sort of pervasive tormenter and antagonist who is everywhere and nowhere at once in the academy, a sort of superset of all academics who are not expressly committed to the use and exploration of digital culture, information technology, open access, and so on.

Some of the practices and structures in academia which are most inimical to the professed goals of many digital humanists are supported largely by inertia rather than strongly felt commitments. That’s actually harder to overcome, but it’s important not to personify inertia or give it more intentionality than it has.

This is not to say that there are not opponents to digital technologies, open access publishing, blogging and so on within the academy. There are. Some opposition is passive or snarky, largely about the comforts of that inertia. Some is much more active, passionate and articulate. I’d rather deal with the latter, because that’s a conversation that can take place largely within the idealized norms of scholarly debate and process. It’s mostly the former, however. That’s where the danger of overimagining an opposition comes into sharpest focus.

The peril is threefold. First, that digital humanists come to anticipate too much that they will be uniquely the target of passive-aggressive opposition, which is bad for both the future development of an institutional project and for the individual careers of scholars, particularly junior scholars. I happened to be reading in the last few weeks within several different strands of the history of various scientific and technological research projects and with stunning regularity the individuals whose work has eventually become foundational orthodoxy were treated with disdain or bemused condescension at the outset of their careers. To some extent, casual and thoughtless snark and condescension are famously everywhere and anywhere in academic life that you care to look for them. If you’re a junior academic, you can pretty much count on the fact that at least some of your senior colleagues think (based on no real engagement or knowledge) that your work is trivial and that you’re a lightweight. Most of the people who think that way won’t have the malice or energy to act on it. But some of them might if they sense a vulnerability, and one of the ways to communicate that is to seem overly anxious about whether there will be opposition to your work or ideas. This kind of passive-aggressiveness is like the old saw about dogs only biting if they sense fear: the best way to keep it at bay is to act as if it doesn’t exist at all, to be as serenely and matter-of-factly confident about what you’re doing as you possibly can be.

The second problem is that arguing in favor of a project or idea through a repeated recounting of its marginalization relies on a construction that has become ubiquitious in almost all struggles for resources or power. E.g., so much advocacy for any program, project or policy seems to require situating it as the victim of some dominant program, as the periphery of a center, as the underdog. Part of the danger of that construction is that it relieves a pressure to make fully conceptualized arguments on behalf of such a program, resting instead on a moral appeal against persecution. But more pertinently in this case the problem is this strategy is now often the prelude to becoming a disciplinary orthodoxy in academia, the way we make a place for ourselves and then settle in to hold the line against the generation behind us. For digital humanists, that strategy is far more inimical to the substance of their ideas and commitments than it would be for, say, rational-choice analysts or social historians.

The third problem, and the one I think is most pertinent to Writing History in a Digital Age, is that stressing out too much about opposition often leads you to miss out on allies who substantively agree with everything you have to say but who work on a completely different subject, in a different medium, or in a different context. So, for example, the digital humanists who believe strongly in the potential of information technology to commingle public, ‘amateur’ and scholarly productions of history, or to circulate scholarly knowledge in new ways, shouldn’t overlook other clusters of scholars who’ve been laboring to accomplish the same things without digital technologies.

I don’t want to be pollyanna about these issues. Junior scholars do need to watch for serious antagonists, and do need institutional protection. Some changes only happen because they’re argued for forcefully, and some forceful argument requires calling out unjustified or irrational opponents in precisely those terms. However, a lot of change in institutions that have long memories and that plan for their long-term survival happens a bit magically, as a critical mass comes together. A theory or a project or a methodology can seem isolated, lonely, persecuted and then hey presto! everyone’s doing it and it’s hard to remember the days when they weren’t. I think the road to that moment is smoother when there’s less angst about opposition along the way.

