Ph.D. Octopus

by Danny

For graduate students, a special season has recently arrived, a season shared by no one else save academics: rejection season. (The non-romantic kind.) Each fall, myself, my colleagues, and graduate students throughout America and the world spend dozens if not hundreds of hours creating grants of different length and emphasis. Yet grants can at once be frustratingly vague yet narrow. One grant I know funds projects that study the relationship between ethics and scholarship; another funds dissertations on international development; many others are general grants that fund any project broadly defined as being located in the humanities or social sciences. In between teaching and working on their own research, many graduate students—starved for funding—spend much of October and November attempting to force their projects into neat little boxes that are rarely perfect fits. This is an incredible amount of effort that only rarely gets rewarded.

The world's smallest violin

And so, at some point between March and May (why would anyone want to know their summer plans or plans for next year before spring, after all?), the rejection letters arrive. They come in a variety of flavors:

Dear Ms./Mr. Graduate Student,

The selection committee for the Beelzebub Award in national development and security regrets to inform you …

Thank you for your application. Over 400 applicants applied …

The application pool for the Quantico Fellowship in Latin American history had an enormous amount of qualified and impressive candidates this year …

(I’ve learned that when a letter’s first sentence mentions the application pool, things are not looking good. At least most rejection letters remind me how great I am.)

A rejectee transforms into a rejector

What people never talk about—or what people rarely talk about with me—is the mental and emotional toll getting constantly rejected for grants and fellowships must take on graduate students. The academic path is already littered with enough land mines regarding self-doubt that it surprises me how little the affects all this rejection no doubt has on each and every one of us is discussed. I personally believe that it is incumbent upon graduate programs, as well as students themselves, to create an honest and open dialogue regarding the affects of rejection. This is even more important in the age of social media, where we only see the accomplishments of our friends, colleagues, and family members posted on Facebook. We rarely hear about all the rejection, and thus measure ourselves against impossibly high standards. This is not a healthy situation, and hopefully posts like this one can get the ball on discussing our fears and frustrations rolling.

Even if one does nothing more than express frustration about being rejected for a grant or fellowship, talking about things in an open forum could do little but help one’s self-perception (as long as it doesn’t encourage self-pity). I don’t think there is any long-term solution to the problem; as many characters on my favorite show, The Wire, repeatedly declaim, “it’s all in the game.” Talking about our collective worries, however, could make the game a little easier to play.

And, as I’ve said for the last decade, my year isn’t complete unless Harvard rejects me for something.

A Portrait of the Professor as a Young Man

by David

Founders Library at Howard University

This past week, I went to the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at the Founders Library at Howard University. I was doing research on my dissertation on Horace Kallen and Alain Locke. Howard University, founder in 1867, is the most famous of American Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). Locke was a professor there for many years. My research, however, was focused on Locke’s time at Harvard University, where Locke was an undergraduate from 1904-1907.

There’s considerable irony to Locke’s attitudes and career. At Harvard, Locke had to skillfully navigate between the various groups of people there: the wealthiest WASPs who wanted nothing to do with him (like Teddy Roosevelt Jr., the president’s son), middle class gentiles and Jews who befriended him despite the racist sentiments they may have held, as well as the small but not insignificant number of other Black students. Interestingly, with a handful of exceptions, Locke wanted nothing to do with his fellow African Americans at Harvard, thinking them crass and beneath him, unwilling to take advantage of the social opportunities Harvard provided and opting instead for self-isolation and segregation. This included pseudo-celebrities like the grandson of Frederick Douglass. On one more than one occasions, Locke referred to his African American peers at Harvard derisively as “niggers” in letters home to his mother.

Just how accurate Locke’s assessment of his fellow Black students was remains to be seen. But it’s ironic that after graduating from Harvard and attending Oxford as the first Black Rhodes Scholar, Locke took a job at Howard University. None other than Booker T. Washington helped him secure that job. The Washington stressed industrial education, Locke imbibed his “self-help” attitude, transferring it to the cultural sphere. This was the spirit behind the Black Arts movement of the 1920s known as the Harlem Renaissance, for which Locke served as intellectual godfather.

Locke had an ambiguous relationship to his own Black identity. He was proud of his family lineage, and of the achievements of great Black artists and intellectuals. He taught at a Black university. He led a Black arts movement. He eventually came to see himself as a race leader. Yet he was never entirely comfortable with large swaths of the Black community.

