How I Talk About Searching, Discovery and Research in Courses

Posted on May 9, 2011 by Timothy Burke

I recently boiled down some of the advice I try to give students about how to carry out searches and formulate research questions, which I’ll reproduce here.

I start with the basic insight that I’ve picked up from Swarthmore’s library staff, that the point where many students struggle in research is not with finding credible or authoritative sources once they’ve settled on a topic but with understanding what is researchable or knowable within the constraints of the assignment, the resources, the disciplinary framework and so on. I feel as if too many of my colleagues are still focused on the former issue rather than the latter one, still too worried that students aren’t finding the “right” sources that have scholarly legitimacy in favor of Wikipedia or whatever they can find on as full-text at 2 a.m. I don’t think this is a big issue both because I have a much higher opinion of Wikipedia and such than many of my colleagues and because I find that students actually have fairly good skills for finding properly authoritative sources and material. As long as they’ve gotten the research framed correctly at the outset, that is.

So what I focus on is processes of discovery that students should use to find out what’s known and knowable, how researchable a particular question is, what the shape or character of information about that question looks like, and how to make smart decisions about where to invest labor and time in developing a research assignment.

Here’s the most important points I usually make:

1. Rapid iterability of search is important.
Especially early in a possible project, when a researcher is testing its viability, it is important to move rapidly through multiple searches. For this reason, it is always legitimate to favor a fast database over a slow one. (And a good browser and a fast Internet connection, etcetera.) A database that returns results slowly or in a form that is difficult to read or digest quickly is a database that must confer some extraordinary advantage in quality and type of information over fast, efficient databases in order to justify using it. Much of the time, those kinds of advantages only pay off in a big way late in a research project, when a researcher has a very well-developed sense of the topic and is looking for extremely specific kinds of information to round out their analysis or inquiry.

2. Always prefer databases that default to simple interfaces. Databases that default to advanced interfaces (or worse yet, require them) are committing aggression towards anyone who is not already an expert user of such a database.
Particularly early in a project, if a student researcher goes to a new database and is immediately greeted by an interface that spams the whole browser window with fifteen different data fields and Booleans-a-plenty, they should close the browser window and find a new database. Advanced search UIs should always be on a toggle, and never a default for a new user. (It’s fine if the database allows users to set persistent preferences so that the researcher who prefers the advanced UI can default to it if they like.) This advice goes hand-in-glove with my point about rapid iteration. Discovery practices early in a project require simplicity and speed because the student should be trying to get an overall sense of an entire information ecology, not to find single authoritative sources or understand a particular topic.

3. Work consciously on developing and refining heuristics for interpreting lists of search results.
I spend a lot of time in class showing students how I make sense of a list of search results and make decisions about whether the results are showing me a viable topic. I show them how to determine whether I’ve got the right keyword or search string, and how to evaluate the type and nature of the information or knowledge that I’m seeing listed. I often try to do this live, without rehearsal, in response to suggestions from the students, so that I’m not “salting the mine” and picking a search where I know in advance what kinds of results I’m going to get. Just looking at my desk for a similar unrehearsed term, I see Hämäläinen’s Comanche Empire, mentioned several postings back. Let’s say a student had read the first part of the book and got interested in Uto-Aztecan migrations after the fifteenth century and about how to read or understand various oral traditions and records relating to Aztlán, the Uto-Aztecan “homeland”.

So if a student entered the keyword “Uto-Aztecan” in Tripod, our local library database, what they get is 13 results. If the student knows nothing about linguistics, they’re probably going to find the titles of most of the results baffling or obscure. Here’s where personal heuristics enter the picture. What I’d point out to the student is that he knows what he wants: history, oral tradition, Aztlan. What he has discovered, even if he doesn’t know what morphology, cognate sets or sytactic change are, is that this search term is used by some other knowledge community besides historians. (In fact, if the student researcher does know linguistics, they’ll know instantly that this term is first and foremost a designation of a family of languages, much as “Bantu” is in African history.) There is a history-themed title at the bottom, but one thing I’d be pointing out in the class discussion is that it’s from 1937. (Actually, it’s a Ph.D dissertation from 1933.) If the student then tries “Aztlan” as a search term in Tripod, they’re going to find two separate search results that are very limited. But the second that returns just one title is a catalog from an exhibition which “contains nineteen essays by an international team of scholars and artists who investigate the concept of Aztlan as a metaphoric center and allegorical place of origin for the various peoples of the Southwest and Mexico”.

So what has the student learned? That this may be a difficult topic to research, but also that there is one title which is worth looking at immediately to further test out the viability of what the student had in mind in the first place. (Hämäläinen’s footnotes are another place to start, and I often point that out to students as well.) It’s not important just yet that the student understand Uto-Aztecan migrations, Aztlan as a place, linguistic history and archaeology as methodologies, or oral tradition and conceptions of origin. What they’re trying to find out by parsing a screen of search results is what kinds of information are produced by different queries, and how to read those results at a glance.

4. How to generate and harvest keywords across multiple searches.
The metaphor I sometimes use to describe this process is tacking into and against the informational wind, as in sailing. A searcher needs to learn how to explore all the permutations and variants of a useful keyword, how to get a feel for when the discovery potential of a keyword concept has been exhausted, and how to leap to a completely new keyword concept and begin again. Some of this involves working through all the variations of a keyword concept inside a single digital database, sometimes it involves trying the same keyword across five or six databases.

Take the Aztlan example above. A student who pursued that keyword in a larger database than Tripod, say, the Library of Congress catalog or WorldCat, would probably realize fairly quickly that the concept is hugely important to the cultural imagination of Chicano activists, writers and intellectuals. The student researcher would have to decide at this point whether they’re going to refocus the paper on this use of the concept, or whether they want to study the historical migrations of Uto-Aztecan peoples out of the southern Sierra Nevada mountains from the original “Aztlan” southward and northeastward (the Aztecs and Shoshones respectively). Re-reading Hämäläinen, the student would see that there was another name for this territory, Teguayo, as well as learning the ethnonyms Numic and Shoshone.

This is a stage where I often advise students to use Wikipedia aggressively, to generate a rich base of keywords. Looking at the entry on Aztlán, the student should harvest Nahua, Mesoamerica, Chicomoztoc, Mexica, and Ute as being of interest, as well as getting a much clearer picture of the two uses of the concept and some of the scholarly debates about the migrations and history.