Posted in Academia, Digital Humanities | 2 Comments

I Endorse These Messages

Posted on January 13, 2012 by Timothy Burke

Remember when people used to use blogs mostly just for shout-outs to other bloggers? Ok, they’re often still for that purpose, but it seems to me that Twitter serves that function far more efficiently. Also, with my own bloggorhea, I’ve always been more likely to drone on about something on my mind than to link to work by others.

But two pieces which I read this week have really reverberated with me. The first was Bethany Nowviskie’s “It Starts on Day One”, at the Chronicle of Higher Education‘s ProfHacker column. Nowviskie argues that graduate programs in the humanities should completely wipe out all of their existing methodology courses (she uses the metaphor of a comet hitting the dinosaurs).

I’d agree with her first complaint against such courses, which is that they often teach methods which aren’t really in use any longer, or are inflected with an unthoughtful ethos of wariness or hostility towards digital infrastructure. The second argument she advances I worry about a bit more, which is that many such courses are “a crash course in academic jargon and en-vogue theories”. I’ve previously voiced my own sympathy for the “more hacking, less yacking” vision of some digital humanists, but it’s important not to kill the small mammals along with the dinosaurs, not to let an insurgent energy overwhelm some of the pedagogical wisdom that’s come out of existing practice. In this case, what that might mean is that we shouldn’t forget that making and problematizing are not binary states. Methods classes that are so entirely about doing or practicing that they never stop to be troubled about the purposes and aspirations of doing very quickly become mechanical and arid. “How” should never become the mortal enemy of “why”, “so what” or “who says so?”

Nowviskie rightfully says that a graduate curriculum must include consistent, persistent attention to the “uninterrogated policies and procedures that cover and shape the humanities in the modern college and university”. That’s very much my own feeling, and a driving force behind my continued blogging. But it’s crucially important not to turn many of the critical commitments of digital humanists into the one uninterrogated idea in that process. E.g., if we are going to teach graduate students in a new methodology course how to work with new platforms and publication forms that reconfigure intellectual property or create open access, we can’t step over the question of whether they should. Whenever you’re dealing with a whether kind of discussion, it’s important not to close all the escape hatches. That’s where methods classes have to come back to theory, to problematizing, and without any stopwatch ticking that says, “Hey, we only have five minutes for gnawing on our own entrails, then we have to get back to learning PHP.” This isn’t just an important pedagogical and ethical obligation: it’s also the currency of the humanities. Methods which are cut-and-dried, just about making, just about doing, just about following the recipe, are by their nature somewhat orthogonal to the spirit of humanistic inquiry.

This leads me to the second piece I really liked in this past week, at Ian Bogost’s blog. Now, look, to some extent this essay is just Bogost being Bogost: whether in tweets, blogs or books, you get the clear sense that he exemplifies the quip about not wanting to be part of any club that would have him as a member. The voice that I’ve built up on this blog over the years is so sedately reasonable that I can’t really write in this space any longer in a more expressive way, as I once think I could, but if I could, I’d probably write very nearly what Bogost says in this entry. Bogost says to humanists that if there’s a crisis in the humanities, they’ve got no one to blame but themselves.

To quote at length, he writes:

“We are insufferable. We do not want change. We do not want centrality. We do not want to speak to nor interact with the world. We mistake the tiny pastures of private ideals with the megalopolis of real lives. We spin from our mouths retrograde dreams of the second coming of the nineteenth century whilst simultaneously dismissing out of our sphincters the far more earnest ambitions of the public at large—religion, economy, family, craft, science.”

Digital culture, he adds, is good for the humanities for the simple reason that “computing has revealed a world full of things: hairdressers, recipes, pornographers, typefaces, Bible studies, scandals, magnetic disks, rugby players, dereferenced pointers, cardboard void fill, pro-lifers, snowstorms”.