Alain Locke (1885-1954)

And I guess this is sort of the point. When I visit Howard, I find it utterly fascinating. I grew up in a thoroughly middle-class/upper-middle-class Jewish environment in Montreal, Canada. Both my parents have doctorates, my father is a professor. I’ve always been totally at home in academic environments.

Without engaging in too much stereotyping, I imagine that for many Howard students, that is not the case. Here is an environment where when I walk around, I’m one of a handful of non-Black people around, and yet nearly all the Black people around me are thoroughly educated undergraduate or graduate or law or medical students or faculty.

One of my first thoughts when visiting Howard was that if I was African American, particularly if I was African American from a poor background, I would find it very empowering. I think it would be more empowering than for a Jew to attend Brandeis, for example (which now has many, I’ve heard of possibly even 40% non-Jewish students). Certainly more empowering than Yeshiva University, which has only Orthodox Jewish men (and boys).

I remember telling this to some of my (white) friends, and they wondered whether they might find Howard stifling, rather than empowering. Too much homogeneity and that sort of thing.

But I really don’t think I would feel that way.

At Howard, there is actually tremendous diversity: Black people of a variety of origins, those whose families came to America as slaves, those from a multitude of countries for Africa or the Caribbean, people of mixed race (with any number of races), people speaking many languages, practicing different religions (or no religion), people gay and straight and bisexual and transgender, with a variety of political leanings and academic interests and socio-economic backgrounds, people of different sizes and shades and hues and features and clothing and hairstyles.

This is of course obvious, perhaps banal to state. But Alain Locke found the 1904-1907 Black community at Harvard rather stifling. I wonder what he would think of Howard today? Or of Black students at Harvard today? I don’t have the answers, and as a historian, I never will. But it’s fascinating to speculate.

by Bronwen

Poor English universities.  No one knows what they’re for anymore.  But it’s so obvious!  So here’s my handy guide to help you figure it out.

Are they for developing business, innovation and skills?

Of course!  The government department responsible for them is the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills.  (No, not  the department of education, don’t be absurd).  You’ll find them here, listed amongst BIS’s other policy areas:

Our policy areas

All our policies aim to drive balanced and sustainable growth.

And don’t forget that one of its key roles in that capacity is Preventing Violent Extremism.

Are they for improving the public and the quality of life of the country?

Again, yes.  Everyone knows that more education means a better educated population.  But what you didn’t know was that education isn’t actually what universities are for (see point 8 below).  No, universities are intended to benefit wider culture.  How will this be measured, you ask.  By impact:

1. Definition of impact for the REF
2. For the purposes of the REF, impact is defined as an effect on, change or benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life, beyond academia (as set out in paragraph 143).
3. Impact includes, but is not limited to, an effect on, change or benefit to:
4. the activity, attitude, awareness, behaviour, capacity, opportunity, performance, policy, practice, process or understanding of an audience, beneficiary, community, constituency, organisation or individuals in any geographic location whether locally, regionally, nationally or internationally.
5. Impact includes the reduction or prevention of harm, risk, cost or other negative effects.
6. For the purposes of the impact element of the REF:
7. Impacts on research or the advancement of academic knowledge within the higher education sector (whether in the UK or internationally) are excluded. (The submitted unit’s contribution to academic research and knowledge is assessed within the ‘outputs’ and ‘environment’ elements of REF.)
8. Impacts on students, teaching or other activities within the submitting HEI are excluded.
9. Other impacts within the higher education sector, including on teaching or students, are included where they extend significantly beyond the submitting HEI.
10. Impacts will be assessed in terms of their ‘reach and significance’ regardless of the geographic location in which they occurred, whether locally, regionally, nationally or internationally. The UK funding bodies expect that many impacts will contribute to the economy, society and culture within the UK, but equally value the international contribution of UK research.
11. The REF panels will provide further guidance in relation to the kinds of impact that they would anticipate from research in their UOAs; this guidance will not be restrictive, and any impact that meets the general definition at Annex C will be eligible.

So, for example, if you had been George Orwell, you would have made a measurable impact on the society or culture by creating (and presumably licensing to your university [see below]) the term ‘Orwellian’ or writing the essay  ’Politics and the English Language.’

Are they for generating income?

