west of the moon

Is history a science?

Yesterday, in my lecture class (Science in the United States), we ended up having a bit of a class discussion about the borders and boundaries of science.   I love this type of question, and I think that we learn a lot about our own assumptions and categories when we try and work through possible answers.  (For instance, when you start pushing people on this question, you find that many people think that if you say something isn't a science, you're saying that it isn't a valid field of inquiry, or that it isn't intellectually rigorous, or that it can't be right.)  I think that some of the students found the discussion frustrating, but I thought it was interesting, and a couple of people told me afterwards that they hope we come back to this topic again.

After class, someone asked me what my own definition is--what do I think makes something a science, or not a science.  I found it a really difficult question to answer, for a number of reasons.  First of all, I don't think there -is- a clear and easy definition.  There's not really a single bright line that can be drawn between "this type of work is science" and "this type of work is not science."  It's also difficult for me because so much of my interest in the question is how -other- people answer it: I know why Albion Small thought that sociology was a science, and why G. Stanley Hall thought that psychology was a science, and why the judges in the Kitzmiller decision thought that intelligent design was not science.  I know the arguments for (and against) including Renaissance European alchemy, dynastic Chinese medicine, Babylonian astrology, and Alexandrian engineering in the historical category of "scientific work".  I can argue both sides of the question about whether modern Western medicine is scientific.  And I've been known to think of the discussions about what constitutes "science" as a kind of inkblot test for what people think about different areas of research.  At the end of all of that, though, where do I personally draw the borders and boundaries?  I'm not sure I know.

I think that most of the time, when people try and drawn the boundary between science and not-science, they start from an instinctive or intuitive sense of which types of work are scientific, and then they back-form the criteria.   Pretty much everyone agrees that physics, chemistry, and biology go in the "science" box, along with their associated branches and sub-fields.  A lot of other disciplines are in a contested area, and a person's first intuitive or instinctive reaction as to whether these other disciplines (psychology, linguistics, engineering, computer science, sociology, economics, political science, medicine, archaeology, anthropology) go in the "science" box or not seems (based on my thoroughly unscientific sampling) to be based largely on her personal experiences.  The sorting into boxes comes first, and on an unconscious level; the outlining of criteria (experimentation, quantification, verification, general laws, predictive power, falsifiability, etc.) comes second, as a way of trying to make sense of the way you've sorted things. 

The way I sort things is based on my own history in this field.  Ten years ago, when I was finishing an undergraduate degree in psychology, I probably would have sorted things differently than I do now; four years before that, when I was a smart-ass high school senior with big plans to be a physics major and equal passions for Greg Egan and Ayn Rand, I -know- I would have sorted things differently than I do now.  Now, though, after six years in graduate school and two years teaching broad surveys on the history of science, I have very fuzzy boundaries for science.  I'm willing to toss most things into the "science" box, as long as I'm allowed to keep up a running commentary on the arbitrary and historically-contingent nature of the definition.  One snag in the sorting, though--the class reading that prompted all of this, the 1895 mission statement for sociology, makes reference to the "science of history", grouping history with economics and sociology, under the heading "social science." 

Is history a social science?  Maybe?  It is (or should be) rooted in factual evidence, and it can (sometimes) look for generalized laws, and certainly there are plenty of people who would categorize it that way.  There's a discussion down in the comments on this post about what it means to have a finding or a result in the humanities, and when I follow that reasoning through, I become more sympathetic to the idea that history (unlike, say, literature studies) can be thought of as a science.  When I first came to Berkeley as a graduate student and attended the day-long orientation for new grad students, I waffled over the afternoon breakout sessions, whether I was supposed to attend the discussions for humanities students or the ones for social science students.  When the idea of history as a social science came up in this reading, though, I found myself pulling away from it.  Is this a type of science, what we do?  My sorting instincts want to put it in the "not-science" box.  If the sorting question is, as I suggested above, an ink-blot test, what does it say about me that I'm resistant to calling this work scientific, even though it meets some of the criteria that logically fall out of my sorting process? 

I don't have an answer here, just a lot of questions, and the overall sense that the science/not-science question is one for which the best answers are more like a spectrum and less like a set of boxes. 

hitting the ground running. or not.

There's something singularly irritating about coming in to campus on a rainy Saturday, hoping to get some work done, only to discover that you no longer have after-hours key-card access to your building.  We've sorted it out, finally--it looks like my building access was accidentally listed as expiring at the end of fall semester, even though my teaching appointment runs through spring semester--but it was frustrating at the time. 

Frustrating, but somehow not surprising.  I've had a very rough time with the start of my semester.  For a quick timeline: Matt and I went on a short vacation, the week before classes started.  We got back in town on Thursday night, and then my parents were visiting Friday and Saturday.  Both the vacation and the visit were great, except that by mid-day on Saturday it was clear that I was coming down with some kind of sick.  From Saturday evening until Wednesday morning, I was almost completely incapacitated by what I'm pretty sure was the flu.  Either the flu or just the worst cold of my entire life--it was miserable either way, with violent coughing fits and severe exhaustion and general all-around ick.  I'm extremely fortunate that I had the option of basically spending four whole days in bed, sleeping whenever I wasn't coughing, and even so it was miserable.  (The pettiest complaint of the whole illness?  How -boring- it all was.  I couldn't even -read-, because my head was so foggy that I couldn't follow anything, even when I could focus my eyes on it.  And all the while, the ever-present frustrating knowledge that I was falling further and further behind on work that needed doing.)

