Works well with Others

You have never heard a Princeton professor lecture, until you have seen him on the big screen.

Micheal Berubé organized this stimulating summit on the future on graduate education in the humanities, where Anthony Grafton, known to all participants as “Tony”, the comma splice slayer, held the opening keynote address—by Skype no less, ostensibly because he was under the weather, but from where I sat in the audience, the the big screen at the front of the auditorium with its freakish lighting made Grafton look the spitting image of the Great OZ.

Grafton spoke eloquently about the troubles encircling the humanities, troubles we are all know well and good, but which he laid out so movingly.  In the last third of his lecture, he got down to some possible solutions to the fact that graduate students  in the humanities often learn skills that do not translate well to the marketplace.  Among other woes, they do not learn to work collaboratively, not does the institution have the administrative wherewithal to evaluate and reward collaborative research projects and publications. 

Many times have I heard colleagues say they prefer to work collaboratively.  In my department, these people are invariably linguists and women of all fields.  It is all too often the male literary critics, like myself, who prefer to work alone.  We write our own books, edit own articles; we do not want to be disturbed by other people interfering with our narcissistic writing projects. [Writing is the only intoxicant for which I receive institutional encouragement and reward]

However, there are collaborations in language departments that have long received institutional encouragement.  Foreign language teaching programs are almost always collaborative.  A whole bunch of instructors work together using the same syllabus, the same textbook.  They compare notes, develop joint exercises, compose and grade exams as a group.  Perhaps the only time I worked in a team during my graduate studies was while teaching German.  We all learned to play good cop to the professor’s bad cop.  We divided up our roles, we each had a different function in the language instruction sequence.  It was a blast and we were grateful that as young teachers we were not left to our own clueless devices, but instead we could work out lesson plans while huddled together.  Irony aside, TAing in German language instruction was a huge collaborative success and a great model for other forms of research

Linguists have been collaborating at every level of the academic heirarchy.  They work together not just as TAs, but as scholars and professors.  No one holds it against linguists coming up for tenure that they co-wrote an essay, because we all understand, “That’s how linguists work.”   Try saying that about a collaborative essay on Goethe’s Faust.  You don’t often get the same understanding—and then who are the Goethe scholars who work together, often across disciplines: quite frequently women who know how to share, not isolated guys trying to show off how clever they are.  Wouldn’t it be great if we could all get together as a group and read Faust?  Stay tuned we have just such an essay in the next Goethe Yearbook.

Heads versus Chairs

What is the difference between department heads and chairs?  Most people are unfamiliar with the distinction and it is only if you have lived under both systems that you even recognize the difference, to say nothing of understanding it.  For the past 12 years I have tried to explain it to myself and friends; I would not want to pretend that I understand all its mysteries even now.  The short answer is that department heads have a great deal more administrative power because they are actually serving the dean, not the faculty.  A department head can, for example, veto the faculty’s decisions about tenure; the head can make appointments without consulting members of the department; the head has sole responsibility for the budget—seems like a great deal more than what department chairs have, but really the system is more complicated. 

Department heads rarely use these powers because they serve at the behest of the dean; they are very rarely people with an independent agenda.  Department heads rarely revamp the department according to their own vision.  The few heads who have tried this around here were summarily fired by the dean—it really was shocking to see.

Chairs work with the assumption that their tenure will last only three years, so they generally do not undertake radical changes because they know that one of their colleague’s will rotate in to replace them.  That is how the argument in favor of the chair system runs, but the reality is also often different.  Department chairs are quite capable of forcing their agenda or resentments onto colleagues.  Reason does not rule in all corners of the university and we have all seen departments with rotating chairs who bash each other. 

When this bashing occurs, in either system, it rarely directly impacts the senior colleagues; usually it is the grad students or junior faculty who become the surrogate targets in a dysfunctional department.

Department heads because they serve under the dean and because they have so much control tend to be mild-mannered administrators, more interested in balance and procedure than in pushing a big vision for their departments. –this is the point in my essay where I start sounding like an eighteenth-century German intellectual discussing monarchy as a form of government—I hereby swear that my department head is an eminently reasonable fellow, and that I am only discussing the system.

The trickiest problems arise when department heads use their bureaucratic power to slowly and subtly favor or disfavor someone.  We have seen here at Penn State how very important the small administrative decisions can become in pushing or covering up behavior.  So the most dangerous department heads are those who use procedures to consistently undermine someone, say an assistant professor working on a book.  By a string of little decisions that only occasionally rise to the level of injustice, a department head can eliminate a colleague without ever having to use the veto power at his disposal.

Within a system of department heads, the only absolute power is the dean and the wise head acknowledges this reality.  With a department chair, decision making power is distributed more diffusely among the faculty.  An effective chair needs to build consensus among colleagues, in order to develop a broadly agreed-upon policy.  This requires great skills as a democratic politician, and admittedly most professors are not Bill Clinton, and so department chairs usually do not undertake sweeping programs. They advance the general consensus which sometimes can look a lot like stasis;  a really successful chair has get everyone motivated on the basis of an intellectual agenda that appeals to the scholarly interests of the faculty.

