There were many images of Rosie the Riveter.

I don’t mean to dishonor the dead as I’m sure that Geraldine Hoff Doyle, the recently deceased model for the now-iconic poster of Rosie the Riveter was a very admirable person. Nevertheless, historian that I am, I feel compelled to point out that there were, in fact, hundreds of different images representing Rosie the Riveter circulating during World War II. My favorite is the Norman Rockwell above which was a cover for the Saturday Evening Post, and therefore was undoubtedly seen by many more people during the war than the one we remember today.

So why is the one that Doyle modeled for the best-known now? It’s not because it was widely displayed at that time. The original of that one is at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and here’s how they describe it:

Artist J. Howard Miller produced this work-incentive poster for the Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company. Though displayed only briefly in Westinghouse factories, the poster has become one of the most famous icons of World War II.

Now, notice the Washington Post‘s very deliberate phrasing in their obituary of Doyle:

For millions of Americans throughout the decades since World War II, the stunning brunette in the red and white polka-dot bandanna was Rosie the Riveter.

[Emphasis added]

My theory has always been that since Doyle’s Rosie is in the Smithsonian collection, the image could be duplicated by t-shirt makers, doll manufacturers, etc. without paying royalties. Rockwell’s, on the other hand, isn’t owned by the government so it hasn’t been distributed nearly as widely.

Newsflash: Starve the patient and the patient dies.

I hate disagreeing with noted self-loathing academic Richard Vedder yet again on the subject of higher education, but this blog post at Forbes asking whether government has any business in higher education is particularly evil. I’m not even going to discuss his recommendation. I’ll settle for just fisking his version of the lay of the land:

Income inequality has increased in the past four decades of rapidly rising higher education, and the proportion of college students from low income groups is smaller today than four decades ago despite massive expansion of federal loan/aid programs;

Gee, you think that has more to do with the failures of higher education or with Republican polices that promote income equality? I forget whet the name of that logical fallacy is, but that certainly is one.

The statistical correlation between state government higher education spending and economic growth is negative, not positive, suggesting the positive economic spillover effects of governmental university aid are non-existent and maybe even negative;

Again, see above. Don’t you think there might be other things affecting the direction of economic growth besides state government spending on higher education? You’re an economist. Maybe you might try an actual study on this one?

Despite rising higher education attainment, crime rates have not fallen dramatically, voter participation has not risen, volunteerism has not dramatically increased, and other alleged social positive spillover effects of more higher education are not apparent;

Higher education hasn’t cured the common cold, reunited North and South Korea or saved the world from Sarah Palin either. Let’s kill it now!

Even if there were some positive external benefits, the sharp rise in higher education costs would call into question whether those benefits exceed the costs.

Perhaps that sharp rise in costs might have something to do with the huge drop in state spending on higher education? Ever heard of economies of scale?

Some two million articles are written for academic journals annually, most of which are little read trivial refinements on topics previously well researched and understood.

Way to be a big favorite at next campus meeting: Blithely dismiss the entire corpus of work produced by whole colleges at once. And I guess every study produced in an American economics department is the greatest thing since sliced bread? And this is from a guy who wrote an entire book about the wonders of Walmart!

Perhaps it’s time to apply Rees’ law in a new context: If you hate higher education this much, you shouldn’t be allowed to work in it. Period. Perhaps more importantly, this strikes me as the epitome of Republican politics applied to academia. Don’t put people who hate government in charge of running your government. Don’t put people who hate academia in charge of running universities. If you do the patient won’t get better, they’ll die. But of course, that’s exactly why they want to control government and/or academia in the first place.

The future of footnotes.

I got my wife an iPad for Christmas, with the understanding that it would double as an ebook reader for me as long as she’s not using it. I downloaded my first book yesterday, Jonathan Bloom’s American Wasteland, thinking it would be the perfect example of something I would blow through quickly and not need again. It’s actually much more useful for someone writing a history of refrigeration in America than I thought, so I’m stuck on the horns of a dilemma: How do you cite an e-book?