If the student tried “Teguayo”, they would find almost nothing. “Numic”, on the other hand, turns up works that are clearly close to the student’s interests as well as works that are primarily about linguistics. (Such as Daniel Myers, Numic Mythologies and David Madsen & David Rhodes, eds., Across the West: Human Population Movement and the Expansion of the Numa.) An important part of keyword harvesting is to know when it’s time to go and read materials for a deeper understanding of the topic. At this point the student should go and read those books as well as sources garnered from an “Aztlán” search that are about the Uto-Aztecan homeland rather than the contemporary Chicano concept of the term. At the end of that process, the student will (hopefully) understand many of the historiographical issues. Now they’re facing a new choice: is this paper going to focus on Uto-Aztecan migrations in general, on oral traditions of Aztlán among many or some particular descendent people, on Spanish colonial interpretations of those oral traditions, on debates about the actual location of the historical Aztlán, or some other focus. Each of those emphases leads to a different set of branching keywords, some of them very general in nature. For example, if the student wants to think about oral traditions of origin and migration, maybe there are broader texts drawn from anthropology, history, Native American studies and so on which will be of great use. So the next round of searching and harvesting begins from that point, and requires a completely fresh take. “Oral tradition” + migration might be one interesting starting point, and that would turn up in the LC catalog Wesley Bernandini, Hopi Oral Tradition and the Archaeology of Identity, which looks very promising for developing this line of research.

5. Associations and folksonomies are underutilized and powerful (but don’t forget bibliographies)
This takes me back to a point that I made some years ago that turned out to be more provocative to many librarians than I anticipated, namely, that Amazon.com’s search tools that associate books through the aggregated preferences of consumers were exceptionally powerful tools for research discovery whose only analogues in conventional library catalogs were difficult-to-use citational databases. Seven years later, I think that’s still the case. Most conventional databases are still only barely Web 2.0-like in what they offer to researchers, or have tried to leapfrog into a Semantic Web-compliant form which aids cataloguers but not most users.

In the case of the search example I’ve been using here, this approach is going to help somewhat less well than it might for other searches, as the student is developing the project towards more scholarly works that are only rarely purchased on Amazon or have significant folksonomies on a site like LibraryThing. Let’s just say my hypothetical student is a gifted researcher and notices on the Amazon page for Myers’ Numic Mythologies a recommendation to look at Peter Jones, Respect for the Ancestors, which engages the contentious relationship between the repatriation of human remains and archaeological evidence and Native American oral traditions. This is a connection that would have been more difficult to find through conventional LC-subject heading search strategies, but once the student has made the jump into this new literature, they may recognize where the most exciting or lively analytic stakes of this topic lie. After all, an undergraduate doing research on this subject is going to find it very difficult to say much about scholarly debates about the archeological and linguistic evidence for the particular location or nature of a Uto-Aztecan polity prior to the fifteenth century. Once the researcher has found the Jones book on Amazon, a big range of interesting, relevant works opens up via the “Customers who bought…also bought” tool, such as David Thomas’ Skull Wars. The LC-subject headings for Jones, in contrast, don’t lead to that debate in any direct way. Here Amazon is showing the student researcher something that readers “know”, but authority-driven cataloging does not know, which is what the Jones book is “really” about, and therefore also, one of the best answers to the question “So what?” in reference to debates about the location and character of Aztlán.

I also point out, however, that bibliographies and footnotes in an existing authoritative source are another fantastic version of this kind of discovery tool, basically a guide to what a researcher read and considered. I suggest that the most recent source with the scope that most closely matches a student’s interests is especially useful in this way.

6. Balancing triage and intellectual depth
I talk a lot with my students about how to apply pragmatic judgments about when to end a search and discovery process in order to concentrate on the completion of an assignment. Discovery can go on endlessly, and never become clearly irrelevant or unimportant. The hypothetical student in my example could decide to actually link up debates about oral tradition and repatriation with the Chicano use of Aztlán, perhaps via reading about the politics and production of collective memory. They could do a comparative analysis of different debates about migration and oral tradition in the historiography of Native Americans across the Americas, or in relationship to immigrant communities in North America. Or comparative with other debates about indigeneity and autochthony elsewhere in the world. And so on.

Everything a student does, or any researcher does in any context, has a point at which there are diminishing returns to discovery simply because of limitations of time, attention, ability and purpose. The important thing for a student to understand is that they shouldn’t feel guilty when they bring a research process to a halt for this reason. There’s no set way to know when you have enough, or what counts as thorough. So I also talk a good deal about how to judge what is required for a given assignment. Some of that is dependent upon a student’s impression of the total space of information about a given topic: is it a huge, contentious, sprawling kind of space or is it a relatively placid, narrow, constrained space? If it’s the latter, for a comprehensive or ambitious research assignment like a senior thesis, a student might be expected to have some knowledge of every source or publication. If it’s the former, not so much. I also talk a lot about developing intuitions about what professors or audiences really want or expect, as opposed to what they might formally say on an assignment sheet, and letting that intuition dictate how much time or effort to put into a research process.

7. Authority and quality assessment: what you know, what I know,what you can learn to know (at this moment)
Only at the very end of talking about research do I talk about how to assess the quality or authority of the sources and information that a discovery process turns up.

Again, this is partly because I think many contemporary students at Swarthmore are already fairly skilled at recognizing basic signs of unreliable or authoritative information. So what I focus on is how to work on developing and refining more sophisticated, semi-scholarly guesses about authority and influence: how to read a search result for signs that a particular author is especially active in a given field of research (present as an author or editor in many anthologies, prominent in citational databases) or that a particular older source has retained its importance or centrality (still in print, cited or referenced in many later works).

I also encourage students to recognize that some of the judgments their professors make at a glance about the authority or influence of sources are not reasonable expectations for undergraduates. I have ways of making guesses about the reputation or influence of authors that relate to my membership in various “invisible colleges”, my understanding of the sociology of academic publishing and so on. I show students how I read a screen of search results and try to distinguish what takes a lifetime of scholarly practice to “know” at a glance and what they can reasonably learn how to do through their own experiences in a given class or over the course of four years of study of a discipline.

Posted in Academia, Digital Humanities, Information Technology and Information Literacy, Swarthmore | 17 Comments

Memoirs from Africa: Paring Down a List

Posted on May 5, 2011 by Timothy Burke

I’m preparing a year-long reading list of books about Africa for the Washington D.C. area Swarthmore alumni. I decided to constrain myself to memoirs or first-person perspective accounts. I decided to mostly concentrate on accounts from the last thirty years or so simply so I can stay with works that are in print and available at reasonable prices. In selecting works, I’ve decided to go for the widest stylistic range I can think of and the widest range of settings, interests and authors. The constraint I’ve made for myself does lead to some unfortunate exclusions: there are some novels that I’d like to use that are pretty damn close to memoirs. It also provides a surplus of certain kinds of books that I find tedious because they follow such a strong template and are so driven by market fads: memoirs of white women who grew up on African farms that followed on Alexandra Fuller’s great memoir of life in Rhodesia and now memoirs of child soldiers and survivors of Darfur. But I think that’s an interesting kind of reading in its own right–to sort distinctively written examples of such mini-genres from the templates which emerge to structure most writing of this kind. I’m also only considering books that I think are provocative sparks to intensely-felt conversation, so avoiding works that are worthy in some fashion or another but tend to only invite a kind of pious, numbed consensus appreciation for their worthiness.