All Stick, No Carrot--How to Judge Scholarship

All stick and no carrot characterizes a common administrative approach to improving the quality of academic programs at state universities. 

There are several problems with the punitive approach to fostering quality scholarship and teaching: the first involves the long term effectiveness of bullying people to work harder—as soon as the pressure is off, they start to relax.  Threats work only as long as they are applied.  Far more effective motivations are ambition, desire and a competitive urge.  Punitive measures dull these forms of inspiration by discouraging independent thinking.

A second problem with the unwavering and strict application of narrow standards is that all shades of nuance are lost in the process of pressing all scholars into the same mold.  For example, the demand that assistant professors publish in flagship journals ignores the often complex relations within academic disciplines.  Cutting edge research is often not published in the mainstream journals.  If you have an assistant professor engaged in truly innovative research, requiring them to publish in flagship journals functions as a brake on their thinking. 

Mainstream journals tend to be quite conservative; they are often the last journals to adopt new ideas, rather than the first.  Institutions are certainly capable of recognizing this tendency.  At the elite coastal universities, it is often taken as a sign of mediocrity, if a scholar publishes in a “flagship” journal. 

Before coming to my current position at a state university, I was taught that you wanted to avoid these journals at all costs because by publishing in them, you showed everyone that you could not do better and that you really had nothing new to say. 

State universities in the middle of the US often look resentfully at Ivy League expectations as just so much snobbery, while the coastal elite see state universities’ mainstream tendencies as sign of plodding backwardness.  What both sides overlook, of course, are the insecurities behind both standards. 

State universities tend to overemphasize bureaucratic standards and procedures because they fundamentally do not have the confidence required decide what constitutes “quality” scholarship.  Is an article really innovative?  State university administrators fundamentally do not trust their faculty to judge; instead they want indicators, such as the ranking of the journal in which an article appears. 

Ivy League universities on the other hand live for the marginal difference between institutions.  They want to always demonstrate that they are better than other institutions, not just their peers, but more importantly they want to keep a long distance between themselves and all other universities in the world.  Thus, they will emphasize innovation over mainstream consensus and conformity. 

The trouble with this approach is that often an argument that seems radically new has only a short lifespan and once a trendy line of reasoning has passed, little remains of the argument and the scholar who made it.  Thus the double insecurity of the Ivy League department: is this young scholar truly innovative and will he/she continue to innovate in the long run. 

Ivy League academics want to know fundamentally whether someone is really and truly brilliant, the indicators that state universities require ultimately matter little in elite departments, in fact, those indicators tend to operate negatively—the more you publish in mainstream journals, the less clever you are.

Waiting for the Upload

As anyone who has tried to set up a web site knows, it takes a good while to put the pieces together, so that they look anything like a competent presentation.  My first attempts at a web site really amounted to my ordinary c.v. set on a shocking green background.  Somehow I equated web design with color, the text I kept the same on the site as on the old typed up document.  How to hurry up the production process without falling into old writing systems?

For all the speed in research that digital humanities provides, I find myself falling back onto books when I cannot get what I want.  My favorite site, Stanford’s Republic of Letters https://republicofletters.stanford.edu/ promises a string of material that I just cannot wait to see, and I have a wish list of material I want to see them archive and integrate into their map of European/North American intellectual circuits.  But I have to wait.  It takes time for them to develop their case studies.  They have a nifty map of Franceso Algarotti’s travels through the courts of Europe.  Algarotti was easily one of the brainiest courtiers in the eighteenth century.  Wrote stylish treatises, dispensed clever advice, slept with kings (ok, maybe just one king).  So reading his letters, tracing his thoughts on music and architecture, rhetoric and painting would make any dix-huitiémiste happy.

Helas pour moi, I must wait until the web site is ready to run, for there are scholars assembling the material in a responsible, scholarly way.  Apparently designing a digital humanities site takes time, just like writing a book.  In the meantime, I just interlibrary an old tome with Algarotti’s letters.

In other words, the back catalogue is what makes the book invaluable.

Just as when Sony buys a movie studio or record company, it is not just interested in what stars they have signed up right now, Sony also wants the archive of old movies and studio recordings for its future use.  Black and white scenes of couples dancing, gangsters blasting their way into a speakeasy, Marvin Gaye’s unfinished album—these are just as valuable in the long run.

Libraries are the back catalogue, it’s where you go while you cool your heels waiting for the web site to upload.  Because if you have to satisfy that burning rage inside your head for reading material, then you are back to consuming books.  Instant gratification is the point of the internet.  If you are filled with a lust to read, and it has to be high quality, not the Hershey's candy of tabloid sociability, then you wind up circling back around to the old media.  Heiroglyphs, anyone?