Well, yes, that too.  Obviously universities, like banks, hedge funds, and private equity firms, need to attract the best and the brightest….administrators.  So they need to generate income for their vice-chancellors’ enormous salaries.  But beyond this, universities can also generate income for the state.  According to the Times Higher,

Referring to suggestions that Hefce might next year raise over-recruitment fines to £10,000 per student under the higher fees regime, he said such a move would cause difficulties for universities, which would find it hard to judge their conversion rates between offers and acceptances under the new system.

But don’t forget that for both the vice-chancellors and the government the real money comes from overseas students (soon to be paying over £15,000 a year for postgraduate courses).  Of course, some people will complain.  Again, the Times Higher

The remarks will make uncomfortable reading for UK universities, which rely on international students to prop up postgraduate studies in certain key disciplines. Institutions will also be aware of the income such students provide through tuition fees, and of the long-standing concerns that they can end up isolated from UK students. The paper’s authors, Lorraine Brown and Steven Richards, both senior lecturers in tourism, note that previous studies have highlighted the “unfriendly, unapproachable and indifferent” attitudes, and in some cases outright racism, faced by overseas students in the UK. However, little work has been done on home students’ attitudes, they add.

Hello!?  Do you see ‘improving the overseas student experience’ on this list of what universities are for?  No?  Didn’t think so.

Are they for broadening the mind?

This is what academics have begun to stress recently.  But honestly, I’m not sure when they’ll have the time.

by Julian 

Scholarship and politics don’t mix. At least not according to literary theorist and New York Times blogger Stanley Fish, who has been arguing for years that professors should “save the world on their own time.” Just last week, he reiterated this point in a column about a conference he attended on “originalism,” the contentious legal doctrine that judges should interpret the Constitution as the framers had originally understood it. Despite the subject matter’s obvious implications for hot-button issues like immigration and the health care mandate, Fish happily reported that conference participants stayed focused only on matters of academic concern. They never waded into the territory of political partisanship.  As he explained,

It would be an understatement to say that these questions provoke heated discussion in the world at large, but at the conference they were not themselves debated; no one stood up to say that he was for or against the individual mandate, or that citizenship standards should be relaxed or tightened. Instead participants argued (vigorously, but politely and with unfailing generosity) about where and with what methods inquiry into the questions should begin. Actually asking and answering them was left to other arenas  (the arenas of the legislature, the courts and the ballot box) where their direct, as opposed to academic, consideration would be appropriate.

While Fish’s insistence on the stark distinction between partisanship and scholarship might strike some as unrealistic, it comes out of his broader view on the nature of academic freedom. From his perspective, academic freedom differs fundamentally from the free speech rights guaranteed in the Bill of Rights. Unlike most workplaces, colleges and universities don’t have the right to fire their academic staff because of their opinions. More accurately, they don’t have the right to do so if they operate under the academic freedom guidelines established nearly a century ago by the American Association of University Professors.

How did faculty members gain these special protections? In the United States, academic freedom began to gain institutional support during the Progressive Era, a period in which many placed a high value on the ability of disinterested expertise to solve social problems.  Academic freedom was originally designed to advance such expert knowledge. The AAUP argued that faculty members needed professional autonomy in order to remain free of the corrupting influence of business interests, religious groups, political parties, and labor unions. To advance knowledge, only accredited specialists could judge the merit of academic work: this explains the necessity of peer review.

By politicizing their work, Fish argues, faculty members weaken these philosophical justifications that protect academic freedom. If the broader public believes that professors at the universities they support promote a political agenda—rather than disinterested scholarship—the public will then have reasonable grounds to insert itself into decisions about research and teaching that had once been reserved for academic experts. The rationale for academic autonomy crumbles.

Not long after reading Fish’s recent column, I happened to come across a speech on academic freedom written by the militant historian, Howard Zinn. As anyone at all familiar with Zinn’s work will have probably guessed, the speech promoted a vision of the academic enterprise diametrically opposed to the one articulated by Fish. Delivered to an audience of South African academics in 1982, the speech implored all scholars to fight against the temptations of political complacency. For Zinn, academic freedom had

always meant the right to insist that freedom be more than academic –that the university, because of its special claim to be a place for the pursuit of truth be a place where we can challenge not only the ideas but the institutions, the practices of society, measuring them against millennia-old ideals of equality and justice.

From Zinn’s standpoint, any understanding of academic freedom that urged scholars to remain aloof from contemporary social struggles remained hollow to the core. Professional autonomy might have its place, but at what cost? 