Here’s what I’ve got at the moment, and what I’d still like to come up with.

Alexandra Fuller, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight
Really, I just love reading this book in courses. It’s so distinctive in stylistic terms, and so unsentimental and unapologetic, that it still unsettles a kind of complacently do-gooder liberal expectation about what reading about Africa or white settlers ought to be like.

Redmond O’Hanlon, No Mercy : A Journey Into the Heart of the Congo
I find this both funny and annoying as hell in turns–it makes for an interesting read alongside Henry Morton Stanley’s Central Africa memoir, in both intended and accidental ways. I also find it very amusing (again, both on purpose and not). There’s some interesting though at times hyperexaggerated accounts of the postcolonial state in it as well.

Robert Sapolsky, A Primate’s Memoir
This is easily one of my favorite memoirs of any kind about any place. I decided to teach the environmental history of Africa just so I could teach this book, partly. There is a ton of stuff going on here: Sapolsky’s uninhibited honesty ends up saying a lot about the culture of research by non-Africans within Africa and a great deal else.

Samson Kambalu, The Jive Talker: An Artist’s Genesis
Great fun, fascinating, and a real cure-all for the endless parade of memoirs by Africans about their experiences of war, genocide and violence.

Adam Ashforth, Madumo
I think this is a good route into talking about witchcraft discourse, the particularity of culture, the problem of how or whether to act when you’re an outsider.

Helene Cooper, The House at Sugar Beach
Really interesting memoir of a childhood in Liberia but also a reflection on the Americo-Liberian community and the historical hole it dug for itself.

Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother
There are other travel accounts by African-Americans that I like, but some are out of print (Eddy Harris’ Native Stranger) and some I don’t like (like Keith Richburg’s Out of America) but Hartman’s is really distinctive and fiercely resists compression or reductionism.

Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone
I need to pick one of the many, many books in this genre. I think this or What is the What, the latter of which raises some pretty substantial questions about authorial voice and ownership over experience.

George Packard, The Village of Waiting
A little older than some of these other books, but I like it a lot, and it definitely sparks off conversations about development, community service, and the paving on the road to hell.

William Kamkwamba, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
God, this is so well-meaning and sincere that I feel a bit like I’ve just watched a marathon of The Waltons when I read it. But again, the last thing I want is a year full of genocide and war.

Aidan Hartley, The Zanzibar Chest
I actually like this less for the early more standard colonial-nostalgia stuff on white settlers and more for Hartley’s honest accounts of his work as a journalist and rootless traveller and the kind of scruffy hedonism that he got caught up in in between covering war and genocide.

Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari
Theroux’s an asshole, but that’s sort of the point of his travel writing, and it makes him fairly interesting to talk about.

Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom
This is a way better read than it has any right to be. But it’s long and not nearly as obviously engaging or provocative as some of these other books. (What’s provocative or controversial about it takes some unearthing for non-South Africans.)

Wole Soyinka, Ake, The Years of Childhood
Gotta do this. Great book, fun to read.

Antjie Krog, Country of My Skull
I like this book a lot. Maybe bends my rules a bit in that it’s as much a journalist’s account of events as it is a memoir of them. Plus the TRC is itself a form of “testimonial memoir”.

Camara Laye, The Dark Child
Maybe loses out to Ake, The Years of Childhood, but it’s a great book. Also a bit older in time frame than some of the rest of these choices. On the other hand, I have very little Francophone work here.

========

Questions I still have, beyond what to cut and what to keep:

1. Anybody out there read Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf’s memoir yet? Any good?
2. Maybe I should venture back into the colonial era and earlier. If I did, I’d be so tempted to teach Mungo Park’s Travels in the Interior of Africa, which I think needs rescuing from Mary Louise Pratt’s interpretation of it as neatly aligned with the purposes of later imperial representations of Africa.
3. Would love to have some more weird, unconventional or surprising kinds of memoirs representing excluded or marginalized positionalities. I’m almost tempted to be really subversive and offer M.G. Vassanji’s A Place Within, the memoir of an African writer of South Asian descent about his first visit to India…
4. I probably should have a missionary’s memoir. Are there any recent ones that are any good? I was toying with Margaret McCord’s The Calling of Katie Makhanya but that also stretches my ruleset a bit.

Posted in Academia, Africa, Swarthmore | 11 Comments

A Generalist’s Work, Day 2

Posted on May 5, 2011 by Timothy Burke

Tom De Haven’s Our Hero: Superman on Earth was one of my accidental discoveries this semester, arising out of trying to help a student in my counterfactual history class with her really interesting project.

I have a long-standing engagement with comics and sequential art both as a consumer and in terms of some of my underlying scholarly interest in fan cultures, subcultures, and divergent national histories of genre and form. De Haven’s book isn’t as formal or far-reaching an analysis as work like David Hadju’s cultural history of the moral panic over comic books in the U.S. during the 1950s or Gerard Jones’ look at the beginnings of the superhero comic as a form. De Haven’s short commentary on the history of Superman as cultural property and idea rests heavily on such work, as well as work about comics history by comics creators such as Jim Steranko’s authoritative account. (Which, by the way, some publisher should consider reprinting.)

I enjoyed his weaving together of the now-familiar, once-obscure story of the travails of Superman’s creators, Joe Schuster and Jerry Siegel, with the evolving meaning of the character to his publics through his successive iterations in different media, which have ranged from a kind of devil-may-care social crusader early on to the weird mix of surrealist plotting and boys-club misogyny of the Mort Weisinger era and onward to the continuity-laden, densely fannish treatment Superman gets in many current comic books. De Haven ends up arguing that there is a sort of essential core to the character, most importantly that he does good because he enjoys it, almost because it’s his hobby. (He points out that the idea that Superman was raised right in the American heartland by two salt-of-the-earth Midwesterners was added relatively late to the character’s mythology.)

In any event, even if you had no interest in Superman or comic books, De Haven’s book is a good model for a looser style of extended essay by an academic cultural critic. It’s not an exhaustive work of original research, and doesn’t need to be. It’s a commentary that requires the author to have an erudite understanding of the texts involved (Superman comics, the television show, the movies, advertisements) as well as the wider social and historical contexts but doesn’t feel obligated to compel its readers to share that erudition in order to understand the basic thrust of his interpretation of Superman. De Haven does a nice job of integrating his personal experience of Superman the character and cultural property into his analysis, and maintaining a relaxed, curious, open attitude towards his subject. In many ways, I wish this is what cultural studies scholarship looked like more often.

Posted in Generalist's Work, Popular Culture | 2 Comments

A Generalist’s Work, Day 1

Posted on May 4, 2011 by Timothy Burke

I’m still feeling rankled by various casual dismissals of generalism and synthesis as a mode of academic and intellectual labor. It’s particularly odd coming from humanists given that the cultural work that many humanists study has frequently been created by generalists of one kind or another. Not to mention that formal humanist inquiry has a long history that predates the modern research university, and all of that work was done by generalists.