Naive person that I am, I think I expected e-books to look something like the screen on Google Books: All the pages are intact, but they’re electronic. At worst, I might have expected that a complete e-book would look like the old scans over at Documenting the American South: The text is different than as it was originally published, but there are red lines where the original page breaks occurred. In fact, at least when using the Kindle for iPad app, there are no page numbers at all. There are these long 4+ digit location numbers, but they don’t precisely match the words on the page and I don’t see any way to use them to locate particular snippets of text. I suspect this is because page numbers would differ depending upon what device you read the e-book on or even at what magnification you set your own device. While this is perfectly fine for reading a novel that you’ll never open again, for historians this ought to pose a problem. How can we tell people where we found what we found?

What’s equally annoying to me is that the hyperlinks for Bloom’s footnotes don’t work on our iPad when I touch them. The hyperlinks to other sites work find and are kind of cool (albeit distracting), but it’s clear that I’m not going to be able to read about Bloom’s sources until I’m done with the whole thing unless I want to lose my place every time I look. As I wrote the last time I pondered the subject of footnotes, what bothers me the most about this is that publishers and perhaps readers probably don’t care. Historians should though as footnotes are an absolutely vital element of the research process. They’re certainly the best way to understand the historiography of anything and are practically what make any well-researched book possible. What’s going to happen if libraries disappear and footnotes become impossible? Will there be anything left to do for research besides Googling your topic?

By coincidence, there’s a very nice post on footnotes up today over at the Historical Society blog. The author, Lisa Clark Diller, quotes Anthony Grafton* on this subject:

Grafton reminds us that “in documenting the thought and research that underpin the narrative above them, footnotes prove that it is a historically contingent product, dependent on the forms of research, opportunities, and states of particular questions that existed when the historian went to work” (23).

That’s obviously true in the sense that historians did not always have as high standards about what constitutes a footnote as they did today, but I always figured todays standards are pretty clear: 1) Give enough information so that future researchers (or your suspicious professor) can trace precisely where you got your information if they are so inclined. 2) Use the same citation style, throughout the entire text. Am I missing something?

As far as I can tell, any changes to this historical contingency in the future could only loosen those standards. Maybe the change would be cultural, but more likely it would involve a significant change in the nature of texts. Replacing paper with pixels would be such a change, and I’m increasingly convinced that that’s not a good thing. I’m still planning on downloading new novels and political tracts at half the price of the hardback copies, but it looks like all my history texts are going to have to be delivered to me the old-fashioned way in the future if there’s any chance I might want to cite them some time.

* Note to self: Read Grafton’s footnote book ASAP. Remember to order used paperback copy so that I can quote it later.

Update: Greetings AHA Today readers! If anyone cares, I managed to get the footnote links to work before I finished the book. To get the page numbers I need to cite, I’m now thinking I’ll go to the free preview on Amazon.com.

Blackboard is the Devil.

This is from an article about teaching history with technology in the AHA Perspectives (subscription only for you non-members):

Course management software was reportedly used by 62 percent of the history faculty in the survey, but these programs were singled out for particular scorn by a number of faculty, both for their clunky interfaces, and frequent upgrades that impose additional burdens in time, effort, and expense. As one respondent observed, “When institutions subscribe to software for teaching such as Blackboard, the software updates often force premature obsolescence on the hardware. The institution and the individual faculty members must either replace costly equipment more often than necessary (with additional costs to the environment), or struggle along with slow hardware. The software “updates” are usually unwieldy, with few real improvements (and often setbacks). They waste valuable faculty time. Such trends should be examined and monitored carefully by the profession.”

I’ve explained elsewhere precisely why I hate Blackboard. However, since I’ve become a devoted ProHacker reader since writing that, I’ll add one thing though: WordPress can serve as a perfectly fine course management system for a lot less money and a lot less hassle.

Obscene indifference to other people’s suffering.

Via the Daily Dish, here’s the worst post on the academic job market that I’ve ever seen:

Assumption 1: Innovation, including academic research, is the fundamental driver of long term health, wealth and happiness for the human race. (The “including academic research” bit is the biggest leap.)

Assumption 2: Unfortunately it’s very difficult to say beforehand who will and who will not produce great, or even good, research. (Even after five years departments have trouble predicting which of their crop will excel.)

