If this is the future, I prefer the past.

My not-quite-hometown paper tells me that the University of Denver is getting its library revamped for the digital age. The people quoted in the story deny that there is going to be the kind of book massacre that would make Nicholson Baker cry will be occurring, but this passage was enough to give me pause:

E-books have helped cut the cost of library acquisitions, said Penrose’s collections librarian Michael Levine- Clark.

Nearly 40 percent of the 126,953 hard-copy books purchased for Penrose between 2000 and 2004 have gone unused. The library can rent e-books and purchase them after they are checked out four times, rather than buying a volume that might never be used.

“This is all about service,” Levine-Clark said. “We can give them wider access to what they really want instead of guessing at the possible need.”

Just because a book hasn’t been checked out, doesn’t mean that the book hasn’t been used. More importantly, just because a book hasn’t been used doesn’t mean that the book won’t be used in the future. I thought libraries were all about planning for the future? This “books have to be checked out in order to be a worthwhile expense” thing strikes me as really dangerous.

Of course, there are other obvious problems with a bookless college library, particularly for we historians. What if the book I want isn’t in digital format? That still happens a lot to me. What if I want to browse something to get a flavor for the content? Yes, I know I can search electronic texts by the word, but what if I don’t know what word I want search for? And, God forbid, what if the library’s servers are down?

One of the few prerogatives I have as a professor is to help my library pick the books they order. Another one is the ability to choose my own textbooks. Unfortunately, that one is apparently under attack too. This is from the Chronicle:

For a real disruption in the textbook market, students may have to be forced to change.

That’s exactly what some companies and college leaders are now proposing. They’re saying that e-textbooks should be required reading and that colleges should be the ones charging for them. It is the best way to control skyrocketing costs and may actually save the textbook industry from digital piracy, they claim. Major players like the McGraw-Hill Companies, Pearson, and John Wiley & Sons are getting involved.

To understand what a radical shift that would be, think about the current textbook model. Every professor expects students to have ready access to required texts, but technically, purchasing them is optional. So over the years students have improvised a range of ways to dodge buying a new copy—picking up a used textbook, borrowing a copy from the library, sharing with a roommate, renting one, downloading an illegal version, or simply going without. Publishers collect a fee only when students buy new books, giving the companies a financial impetus to crank out updated editions whether the content needs refreshing or not.

All the questions I posed above with respect to libraries still apply, but since we in the humanities tend to actually discuss our books in class all sorts of other issues now apply. What if students don’t have e-readers? What if the books I want to assign aren’t available on the kind of e-readers that our students have? Will “My eReader has a bug in it” become the new “My dog ate my homework?” If students can’t read regular books critically, will they read e-texts any better?

But as a devoted reader of UD, I gotta say my biggest worry here is the fact that students will have to bring wifi-enabled devices into class in order to have access to the books they’ll need for class. Under this scenario, I’d have no idea whether students are looking at their texts or checking Facebook. It should be my prerogative to keep the wonders of the internet out of my classroom if I so chose. When I want all students to have access to computers in class, we all go to the computer lab.

Don’t mess with my prerogatives. I have so few of them, after all.

Academia works best when we say union yes.

Yesterday, while pressed for time, I dropped the title of this post toward the top of the comment thread of an excellent Historiann post on faculty salaries. That post was based on a post concerning the same subject by Tenured Radical. Perhaps I played some part in the fact that Tenured Radical’s follow-up to her first post is on the questions of unions.

I’ll start with the second Tenured Radical Post:

For those of you who say we need a union — I am on record as saying “union, yes” as well: I would *happily* trade tenure for a union, any day, any time. But you know why we have no unions? Faculty do not believe in the collective, and they are so easily divided by self-interest, envy and shame. Our individualism, and our fear that if we organize we will lose the social respect that came with that PH.D., bites us in the ass every time. Hence, those of us who can cut our private little deals and leave most of our colleagues in the dust.

Of course she’s right, which is precisely why I think I need to say some more on this topic. In graduate school, I was on the board of the first graduate teaching assistants’ union in the country. My first favorite subdiscipline and the subject on the job ad that got me my current job was labor history, but really I’m interested in the history of industrial relations, the relationship between employers and employees. Oddly enough, I think my work on the history of the first important company union in the country makes me well qualified to talk about academics and unions, as does a few years as president of our campus’ AAUP chapter.