I’ve decided to add a category to my blog in which I document the work of reading, study and writing that informs my practice as a generalist and synthesizer. I’m not entirely happy with having to prove that this approach also requires hard work, since I think that concedes more than I’d like to a productivist, bean-counting sensibility. (There’s another attitude that I find perverse: scholars on the left who could otherwise rattle off chapter and verse dismissals of how the logic of capital perverts and twists our human possibilities are sometimes remarkably quick to crack the whip on their colleagues in order to enhance their own authority.) But ok, the point is partly to demonstrate that generalism doesn’t just arise spontaneously from personal intuition, that it is a practice of investigation and inquiry. My generalism is very much mine, much as two specialists in a relatively narrow field of study can nevertheless be extremely different in their understanding of the field. I’m sure over the course of a year of documenting my readings and work, the pattern of my interests will become fairly clear.

I’m going to do this mostly as short book notes or commentary, which is a category of writing on this blog that I enjoy doing anyway and haven’t done enough of over the past year.

So let’s start inside my own “discipline of record” with the 2009 Bancroft Prize-winning book The Comanche Empire, by Pekka Hämäläinen.

Why have I been reading this book, other than it is a terrific work of historical research and analysis? Partly because I think it offers a comprehensively new framework for thinking about the relationship between non-Western and Western empires in the 19th and early 20th Century that goes well beyond the case study in its implications. Much like Richard White’s The Middle Ground and Mechal Sobel’s The World They Made Together, Hämäläinen’s study is a careful questioning of some prevalent understandings of imperial and racial domination and of the nature of imperial frontiers.

The book argues that the newly formed Comanche empire of the late 18th-early 19th Century in south-central and southwest North America did not just happen to coalesce as the early United States pushed westward and the movement towards Mexican independence began, that these were connected events which were in turn part of changes in larger patterns of global trade and political formation. Rather than insisting that Comanche imperialism was somehow dependent upon or caused by the intrusion of the West, Hämäläinen argues that it was both profoundly related to but not a consequence of Spanish, U.S. and Mexican territorial and cultural power. His account refuses to interpret “Indian dispossession back in time to structure the narrative of early America”, insisting instead that the formation of the Comancheria has to be understood on its own terms, not as a prelude to some inevitable later imperialism.

Most immediately, the book inspires me to think differently about African polities between 1780 and 1880. Hämäläinen’s analysis underscores for me the extent to which much of the political history of African societies in this period has been either similarly subjugated to a backshadowed sense of some later inevitable imperialism or is frankly shoved aside for the ways in which it complicates post=1960 nation-making projects. The history of the Ndebele polity in what is now southern Zimbabwe (and other mfecane-linked episodes of state formation) is very much an “African imperialism” with some resemblances to the Comancheria as Hamalainen describes it. It’s inconvenient to dwell on it as such as this destabilizes both the production of southern African indigeneity and the assumption of the unique moral infamy of late 19th Century white imperialism.

In a larger sense, this kind of analysis also points the way out of some of the stalls and cul-de-sacs of postcolonial theory towards the work that Anthony Appiah has been pursuing in Cosmopolitanism and The Ethics of Identity, the critique of statism that James Scott has been refining in his last few books, or the wide-frame reconceptualizing of what we mean by “empire” that Frederick Cooper and Jane Burbank have initiated recently. Hämäläinen’s book is the kind of really focused, detailed reconsideration that moves conceptual and intellectual debates ahead where more abstract or theoretical interventions (such as Nicolas Thomas’ Colonialism’s Culture or David Scott’s work) might not. For exactly that reason, it’s the kind of book that should quickly leapfrog out of the specialized historiography to which it most immediately belongs and be read widely, and not just by other historians or specialists with an interest in Native American or Western culture.

Posted in Academia, Books, Generalist's Work, The Mixed-Up Bookshelves | 2 Comments

On the Bubble

Posted on May 3, 2011 by Timothy Burke

Is higher education in a bubble like (or worse) than housing prices before 2008? This N+1 essay by Malcolm Harris argues that a 900 percent increase in the average tuition since 1978 and a collected student debt burden that now surpasses credit cards as the largest source of indebtedness in the U.S. means that yes, it is a bubble. (via 11d)

I think the N+1 essay is fairly on-target. The basic thrust of Harris’ argument is that demand for higher education is strongly inelastic, that students have been willing to incur almost any debt load in pursuit of the credentials offered in higher education because those credentials appear to be the only way to secure a middle-class life, and hence, higher education ratcheted up tuition rates well above inflation for decades.

Harris doesn’t dwell so much on a key question, namely, does higher education in fact succeed in securing that access? If it did, then the main question would be, “When does the debt load overwhelm expected earnings gains from undergraduate or graduate education”? This question was being debated intensely even before the recession, which increasingly appears to be less a conventional business-cycle downturn and more like the first wave of a long-term restructuring of the American economy. I think now there’s at least some reason to think that increasing numbers of undergraduates will graduate with student debt that will take decades to pay off, assuming they can find work at all. And many will feel compelled to incur still more debt for graduate training, with little subsequent improvement in their prospects.

Still, when bubbles pop, they don’t pop for everyone. There are plenty of U.S. neighborhoods where housing values have stayed fairly close to their peak or where losses have been small. Some of those neighborhoods are attractively situated and full of luxury properties that remain highly desirable, others are composed of properties of modest value that were never the target of speculation.

Where will the higher education bubble pop most destructively? 1. For-profit online education with no brick-and-mortar anchor. The degrees are not valued much by employers, but more importantly, their business model rests on charging high prices for extremely cheap services, fueled by the availability of credit to desperate students. There’s only one way out for the for-profits before they go spiraling to hell the same way subprime mortgages did: trimming their margins to the bone while enhancing the quality of their product and becoming a serious price alternative to brick-and-mortar higher education. Not going to happen: their CEOs like their multimillion dollar paydays too much. 2. Expensive brick-and-mortar higher education (both small and large institutions, public and private) that doesn’t deliver prestige value, doesn’t deliver actual services or value-added instruction, is under-resourced in relationship to price, and which offers students little vision of what the human or instrumental gains they’ve secured at such high cost. Institutions which are selling narrowly tailored vocational training in fields which are already vastly overcrowded or which might evaporate overnight are going to get hit hard if the recognition takes hold that such degrees rarely match value to cost over more than a few years after graduation.

What educational neighborhoods will retain their value if the bubble bursts? 1. Community colleges. That’s already quite clear even before the bubble pops: many of them offer an attractive mix of value, quality and accessibility. 2. Expensive universities where there is a specific, indisputable connection between the high-quality educational program offered and specific high-paying careers with long-term prospects. MIT or CalTech, to name two.

What’s in the balance? Expensive colleges and universities that are well-resourced, have significant established cultural or prestige value, and strong instructional programs as well as a wide range of services. Places like Swarthmore.

So let’s look a bit more deeply at this category.

