Thursday, April 30, 2009

The return of the Generalist

As the size of humanities departments diminishes, graduate programs need to reconsider how narrowly new PhDs should specialize. From the Ivy League to state universities to traditional colleges, liberal arts departments have shrunk, even as the discipline continues to find new methods and questions.

To keep up with the expanding subjects, departments need to train students to become more flexible, capable of teaching and writing in more than one field. If a history department has just one French scholar, it is not enough for that professor to focus only on the newest specialty. Somehow it is necessary to teach it all, to cover seventeenth-century Absolutism along with the colonization of Algeria—a tricky move if there is only one French history professor.

Yet increasingly we are confronted with the reality that if we don’t teach a subject, no one else will.

Lots of professors are less than eager to teach beyond their specialty. How is teaching a distant subject matter going to foster your publication record? If the Cold War is your domain, how is teaching the eighteenth century going to help you finish your book on the Berlin Wall?

Ultimately, we have to move in both fields, the ones in which we teach, and the ones in which we publish. The result may be less narrowly defined publications and less historicist courses. Classes may ask bluntly what does the French Revolution have to do with the Cuban missile crisis or the Iraq war? Essays may more inclined to explore the longue durée.

Either way, we will have to think more broadly.

Monday, April 27, 2009

Corporate University?

Now with the news that GM has had too many brands that need to be pared away, one is reminded of all the downsizing that humanities departments have undergone. The Liberal Arts have been subjected to a corporate model of accounting while GM it seems has been following a different pattern, one that preserved old brands --not unlike preserving old languages. Is Pontiac the practical equivalent of Latin? or Old Hittite? Should we applaud GM for its commitment to history?

Monday, April 13, 2009

It's gone. . . .

What to do in the absence of a good bad sci fi television series? How to carry on, now that the tedium of Battlestar Galactica is over? This is the secret burden of those raised on any version of Star Trek, the yearning desire for the comfort of pompous impossibilities. Network executives have surely anticipated this response, and I am merely unaware of the next installation coming my way for me to loath and desire like cheap candy.

Friday, April 3, 2009

Professorial Voice

Went to a lecture given by an old professor of mine, a famous fellow, who has written more books than years I will probably stay above ground. Eighty books to Sander Gilman’s name:

Sitting back to take in his talk, I was immediately struck with how unchanged he looked, and then most remarkably the sound of his voice. If you don’t see someone for a long time, the voice is the feature you most thoroughly forget.

The sound of a human speaking does not linger like an image or a piece of advice once given. If he is real person, we don’t hear the voice over and over again as if he were Robert Plant. Yet when the voice returns, once you hear your old teacher again, the satisfaction and pleasure of recognition is quite remarkable.

I had heard him speak many times, in class and down the hall, yet this intimate apprehension had been replaced after leaving graduate school by reading and professional commentary. “So what do you think of Sander’s latest book?”

But today what really mattered to me sipping coffee in the audience was the childish happiness of hearing an authority who had trained me speaking familiar truths again, and yet not without surprising turns of thought that reminded me of his continued mastery.