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.