My favorite industrial relations book of all time is What Do Unions Do? by Freeman and Medoff. In it, they explain that there are two faces of trade unions: the monopoly face and the voice face. The monopoly face is based on their control of labor in the shop and is the main source of union power. Raise or wages or we walk! This is an obvious reason for academics to organize, as they are much more likely to get salary increases if you have this kind of control. Unfortunately, is the only face of unionism that most people know, and that’s why current labor law is so unfriendly to organization.

However, the other face of trade unionism is pretty useful too. The voice face refers to the ability of union members to communicate how they really feel about their jobs to management without being fired. I know what you’re thinking. I’m tenured! I don’t need no stinking union to tell my dean what I think. Those of us who’ve seen what’s happened to a few outspoken faculty members around the country (if you need an example, friends, remember the state where I teach) know that tenure isn’t quite the protection it used to be. More importantly, your administration doesn’t have to fire you in order to make your life miserable. Unions, in short, can make your whole campus better in both monetary and non-monetary ways.

The wonderful thing about this voice face though is that you don’t even need a union in the legal sense to take advantage of its value. All you have to be is unified. My AAUP chapter is an advocacy chapter. That means that we don’t bargain collectively, we ask lots of questions and try to convince our administrators to follow AAUP principles. What those principles are is a subject of another post, but here’s the key thing: following AAUP principles actually benefits management as well as labor. They not only get the benefits of best practices, they get to deal with much happier faculty members than they would have otherwise since the AAUP is all about empowering faculty to help make decisions, including decisions about salary. I’m not all afraid to advertise my trade unionist sympathies [Heck that Union Yes! bumper sticker is on my office door!] because I’m really more of a tenured moderate than a tenured radical. I try to work with the administration to make campus better rather than work against them. Working with administrations is particularly important to affect change in these parts because they have no obligation to listen to us whatsoever if we just stomp our feet.

Does this make me a sell out? I don’t think so. If there were a critical mass of faculty ready to organize on campus, I’d be the first one on the front lines handing out cards. That critical mass is particularly important in Colorado because we have such horrible labor laws. Workers who want to start a union not only have to win a representation election, they have to win another election after that in order to get dues checkoff to fund their organization. Seriously, we’re worse than a right-to-work state, and don’t get me started on the Democratic governor who vetoed the bill that would have put us back to normal.

And to those of you who are sitting alone, griping anonymously on the Internet about how tough things are, why don’t you look around this site and maybe join up. See what the collective wisdom of your colleagues can teach you. There is power in the union, but the non-unionized are not necessarily powerless.

A vicious circle.

So Richard Vedder thinks that higher education is ineffective:

Over 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees (over 8,000 of them have doctoral or professional degrees), along with over 80,000 bartenders, and over 18,000 parking lot attendants. All told, some 17,000,000 Americans with college degrees are doing jobs that the BLS says require less than the skill levels associated with a bachelor’s degree…

Increasingly, state governments are cutting back higher-education funding, thinking it is an activity that largely confers private benefits. The pleas of university leaders and governmental officials for more and more college attendance appear to be increasingly costly and unproductive forms of special pleading by a sector that abhors transparency and performance measures.

I thought state governments were cutting back on higher education because the economy tanked two years ago, but maybe Vedder is too well-paid to even notice that. So why quibble? Let’s look at Vedder’s premise:

Fewer people should get college degrees. Which ones? How exactly are we going to know who the bartenders are going to be they start college? And, as Dana suggests at the Edge of the American West, how do we know those bartenders are even failures?

More importantly, I wouldn’t be so sure that the cutting back on state funding is going to lead to Vedder’s expected outcome. With less income from the state, colleges will be more likely to increase tuition and enrollments in order to meet that shortfall. Since college remains the best investment you will ever make, people will likely just go out and borrow more money to attend it. If the federal government destroyed every student loan program it ran, the private sector would jump right in and make those loans themselves (at a much higher interest rate), particularly since defaulting on a student loan is a lot like signing your life away.

The other possible outcome of trying to keep people out of college is that cash-strapped administrators will try to do more with less. See Exhibit A, California:

In the face of growing demand, limited infrastructure, and diminishing funds for state-supported higher education, some experts believe the only way California’s higher ed system can continue fulfilling its mission is by expanding its online offerings.