Wednesday was the first day of classes for spring semester, and I managed to drag myself out of the house and up to campus.  In retrospect, I'm not sure this was the best idea--as much as it seemed pathetic to have to cancel the very first class of the semester, it was probably equally pathetic to start class with an instructor who's barely managing to stand up, much less think clearly and answer questions. 

That was a week and a half ago, and I'm pretty much over the flu/cold, so that's good.  I can't shake the feeling that there's still a lingering effect on my teaching.  The first week was so off-balance that I'm only just now starting to feel really comfortable with the material.  Clearly this isn't how it's supposed to work.

It's a shame, too.  This semester, I'm teaching "Science in the United States", and it's a course with a lot of potential.  I'm trying to focus the course around the relationship between science and society in the US, starting back in the colonial period and stretching more-or-less to the present day.  Major highlights along the way include the debates about evolution in the schools, the history of American eugenics programs and scientific racism, the development of conservation movements (and, later, environmentalist movements), the growth of the research university, the development of the military-industrial complex, the Army Alpha tests and the birth of intelligence testing, the Manhattan Project, Sputnik and the space race, and a lot of other things.  It's great, because there are a lot of complex issues at stake, and never really any clear answers.  On the first day of class, we had a little bit of discussion in class about the role that the government plays in funding science, and how it's affected scientific work (both in positive and negative ways).  I have great students, great historical material to work with, and a lot of enthusiasm for this topic.  And yet I still don't feel like I'm on track.

It's kind of like--this is an awkward analogy, but bear with me.  It's kind of like when you start to tell a story, or maybe a long joke, but right when you're starting you get distracted by something, and you start the story all wrong.  Maybe you forget to mention something important, or you get off on some boring tangent, or something.  When you have a bad start, it's hard to get the narrative back on track.   It's an awkward analogy because a teaching semester-long lecture course is, of course, not exactly like telling a story.  A good course will have a rhythm to it, though, and a couple of thematic through-lines, nested story arcs.  Because I had the flu, or maybe just a bad cold, my semester got off to a rough start, and I haven't quite found that rhythm yet. 

constructive criticism.

I've had a string of days full of tiny irritations--each little thing is insignificant on its own, but as they accumulate I start to feel like I'm being nibbled to death by cats.  I've locked myself out of my campus office five times in two days, locked myself out of the house once, and even managed to lock myself out of my locker at the gym.  A lot of the campus-office lockouts happened because I had to move offices--it's much easier to forget your keys when your hands are full of books, papers, and miscellaneous office accoutrement like tea canisters and little plastic airplanes.  Moving offices is itself slightly irritating, because it's a very physical reminder of my impermanence in this department, and on top of that, the new office is much further from the water cooler and the copy room.  (Do you see what I meant when I said these were tiny insignificant irritations?)  One of the books on order for my spring semester class hasn't come in yet, which means I can't check page numbers for assigning reading on my syllabus, and the library's only copy has gone missing, which means that I -still- can't check page numbers -and- we probably won't have a copy of the book on course reserve for students who can't afford to buy their own copy. 

Tiny, minor, absolutely petty things.   For me, the best way to wipe out this state of mounting irrational irritation (somewhere inbetween the mood Jed calls "the mullygrubs" and Holly Golightly called "the mean reds") is to get thoroughly involved in some kind of work, so I've thrown myself head-first into next semester's course prep, even though we're almost two weeks away from the first day of class.  I have a course reader, I have a syllabus (although still tragically lacking specific assignments from the missing book), I have the first lecture done and good outlines for the next few. 

Part of my preparation for the new semester involves reading course evaluations.  At the end of each course, our students are asked to fill out evaluation forms for the instructors.  The forms are anonymous, and instructors aren't allowed to look at them until after final grades have been submitted.  It's never been clear to me whether course evals actually mean anything.  People applying for jobs will use selected quotes from the evals as "demonstrations of teaching excellence", and I hear rumors that they may be involved in tenure review, but I don't know if they're used for anything else.  From what I can tell, a lot of faculty members never even look at their course evals.  I like to check mine over, though, to see if there are any general trends in my teaching I need to pay attention to. 

As I'm writing this, it's occurring to me that the best advice for reading course evaluations is the same as the best advice for dealing with manuscript critiques from a writing workshop.  You'll get some completely contradictory responses to the exact same material, and you can't take any one response too seriously or try to change everything that people suggest changing.  That said, if almost everyone says that you need to change one particular thing, you should think about changing it.  You may not end up making the change, but you should at least think about it.