In this world, each extra PhD raises the chances of one more brilliant, world-changing idea. While hardly comforting to the thousands who toil without job prospects, the collective benefits just might outweigh all the individual misery.

Spend a lot of time one the job market before writing that? I doubt it. It takes someone who’s never suffered at all to be so callous towards the people who have.

More importantly, the main assumption behind this argument is incomplete at best, and painfully wrong at worst. Who says the people who do the best research, let alone the most valuable research, are the Ph.D.s getting jobs when they’re done? Suppose your filed is particularly oversupplied the year you enter the job market? Suppose the school you want to work at is more interested in how well you teach? Suppose your research is great, but you don’t interview very well. Suppose your research is terrible, but you could afford to attend a snooty school and you interview very well.

I guess what offends me most about this argument is the notion that the oversupply of Ph.D.s of all kinds out there is in any way rational on a societal level. Certainly it makes economic sense for graduate programs to admit anybody who can pay the tuition, and for other schools to hire the surplus that those programs create at fire sale prices, but telling people who aren’t going to win the lottery that their loss is society’s gain is just obscene.

I wonder what the contingent faculty of the world think about this…

From the state to the student.

Leave it to CNBC to point out that taxpayers are on the hook for student loan defaults, but not to point out that state cuts to higher education are what makes it necessary for schools to raise tuition, thereby forcing students to take out so much in loans in the first place. The burden of paying for higher education has been transferred from the state to the student and they’re worried about a 7% default rate? That’s despite the fact that:

If you default on a student loan today, you could lose everything.

Cry me a river.

Hot chocolate.

“Are there any Polar Express passengers in need of refreshment?”

Dereliction of duty.

I’ve seen links to this story about U-Mass Amherst more than once today. Here’s the part that made my jaw drop:

The history department last year stopped requiring students to consult with their advisers before registering for classes. Instead, it recently started training students to mentor one another.

If only I could train students to sit in for me at department meetings.

A conflict of interests.

There isn’t a lot of news to any academic observer with their eyes open in this essay from the Economist. Nevertheless, I think this observation is useful to remember:

The interests of academics and universities on the one hand and PhD students on the other are not well aligned. The more bright students stay at universities, the better it is for academics. Postgraduate students bring in grants and beef up their supervisors’ publication records. Academics pick bright undergraduate students and groom them as potential graduate students. It isn’t in their interests to turn the smart kids away, at least at the beginning. One female student spoke of being told of glowing opportunities at the outset, but after seven years of hard slog she was fobbed off with a joke about finding a rich husband.

Personally, I pride myself on being the guy who’ll give the “Do you know what you’re getting yourself into?” speech to students considering graduate school in the humanities. I think I can be nice with it so they are adequately informed without having all their hopes crushed. As we have an MA program, this does not necessarily make me popular with my colleagues but I think I have a moral obligation to help students evaluate what is in essence a very expensive investment.

All this said, a couple of weeks ago a former undergraduate student of mine just got a tenure track job at our local community college. It would be rude to talk about the pay, but I will say he’s teaching a 5-5 with up to 60 students in each class and, of course, no TAs. I’m proud and happy for him, but this still goes to show that even when you make it, you’re not necessarily in the greatest of places. That fact alone should be enough to cut the supply of graduate students out there in the world, but I’m afraid that fact isn’t really getting around.

Nothing about my breakfast. Just links.

By far the most annoying thing about Yahoo! phasing out Delicious is that I have to start tweeting in order to keep having my shared links appear in the “What I’ve Been Reading” section to the right of this blog. Not only has this been helpful to me when it’s time to write posts, I can see that somebody clicks on something from that list almost every day. Therefore, rather than wait for the axe to fall, I went and did what I vowed I’d never do and started a Twitter account. My user name is jhrees.

If you are an advanced Twitterer and you elect to follow me, my pledge to you is that I will never leave any commentary about myself or what I had for breakfast. All you’ll get are links to historical and academic stuff that I think are interesting. If you aren’t an advanced Twitterer, you can still see this same stuff over on the right.

One more thing oh people who have been using Twitter for some time now, who the heck should I be following (other than Steve Martin, that is)?