As a member of generation-fucked, I find these types of arguments frustrating. Let me rephrase that. I find them god-damn fucking frustrating. I encounter them mostly from academics, who make some series of arguments about why no one should follow them into graduate school. All the reasons why people say it is a bad idea to go into grad school (terrible job market, no social respect, you will simply be a source of cheap labor, etc…) are all true, of course, but turning them into reasons why you shouldn’t go into grad school misses the point.

Think about it this way: would any good progressive look out across the Rust Belt in 1985, fold their arms, and say (with a certain self-satisfied air of regret), “well I’ve always told Youngstown high school graduates that they shouldn’t go into the steel industry.”

Of course not. They would blame union-busting, and off-shoring, and leveraged buy-outs, and Reagan, and everything else. But they wouldn’t shift the blame onto the workers themselves, who should have known better than to go into that industry.

Obviously people who are considering a PhD or JD have more options than a steel worker did, but anyone who thinks that recent college graduates are just overflowing with good choices is just revealing their own generational entitlement (defined, for the purpose of this post, as anyone who came of age before the country went to the total shitter, especially those who took advantage of that non-shittiness to get good public education, and then gleefully grabbed up all those fun tax cuts and cushy tenured jobs).

What, prey tell, are those would-be English PhDs supposed to do? Journalism? Ha! We know they can’t do law school! Publishing? Not even worth joking about. Secondary school teaching? Not now, after NCLB/Michele Rhee/budget cuts/TFA/Scott Walker have all had a go at teachers. People don’t have interchangeable skills, (we all can’t just smoothly transition from excelling at languages since 7th grade into a career as a chemical engineer) and those of us who hoped to make a living on our writing, thinking, teaching, arguing, etc… don’t have a ton of options these days.

The problem with the “no one should go to grad school” articles are that they, unconsciously or not, shift the blame for the endemic joblessness onto the most vulnerable, those who are, or will soon be, unemployed. This is especially pernicious when these arguments come from tenured faculty who should be exactly the ones who have the greatest responsibility to try to fix the Academy. Implicitly, they accept conservative narratives about individual agency within capitalism. Rather than fight the real enemy (the corporate administrators, the Tea Party Governors, neoliberalism, etc…), they turn it into a moralistic argument about what some 22 year old should be doing. It all becomes a way to justify to themselves why they aren’t helping out the grad student union, or marching with OWS, or challenging their University President.

Now, don’t get me wrong, it often is a terrible idea to go to graduate school. It is generally a terrible idea to be young right now. But let’s not blame some poor kid who wants to dream that he might not have to be a barista for the rest of his life. The people we should be paying attention to are the university presidents, and politicians, and think tank “intellectuals” and everyone else who is destroying our educational system and our economy.

 In line with our series of three posts on affirmative action, I thought I would mention this cool new book that just came out called “Too Asian?” Racism, Privilege and Post-Secondary Education. The title is a response to Canada’s Maclean’s magazine article “Too Asian?” from 2010. It just so happens that I contributed the second chapter, “Asians and Affirmative Action on Campus: An Historical Canada–US Comparison.” That chapter came out of this blog post. Here’s the blurb on the book:

The now notorious Maclean’s article “’Too Asian?’” from the magazine’s 2010 campus issue has sparked a national furor about race in Canadian higher education. Since the founding of the federal policy of multiculturalism, Canadians have prided themselves on their ability to integrate diversity into a broader multicultural environment, but the often heated discussions about race point to fissures in this national project. This collection uses the controversy about the Maclean’s article as a flashpoint to interrogate issues about race and representation on Canadian campuses and what it means for students and learning across the country.

Anyhow, if you’re interested in buying the book, you can do so at this link.

Affirmative Action got its start in the 1970s as a conservative program that had the support of the Republican administration of Richard Nixon. A combination of the civil rights movement call for change and black student led protest for increased access to majority white college campuses provided the context for the implementation of affirmative action. The purpose of the program was to increase the number of women and historically underrepresented minorities in employment and education. Despite the very auspicious beginnings of a policy that had liberal and conservative support, the backlash began soon thereafter. During the 1970s, the main criticism came from supporters of a so-called colorblind policy.  The current day post racial critique of affirmative action is colorblindness that has been updated and repackaged for the new millennium. Despite its seemingly neutral and laudatory goals, the true purpose of post racialism is to undermine a program that is essential for continued opportunities for people of color.