——————

Harris’ N+1 essay doesn’t really probe that deeply into why the costs of higher education at its upper end went up so fast for so long, relying instead on cynicism plus Marc Bousquet’s oft-repeated mantra that administrative growth, not faculty growth, explains most of the budgetary expansion. Bousquet’s basic analysis is sound, particularly applied to large private and public universities, but I think he underestimates how much of that growth on the staff side has been driven by the changing expectation of students and their families that highly selective institutions should be full-service institutions. When students (and staff and faculty) envision something that they believe a college or university should do, that quickly becomes an assumption that this mission or function should be enacted through one or more paid staff positions. If the best-resourced selective institutions are the equivalent of an expensive house in a highly desirable zip code, then this kind of staffing is the luxury feature that most of the customers expect. Even if the higher ed bubble pops in some fashion, I don’t think a place like Swarthmore could ride out the changed environment by cutting back to nothing but extravagantly offered instruction.

Nor do I think that colleges and universities like Swarthmore will need to somehow pare back their curriculum to raw instrumentality, to nothing but teaching which is narrowly fit to vocational ends. The basic line that we and our peer institutions offer will remain sound. The best secure way for ambitious, bright, competitive young adults to find their way in a 21st Century world, both as human beings and as workers, is through an education which emphasizes critical thinking, adaptability, creativity. Students can’t just study something in a fixed way in order to apply to a fixed short-term career objective. They have to be capable of making normative judgments about what to study and how to study it, about how to choose which methodologies or tools they need to engage a particular problem, about how to assess what audiences and customers need or want. Students need to figure out what matters and why it matters, and that inquiry always has to include the possibility that something that an authority (professorial or otherwise) thinks is significant is not.

So this, in my view, is where riding out the bubble will be decided for institutions like Swarthmore. They will have to persuade their anxious publics (students, families, employers, the society at large) that this vision really enables the people who pay for it. I think that’s not too difficult. More difficult, more important, is to prove that this vision is what the institution actually does, and to be able to point to the specifics of how it’s done. Here I’m pretty worried, far more so at the end of a year of extensive participation in strategic planning and curricular deliberation.

The worst thing that can happen when a bubble begins to pop or a form of professional labor begins to undergo major transformation is panicked retrenchment. When the shape of the crisis confronting journalism and publishing began to be clear, many professionals in those fields retreated into surly, hyperexaggerated assertions of what they took to be their essential prerogatives. The music industry, confronted by digitization, chose lawsuits and and legislatively-mandated market capture and it took a technologist to show them the market they’d been missing, a vision that many in the industry still refuse to fully credit.

Nothing about the near-term future of highly selective colleges or universities requires abandonment of their deep traditions. Quite the contrary. One of the stupidest things about the alleged rationalization of higher education in the United Kingdom has been the horrific damage to humanistic inquiry as a whole but also to any experimental or innovative programs in the name of a dystopian fetish for metrics of productivity. That’s not the way that selective colleges and universities in the U.S. are going to prove that they have a specific educational design that guides students through making creative, flexible choices about knowledge and interpretation. In riding out a bubble, humanists will need to excel at what they already excel at, the making of normative judgments and avoiding simple reductions of inquiry to instrumental ends, but social scientists and scientists will also need to enable students to think broadly, to make choices, to creatively apply one way of knowing to other ways beyond the specific intent or instruction of their teachers.

What I’m seeing, not just at Swarthmore but at many of its peer institutions, is a strong tendency in the opposite direction as faculty grow more and more anxious about the future. A curricular version of the Smoot-Hawley Tarriffs is threatening to take hold, with the same disastrous consequences, as faculty scurry back inside their disciplinary walls and insist that the value they provide to a college or university is only secured through exclusive, deep study of a single disciplinary tradition.

This has been an issue for a long time in academia since the fall of core curricula and strong shared canons, but it’s a different issue in an environment of resource scarcity than it is in an era of growth. Intellectual magnanimity is easy when endowment income and tuition revenues are rolling in by the barrelful.

The problem is that faculty at many institutions mandate that students pursue the liberal arts via distributional or general education requirements, but there are no obligations on the faculty themselves to match or embody that vision. Students are expected to make connections between subjects and courses largely on their own, and often find that the connections that they have made are complicatedly inexpressible within any given course or disciplinary major, in conversation with any given professor.

Deep disciplinarity or exclusive specialization is itself a completely valid choice within a liberal arts environment, with profound returns. The point is, however, that students should be guided to understand it as a choice. When that choice is dictated and never justified, when the alternatives are disparaged actively or implicitly through their absence among the faculty, then in many cases students at a liberal arts institution finish their studies as trapped as if they had pursued a narrowly vocational program. Worse, since some professors in liberal arts disciplines, especially in the humanities, are fastidiously tight-lipped about how to make use of what they teach beyond going to graduate school and becoming a professor. In a highly selective liberal arts institution, a specialist has to be able to explain what the intellectual, abstract, normative value of specialization is, and that requires valid models for other choices of how to live and know and think in the world.

Formal interdisciplinary programs are not the opposite of disciplinarity. Indeed, they usually work to reinforce disciplinarity, often through aspiration to it, through demands for parallel appropriations of resources. The alternative is nondisciplinarity, generalism. Interdisciplinary programs are treaty organizations. What a liberal arts college or university really needs as a deliberate commitment is a scattering of faculty and staff who habitually smuggle things across borders.

When disciplinary scholars retrench behind defensive fortresses, they often insist that you cannot do this kind of smuggling, this sort of generalism, until you are sufficiently trained in a specialized tradition. In a four-year program of study, that typically defers the day when a student is imagined as capable of choosing what to know and how to know it until after they’ve graduated, when their choices no longer are the active responsibility of faculty. Strong defenders of disciplinarity are happy to take credit for the alumni who achieve professional success outside of academia, but often cannot point to their own deliberate pedagogical practices which might have provided a foundation for such later choices. It all just works out somehow. Or it doesn’t. C’est la vie, not our problem, gotta leave the nest and fly someday.

I see myself as both a humanist and a generalist. I do not believe that generalism is a privilege which only makes itself available following upon the intensive study of a specialized tradition. Generalism itself has best practices, it has rigor and structure, it has its own kinds of depth, and as a result, can be taught. Moreover, it can be taught in parallel to specialized inquiry from the first day to the last day of an undergraduate education, within and alongside courses. It can be embodied in the work of faculty, expressed in the work of research and publication, legitimated in the small daily gestures that compose collegiality.

I’ve written a lot about generalist inquiry and its limitations at this blog, and how appreciative I’ve been of my colleagues’ invitation to teach and write in that spirit. I’ve gotten the sharp sense this year that the invitation is being withdrawn, and not just here, but for other faculty at other institutions. Generalism is dismissed with new sharpness as “loosey-goosey”, “superficial”, “empty”. I’ve been a smuggler for two decades, but for the first time in my life as a professor I’m now running into active border patrols.