With all of the caveats in mind, I do take my course evaluations very seriously.  After my first semester teaching, a lot of people said that they found the material interesting but didn't always see what the point was.  The next semester, I did more signposting ("here is the thing I am about to say, here is why it is important") and made more frequent (and more explicit) connections between the specific topics and the overall course themes or concepts.  At times it started to feel ridiculous, like I was telling them the same things over and over again, but the feedback the next time around was extremely positive, and many students said that all that signposting and connection-drawing had really helped them understand the material better.  All of my students say that I talk too fast, and I'm actively working on that, but apparently with only minimal success.   I've even taken some of those sharp stinging critcisms to heart--one of last fall's evaluations said "she keeps saying that things are 'interesting' when they aren't really."  Since then, I try to not refer to things as "interesting", because that's subjective.  As the authority in the classroom, I can say that something is "relevant" or "significant" or "meaningful" or "important", but "interesting" varies from person to person.  (To be briefly immodest: every semester, I get a few evaluations that say things like "I took this class because I needed to fill a requirement, and I've never liked history classes before, but Professor Groppi made it really interesting!"  I hope those students realize how incredibly valuable that kind of thing is to a teacher, not because it's useful per se, but because that's the kind of comment that gets you through the bad days.) 

The one thing that consistently jumps out at me from my course evaluations, though, is how visual these students are, at least in terms of their expectations.  I use PowerPoint presentations in my lectures, but fairly minimally.  Whenever I mention a specific person, I try to have a picture of that person.  Whenever I talk about geography, I try to have a map.  I use diagrams to illustrate some key concepts (important in teaching the early history of science), I use pictures of scientific apparatus, and (I'll confess) sometimes I just use pictures for visual distraction or amusement value.  My presentations are mostly images, though, not "key concepts" or bullet points or outlines.  Every semester, the student feedback about the visuals hits the same two points:  they want more pictures, and they want bullet-points and outlines.  (This semester, someone even suggested that I use embedded video clips, to liven things up a little.) 

This is one area where I feel like I'm swimming against a current.  I understand that the bullet-point PowerPoint is practically an industry standard at this point, but I don't like it.  As a visual display, I don't think it's a good way to communicate information, but more importantly, I think it's bad pedagogy.  It short-circuits some of the information processing that the students need to be doing on their own.  I don't want them going down some list of key ideas and ticking them off as I recite them--I want them to be fitting the pieces of the puzzle together, seeing the categories and connections and contexts.  The bullet-point teaching style always looks to me like a slide backwards towards rote learning and recitation, and that's not what we should be doing, certainly not at the college level, and certainly not at a school like Berkeley, where I can reasonably assume that my students have an educational background that's prepared them to do this kind of work.

You know, I'm too young to be a cranky old woman. The good news for my students is that this semester's class ("History of Science in the United States") covers a modern-enough time period that I'll have a lot more pictures available to me than I have in past semesters.  (Y'all have no -idea- how hard it is to find good illustrations of people, places, and equipment when you're dealing with, like, ancient Mesopotamia or the Kingdom of Kush.  Even in slightly more modern times, all of my portraits of Indian and Islamic mathematicians and astronomers last semester came off of postage stamps.) 

doing a job.

If you've missed the recent, er, "bright gumdrop unicorns" academic-blog fuss-up, you're a luckier person than me.  That said, I'm going to drag you into it.  Short version: sometimes academics with tenure-track positions apply for other tenure-track positions.  Some academics, presumably ones with tenured positions, think that these people are selfish and immature gits.  The two sides have been bickering for a week or so, in blog posts and comments.  The bickering was sparked by comments that people going by "webmaster" and "edsmithers" left on "Dr. Crazy"'s blog, and has been discussed by "Sisyphus", "New Kid", "Dr. Curmudgeon", "Maggie May", and a variety of angry anonymous contributors to Rate Your Students.  (And can you tell that I'm a little frustrated with the pseudonyms?  It's not that I don't understand it.  I do understand it--the kind of conversations people want to have about academic culture, they're afraid to have openly and under their own name.  I think I've only seen one real name in this whole mess, from a commented in the phenomenally reasonable and thus far vitriol-free discussion at the Philosophy Job Market Blog.  That person, unsurprisingly, has tenure.) 

In any event, there's a lot in these discussions that's frustrating, and I suspect that the conflict here has been artificially magnified by the lens of the blog community, but there's also a lot that's interesting.  One of the things that I've been noticing is the huge gap between the two sides on this simple question: this "being a professor" thing, is this a job?

You would think this was a simple question.  If they pay you to do it, it's a job, at least of sorts.  It's not that simple, though, starting right at the beginning with the highly stylized (and almost completely opaque) process by which one -gets- academic jobs.   

And then there's the question of departmental structure and oversight.  Last year, I applied for a position doing historical research and analysis for a government agency, and the application forms asked me to list the name and phone number of my current supervisor.  I had absolutely no idea how to fill that out--I don't have a supervisor.  I was trying to figure out if there's anyone in the departmental structure who I have to report to or answer to, for anything, and I'm pretty sure there isn't.  And I'm just a lecturer--for regular faculty, it's much more clear that they don't have supervisors, or bosses, in any kind of normal sense.  There's the department chair, and at some level there's the higher-level university administration, but... but as far as I can tell, those relationships function like bosses or supervisors, in any way.   A lot of the administrative structures surrounding faculty are very historically entrenched, and if you look at that history, you start to realize that it almost makes more sense to think of university professors as independent contractors attached to a university faculty. 