A new report, released Monday by the California Legislative Analyst’s Office, calls for the state legislature to explore a number of moves toward this end — including facilitating the sharing of online courses across public university and community college campuses; evaluating potential online “re-entry” programs for former dropouts looking to finish their degrees; and allowing adult learners who are approved for in-state grants to attend Western Governor’s University, an online institution based in Utah.

I can’t think of a better way to produce more bartenders. It’s a vicious circle that kind of reminds me of the modern Republican Party’s views about the role of government in society, but that’s a subject for a blogger with more time and a stronger stomach than I have at present. Maybe after the midterm election is over…

Keeping track of what you’ve read with LibraryThing.

I’m obviously getting old. How do I know? I can’t remember what I’ve read a month after I read it. It’s not as bad as that sounds at first glance. My reading comprehension is still the same as it always been. The problem is that I can’t remember the titles of what I’ve read in any given year. I remember information, but I often have no idea where I read it first. As I get less possessive about books and the technology itself changes from paper to pixels, I fear this problem will get worse before it gets better (assuming it ever gets better).

My new solution to this problem is LibraryThing. The site is a place to record your library, and get suggestions from people who read the same kinds of things that you do. I’ve been meaning to join it for some time, but it was trying to pick a Christmas present for my brother that made me pull the trigger. I usually buy him the best thing I read all year, but this year I can’t remember what that was! Sure, I should probably take a look at all the lovely social functions there so that I can pick all the best books for a finicky reader like myself. For now though, I’ll simply settle for keeping a running list so that I ditch the sinking feeling that I’m slowly losing my mind.

There is more than one way for higher education to be misaligned.

I saved this piece by Jason Schmitt a couple of days ago, so that I could go back to it later and read it more closely. Unfortunately, I still have no idea what the dude is talking about:

For the last several years I was a staunch opponent of tenure. “Tenure is for slackers” was my thought. I wanted to make a real difference. Engage my classes. Teach lots of people. Create leaders to help guide my Rust Belt economy for the future. I knew someone of my personality couldn’t do that if I was attending mundane departmental meetings, teaching two upper level classes to the most privileged in society — or accepting a tenure track position in Nevada. I also knew that I wanted to be on the front lines. Protection wasn’t important in my first iteration as an academic because in the back of my mind Detroit tool and die makers don’t have tenure and they have a much rougher go at life behind their honing machine than I do. The only vital trait I knew I needed was being an outstanding professor.

Regardless of my scattered, over-burdened life, my philosophy held true. I have more work than I can handle due to my teaching abilities. I have been getting dirty in the front line ditches for several years now, but it is not enough to make the difference I desperately seek. And I think a piece of shrapnel may have made its way to my core because I can’t help but think this system in which I play — of higher education — is misaligned.

So is he saying that higher education is misaligned because it doesn’t reward good teaching? Then why does he apparently have more work than he knows what to do with? Indeed, he writes later that he’s gotten two offers for tenure-track positions that he’s turned down.

Tenure is not an excuse to sit on your butt for the next thirty years. That’s why they invented post-tenure review. Tenure is job protection for positions that are economically tenuous and potentially politically controversial. It doesn’t just benefit the professors who hold it. It benefits universities by incentivizing job applicants to undergo rigorous training and it benefits students by assuring that their professors can offer them the full benefit of their knowledge.

Cary Nelson covered the opposite position well in a recent Chronicle piece:

Professors without tenure are nothing more than at-will employees. They can be fired tomorrow or whenever their contracts expire. One complaint from a student, parent, or politician is all it may take. What if a professor offends a parent or preacher by teaching evolution? What if a professor expresses sympathy for unpopular religious beliefs? What if a professor admits that he or she supports gay rights? What if a professor asks students whether the war in Iraq was in the national interest? Worst of all, what if a professor asks students whether the college really needs that fancy new administration building? Administrators who prefer to avoid controversy just won’t send that professor a new contract.

I don’t care how good a teacher Jason Schmitt thinks he is. He will still be replaced in a heartbeat if any of the universities where he works believe that they can save money and/or trouble by hiring someone else to teach his classes instead. Money over everything. That’s higher education today, and tenure is just about the only protection that some of us have from that mentality. More importantly, people with tenure are just about the only people who can safely express an opposing viewpoint to that mentality.

I’m not going to argue here that there aren’t any tenured professors anywhere who have retired in place and don’t care about their local communities. However, there is more than one way for higher education to be misaligned,

Sioux Ghost Dance (1894).

Yeah, this one is going in the lecture, particularly as I just read this:

Did you notice whose name is in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen? When you think about it, that explains a lot about this movie.