The 1970s laid the foundation to the eventual conservative political ascendancy that was deeply critical of the racial advancements of the civil rights movement.  The right was able to complete a bit of historic revisionism in embracing the “good” 1960s ideology of colorblindness. They shaped a new racial narrative by employing civil rights rhetoric to critique and attempt to dismantle a program that provided for racial progress. This sort of political positioning was a brilliant and cynical element of the conservative battle against affirmative action. They claimed the unassailable moral high ground while advocating for the policy’s demise.It is perhaps unremarkable that the Republicans soon reversed their position and led the political fight to end the program. The 1978 case of Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, denied the constitutionality of an explicit racial quota system in admission. The Bakke decision was a measured victory for opponents of affirmative action.  Harvard University’s amicus brief was instrumental in the shaping of the Bakke ruling that left colleges free to consider race as one element in a range of student attributes during the admissions process. The ruling explicitly banned quotas and specific numerical goals for its minority admissions. Another major landmark in the fight against affirmative action was also located in California politics came in the form of Proposition 209, which outlawed affirmative action throughout the University of California system in 1996.

By the late 1990s a visible cohort of African American conservatives became vocal critics of affirmative action. The University of California Regent Ward Connerly and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas gave credence to the idea that the policy led to elevating underachieving  (and therefore undeserving) students of color for admission to elite institutions. These were the “affirmative action babies,” that were not academically qualified, angry, radical. Although the popular narrative inflated and misread the empirical data, students of color who attended college and graduate school during this era had to combat the poor national and campus reputation that unfairly targeted recipients of affirmative action.

This brings us to the present day post racial imaginings of people in all areas of the political spectrum that has targeted affirmative action. This concept reached a fever pitch with the election of Barack Obama in 2008.  It contains a seductive and triumphal reading of our collective racial past. Proponents argue that affirmative action should be relegated to the past due to the racial advancement of the past four decades. There undoubtedly has been dramatic improvement in the educational, employment opportunities, and income for people of color. Yet there are still real disparities between white achievement and black and Latino opportunities. There is an even bigger problem of persistent poverty in communities of color that affirmative action does not address. Affirmative action is an important program that benefits stable working class and middle class. Post racialism flies in the face of a sophisticated and nuanced reading of the social and economic position of people of color.  The post-racial position contains a simple self-denying ordinance: if we do not talk about race, perhaps it will go away. It is a feel good, do nothing belief. We have to fully and completely acknowledge race and continue programs like affirmative action if there is any hope of truly obtaining racial justice.

So why, then, do colleges insist on giving such advantages to white lacrosse players? The answer:

The push by Midwestern liberal arts colleges to add lacrosse programs is one of several tactics employed by these institutions in recent years to hold on to a demographic that presidents say is central to these institutions’ identities and bottom lines, particularly as the population shrinks and becomes more coveted by other types of institutions. Middle-class suburban students, who are not only able but willing to pay the high price for private education, used to be liberal arts colleges’ bread and butter. Now they’re increasingly lured to other types of institutions. Lacrosse is a weapon in the fight to keep them

Let’s dig into this demographic that is “central to these institutions’ identities and bottom lines.” We learn they are “likely white, from a well-educated and wealthy household… Lacrosse players are desirable for several reasons, but the main one is that they tend to be what enrollment professionals call ‘full-pay’ students, or students whose families tend not to qualify for need-based aid.” Ivies, notoriously, recruit for waspy sports like squash and rowing, giving a leg-up to the long-suffering “arrogant prep school jock” demographic.

Do we Really Need Affirmative Action for these guys?

The recruitment of lacrosse players is hardly the only way that colleges give advantages to the already privileged. The worst are legacy admissions. Having parents who went to Yale can be the equivalent of a 160 point increase in your SAT scores when applying. At Amherst, a legacy is 4 times more likely to be admitted than a non-legacy. Nor are legacies insignificant. At most elite schools they compromise between 10-25% of admissions. Finally, schools like to maintain “geographic diversity,” which means that students from sparsely populated mostly rural and white states like North Dakota get an advantage. Note too, that these groups get this formal advantage above and beyond the millions of informal advantages in life that have accrued to them on account of their wealth, whiteness, and educated parents.

Meanwhile, of course, thanks to the age of austerity, black and Latino students are less likely to even have the chance to go to good public universities. Tuition is skyrocketing and the predictable consequence is that poor and working class communities of color have fewer options. Here in New York, thanks to the CUNY tuition hikes pushed by Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo (aka Governor 1%), we’ve seen dramatic drops in the black and Latino enrollment at top CUNY programs. So Cuomo takes the money that had been going to education for poor black and Latino students and hands it over, in the form of tax breaks, to rich suburbanites who now have extra cash to pay for lacrosse lessons.

Something is going on in society when we freak out about giving someone from a poor background a leg-up, but we are silent about all the advantages we give—at the exact same moment!—to privileged demographics. Those who claim to speak on behalf of a “meritocracy” would have a lot more credibility if they showed even half of the concern about how all these privileged people get an unfair advantage. As long as Harvard continues the far more unjust policy of giving an advantage to children of Harvard graduates, I will never take seriously a critique of race-based affirmative action.