This may seem like a semantic difference, or a trivial one, but it's something I've been having to think about.  Most of the people in my life are not academics--my parents, my partner, my best friends, they're all people who are outside of this whole structure, and in the last few years I've been doing a lot of translation work.  I've had to explain to my parents why sending out copies of my resume to various schools, whether or not those schools currently have a position open, isn't going to help me get a tenure-track position.  I've had to explain to a lot of people why several years of experience teaching a course on pre-modern and non-Western science is not a useful professional qualification for the position of assistant professor in pre-modern or non-Western science.  Trying to explain that last one, actually, leads into a murky exploration of what exactly a professor is--if it's a job, what are the job qualifications and the job responsibilities?  If you're hired as an assistant professor, your job is, broadly speaking, to be an expert in your field of knowledge, and to be a part of the intellectual community in your department.  You have specific responsibilities--teaching certain classes, "service" requirements like committees and advising, and so on--but if those specific responsibilities were the core of the definition of the professor, then these searches wouldn't be so narrowly defined.  If you're a history department, and you're conducting a search for an assistant professor in post-1945 American history and culture, you're not actually just looking for someone to teach your courses in modern American history--almost anyone with a doctorate in US history (or related fields) can do that.  You're looking for someone to attract (and then advise) graduate students in modern American history, someone to write books and give talks and boost the profile of your department as a place with a good modern American history program, and also to teach the courses.  (Increasingly, history departments are dropping full-time tenure-track lines in favor of just hiring part-time or temporary faculty whose only job responsibility is teaching the courses, but that's a discussion for a different day.  And one that's already been covered, in part, by Sterling Fluharty, in posts here and here.)

The question of professional roles and responsibilities is a little bit of a tangent, but one that does relate back to the bigger question, "is this a job?"  If you look at the debate over whether there's anything wrong with junior faculty applying out, the employment language is a contentious point.  You see people on one side talking about the university as an employer, people on the other side talking about the department as a family.  Is this a job, or a vocation?  (The discussion on PJMB has included the question of whether having geographic preferences for where to spend the rest of your life is an indicator that you don't really love your work.)   Those of us without tenure-track positions have to contend with a fiercely competitive national job market to have a chance of getting a tenure-track position, and the junior faculty who have those tenure-track positions have to demonstrate extraordinary success both within their school (in terms of teaching, advising, and service) and in the larger academic world (in terms of the publication record required by your tenure review), but many of these blog posters and commenters describe senior faculty members chastising junior faculty for being "careerist" or "mercenary" in terms of their work choices.  I feel like the heart of that conflict has something to do with the assumptions about whether this is a job, or at the very least, what kind of job it is.

The belief that an academic department is primarily an intellectual community (rather than primarily a workplace) is a wonderful one, and when it works out that way, the result is something enriching for everyone, faculty and students alike.  There's a disconnect, though, between the model of the department as a community (or a family) and the practicalities of the situation most early-career academics are facing.  I wouldn't say that I have any answers or big insights, but I think that the discussion itself is interesting in the way that it exposes the bones of the problem.

 

absorbing the status quo.

Yesterday evening, at the gym, I was changing back into my clothes when I noticed a five- or six-year-old girl staring at me.  My locker is in the downstairs kids-allowed locker room, as opposed to the upstairs grownups-only one, so having kids around is pretty normal.  The staring part, I'll admit, was a first, but you know, little kids find all sorts of things interesting, and it didn't actually bother me.  She was with her mother, and her mother kept reminding her that if she didn't get into her bathing suit faster, she'd miss the start of swim class, but she was too busy watching me.  The putting-on-pantyhose part was the most interesting, but even putting on moisturizer, combing my hair, buckling my shoes was interesting.  Her mother tried, once or twice, to discreetly get her attention elsewhere, but she was having none of it, and eventually the mom gave up.

"I'm sorry," the woman said.  "I think she just finds your routine fascinating."

"Oh, it's okay.  I don't think there's anything weirder-looking than someone trying to put on pantyhose."

"And she just learned what panythose were last week.  We made a scarecrow for Halloween, and we stuffed some stockings with straw, for his head.  She was really interested in how they stretch and stuff, and now she keeps saying she wants to wear them."

I looked at the girl, whose eyes had gotten really big, listening to us talk.  "They're not very comfortable, you know."

"That's what I told her," said her mom.  "And sometimes they itch." 

Suddenly I felt the need to say something about why I was wearing pantyhose, even though they're uncomfortable and sometimes they itch.  I didn't think I could explain the major reasons to a five-year-old, not while she was already running late for swim class, but I hit on one thing that might make sense.  I gestured towards my feet.  "But it makes it easier to wear shoes like this" (Dansko mary janes, the best shoes ever, by the way) "without socks."

"But they are socks," she said. 

I opened my mouth to start to say "no" and then stopped, realizing, well, kind of, except they're not.  Huh.  "They do the same thing as socks, I guess, but they don't look like socks."

She laughed.  "They don't!  They don't look like socks at all."

"But they work like socks, sort of."

She nodded, as if that made sense, and finished putting on her bathing suit.  Having solved the mystery of pantyhose, she was finally ready for swim class. 