Obviously this dismays me personally a lot. It’s been a reminder to not grow too comfortable. People are friendly towards trespass in a distantly magnanimous way until they think their own forests are being poached from. But I’m honestly more concerned for the consequences in the coming shake-out of higher education. If students at an allegedly liberal arts institution are confronted by a landscape of curricular rivalry and enrollment capture, not only will they not learn how to make judicious choices about what to know and interpret and how to do so, but they will quickly regard institutional rhetoric about the liberal arts as an insincere atavism. Under those circumstances, the only reasonable choices for those students who happen to end up in such a place will be those choices which most mimic or resemble vocational or pre-professional pathways. At which point, many students may reasonably ask why they shouldn’t just cut to the chase and leave for an openly vocational institution, selective or otherwise. Maybe that only gets you a job for a few years after graduation, but that might be preferable to a program which offers no vision at all besides “choose a discipline, become an apprentice academic in that discipline, go on into academia”. At that point, do not ask for whom the bubble pops: it pops for thee.

Posted in Academia, Swarthmore | 10 Comments

The Non-Science That Explains What’s Wrong with Science Explaining Non-Belief in Science

Posted on April 26, 2011 by Timothy Burke

I’ve found Chris Mooney’s past work on the politics of science and on scientific literacy interesting, but there is something that gently grates on me in his Mother Jones essay published last week.

In the essay, Mooney reviews arguments from neuroscience about why we believe what we believe, how we react to new information that contradicts our existing convictions, and about the actual cognitive processes involved in persuasion or being persuaded, concluding that at least some of the tendency to reject new information or challenges to our beliefs is cognitively hard-wired. Mooney extends this observation to explain how many people arrive at a misreading of scientific publication or knowledge, in part because the norms of scientific publication require the provision of information which permits or encourages misreading. Much of his analysis dovetails into established arguments about the power of framing discourses in the media, forms of confirmation-seeking consumption of information, and the degree to which strongly held values trump factual information or rational persuasion.

I have a lot of complicated misgivings about the implications of this overall approach in its reconsideration of the public sphere, deliberative processes, the act of persuasion, and our models of subjectivity, agency and consciousness. But I have a simpler objection to this particular subset of the bigger paradigm. Namely, that it is not irrational or unreasonable to regard scientific claims which recommend or insist upon particular public policy initiatives with sharply pronounced skepticism across the board. Not because science itself requires a particular form of skepticism (though it does) but because such skepticism is evidence-based, derived from the history of the relationship between policy, the modern state, and science, a history which even non-experts have often viscerally experienced or witnessed.

Three kinds of evidence particularly warrant this preemptive skepticism. The first is spectacular, well-known examples of flagrant ethical misconduct in the pursuit of scientific knowledge justified by an appeal to the public good or in service to a public policy objective. The conventional response is that these incidents, such as the Tuskegee Experiment or the fudging of informed consent in the creation of the HeLa cell line, have been dramatically reduced through institutional reforms and safeguards. Perhaps, but the record on this point alone is sufficient to justify caution about scientific work whose procedures and costs are justified or demanded because of some allegedly urgent public good or policy priority.

Second, the interests of political elites and institutional actors within modern states are demonstrably not identical in all or even most instances to the public good, and have a history in their own right of delivering policies which subsequently prove to have unintended, uneven, self-interested or destructive effects. When scientific knowledge gets caught up in that process, it becomes by definition less trustworthy or more worthy of skepticism than research which is not strongly directed towards justifying political or bureaucratic decisions. Add to this the intrusion of businesses and other private institutions with a strong interest in the production (or suppression) of particular kinds of scientific knowledge in relationship to the making of public policy. A historical perspective quickly demonstrates that many claims imbued with the authority of science, deployed in service to policy, have had powerful consequences but a very weak relationship to scientific truths. If you lived through the last fifty years, you can remember a great many things which public officials and influential scientists told the public to do or believe which were not just wrong but primarily served the self-interest of government, private industry or research institutions. It is completely rational to recall this evidence every single time that science and policy intersect.

Third, more and more studies today are suggesting that a good deal of scientific research, both that which concerns policy-making and that which does not, is covertly or subconsciously manipulated to produce results which just barely cross the threshold of statistical significance or otherwise establish “legitimate” results. What this suggests is less that many researchers (both scientists and social scientists) operate with conscious bad faith and more that there is a system of underlying incentives which pushes research communities towards the entrepreneurial overproduction of unnecessary or marginal knowledge. Where this has particular implications for the intersection of policy and science is that overestimating the significance of results or simplified interpretations of results in order to suit policy formation and public debate are governed by the same system of incentives. As a result, attempts to apply or deploy research findings in policy formation are often drastically premature, or mismatch the expense and difficulty of policy to the strength of research findings. Moreover, the rhetoric of scientific truth is often used in such cases to strongarm more complex or humanistic ethical and practical objections to a particular finding and its application aside. Again, the historical record of the last fifty years in the United States and Western Europe is fairly replete with expensive or drastic public policies adopted on the strength of thin or tentative findings which were easily contradicted or reversed by later research. And so again, presumptive skepticism towards scientific and social scientific claims that inform or demand policy implementation is justified on evidence, not because of underlying, intrinsic cognitive orientations.

Mooney’s essay addresses a lack of belief in the findings of fundamental or basic science. You could argue that this lack of belief is not justified by the evidence I’ve described above, that basic science should be subjected to the ordinary skepticism demanded by the scientific method but not judged against some record of particular historical propensity for error. Indeed, the opposite, given basic science’s strong record of continuous progressive improvement in the quality and depth of its understanding of the universe. The problem is that scientists operating in this domain rarely take pains to distinguish themselves from science which is claimed by policy-makers or claims to have found concrete solutions to real-world problems. Nor are many scientists particularly eager to acknowledge the sociology, politics or history of science as having any relationship to their research work, whether pure or applied. Instead, many would rather do what Mooney offers: use science to explain away even the critique or suspicion of science as definitionally extra-rational and to consign any actual engagement with that popular skepticism to humanists who wallow in the rhetorical and discursive to begin with.

Posted in Academia, Politics, Popular Culture | Comments Off on The Non-Science That Explains What’s Wrong with Science Explaining Non-Belief in Science

Adaptation

Posted on April 21, 2011 by Timothy Burke

I really love the idea of courses which combine trying to apply a body of knowledge to a practical problem with exploring why said practical problem actually poses intellectually challenging questions with no clear answer. I’ve mentioned before at the blog that I think the best possible way to teach a graduate seminar in a particular field of historiographical specialization would be to collectively build three syllabi in that field over the course of the semester: a survey course and two topical courses. That puts a useful constraint on what and how the seminar might read the historiography, but constructing syllabi also involves fascinating and intellectually challenging judgments: what kinds of scholarship is teachable? What do we mean by teachability? Does scholarship serve a function that is independent of its particular uses by particular audiences? Is there work we value that can never be used in a classroom, and what distinguishes it if so?