The Devil wears Theory

This wonderful scene displays the fantasy of absolute power that French theory once represented.  It also provides a telling account of how the trickle down theory works in economics, as well as in Hollywood’s star system.  Back when Roland Barthes was a structuralist, he maintained that fluctuations in fashion were determined by a handful of editors—meeting in Paris, of course, not New York City, as the film shows.  These editors’ decisions, just as this scene shows, eventually determine what ordinary women in humble circumstances decide to wrap around their bodies.  Throw in a few key designers and advertisers (the scene gives us a string of product placements) and you have a consumerist version of Lacan’s dictum that the unconscious is structured by the Other.  In the movie's terms, this means that the impulses that drive your intimate consumer decisions are really guided, if not determined, by forces completely outside your control.  Individual identity, the possibility of free will, serves as an illusion that drives the fashion system, or all of society, for that matter, forward.

            French theory back in the day loved this sort of thinking, for it aligned intellectuals who explain the system’s trickle-down operation, with the masters at the social peak.  Lacan and Barthes probably did not want to be overtly connected with the fashion industry, but they surely found the status alluring.

            In other words, the system is as much a construct of intellectual theory building as anything else.  This scene’s dressing down about dressing up asserts totally mastery and control—a reality only if you are committed to the fashion system itself.  You have to believe in the hierarchy for it to work, which means that critical descriptions of the trickle down system have the perhaps unintended effect of reinforcing its operation because they insist—“This is how the world really works.” The argument claims that the theory applies even to people who don't realize that their decisions have been made for them, but by making the argument, by showing how determined ordinary people are, the theory strengthens that control.

            Meryl Streep’s speech gives us a nice summary of how trickle-down economics works, as well.  The elite make the key decisions and the lower classes pick up the remainders.  This alignment of feudal hierarchy and luxury consumption has been theorized for the last three hundred years—Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees is one of the most famous, first versions, but the idea has surely been around much, much longer. 

            Add to this system, the famous actors displaying their prowess as thespians.  At the center, stands the queen of Hollywood quality, attended by a bunch a speechless pretty women and her knowing, New York side-kick.  The young rising star is given a lesson not only in the operation of the fashion/class/star system, but also in how to perform: Streep performs how to perform, Hathaway takes notes. 

Digital Lounge

Flew last week to Madison for a gathering of administrators in Big-Ten German departments, where, aside from exchanging professional information and pleasantries, I made two realizations.  Both were surprises in their own way.  The first came about by accident—as I was flying the many legs from my university to Madison, I happened to sit at an airport gate next to three graduate students on their way to Madison for a conference called NAVSA.  I had never heard of this organization; I could not even spell it, but they were talking loudly in this airport lounge about their papers and who all they were going to see.  Most importantly they were complaining about what it was like to be a graduate student, and since I never get hear graduate students speaking that way anymore, I decided to eavesdrop.  This meant simply sitting there with a zombie look on my face, because these three women were speaking so loudly that the whole lounge was taking in what they were saying.  I simply pretended to be a burnt out, middle aged, pudgy businessman staring blankly off into space—a convincing disguise, and one I could naturally pull off.

            So what did these three young graduate students reveal—well, first that graduate students complain about pretty much the same things we all did.  Dissertation chapters, finishing conference papers, should I go to this other conference, getting a job—nothing surprising there.  But then the conversation took a turn, and these three women started unburdening their souls about---digital humanities.

            What shocked me the most, was that they spoke about digital humanities without the slightest worry about defining what the heck was.  Tenured professors hem and haw as if no one really knows what digital humanities is, and then they all laugh out loud together, nervously.  These graduate students talked about it as if it were just their TA assignment.  Two of them had paying jobs in digital humanities.  One of them apparently had landed some nice post-doc in the field, another was working in some help desk capacity. She complained at length and in detail, as only a grad student can, about clueless, old professors who call her help desk with the simplest problems, one after the other, asking the same stuff—and all she wants to do is yell at them “Read the FAQs page!”  This made me cringe appropriately.  But she continued, “They need someone to hold their hands.  Can’t they read.  I mean they are trained in reading and critical thinking. Can’t they read the help page and figure it out for themselves.  I have to answer the same questions over and over again. I want to shout at them, but I don’t.”  Well in fact, she had just done that, because as I slowly turned to look up, I noticed that the airport lounge was filled with several obvious academics, all of whom had assumed the same blasé attitude while listening in.

            What was most obvious from their continued dialogue was that they all studied software programs as if they were foreign languages.  They knew how to build websites, run complex searches through corpuses of data, and generally treated the entire field of website design as just another part of writing a PhD thesis.  Digital humanities was nothing more than another self-evident part of their training, one that came with the usual institutional complexities.  So while I am a hopeless old professor who has taken seminars on web site design, but who has a better chance in holding a lecture in Latin than posting his own page, the lesson is that graduate students will learn and carry out these tasks directly because everyone they know is doing the same thing.