On my end, I spent a while continuing to think about the mystery of panythose.  I mean, this is a problem I sorted and solved last year, when I started teaching, but it still bothers me from time to time.  I dress for teaching much the same way that I would dress for an office job--business-y skirts, button-down shirts, panythose, the all-purpose Dansko mary janes.  (Seriously.  Best shoes ever.  Super-cute, very professional, but also no/v. low heel and good foot support.)  It feels strange to me, sometimes, in the context of all of the discussions of feminism and image and presentation, that I choose to wear this.  It's not just that I'm wearing panythose, it's also that I'm wearing clothes with no pockets, that I wear makeup (extremely minimal, but still), all of it.  It's not as though I'm in a work environment with a dress code.  (Although there's more dress conformity, in my department, than one might imagine.  One or two faculty members will show up to teach in jeans, but by and large, the male professors wear ties, or at least dress shirts, and the female professors are at an equivalent level of formality.)

The reasoning, on my end, has been very simple.  I have enough to think about when I'm in front of a classroom.  I don't want to be putting any real attention into my clothes. (This is, oddly enough, why I choose skirts over pants, even though skirts necessitate pantyhose.  I sometimes get self-conscious about how I look in pants, and I don't want to divert any mental energy in that direction when I'm teaching.) More importantly, I don't want anyone else paying attention to my clothes.  The skirt-and-blouse model has a kind of entrenched position in mainstream American culture--it's the closest I can come to a uniform for this type of work, which means it's the closest I can come to being invisible.  I don't want to be making any statements.

Of course, sometimes choosing to not make a statement is choosing to endorse existing social norms, etc etc.  It's not that I want to be tacitly supporting a system where dressing this way is the default.  It's that I've prioritized other things.  Almost all of the time, it's not an issue.  Every once in a while, like when I'm meeting with students who want me to be faculty sponsor for a feminist-themed DeCal class, or when explaining to a five-year-old girl why I'm wearing pantyhose even though they're uncomfortable, it twinges at my conscience. 

Fall 2007 Courses

I've mentioned my courses already, but in case anyone's interested, the course websites are up and running.

• History 30A: The History of Premodern Science
• History 103S/103D: Science and Fiction in Twentieth Century America

If any Berkeley students are reading and are interested in taking either of these classes, welcome!  History 30A is currently full, but we expect that all students on the waitlist will eventually be able to enroll.  Enrollment for the History 103 seminars requires the approval of Leah Flanagan ([email protected]) in the History Department, but don't be put off by that--non-majors are welcome to enroll.  For both courses, if you're interested in the course but haven't been able to enroll yet, you should still attend this week.  Thanks!

(Also, quick note to everyone else: it looks like the post office may have lost a bunch of mail that arrived while I was on vacation last week.  I've been talking with them about ways to track the mail down, and I've contacted everyone who I -know- was sending me mail, but if you sent me something by postal mail between, say, 10 August and 20 August, you shouldn't necessarily assume that it arrived safely.)

upcoming courses.

Somehow, it's August already, and the start of the semester is rushing towards us.  I have two courses at Berkeley this fall: a lecture course on the history of premodern science (the same course from last fall) and an undergraduate seminar.  The seminar should be interesting--last fall, I taught a seminar on Darwin and social thought, which went very well.  I thought about repeating that course, but decided instead to try something different. 

My seminar is (somewhat whimsically) titled "The Final Frontier: Science and Fiction in Twentieth Century America".  The idea is that we'll be using works of fiction as a framework for looking at social and cultural changes in twentieth-century American history.  The seminar structure is a little bit of an experiment for me--the assigned readings are almost all fiction, and the students will have research assignments to find secondary source material that puts the fiction in a historical context.  This type of seminar is supposed to help history majors develop experience with secondary source research and historiographical analysis, and I think (I hope!) this is a good way to meet those goals.  A lot of history courses use novels in their course reading, but I don't think a lot of students ever have a chance to think critically about the ways that fiction can inform historical research and analysis.  And since I really do think that science fiction has the potential to cast some light on the relationship between science and society, this is a chance for me to see how my students see those same relationships.  (I'll let y'all know when the course website is ready, so that you can critique my reading lists!) 

academic blogging.

As promised, my reaction to the most recent Digital Campus episode  Some background: Digital Campus is a biweekly podcast from the Center for History and New Media, dealing with issues of technology and the college classroom.  If you're teaching college students, you should be listening to this podcast--it's the most consistently intelligent and useful discussion about technology and teaching that I've found so far.  (Their first episode, about Wikipedia, actually effected a fairly substantial shift in my own reaction to Wikipedia as it relates to my students.  It was also just a breath of fresh air, to listen to a discussion about Wikipedia and college teaching that -didn't- engage seriously with the "Wikipedia is the Devil" mentality that's so prevalent among academics these days.) 

Episode 10 of Digital Campus is all about blogging, and was an interesting discussion, largely because the DC participants are all blog-positive.  (Also unusual in academia these days--I wouldn't say that Ivan  "Bloggers Need Not Apply" Tribble represents the majority view, but he represents a view that's cast a shadow across the whole dialogue.)  Dan Cohen in particular has a reputation as a persuasive advocate for professorial blogging, and I generally agree with him.  Blogs can be a useful venue for discussing one's work, for sharing ideas and information, for tapping into communities, and for making connections (both personal and professional).  There's no reason at all why being a professor (or a lecturer, or adjunct instructor, or what-have-you) should mean that you have to cut yourself off from the larger internet discourse.

