The Value of Nothing.

So what are you going to leave out?

Randall Stephens at the Historical Society Blog and I saw the same Chronicle of Higher Ed article (subs.) in the last few days. Here’s Stephens’ summary (if you’re a non-subscriber like I am):

“Several years ago,” writes David Glenn, “a small group of faculty members at Indiana University at Bloomington decided to do something about the problem. The key, they concluded, was to construct every history course around two core skills of their discipline: assembling evidence and interpreting it.” Glenn goes on to explain some of the interesting assignments and exercises history students at IU are doing in and outside of the classroom.

Stephens buys it. I was more skeptical (perhaps because it was our campus assessment officer who forwarded it to me), so I went digging. Here are Arlene Díaz, Joan Middendorf, David Pace, and Leah Shopkow of Indiana University in the March 2008 Journal of American History (via the History Cooperative, footnotes omitted throughout):

It is a story replicated in many history classrooms during the course of a semester. Students have once again done poorly on an assignment or exam. Their essays are the sites of massive, undifferentiated data dumps. They have paraphrased primary sources instead of analyzing them, ignored argumentation, confused past and present, and failed completely to grasp the “otherness” of a different era. A few students, as always, have done extremely well, but many have done poorly. What is wrong with these students? How can a teacher help them understand history?

These sorts of poor performance often result from a mismatch between what college history teachers expect of their students and what those students imagine their task to be. Most college professors learned how to be historians more or less by osmosis, without explicit instruction on how to perform many of the operations necessary to produce historical knowledge. They, like the minority of students who seem to perform historical tasks effortlessly, are naturals who have not had to reflect consciously on what they do automatically. As a result, professors often do not model for their students some of the most basic—and most essential—steps in historical analysis. As Sam Wineburg has noted, it is so habitual for historians to check the author and date of a passage before they begin reading it that they do not realize that such procedures are not natural for many of their students. Such intellectual maneuvers, unmarked by the professor and as invisible to the students as the sleight of hand of a magician, often leave students with the “facts” of history, but no idea of how they were created.

I don’t know why I didn’t notice this article when I first saw that issue, but now I can see that there are many parts of it that certainly speak to my experience:

We expect our students to know that the bias of a source does not necessarily disqualify it from usefulness. They may be asked to use the same primary source as a locus of information about what “really” happened in an era and also about the subjective perspectives that particular individuals brought to their experience. For students expecting a different kind of discussion this may seem like a walk into a confusing twilight zone.

Adding intention and argument into the mix renders history even more slippery and subjective. Students who read for the story and the facts, not for the argument and its validity, often experience a task such as identifying and evaluating thesis statements or arguments from sources as a major challenge. As one of our interviewees pointed out, many students “do not feel that they are qualified to critique someone who has written a book because automatically this person obviously knows much more than they do.” Such students do not expect to evaluate texts critically, and they are uncomfortable with inserting themselves into an ongoing dialogue about an event or issue of the past or with disagreeing with experts.

Then the article gets into exactly why the campus assessment officer forwarded the Chronicle piece to me in the first place:

As a result of the workshop, we now have a prototype with which to begin departmental discussions for reforming our curriculum, based not on geography or period but on the historical skills students need to learn. We do not envision that faculty will be required to teach these skills in any particular way, or that all faculty will focus on all of the skills. We hope instead that each faculty member will choose at least one skill pertinent to the class content and course level, and explicitly model it in a way with which he or she feels comfortable. Because many of these skills are interrelated and used in many different historical tasks, we believe that if each professor explicitly teaches and provides practice for one or more of these during each semester, more of our students will be better equipped to improve their performance in history courses. Ideally, by the time a student gets to his or her senior research course, the professor will not have to teach that student how to analyze a primary source or recognize an argument or compile a bibliography.

My department is currently being asked to do pretty much the exact same thing. The difference is that we have been told that we are probably teaching all the skills we want students to learn now, we simply have to map them in order to prove to accreditation bodies that we actually do assessment. Think of it as curriculum reform through improved marketing.

Oddly enough, I think I like our method better than what’s been going on at Indiana because it’s less invasive towards historical content. Perhaps I’m being technical, but to me a curriculum is not a set of skills or time periods, it’s a long list of historical subjects. When I started teaching, I had a picture in my mind of what needed to be covered in…say…a post-1877 U.S. survey course. That list has dropped steadily over the years as I’ve done exactly what the UI people suggest, teach skills like writing and source interpretation. [I's probably a product of teaching too much historiography. It's probably inevitable that all that stuff slips into your other classes if you teach it as regularly as I do.]

Nevertheless, I have always been acutely aware of what this practice costs me in coverage. Every moment I spend teaching how to write a paper is less time to spend on historical content. There are sacrifices I can live with (like the lead up to WWII, which ought to come in a world history course anyway) and ones that just kill me (like most of the pre-Brown v. Board Civil Rights Movement).

Don’t get me wrong. I think I’m a better teacher for covering more skills and less specific facts and I’m sure my classes are much more useful for students, especially the non-history majors. I just don’t think this manner of teaching should be marketed as a purely win-win situation.

Gordon Wood wants us to all write like David McCullough.