Subway posters ’til you’re blue in the face.

I love subway posters. Therefore, I had high hopes for this post. Disappointed by what Ivy Lee did in New York, I did some Googling and found Subway poster heaven on the web site for the London Transport Museum.

The best source is the one that fits your argument.

There is an article in this month’s AHA Perspectives which got me thinking about the research process yet again. Here’s David Ransel from Indiana:

The Australian anthropologist-historian Greg Dening observed that the perceived value of a source increases in proportion to the difficulty of gaining access to it. He demonstrated this effect in a delightful story of his search for the letters of William Gooch, a young Englishman who had traveled in 1792 to the South Pacific as an astronomer on a supply ship and met a violent end at the hands of Hawaiian natives. Dening traveled to England and had to overcome a number of obstacles before obtaining permission to read the letters—and, accordingly, attached great importance to their contents. The story has a powerful resonance for those of us who work in far-off lands where library and archive access is even more difficult than in the United Kingdom. We are indeed apt to attach excessive importance to materials for which permission to read or copy requires lengthy battles with bureaucrats and archivists. By the same logic, we can easily undervalue sources that fall into our laps. I once acquired—in a casual trade with an illegal book trader in the Soviet Union—an 18th-century Russian letter-writer’s guide. It struck me as a quaint souvenir and possible reference for official titles and forms of address. It was only when I showed it to a senior colleague and heard him exclaim that the book contained a capsule social history that I realized how useful it could be in reinforcing the arguments of my first monograph on the importance of patronage and personal clienteles in Russian politics. This book of model letters constituted a primer in how to initiate, reestablish, nourish, or end a patron or client relationship. I soon produced a couple of articles based on the letter-writer.

Despite the fact that I’m an American historian and I don’t (usually) go off to far-off lands to find my sources, I do identify with the point. I remember way back in ancient history (before Google Books) when I would play stump the librarian with the government documents guy at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin or keep going back to the Library of Congress with two pages of requests because I wanted to track down a particular obscure source in order to make my point.

However, it’s not often like that for me anymore. I still go to archives. [In fact, I've been trying to arrange an upcoming archives trip most of today.] With respect to published sources though, almost everything I’d ever want seems to be available online. While I might have said that doesn’t fly for stuff published after 1923, the more I explore HathiTrust, the more good stuff I find published after 1923 in full view format. [How is that possible anyway? Anybody out there understand copyright law?]

After spending ten years or so in various libraries looking at refrigerating equipment manuals, I found one on Hathitrust published in 1933 on Monday that I had never seen before. This made me very happy. It’s going to get cited in the book manuscript in five or six places. I didn’t have to travel outside my office to find it.

So while having to scour the ends of the earth to find something certainly makes that something appear important, and (as Ransel suggests) reading easy to reach sources in new ways can also be very interesting, I think what really matters is whether any source helps you make your point effectively. And thanks to technology, that’s easier to do than ever.

What should students know after your history course is over?

This morning at the Historical Society blog, Randall Stephens asks a really common question, “What do undergraduates know about history?” The reason to ask that should be obvious. If students don’t understand the historical background that your lecture is predicated upon it will likely go in one ear and out the other. My fear, however, is that even if students do understand the historical background that my lectures are predicated upon it will still go in one ear and out the other because too many of them simply do not have the skills they need to master the art of historical thinking,

It’s no coincidence that I used that phrase as Randall brought up Sam Wineburg. Here is the quote from Wineburg before the one he uses:

Let me give you a quote: “Surely a grade of 33 out of 100 of the most basic facts of American history is not a grade of which any high school can be proud.” Did this come from the 1987 National Assessment of Educational Progress report by Diane Ravitch and Chester E. Finn? Did it come from the 1976 bicentennial test that Bernard Bailyn did with the New York Times or the one that Allan Nevins did in 1942? No. This is a quote from a study done in Texas high schools by J. Carleton Bell and D.P. McCollum, published in the 1917 Journal of Educational Psychology. It was the first large-scale factual test of American history that we have in American education. Think about who went to high school in Texas in 1915 and 1916; only 10% of the population, the elite, and yet they scored horribly on this test.

In other words, the problem of students lacking specific factual knowledge has been around for a long time. Perhaps the results are more comical these days than they used to be. Nevertheless, we can’t control what students know before they enter our classrooms. We can, however, control what they know after they’re done.