I’ve experimented with classes that are annotating primary documents, something that other faculty at Swarthmore have taken to a whole new level. Similarly interesting discussions arise out that kind of “applied knowlege”.

Another concept that I haven’t tried yet but which seems like a natural possibility is guiding students through the preparatory work that an author or producer might do if they were adapting a body of knowledge, a setting or a story for some kind of media besides scholarly publication. Say, what kinds of researched knowledge you might need if you were going to write a script, make costumes, find locations, fine-tune dialogue, craft audio, and so on for a film working with a particular historical setting.

Or, in another case, if you were going to debate and discuss what you’d have to do to successfully adapt a science-fiction novel to a film. Not actually create the adaptation, just figure out what the issues involved in an adaptation might be, what rules of preference for ‘adaptable’ works a group of students could generate and discuss and so on. This is probably yet another example of an exercise or a direction for a class that would define me as the advance guard of a barbarian horde dedicated to despoiling the noble traditions of disciplinary inquiry and serious scholarship. But honestly, you can study texts which exist and use them to raise the same questions: how does intertextuality operate? How do visuality and textuality interrelate? Are there cultural works which are so strongly native to one mode or form of representation that they have no plasticity, no room for reinterpretation or translation into other forms? Are specific technologies of representation necessary preconditions of some kinds of cultural work? It’s just that starting from the question, “Which books on this list do you think could plausibly be adapted into films, and what kinds of translating and interpreting would you employ in your favored cases” gives those discussions an interesting mix of open-ended contingency and practical concreteness.

Having to explore your reasoning for those kind of preferences is a really interesting exercise. For example, on the Register‘s current list:

John Scalzi, Agent to the Stars. This seems like an easy adaptation to me, and a highly viable one. But why? Some of it is Scalzi’s prose and dialogue: it already feels like a screen treatment in places. The pacing of the story fits the likely pacing of a standard commercial film. The premise isn’t complex, it doesn’t have a huge amount of world-building or backstory. On the other hand, stripped of Scalzi’s wit and the smooth readability of his prose, it could come off as derivative or familiar.

Stephen Donaldson, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. Well, maybe I’m inclined to think these books both unadaptable and unwise to adapt because I don’t like them much. But an assignment’s an assignment, so independent of my feelings, this is the classic kind of premise that creates a puzzle about the relationship between diegetic and extra-diegetic elements. In the best case scenario, that’s a goad to the creation of really amazing work that pushes at the boundaries of what cinema can be. In the worst case scenario, well, we’ve all seen epic fails in rising to this challenge. There are some existing films that work brilliantly with the basic construct at the heart of the Thomas Covenant books: The Wizard of Oz for one (the visual and narrative relationship between Oz and Kansas, but also Dorothy has Covenant’s dilemma in the sense that it’s important that she not accept Oz for what it offers, just without so much self-loathing, leprosy and rape).

David Brin, Kiln People. I think I might pick Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon instead for some of the same themes and mood of this Brin novel, but both of them strike me as readily adaptable and as being adaptations that could support a really wide range of visual aesthetics and thematic ambitions. Compare to the Scalzi: anybody who tries to make that a “heavy” text or as an occasion for visual invention is going to break what charm it has. But Kiln People or Altered Carbon have some thematic potency lurking inside the noir-ish mood.

Jack Chalker, the Well World books. Can’t see that these could be adapted as a single feature film, for a zillion reasons, ranging from the irreducible genre geekiness involved in their premise and style to the visual challenges to almost-Rule-34-invoking Chalker fetish about body-swapping to the convoluted plotting of even the relatively simple first book in the series. On the other hand, this strikes me as an insanely appropriate series for adaptation to a digital game, especially a massively-multiplayer persistent-world format.

Robert Heinlein, Time Enough For Love. As my uncle once put it, “Easiest book ever to summarize: an immortal guy has sex with everyone he meets, and then travels through time to have sex with his hot young mother. The End.” Here the premise restricts what it can be: too outre and Mary-Sueish to work as a story played straight, and made as a piece of porn that tries to hold on to a shred of narrative complexity, it would be at best a quaint period piece alongside “Dwarf Threesome Amateurs” and so on in the contemporary market.

Kim Stanley Robinson, The Mars Trilogy. Great text for thinking about how cinematic work handles (or fails to handle) world-building fictions. (Anybody who watched Game of Thrones this last week saw a case of a cinematic work really struggling and sometimes failing to surmount this obstacle.)

Posted in Academia, Intellectual Property, Popular Culture, Sheer Raw Geekery | Comments Off on Adaptation

Two Cups Short of a Full Service

Posted on April 19, 2011 by Timothy Burke

Jon Krakauer’s lengthy take-down of Greg Mortenson adds a lot of detail and bite to the expose aired on 60 Minutes this past week.

Reading across a lot of message boards, I think it’s fair to say that a great many folks are pretty much sticking their fingers in their ears and yelling, “I don’t HEEEEEARRR you” in response. Or angrily blaming the messenger rather than harkening to the message. With Mortenson offering up shopworn orientalisms like “The Balti people have a completely different sense of time” and as of this morning, the beginning of a “my co-author is the guy who screwed up” line of defense, I think eventually they’ll have to come out of the bubble.

Other folks are wearily copping to having believed wholly in the Mortenson story as it was given out in the past, and promising to be more cynical next time.

I don’t think cynicism is the issue. The thing we all really need is a sharper understanding of the development industry and a wiser appreciation of how our own desires for sweeping messianic transformations are as much of a target market as any other consumer demand. I don’t know that we can blame people like Mortenson for giving us what many of us want. Nor should we be surprised when people like Mortenson raise millions of dollars before anyone thinks to ask skeptical questions either about the concrete organizational principles involved or about the accounting. Well-meaning, smart young people all around the world who get involved in philanthropy, NGOs, community service, development work and the like frequently find that good intentions, passion, and a dollop of appropriately couched ideological genuflection to the audience for a given pitch are the equivalent of picking up the “Pass Go and Collect $200” card. There’s little incentive to spell out plausible limits, models of organizational sustainability, or to downplay the potential positive impact of a project. Often it’s the opposite: the more messianic the rhetoric, the more likely the pitch is to succeed.

Other bright and capable young people are often the folks who then get handed a project that’s been sold in these terms, and they’re the ones who end up knowing full well both that the project is impossible and that the money will be siphoned off by a thousand middlemen on its way to the site of its supposed implementation. Not that the more organizationally sober end of the development industry is secured against against projects that don’t really make much sense when you get down to the local level, or against various transfers of funding away from the site of a project. But it’s worse with messianic projects that operate at large scales of ambition and funding.

If there is anything good in Nicolas Kristof’s “DIY development” model, two crucial limits have to be in force: the money and scale of a project has to be limited, and there can’t be even a whisper of messianism involved.

