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.