The specific structure for the podcast discussion was an argument against anonymity or psuedonymity in academic blogging.  (Again, a reference from Dan Cohen's blog, which gives most of the context for the podcast discussion, for those of you who haven't heard the episode.)  I agree wholeheartedly here--not just because it makes my own non-anonymous blog feel less weird!  Anonymous blogging grows largely out of fear, and it's hard to overstate the degree of fear that permeates the academic world these days, especially at the level occupied by those of us who don't have tenured (or even tenure-track) positions.  The DC group, discussing the disappearance and reappearance of the formerly-anonymous PhDinHistory blog, commented that the author, Oklahoma graduate student Sterling Fluharty, never posted anything that would have seriously compromised his chances on the job market later on.  I'm glad to hear them say that, but I admit, were I in Fluharty's position, I'd have been just as nervous about guarding my identity.  I read his blog pretty regularly, because he provides an honest and statistically-grounded picture of just how dismal the employment picture is for those of us with doctorates in history.  (Think I'm exaggerating?  Go read the blog and see what I'm talking about.)  He's openly addressing all sorts of questions that I absolutely shy away from discussing even in oblique terms; it sometimes feels as though there's a veil of silence drawn across all of the practicalities and problems of employment in the academic world.

People blog anonymously out of the belief that what they write could somehow reflect badly on them or be used against them.  Anyone who's been involved with online journalling or blogging for any length of time, though, should have internalized the first rule of anonymous/pseudonymous writing: you will be found out.  Never say anything under an obscured identity that you wouldn't be willing to take responsibility for under your own name.  The second rule of anonymous/pseudonymous writing?  People will be -trying- to find out who you are.  People can't resist a puzzle.  I'm not saying that pseudonymous or anonymous writing is wrong--I'd be a hypocrite to say that, having engaged in it myself at various points.  There are all sorts of reasons one might want to make that effort, and some of those reasons are valid.  I'm just saying that it isn't a shield.  (The corollary principle, of course, is that anyone whose identity can't be verified shouldn't be trusted.  Accountability and credibility go hand in hand.  This is why I take all of FemaleScienceProfessor's wonderful and horrifying stories with a grain of salt.  If it's all true, then it represents a kind of shocking state of affairs in the social culture of the physical sciences, but unless/until I know who she is, I'm forced to be skeptical.)

While I agree entirely with the DC crew that academics shouldn't be afraid of blogging, and that they shouldn't fall back on anonymity or pseudonymity, I stopped agreeing with them when they recommended that academic bloggers stick strictly to a declared topic or purpose.  I see what they're getting at--if you want this to be a part of your professional portfolio, you should stay on message.  Not only that, but even as blog-positive as I am, I definitely think there's a line to cross, and I've read plenty of weblogs and online journals where I can't help but wonder if the author really understands that he or she is writing in public, and that they'll inevitably be read by their parents, or students, or new friends, prospective employers, complete strangers, coworkers, -anyone-.  So I understand the advice to think before you post.

I think there are different ways to think about blogging, though.  Different ways to conceptualize the process.  I have a lot of respect for the topic focused weblogs, and I'll freely admit that they're the safest choice for academics who are concerned about repercussions of public writing.  When I think about what kind of weblog I'd like this to be, though, when I think about the ones I enjoy reading, the ones I'd like to have as models, I'm never drawn to the strictly topic-focused.  Two of the standouts, to my mind, are Timothy Burke and jo(e).   The latter is almost exclusively personal--even when she writes about teaching, it's about the personal moments.  (She's also a good example of someone who I think is doing the right thing by blogging pseudonymously--it doesn't seem to be about obscuring her own identity so much as giving a little privacy to her children.)  I don't want to bring my personal life so much into focus, but I do love how she writes.  Burke, though, does a great job of engaging in academic discourse while still giving the reader a sense of the person behind the website. 

Those of you who've been reading my online writings for any length of time know that I've gone through all the extremes of comfort and discomfort with this project.  What keeps me coming back is the sense of community, and the sense of dialogue.  I keep this site going because I persist in believing that it can be a part of a conversation.  Weblogs and journals that are narrowly topic-focused often feel to me like they're coming from a position of authority, not of conversation.  (The exception to this is the topic-focused group weblog.  Daddy Dialectic, for instance, is a group of fathers who are all using the group blog to explore issues related to parenting, and they're a great read.  Likewise Body Impolitic, Laurie Toby Edison and Debbie Notkin's weblog.)  I don't want to be an authority here.  I have other venues open to me that are better suited to speaking from authority. 

show-me.

For all that it sounds like I've been whining about these trips, I want to be very clear about this: I love doing this kind of research.  The boxes and the folders and the reading rooms.  Doing it with a digital camera is new to me, but the principle is still the same.  I mentioned my mother's "history detectives" comment because there's a way in which this does feel like detective work, or maybe more like archaeology--carefully sifting through the accumulation of history to find bits of evidence, bits that can later be strung together into the skeleton of your book or article.  I can't push this analogy much further before it snaps, but there's at least something to it.