Here’s Gordon Wood defending narrative history in the Washington Post:

Academic historians have not forgotten how to tell a story. Instead, most of them have purposefully chosen not to tell stories; that is, they have chosen not to write narrative history. Narrative history is a particular kind of history-writing whose popularity comes from the fact that it resembles a story. It lays out the events of the past in chronological order, with a beginning, middle and end. Such works usually concentrate on individual personalities and on unique public happenings, the kinds of events that might have made headlines in the past: a biography of George Washington, for example, or the story of the election of 1800. Since politics tends to dominate the headlines, politics has traditionally formed the backbone of narrative history.

“Resembles” a story? I thought that is a story. In any event, let’s continue w/ Wood:

Instead of writing this kind of narrative history, most academic historians, especially at the beginning of their careers, write what might be described as analytic history, specialized and often narrowly focused monographs usually based on their PhD dissertations. Recent examples include an account of artisan workers in Petersburg, Va., between 1820 and 1865, a study of the Republican Party and the African American vote between 1928 and 1952, and an analysis of the aristocracy in the county of Champagne in France between 1100 and 1300. Such particular studies seek to solve problems in the past that the works of previous historians have exposed; or to resolve discrepancies between different historical accounts; or to fill in gaps that the existing historical literature has missed or ignored. In other words, beginning academic historians usually select their topics by surveying what previous academic historians have said. They then find errors, openings or niches in the historiography that they can correct, fill in or build upon.

His solution?:

[T]he academics have generally left narrative history writing to the non-academic historians, who unfortunately often write without much concern for or much knowledge of the extensive scholarship that exists. If academic historians want popular narrative history that is solidly based on the monographic literature, then they will have to write it themselves.

In other words, we should all write like David McCullough. Now I happen to like David McCullough, but this strikes me as an overreaction. If “narrative” history is mostly political, how are historians supposed to approach something like race, class or gender then? This reads to me like an attempt to get historians to change their topics rather than their methods using book sales as an excuse. He actually calls out a few unfortunate recent Ph.D.s by topic (but not by name):

“an account of artisan workers in Petersburg, Va., between 1820 and 1865, a study of the Republican Party and the African American vote between 1928 and 1952, and an analysis of the aristocracy in the county of Champagne in France between 1100 and 1300.”

Class. Race. Class. Is that a coincidence?

But writing about race, class and gender doesn’t have to be this way. I can think of any number of extremely well-written, well-researched narrative histories with narrow focuses and non-political topics: Boyle’s Arc of Justice, Green’s Death in the Haymarket. It is possible to write analytical history that tells a story. Unfortunately, most of us don’t have the same access to publishers as David McCullough (or Gordon Wood for that matter).

“They’re scared of what you represent to them.”

Price point?

Have the regents who just raised fees/tuition in the University of California system 32% ever considered that with fewer students able to afford their colleges, fewer might attend and the system might actually lose revenue?

“Falling Hare” (1943).

The Shock Doctrine in higher ed.

I bet you Naomi Klein would agree with this extension of her thesis if you ran it past her. From Academe:

As a faculty member drawn into administrative service over the past decade, I have witnessed how economic and fiscal challenges have steadily eroded, if not entirely eliminated, the crucial tenets of shared faculty and institutional governance. I see this development as an academic form of the “shock doctrine” eloquently described by Naomi Klein: fiscal crises destabilize a college or university, instilling fear into loyal and dedicated campus constituents who have emotional ties to their institution that go beyond a typical employer-employee relationship. While these fears are understandable, they may escalate into concerns about the very viability of the institution, which is rarely at stake. This anxiety contributes to an environment where the reframing of decision making and governance, in ways that would ordinarily be rejected by the faculty, is presented as urgent and necessary. Under this pressure, decisions are often made quickly by a select few, behind closed doors and with little transparency. Sadly, for me, faculty members often accept and approve of these practices.

I keep hearing the phrase “Your university is not broke” at various AAUP functions, which is probably true. However, more important than that (because it would still apply even if your university is broke) would be “Open the books!”. This way faculty can at least have a chance to understand the root of the problem.

A day or two ago, I ran into this article about the closing of the University of Illinois’ online arm. The system pored $7 million into this stupid idea. Was anybody held accountable? I doubt it, but I’ll bet good money that eventually it will be the students and the faculty who’ll have to pay for that mistake.

“My biggest fear,” Mr. Yudof said, “is an exodus of faculty.”

So tuition is going up 32% in the University of California system and the system president’s primary concern is the faculty? Really? Why then doesn’t he just turn around and use all that new money to increase professors’ wages?

Let’s look at the whole title quote of this post, as reported in the NYT:

Mark Yudof, the university president, said the state budget cuts had left the university no choice but to raise fees, and noted that the system received only half as much, per student, from the state as it did in 1990.

“My biggest fear,” Mr. Yudof said, “is an exodus of faculty.”

Unless the Times skipped something in the middle there, that’s practically a promise to raise wages. After all, if keeping faculty from moving really was the UC’s primary problem, the fix ought to be really obvious. It’s also a complete dismissal of any concern for the economic and racial diversity of the student body. Should it make us feel better or worse then that this concern for the faculty is almost certainly disingenuous?

Since Theodore Roosevelt was the last President before Obama who could actually write…

…this is now at the top of my Google Books reading list:

Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography.

Strike at U. of Illinois.

Graduate student employees at the University of Illinois have gone on strike to protect their tuition waivers. As if they won’t have enough trouble getting a job when (and if) they ever finish their degrees, the administration there wants them to pay to work. Are they trying to dissuade anyone from going to graduate school there?

Update: That was fast.