I think there are two ways to address knowledge deficiencies among students. The first would be to cover everything important that you think they’re missing. The problem with that strategy should be obvious. How do you know what they don’t know? Are you going to give them a standardized test at the beginning of class? Let’s supposed you did and that was a perfect indicator of student knowledge (which is an assumption I could spend an entirely different post attacking). How are you going to figure out what they know about the topics NOT covered on the test? Do you really want to spend that much time prioritizing specific factual knowledge?

The other strategy to address knowledge deficiencies would be to ask a different question. My choice would be “What should students know after your history course is over?” More importantly, my answer to that question isn’t a list of facts. It’s a list of skills:

1. How to think like a historian.
2. How to express that kind of critical thinking in a written format.
3. How to read critically.
4. How best to conceive of history in general (rather than memorize specific historical facts).

Ideally, more than a few historical facts will slip in while this teaching of skills is going on. After all, you have to teach your students some facts or else they won’t have any building blocks for their arguments. The difference is that they get to pick the facts. The information they learn that is most useful to their lives will likely be the facts they use in answering my questions, and will hopefully then be most likely to stick.

Thinking and teaching this way has been a gigantic change for me. As a longtime history geek, I’ve always had a very good memory for all sorts of little details that served me well on history tests. I’ve reached the point in my career where I can lecture of a single-page PowerPoint slide list if I have to (even though I prefer more notes to help me through those more than occasional moments when I lose my train of thought). I’ve always prided myself on covering every aspect of American history: social, cultural, political and economic.

Then I ran straight smack into reality. Most students thought what I thought was interesting was actually extremely dull. I had to decide between covering everything badly or covering fewer things well. More importantly, all this talk about assessment got me thinking about the outcomes I wanted from my survey classes, and strangely enough there wasn’t a single specific fact on my list.

Imagine your average freshman survey student. How much are they going to remember about the history you covered in your course ten, twenty, maybe fifty years from now? Unless you’re a historian, facts are fleeting (and they always have been). Skills are forever.

No footnotes please, we’re Americans.

I spent a big chunk of my weekend reading Bill Bryson’s book At Home: A Short History of Private Life. I’ve known about Bryson for ages having been slipped a few of his books by British friends long before he made big here in his home country.

What made me fork out my cash for the hardcover was this review I found through AHA Today. It’s not just that it’s a good review, but it was there that I realized that Bryson deals with the history of ice and if any book deals with ice then reading it becomes a professional responsibility for me.

The book is rambling in the most delightful way. The premise is that he tours his house and gives you the history of everyday objects and architectural arrangements as he goes. In fact, he might as well have called it A Short History of Nearly Everything again as it goes in directions that I neither expected or understood the connection between the room he was supposedly in and the history he was covering. What do bedbugs have to do with the study, for example?

But while the book is a mess organizationally, the history it covers is absolutely fascinating. Indeed, I found myself moving for the footnotes multiple times (not just in the history of ice section) so that I could read more about some of these topics. There’s where my real problem with the book lies.

The footnotes aren’t there. Actually, there are footnotes, but you have to go online to the book’s website to read them in .pdf format. I think I’ve heard of that before even if I had never encountered it yet myself, but that’s not the end of my problem. When I got to the section on the history ice and really needed to check every source I quickly realized that the pages numbers in the book didn’t match the page numbers in the notes. The online notes were the notes for Bryson’s British edition. Nobody had bothered to write up the notes for the American version!

Footnotes may be an expensive bother to the average publisher, but they should be an absolute obligation to anyone writing history. At the very least, they should be there to convey a sense that the work is trustworthy and to serve as suggestions for further reading. I’m sure this is the publisher’s fault rather than Bryson’s, but my unduly long quest to find his references still bothers the heck out of me because I fear that it might become the future of research.

One hundred years from now, if we’re all reading books on our souped-up tablet devices, I can imagine footnotes going through something of a renaissance. How does the author know that? Tap the number and find out. Publishers don’t seem to care about such things, though. If readers stop caring about such things too, then what if nobody bothers to program the links?

It’s bad enough that whole books are going totally electronic. If nobody cares about footnotes and they go electronic too, how long will they last? Where will researchers find the most appropriate references if all they have to go by are the largest databases ever known? How will they find the needles in the proverbial haystack without guidance from those who came before?

If this is the future of the research process it will be like drowning in the ocean while simultaneously dying of thirst.