American higher education, Zinn insisted, had historically served the interests of wealthy elites that dominated the worlds of big business and the state. As long as faculty members quietly went along their business—training the middle managers and professionals that would keep the deeply unequal society running smoothly—the powers that be would grant them a degree of autonomy and prestige. Should scholars really be content with this state of affairs?

Zinn also maintained that in attempting to remain apolitical, academics actually performed a disservice to scholarship. Under the guise of objectivity, academic standards often masked support for the status quo. These standards encouraged social scientists to put on blinders when they examined issues of racial, sexual, and class inequality. In the name of supposed neutrality, professional disciplines such as engineering and finance often eschewed questions of values all together. This kind of thinking, he believed, helped encourage the mindset that led American academics to play important roles developing weapons and providing expertise for the Vietnam War.

Zinn used his own experience teaching courses at the historically black Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia in the 1950s and early 1960s to illuminate the limitations of a narrow view of academic freedom.  The Spelman campus, he remembered, was beautiful. Ideas were openly discussed within college walls. However, faculty and students were expected to publicly remain silent on segregation.  If they had publicly expressed themselves on this issue, it would have caused a scandal and threatened the college’s vaunted autonomy. With the rise of the Civil Rights Movement, Zinn explains, a critical mass of students and faculty stopped self-censoring themselves. They had realized that a measure of academic freedom within the college meant little if it was not accompanied by the right to fight for justice and equality on the outside too. In stark contrast, to Fish, Zinn concludes,

I did not think I could talk about politics and history in the classroom, deal with war and peace, discuss the question of obligation to the state versus obligation to one’s brothers and sisters throughout the world, unless I demonstrated by my actions that these were not academic questions to be decided by scholarly disputation, but real ones to be decided in social struggle.

Zinn practiced what he preached. He served as a faculty advisor to SNCC in the early 1960s. In the 1970s, he engaged in sit-down strikes with campus workers at Boston University. In 1980, he produced one of the most famous and contentious works of revisionist scholarship in American history.  Throughout his career, he devoted his writing and public life to exposing injustice. Due to his outspoken activism, he was trailed for decades by the FBI and at least one high-ranking member of his university tried to have him fired.

Is there a middle road between the radical commitment demanded by Zinn and the academic formalism celebrated by Fish? It seems to me that academics often produce first-rate scholarship that also happens to promote a political agenda. There are many works based on meticulous research and judicious reasoning that also make clear interventions into contentious public debates.  Just in the past year or two, this appears to be the case in books as varied as Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson’s Winner-Takes-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned its Back on the Middle Class, and, Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin. The authors of these books have all received praise (and criticism) from their peers in academia, while also making important and pointed contributions to debates of major public significance.

by David

The University of Cambridge in England is one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious academic institutions. Some of history’s greatest thinkers, including Sir Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and Sacha Baron Cohen, are among its alumni. One would think, then, that a university of this import would only offer the most reputable academic awards, grants, and scholarships to assist its students. Not quite.

Take the Elizabeth Kolb Memorial Trust. Sponsored by Fisher House, the University of Cambridge’s Catholic Chaplaincy, the grants of up to 500 pounds, for the purchase of books and other school-related materials, are to be awarded to female Catholic students born in the United Kingdom or the Republic of Ireland. But wait, there’s more:

The trust was created in 1958 by the will of Louis Michael Kolb, “in memory of my truly beloved and unforgettable wife Elizabeth”, to give “grants-in-aid to assist worthy girls of the Roman Catholic faith born in the United Kingdom engaged in any particular course of studies and in their living expenses at the Cambridge University, England”. Applicants must be practising Roman Catholics who were born in the United Kingdom or the Republic of Ireland, and must be engaged in any course of studies at the University of Cambridge. Under the terms of the will, preference is to be given to“Roman Catholic girls whose parents or either of them were born in the Jewish faith whether or not such parents shall have remained in the Jewish faith”. (emphasis mine)

So, if you know any British-born practicing Roman Catholic girls whose parents are or were Jews, make sure to get the word out.

By Julian 

Do you own dog-eared copies of David Hollinger and Charles Capper’s The American Intellectual Tradition? Do you get into heated arguments with your philosopher friends about the continued relevance of the pragmatist tradition? Did you consider a career in finance, but instead opt for the much more sensible life choice of writing academic articles about the social history of ideas? If you answered yes to any of these questions, there’s a good possibility that you might be interested in putting together a panel for the Fifth Annual United States Intellectual History Conference next November in New York City. The Call for Papers has just been posted here. This year’s theme is “Communities of Discourse.”