If I gave you an unlimited line of credit and carte blanche to run everything your way, do you think you could make a single secondary school work? I mean, really work so it was beyond reproach, was by almost any measure superior in outcomes and character and ethos to any alternative? Now what if I took away from you the choice of where your school was located and restricted you to pupils who lived within 30 miles of your school? Now what if I required you to obey all relevant national and local laws addressing education? Still confident? Now what if I made you operate within a budgetary limit that was generous by local and national standards but not unlimited? Getting harder yet? Now what if I put your school in a location with very little infrastructure and serious structural poverty?

The point here is that when one crucial task like that is hard enough, we should be deliriously happy to see a person dedicate their life and money and effort to make that task work. One. When we keep our checkbooks closed and our frowny-faces on because that’s not enough, not nearly enough, we create a situation where development messianism is inevitable. We invite not mission creep but mission gallop: make a hundred schools! change gender ideology! eliminate poverty! Under the circumstances, looking back, you have to ask how that was ever creditable, why anyone cheered and hoped and wrote checks.

The most awesome development project I’ve ever seen personally was a former small businesswoman in the Peace Corps who was teaching a handful of small business owners in a small African city how to do double-entry accounting with handwritten ledgers. The smart insight here was that most of them didn’t want to hire anyone who wasn’t kin because they couldn’t track the flow of money through their business, and that most of them couldn’t really invest anything they accumulated or expand their business for the same reason. I’d have given her a donation. The most awesome educational project I’ve ever seen in Africa is Ashesi University because it’s working hard to make one institution work well, looking to the future, laying the groundwork for longevity, and the people involved are soberly aware that this is very much a big enough project all by itself.

Tie a string around your finger, write a cheat sheet on your wrist, whatever it takes: when you see a lone crusader telling you that he’s dedicated his life to comprehensively fixing some faraway place, don’t believe it. No knock on that guy: he may well be nice, he may well be sincere, he may well have suffered for his cause, but it is never going to pan out. Put your faith in the small, the focused, the modest.

Posted in Politics | 5 Comments

Keeping the Keys to the Kingdom

Posted on April 18, 2011 by Timothy Burke

In February, Margaret Price published a thought-provoking piece at Inside Higher Education arguing for systemic reforms to the recruiting and promotion of faculty in order to mitigate or eliminate discrimination against professors “with mental disabilities such as bipolar disorder, severe depression, autism spectrum disorders, or AD/HD”.

I’ve been thinking about her essay over this spring. As she points out, this is not about bringing a new group of wholly excluded people into the academy, given the evidence that such individuals have long played an important role in university life. Rather, she argues, we could make formal accommodations for this range of psychological orientations, particularly in the interviewing process, and do so across the board for all candidates so as to avoid putting the burden on disabled candidates to self-identify in order to receive such consideration.

As I read over her suggestions, many of them amount to simply being considerate and structuring on-campus interviews to be less grueling. Other suggestions might be helpful for any candidate, such as having everyone wear name tags during the candidate’s visit.

There are a range of objections to make as well. First, that there are non-arbitrary reasons to prefer “the good man speaking well”, as Price puts it via Quintilian, in a teaching position. The job requires clear communication, though within some fairly broad parameters, and a good teacher needs to adapt somewhat well to a range of emotional needs among students. Second, that I’m not sure what the evidence is that “quirky” styles of presentation and conversation that relate to variant mental orientations are in fact being progressively discriminated against in contemporary academia.

But I don’t want to object too strenuously, because I don’t have any problem with most the kinds of adaptations she suggests. I think I worry more about the process by which we get to those practices. We ought to be more generous in our vision of the range of humanity encompassed in our workplaces, our friendships, our lives. That’s the paradigm shift implied in some calls for diversity, but it goes beyond the concrete categorizations that project often focuses upon. In many ways this is less about vigilance and more about relaxation. If Price is right that some academics suffer from standards of communicative skill that too narrowly privilege one type of self-presentation, the answer is for each of us to be less entitled in the demands we make on each other.

Here I’m very much with my colleagues in their call for a renewal of practical wisdom. But in their view–and mine–one of the consequences of such a turn would be that we’d stop trying to make systems, rules and structures do to us, for us, with us, what we ought to do for ourselves. That’s my concern with the call that Price makes, that a reminder to be a more decent human being easily curdles into an institutional imperative to do so, and from there into a set of rules, strictures and requirements that are tasked with taking away our discretion, remediating our failures, serving as a guarantee against our fallibility.

This turn is a much bigger issue than one area of accommodation for disability. I’ve been repeatedly struck in conversations with some students this year about our planning process that some of them expect the college to have or acquire robust structural instruments that will automatically accomplish long-term objectives. Some of them add that they do not trust individuals to arrive at the same goals through repeated exercises in discretionary judgment. The system must do the work automatically, it must create a blanket of rules and laws, in order for projects like diversity or sustainability to avoid subversion and accident at the hands of individuals.

That push comes from a lot of places: an embedded haze of perpetual suspicion that suffuses academia, an inability or unwillingness to investigate whether some goals are hard to achieve whether or not anyone opposes or impedes them, and most of all, a touching but naive faith in the power of institutions to do anything if only we can find the correct systems to secure an objective.

Whatever the source, though, the consequences can be pretty baleful. The impulse that makes us want to set rules that strictly circumscribe acceptable conduct, remove discretion from deliberations, and compel processes to run along foreordained tracks towards necessary results are the same impulses in other kinds of governmental and institutional practices that lead us to favor metrics and quantities over observation and interpretation. That’s when the cry goes out for quantification not as an investigation of the world but as a buttress against slippery words, judgment calls, the variability of people. We are trying to protect ourselves from ourselves, to hand over our custodianship of our everyday human obligations to some larger, more distant machinery. Small wonder that in some cases as these efforts advance, adjustments in process that seemed like small reforms blossom into managerial prisons of the kind that now blight higher education in Great Britain.

What especially frustrates me is when the call for these kinds of rules and constraints comes from a concern for how we treat human beings, or from ways of knowing that I think excel at exploring and complicating what it means to be human. I’m with Price about loving and valuing a wide range of faculty temperaments in academia, but if we can’t get there by the constant reexamination of decency and fairness, we’re not getting there with rules and requirements. If we can’t get the results we want from the discretionary judgment of people we trust to teach students, publish research, know their fields, decide on tenure and promotion, we’re not getting there by compelling those people to take up fixed positions or preset obligations.

Posted in Academia, Swarthmore | 2 Comments

Courseblogs: An Experiment in Progress

Posted on April 7, 2011 by Timothy Burke

I’m going to talk tomorrow a bit about the courseblogs I’ve got going this semester:

History 83: What-Ifs and Might-Have-Beens

and

History 1Y History of the Future

I’m particularly keen to attract interested comment on the research proposals the students are developing in the counterfactuals course, History 83. If you see a proposal that interests you and you have some thoughts on it, please feel free to comment.

Posted in Academia, Swarthmore | Comments Off on Courseblogs: An Experiment in Progress