Where the evenhanded compulsion of my public voice kicks in the wake of his complaint is simply to say that the things scholarly humanists care about, they care about earnestly, passionately, sincerely, and much of how they care about what they care about would be easier to appreciate if those passions were sized to their subject better. Bogost is complaining in part about something that Bruce Robbins observed some time ago about the political posture of many cultural studies scholars: that they simultaneously assume that the stakes of scholarly work are so very high that the least form of error (political, interpretative or empirical) is devastating in its possible impact and that scholars and intellectuals are peripheral, unimportant and marginalized (and must somehow figure out how not to be). The consequence of that dual construction is that the simple pleasures of humanistic writing and teaching get washed out and so too the simple possibilities of talking with publics about culture and ideas in a conversation that could satisfy everyone involved.

Scholarly humanists, taken as an abstract whole, are now so anxious about so many things: their prestige, their authority, their exclusivity, the stability of their subject, that they strain the patience of anyone or any group more serene in its sense of place within the university or the culture. And that anxiety often leads to lashing-out in all directions: at enemies both powerful and weak, at baffled witnesses and sympathetic friends, even to purification rituals within the ranks. I don’t think it has to be that way at all. Bogost thinks the answer is a purge. I think the answer is both as difficult and as simple as a more relaxed, humble and curious approach to being humanists, to scale down the claims we make and the stakes we impose.

Posted in Academia, Digital Humanities, Information Technology and Information Literacy, Intellectual Property | 5 Comments

Pictures from an Institution 9 (Visitors)

Posted on January 13, 2012 by Timothy Burke

Catching up here with some photo sessions from the fall.

Broadly speaking, my theme of the visual documentation of faculty work always has two accompanying problems. The first is that some of the work of faculty makes for a lousy picture, or can’t be pictured at all. I’m just finishing my fourth tenure dossier review of the last four months, and I’ve done a fair amount of peer review recently as well. I can’t actually give any picture of that without puncturing confidentiality.

Second, much of what faculty do as a part of their professional duties is also very pleasurable or interesting. For so many people, it’s not work if it’s not unpleasant and burdensome. Before we get to any of the other reasons why there is some popular dislike of professors, I think the fact that academic labor is often enjoyable is a mark against it: we get to think, to write, to explore our interests, to merge our personal vision of the world with our professional obligations. Or, as in this case, to listen to, converse or present to a variety of interesting visitors to our workplace. We go out into the world, but at many campuses, the world also comes to us. Still, it is work in the sense that it takes time, it takes effort, and it produces value for our employer as well as ourselves.

Visitors are like a slow-motion but also humanly satisfying version of the serendipities I often find in digital culture. A team or a group is travelling to campuses like Swarthmore: I don’t know in advance they are coming or often even that I’m invited until a week or two before the visit, but then the day arrives and I find I learn something completely new. Or I find out that something I thought was a problem unique to us turns out to be widely shared, or what I took to be an improbable ambition has been accomplished. Sometimes they’re reassuring: old friends are still friends, and as reliably insightful as ever. Sometimes they are transformative: a look at work I’ve never even heard of that once seen becomes central to my thinking about a problem.

Posted in Pictures from an Institution, Swarthmore | Comments Off on Pictures from an Institution 9 (Visitors)

Discovering the Template

Posted on January 12, 2012 by Timothy Burke

I’m very restless with my syllabi and with the courses I teach: I do new preps fairly often and tend to overhaul substantial portions of existing courses equally often.

In thinking about new classes, I tend to ask myself:

1. What’s a subject that interests me personally, whether or not I do dedicated research on it? There’s nothing worse than a class taught as a obligatory sacrifice to the disciplinary gods.
2. What’s a subject that I believe is likely to make sense to our students, be interesting to our students? If I pick something I think is interesting but that has no traction or connection to what any of our students believe to be important, I have to spend a lot of extra effort to explain what the class is about and why it matters. That might be worth it on occasion, but the key thing is that I can’t design a course of that kind and then skip that extra effort.
3. What’s a subject where the material I can assign, particularly readings, is lively and diverse and plentiful? A subject that’s potentially interesting but has mostly developed through leaden, specialized or obscure scholarly writing is not a good topic to teach to undergraduates.
4. What’s a subject where both the nature of the topic and the material available lets me present a variety of divergent ways to think about and make use of the subject matter? A subject that’s interesting but only within a scholarly or constrained intellectual tradition is not a good subject to teach to undergraduates.