Speaking of intellectual networks, and in the interest of full disclosure, three out of the five of us here at PhD Octopus have presented papers at this conference in the past. There’s no doubt that our own communities of discourse have expanded as a result. Since I began attending the meetings four years ago, I’ve always come away impressed with the conference’s sustained growth, the quality of scholarship on the panels, and its organizers’ tendency to highlight innovative historical work that also has obvious contemporary relevance. Besides all that, it’s nice to attend a meeting where the participants actually seem happy to be there, rather than nervous about the anxiety-inducing job interview to come.

by David

The Ph.D Octopus (image by Parsiri Audcharevorakul)

Today we launched the official Ph.D. Octopus Facebook page. We’re finally entering the 21st century, I guess. Heck, we haven’t even really decided how we’re spelling Ph.D. But I guess it’s fitting that I contribute this post along with that piece of news, and the above image, which we’ve been hiding for far too long, crafted by the lovely and talented Parisi Audchaevorakul.

See, over the weekend I was having a conversation with my new friend Holger Syme, a professor of English at University of Toronto. Holger also has a wonderful academic blog called Dispositio. And so we discussed our blogs. Eventually, the conversation turned to the horrendous state of the academic job market (as it does) and then to the process of acquiring those disappearing jobs, and getting tenure, and to the process of peer review.

For those who don’t know, peer review is the process by which academic work is rendered legitimate. In practical terms, it means that when we submit articles to academic journals, the article is reviewed by two of our peers, that is to say, by two other academics in our field, two similar specialists, who might be able to speak the article’s accuracy, originality, and importance, and to the author’s general competence.

The goal of the system is for our peers to operate as gatekeepers. They are the ones who decide if the article is good enough to get in, and the number and quality of articles (and books) that we write determines the fellowships and jobs that we get, and whether we get tenure.

It’s not bad in principle. But there are problems. First, it’s never entirely clear that these two readers are actually experts in your field, or that their judgments are good. If your article is rejected by one journal, of course you can take it to another. But the reality is that two people may dislike your piece but a dozen other equally qualified “peers” might have loved it, and you have no way of knowing, because the peers are anonymous and the process is rather opaque.

Second, and perhaps more important, the process is painfully slow. Even if the two reviewers like your article, it might take weeks or even months for them to actually read it, then they send it back to you with the instruction “revise and resubmit,” and then the process repeats itself. Actually getting it to print can take even longer. Sometimes it takes years before the actual discovery or innovation that your work produces ever sees the light of the day, and that being the very dim light of an academic journal, which even at their most prestigious are read by very view people indeed.

What Holger did that so fascinated me was compare this peer review process to his own blogging. Because Holger has tenure, he can write (within reason) anything that he wants on his blog. He can share his academic work there. And so he does. And when he does, he gets responses in real time. If he provides a novel piece of research, say, a new analysis of one of Shakespeare’s plays, or even digital images of marginalia from the early 17th century, he can get comments, that is to say, peer reviews, immediately. Indeed, that is precisely what happened in the above post. Holger wrote it on December 21, 2011. Professor Martin Wiggins, of the University of Birmingham’s Shakespeare Institute, offered comments and corrections on December 22, 2011, the very next day. Then Holger edited the post, and thanked and responded to Dr. Wiggins in the comments.

Now, if Holger didn’t have tenure, and Professor Wiggins wasn’t a nice person, he could have stolen Holger’s work and done published it with more correct information, or simply published it first in a more reputable setting, and Holger’s path to tenure might have been thwarted. After all, we don’t get credit for our blog posts on the tenure clock. So for someone like me, or any of my non-tenured (or unemployed) co-bloggers, it might be academic suicide to publish our original research out here in cyberspace, rather than in a peer-reviewed journal, or in a book printed by a university press.

On the other hand, I wonder if, in the future, blogs such as these will sort of play the role that Sean Parker’s Napster did for the music industry. If we could all publish our work, safely, in real time, and have legitimate critics respond to it in  real time, and edit it in real time, wouldn’t that be a more effective way of advancing scholarship?