This week, as you may have guessed from comments on other entries, I'm in Missouri, at UM - Rolla.  (Formerly the Missouri School of Mining and Metallurgy, soon to be Missouri Science and Tech.)  As it turns out, I've been through Rolla before.  When Matt moved to California, we drove out from Boston together, and on Day Three (St. Louis to Oklahoma City) we passed through here on I-44.  I only remembered this on Monday evening, after leaving St. Louis.  Once you get clear of the city, it's a beautiful drive, gentle hills and trees in these hyper-saturated greens.  The last time I came this way, it was also summer, so I don't know what this area is like in the colder months, but I imagine all those trees and fields do something interesting in the fall.  It looks as though I'll have most of tomorrow free, and I have some touristing planned.

The archive experience I described in my previous entry isn't a universal one--it's the most common experience I've had, but there's a second type as well.  The Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan is a lovely, well-funded, relatively high-traffic archive.  (Anyone who ever doubted that archives and historical libraries can be high-traffic should have seen the crowd at the Bancroft Library before it closed for renovations.  People were queued up for an hour or more just to get in, and making reservations days in advance.)  Here at Rolla, they have the second type--running on a shoestring budget, jammed into whatever space the university can spare, staffed by a dedicated but under-supported staff.  (In all of my experience with these lower-traffic places, I've only encountered one archivist who was anything short of absolutely wonderful.  Archivists are the unsung heroes of the history profession.)   There aren't nearly as many procedures here, and I've been basically working at a desk in the archive office, surrounded by stacks of file boxes.  I've been picking up some informal history of the institution from the archivist, and a little bit of workplace gossip, along with my documentary evidence.

Rumor has it that Rolla has very little to offer by way of nightlife, but that's okay.  I'm spending afternoons and evenings locked away in my hotel room, organizing my archive files and writing up my finding reports.  Entertainment would be wasted on me.

neutral point of view.

One of the books I'm working through at the moment is Mystics and Messiahs by Philip Jenkins.  Five or six years ago, I read an article Jenkins wrote for The Atlantic Monthly about global Christianity; specifically, the article looked at the different types of Christianity proliferating (and thriving) in the Global South, pointing out that the face of religion internationally is not what you might expect if you're only extrapolating off of what you can see in Europe and the US.  I was reminded of the article recently, went looking for some books by Jenkins, and came up with Mystics and Messiahs, a history of cults, sects, and fringe religious groups in the United States.  (Although it turns out I was mistaken--I checked to see if the Atlantic had the article on their website, and in the process I've figured out that I was thinking of a different article.)

I'm enjoying reading this, but I'm also finding it troubling, or maybe just slightly irritating.  One of his major arguments is that fringe religious groups attract media or government attention far out of proportion to their actual size or importance, and that the portrayals of these groups in popular culture rely more on stereotypes than reality.  Cult persecution as a mainstream exercise in moral panic, as it were.  By and large, I'm finding it a persuasive argument, but I keep having these twinges while reading, the occasional annoyance at what appears to be a blanket dismissal of all anti-cult arguments.  It's a problem of style more than content--one of the twinges came from a statement (I can't find the sentence at the moment, but I'll come back and update this when I do find it) about how some new group was subject to the same overblown accusations of trickery and confidence scams.  The way it was phrased, the clear implication was that these are empty accusations, but just a chapter or two earlier he'd spent a great deal of effort cataloging all the ways in which many of the religious sects in the early twentieth century actually were confidence scams, or at least profit machines with a light religious gloss. 

The problem I'm having is most clearly illustrated by Jenkins' description of the conflicts in the 1940s and 1950s between the US government and the United Effort Order group, based out of Short Creek.  Here's an excerpt:

"Among the main victims [of increased federal anti-cult activity] were the Mormon fundamentalists, who had resisted the church's abandonment of polygamy and maintained separate colonies in remote areas.  The major sect was the United Effort Order, which had its communal headquarters in Short Creek, on the Arizona-Utah border; it claimed some twenty-five hundred members.  Though these "cultists" were usually ignored, there were sporadic investigations and prosecutions, beginning in 1935 when welfare claims from the area exposed a system of highly unusual family structures.  The legal situation was sensitive because community girls generally married at ages much younger than had become the American norm, so sect activities were portrayed in terms of a sexual threat to children. ...

"The [anti-polygamist] movement culminated in 1953 when Arizona authorities undertook a massive sweep aimed at eliminating the main traditionalist center of Short Creek.  ...  The news media paraded the now-classic charges of cult abuses, stressing "child brides" and "white slavery," and promising to save the "numerous women who were forced into the cult's bizarre system against their will."  Ultimately, over a hundred defendents stood trial in a mass prosecution that was billed as an epic cult trial.  Still, the purge failed to eliminate the practice of polygamy, and the harrowing images of children being dragged from caring if unorthodox families created a backlash."

That backlash essentially guaranteed that the federal government would adopt a relatively hands-off policy towards the group at Short Creek, now called Colorado City, and other similar communities.  Colorado City figures promimently in Under the Banner of Heaven, Jon Krakauer's book about Mormon fundamentalists.  One of the stories Krakauer tells is that of Flora Jessop and her sister Ruby.