What I’ve become aware of over time is that the syllabi that result from following these rules have a consistent implicit design to them. I haven’t consciously planned to make my classes this way, but as I look back at what I’ve done for the last decade, I see the same structure over and over again.

While I put a premium on material that I think can spark interesting conversations, and on a heterogeneity of voices and approaches, very much privileging material by non-academics as much as by scholars, I can see that another thing I often do in my courses, particularly thematic classes, is provide a “spine” narrative that supports the discussion. For all that I think “coverage” is an uninteresting objective for a class, I clearly recognize that without some core storyline or knowledge base, a class would be nothing but 14 weeks of “another interesting reading”: fun and diverting, but not giving students any sense of cumulative ownership over the subject, a sense that they know something that can be brought to bear in unexpected and creative ways on later readings (and on later experiences once the class is over).

To give an example, take a look at my spring 2012 syllabus for The History of Reading. The first third of the course is a highly compressed overview of the “standard narrative” of the historiography of reading and the book: pre-Gutenberg, Gutenberg & early modern print culture, massification of print, globalization of print culture. Rather than trying to give a full, rich view of particular historiographical nodes of debate at each stage along the way, I basically pick on or two readings as synecdoches: Eisenberg and Darnton for Martin, Febvre, Johns and all other early modern & post-Gutenberg analyses, or Rose for much of the literature on massification. Hofmeyr and Khumalo for globalization, here picking Africanist work simply because it’s what I know best.

I feel that the more typical impulse from many scholars setting up a class like this is to want to take one or two more tightly circumscribed periods and locations and really get into the back-and-forth of scholarly debate and research. For me, this is just that “spine” that establishes a baseline knowledge that the students can then bring to bear on all sorts of other claims about reading, the book, print culture, literacy and the like, both later in the class and in their research papers. I also have noticed that I frequently place a more universalizing or cognitivist text at the front of courses with this design, to put history as a discipline in some kind of perspective.

The second portion of the class is just a selection of materials about reading and books that I find engaging, written for larger publics. Again, looking at my syllabi, I see now that I usually try to make this move at this point in a course, taking the more specifically scholarly historiography and putting it into relationship with some broader, wider set of reflections about the topic.

The third part of the class is where I try to make the history pay off as a way to read and reconsider contemporary debates of some kind. Most of my classes have as their fundamental argument that contemporary practices and debates have a hidden “genetics” behind them, that there are histories embedded within them that shape those practices without any conscious intent. Or alternatively, I hope to suggest that issues and questions which are taken as being unique or special to our contemporary moment are not, and that the study of the past can usefully unsettle that perception. The point is, one way or another, I want to see what happens when we try to put the historiography to use. Maybe in this case we’ll decide that many of the obituaries being written for the book or for reading are not only in error, but that this is only one of the many moments where it’s been commonplace to believe that reading is at any end. Maybe we’ll decide that reading is genuinely undergoing a revolutionary reinvention (or a total eclipse). Maybe we’ll decide that reading should be knocked off its throne, to be one of a multitude of literacies worth having. Maybe we’ll feel that reading is wonderful but that the modes and practices of reading privileged by the scholarly humanities are killing that which they profess to love. I have no idea. The point is that just covering an academic subject is pointless if the students don’t get some chance to put it to use. And if they get that chance, one of the options on the table always has to be that concern for the subject itself is an impediment to some important or practical outcome. If I’m teaching African history, for example, I feel obligated to offer students at least a glimpse of the ways in which you might decide that “African history” is not the subject frame that you need for studying human experience that has taken place on the African continent.

Posted in Academia, Swarthmore | Comments Off on Discovering the Template