This is not to say that peer review should be done away with entirely. But it seems like a community of academic bloggers should at least have some effect in speeding the process up, and ideally in making it more transparent and democratic as well. For example, suppose Dr. Martin Wiggins was simply Mr. Martin Wiggins, amateur Shakespeare buff, who knew enough to provide relevant criticism to Holger’s post. Theoretically, as long as the scholarship is sound, it shouldn’t really matter where it’s coming from.

That’s precisely the point of William James’ 1903 essay, “The Ph.D. Octopus,” that we should not fetishize degrees, like the Ph.D., but instead evaluate work, and academics, on their scholarly merit. We’re not quite there yet, and I’m not quite sure where there is. But I think I’d like to get there eventually.

by David

Yale Quarterback Patrick Witt aka Captain Douche

As a Harvard alum, I suppose I could take some obscene pleasure in the recent revelations about Yale quarterback Patrick Witt. You know, the guy who chose to play in the Harvard-Yale game instead of attend his Rhodes Scholarship interview? Yalies celebrated his upholding team and school loyalty over personal prestige–even as Harvard crushed Yale in The Game, 45-7. Except, according to this New York Times story, Witt rescinded his Rhodes application not because of the scheduling conflict, but because of a sexual assault allegation issued against him by a fellow student.

This was already a bizarre tale. Witt’s coach at Yale, Tom Williams, had lied about having been a Rhodes Scholarship candidate himself to suggest that he was in a prime position to advise his star quarterback. Then we find out that the campus paper, the Yale Daily News, had known about the sexual assault charges and been sitting on the story for months.

The thing is, I don’t take any pleasure in this at all (nor should anyone). Instead, we should lament the perils of athlete worship, which has reared its ugly head recently, most notably in the rioting of Penn State students over the firing of the late and disgraced Joe Paterno, protector of alleged child-rapist Jerry Sandusky.

I don’t know if Witt is guilty of sexual assault. But as the NY Times piece indicates from his prior arrests, he has a clear record of extreme douchebaggery. What we have here is a problem of the over-emphasis of collegiate athletics, and particularly the worship of male college athletes. These are people whose already inflated egos are fed from the moment they arrive on campus. This problem can lead to an equally inflated sense of privilege. Sometimes, this privilege just creates more and bigger douchebags. But other times, it can create atmosphere where real crimes go unnoticed, unreported, or unpunished.

by Bronwen

This week I lectured on ‘The First World War and Africa’.  My students seemed to really enjoy the topic, which isn’t surprising; in a course (African History since 1800) where so much is new to first year undergraduates, the First World War is a topic they know quite a lot about and for which they have an extensive frame of reference.  This is because the First World War is constantly talked about here.  Between high school course work on the causes of World War One, and the pervasive cultural memory – enhanced by Downton Abbey and recent BBC miniseries like Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong – students arrive at university with a pretty solid foundation in World War One history.

Obviously, the First World War was pretty devastating to Britain.  Not only did 2.19 per cent of the population die in the war, but over a million and a half servicemen were wounded as well.  Its social and economic impacts in the British and French colonies in Africa were similarly devastating.  Contrast this with America’s 0.13 per cent casualty rate (as a percentage of the population) and its easy to see why this is a topic that has a much greater, more lasting emotional impact here. World War I was the event that catapulted Britain – like it or not – into the modern age. Add to that the historiographical line that has made its way down to the classroom level – the futility and pointlessness of the war – and it becomes clear that all my student essays this term are going to be about the impact of the Great War on Africa.

I think all of this is interesting because, although I feel like I had a really excellent high school history education, and a fantastic undergraduate history education, I arrived in Britain knowing only a few key facts about the First World War: that it had been the first major conflict in which the flame-thrower was used; it gave rise to Egyptian nationalism; and it was a major influence on Hemingway.  My husband was pretty dismayed when I explained that in a lot of American schools, World War I is taught as basically the pre-World War II: the same actors, basically; the same plot-line from an American perspective (we come in late and end the war); and pretty much important (from our perspective) because it lines up the causes of the Second World War.  Obviously this is not the case everywhere in America, and I’m sure that if you chose to focus on this in college, there’s loads of good teaching out there.  But it is possible to come through the American education system without too much emphasis on this conflict.