"[Flora] Jessop grew up in Colorado City as one of twenty-eight siblings in a polygamous family.  When she was fourteen she filed sexual abuse charges against the family patriarch, her fundamentalist father, but the judge presumed she was lying and dismissed the case, after which leaders of the FLDS Church confined her to the home of a relative for two years.  ...  When she was sixteen, church authorities gave her a choice: "They told me I had to either marry this guy they'd picked for me -- one of my dad's brother's sons -- or be committed to the state mental hospital," says Jessop.  She opted for the arranged marriage and then fled both the marriage and Colorado City at the first opportunity." 

Krakauer goes on to talk about Ruby Jessop, who was forced to marry at the age of fourteen, raped by her new husband, and kept locked up in an uncle's house when she was caught trying to leave Colorado City.  By the time Flora was able to convince the state child protective services to take the case seriously, Ruby was insisting (when interviewed in front of her family members) that she was happy and nothing was wrong. 

It sounds sensationalist, pairing the Jessops with Jenkins' analysis of the 1953 raids.  I know that it sounds like an appeal to emotion rather than to reasoned historical discussion, but that's almost my point.  I don't doubt Jenkins' larger argument, that the public reactions to fringe or cult groups are often based on something other than the reality of life within those groups.  Not all groups are as bad or as dangerous as they're portrayed to be.  But I think there's a balance to be struck, between deflating the moral panic and acknowledging the actual negative aspects.  The Krakauer book is a good comparison here, because one of the things it does brilliantly is shine a light on some of the darker aspects of the FLDS (and of the history of both the FLDS and the Mormon mainstream it branched off from) in a way that critiques and analyzes but pulls back just shy of outright moral condemnation.  It's almost as though Jenkins is trying so hard to not pass judgment that he steps back from acknowledging all of the relevant facts.

This is unfair, what I'm doing here.  (And not just because Krakauer, doing a mixture of journalism and history, was free of the kind of stylistic constraints that Jenkins, doing academic history, no doubt felt bound by.  Those stylistic constraints are themselves the subject of another post, someday.)  Jenkins is trying to do something very specific in his book--he's not interested in the darker aspects of the groups he's studying, except insofar as those darker aspects relate to the public perception.  And it's not a bad book at all--it's actually really interesting.  I'm picking up a lot of great information about spiritualist trends in the United States, some fascinating details about things like the Foursquare Gospel and the early theology of Nation of Islam and the context of those yoga sessions I'd heard about in William James's Cambridge.  If you look just at the point that Jenkins was trying to make, the book is a success.  It's not his fault that I sometimes want to be reading a different book, one that does a different kind of analysis.

Or is it really that unfair of me?  Look, I bring topics to the weblog when I want to discuss them.  I don't have a clean and articulate conclusion--I don't have a position paper, I just have a set of questions.  And here, the questions have to do with what the author's responsibilities are in a situation like this.  The real focus of the book is the public portrayal of cult groups, not the actual beliefs and practices of cult groups.  But I'm troubled by the way in which he seems to be ignoring (or just downplaying) certain practices that must, I would think, be relevant to a reasoned analysis of the public portrayal.  To go back to the Short Creek example: the federal government accused the Short Creek community of child sexual abuse and other kinds of "deviant" or illegal sexual practices.  Throughout the book, Jenkins talks about incident after incident where some fringe or cult group was accused, either by the government or the media, of deviant or illegal sexual practices.  In terms of his broader argument, he's pretty persuasive on the point that the accusations of sexual deviance are just part-and-parcel of the public fear of non-mainstream religious groups.  In the portrayal of the Short Creek raids, it's as though he's (implicitly) asserting that the accusation themselves are what's interesting and important, that the truth or falsity of the accusations is irrelevant. 

I think it might actually be very relevant, though--if you accuse someone of something that isn't true, then the accusation probably speaks mainly to your own situation.  If you accuse someone of something that -is- true, though, then your accusation might or might not be a reflection of your situation.  If the people at Short Creek really were engaging in the sexual abuse of children, then the fact of the accusations might be meaningless in terms of historical analysis. 

Another side of the problem: Krakauer and Jenkins are both, on some level, doing the same thing.  They're taking something that's generally accepted to be "strange" (for Krakauer, Mormon fundamentalism; for Jenkins, religious fringe groups in general) and analyzing how closely it relates to something "normal" (in both cases, mainstream religion in general).   In the case of the Krakauer book, he uses the juxtaposition to make the "normal" seem a little more strange--the courtroom chapter, with the back-and-forth as to whether self-styled fundamentalist prophet (and murderer) Ron Lafferty could be considered legally insane on the basis of his religious beliefs, has some of the most skillful analysis of the relationship between religious and secular belief that I've seen in a while.  In contrast, Jenkins is trying to use the juxtaposition to make the "strange" more normal, and while I see the value in that, I'm not sure it's always the right move.  It's one of those rhetorical moves that I think is designed to demonstrate objectivity, but it's a false objectivity--presenting everything as equally "normal" does, in fact, involve an implicit value judgement.