Despite my explanation, I’m not sure he believed me until we (finally) watched the first season of Boardwalk Empire.  Talking about it afterward, we were commenting that if this had been a story set in Britain at the same time (1920), it would have been all about the war, the changes in society after the war, the crumbling British institutions, etc that are all the fodder for Downton drama [in fact, the first episode of season 2 of Downton drove me nuts a little because they just wouldn't shut up about the war! even though it was supposed to have been going on for a couple of years by that point!].  Instead, the characters who fought in the war are outsiders, are really not supposed to bring it up, and are even shunned a little for having participated (especially for having volunteered).

In fact, the big cultural shared moment that pushed the US into modernity in the way most like World War I for Americans is the Great Depression, an event that really didn’t affect Britain to the same degree.  For both countries, there’s a heyday for the wealthy before an almost hubristic crash, which brings about more equality and more social programs. A recent piece in the FT Magazine by Gillian Tett points out that the reality of economic austerity is much closer for those in Britain than for those in the US precisely because our big cultural shared memory of austerity in America is over a generation ago, while the memory of the pain Britain felt in the 1970s is still relatively fresh.

Perhaps, following on from Gillian Tett, this all helps to explain both countries’ recent behavior, then.  If the First World War is such a dominant theme in British life and education, maybe that explains their unwillingness to get sucked into the entangling alliances of European politics and finance.  And if the Great Depression is a strong cultural memory in America, perhaps the idea of austerity and life before safety nets, and the pre-modernity it implies, makes the total return to Gilded Age politics distasteful enough to prevent too many cuts.  Here’s hoping, at least.

The roots go much deeper.

By Julian

Last week, Newt Gingrich reinvigorated his presidential campaign with a fiery appeal to conservative victimhood. Questions about his past infidelities, Gingrich explained, reflected the liberal media’s efforts to destroy the conservative movement. “I’m tired of the elite media protecting Barack Obama by attacking Republicans,” he thundered. Cue the multiple standing ovations from the rapt audience of South Carolina conservatives. Never mind the fact that Gingrich had helped build his career by denouncing Bill Clinton’s commitment to “family values” while he himself engaged in extra-marital affairs. For those in this audience, all that mattered was that they had found a politician willing to voice their grievances against the all-powerful liberal establishment.

The right-wing populism that Gingrich so effectively marshaled at last week’s debate is often contrasted with a more reasonable brand of conservative thinking that supposedly flourished in a past golden age. In this declension narrative, touted by Mark Lilla in his controversial review of Corey Robin’s new book, The Reactionary Mind, a sophisticated conservative intellectual tradition has recently descended into the swamplands of populist demagoguery. As Lilla explains, “Most of the turmoil in American politics recently is the result of changes in the clan structure of the right, with the decline of reality-based conservatives like William F. Buckley and George Will and the ascendancy of new populist reactionaries like Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, and other Tea Party favorites.”

The problem with this view, as others have pointed out, is that American conservatives have been bashing the “liberal elite” now for going on six decades.  It’s part of their DNA. William Buckley Jr., the most influential intellectual in the postwar conservative movement, might have rejected the conspiracy theorists at the John Birch Society, but he also supported massive resistance to the Civil Rights Movement, wrote a book defending Senator McCarthy, and praised the fascist government in Franco’s Spain. While he could be witty and charming, Buckley was also merciless in attacking a liberal elite that he believed had come to dominate (and enervate) American society since the New Deal.

In fact, Buckley launched his career in 1951 with a book that claims liberals had used “academic freedom” as a tool to monopolize higher education and suppress conservative thought. During a period in which over 100 professors lost their jobs because of the Second Red Scare, Buckley asserts that conservatives were academia’s true victims. In God and Man at Yale he also calls for the elimination of peer review and tenure in favor of a system that would allow those who pay for colleges and universities—typically parents and alumni—to determine their ideological content: “For in the last analysis, academic freedom must mean the freedom of men and women to supervise the educational activities and aims of the schools they oversee and support.” Universities needed to be run by the people who paid for them, not a band of unaccountable academics. It’s hard to imagine a critique more populist in character.

To be fair, right-wing appeals to populism explain why conservative intellectuals helped inspire a mass movement rather than a club for disenchanted, antediluvian curmudgeons. Still it’s worth remembering that intellectuals such as Buckley gained fame and notoriety by providing learned support for causes such as McCarthyism, Massive Resistance, and the firing of liberal faculty at Ivy League Universities. They provide a blueprint for today’s Newt Gingrichs, not an antidote.