My point with all of this is to highlight the power of definition. When admissions offices take race into consideration it is defined as “affirmative-action” and therefore a betrayal of American ideals of meritocracy; when they take where your parents went to school into consideration it is simply a legacy admission, protecting the unique “traditions” of each school. Schools take lots of things into consideration: but somehow the act of taking race into consideration gets picked out, put into a separate category of decision making, and subjected to a separate critique and logic than do those processes which benefit white people. One of the privileges of whiteness, then, is its invisibility, as society naturalizes and normalizes the very processes that give white people advantage, sewing white privilege into the unexamined fabric of social reproduction, while subjecting to the most strict and withering examination any systems that try to remedy existing inequality by benefiting black or Hispanic students.

So with this in mind, let’s take a look at race and graduate school. In 2009, 4.9% of all doctorates went to black graduates and 3.7% went to Hispanic students. For both groups that is about 1/3 of what their general population suggests should be the case. Although women come closer to parity, they still only comprise 47% of phds, despite comprising a higher percentage of undergraduates. Clearly we are not in a nation where Affirmative Action has run amuck.

Outside of a handful of disciplines in the humanities, most grad programs are shockingly undiverse. Economics programs, for instance, are both heavily white and heavily male (.73% of PhDs awarded in 2009 in economics went to black students, 1.46% went to Hispanic students. About 2/3rd of econ PhDs are men, perhaps part of the reason the field is so enamored of autistic math-oriented modeling). My university, NYU, lists 7 tenured or tenure track professors of economics who are women; this comprises 13% of the 55 professors in the department.

The sciences do have a lot of Asian-American PhD students, but only 2.9% of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) PhDs go to African-Americans. (Remember this when economists talk about whether their field is a science; it’s not, in fact its much more racist.). Given that 67% of all PhDs in the nation go to those in the STEM fields, you can see that African-Americans and Hispanics are in fact dramatically underrepresented in academia overall.

Perhaps the worst offenders, when it comes to diversity, are philosophy departments, which are remarkably white and male. One study found only 16% of academic philosophers were women and another showed that a shocking 1% of academic philosophers were black. NYU has one of the most prestigious philosophy departments in the world, yet only 6 out of the 36 professors on their website are women (16.7%). As an undergrad, my girlfriend was repeatedly dissuaded from applying to philosophy PhD programs because she was told that it would simply be much harder as a woman to flourish in such a program. Philosophy is especially interesting, because unlike the sciences, it can’t (or shouldn’t) hide behind the formalism of quantitative standardized test scores to explain its lack of diversity; like the other humanities, it supposedly studies more abstract and less measurable ideals of critical thought and intellectual creativity and could sorely use engagement with other perspectives.

It’s hard not to see these numbers and suspect that there are processes of exclusion—formal or informal, conscious or unconscious—going on that are keeping some departments from being particularly diverse. For instance, one study examining why there are so few women in the sciences concluded that who students see teaching matters a great deal: women who only see men teaching Chemistry are less likely to stick with the discipline or find mentors there. Similar processes, no doubt, occur with race. Until those disciplines make exerted efforts to promote professors who are women, black, or Latino, students will never see professors who look like themselves. Thus inequality replicates itself.

The only really diverse PhD programs are in parts of the humanities, like history, English, American studies, cinema studies, etc…, where black and Hispanic students make up a significant percentage of the PhD students.

I suspect most of the readers of this blog belong to this world of the humanities, so we probably overestimate academia’s diversity. But the humanities are actually a tiny bit of university life, accounting for less than 10% of all PhDs. And while there are a small handful of programs within the humanities like Chicano studies, or African studies, that recruit high percentages of minority students, they are at least partly balanced out by (white) ethnic studies programs that recruit almost no students of color. NYU has an Irish studies, a French studies, a Hebrew and Judaic Studies, and a German House. Unsurprisingly, white applicants compete with few students of color in these departments.

Given the differences in integration between departments, we have to look at what happens not on the individual level, but between departments, when University and Federal decision makers allot funds. It is certainly true at NYU, and I suspect at most places, that those departments with the most money for their graduate students and for new hires, are also departments with the least racial diversity. Economics PhDs get paid more than English PhDs; Science ones more than humanities ones. And the jobs crisis has not hit the sciences and the (profitable) social sciences like Econ nearly as much as it has hit the humanities and (non-profitable) social sciences like sociology.

Keep this in mind as humanities departments get shuttered, and states instead push math and science. Normally the justification for this is that science and math are more profitable, implying that these changes are the result of neutral market logic. But these “profitable” sciences only exist thanks to massive and generous Federal subsidies. Take a look at Harvard’s financial report: the school took in $686 million dollars from the Federal Government just last year, the vast majority of which went to the STEM research. Meanwhile the National Endowment for the Humanities gets about 3% of the funding that the National Science Foundation gets. And most of that humanities money goes not to universities, but to museums, historical societies, and the like. Given that black and Hispanic students are much more likely to prosper in the humanities, this discrepancy in Federal funding has obvious racial connotations.

The point is this: it is not neutral market-logic at play reducing funding for the (racially-diverse) humanities, but rather, in large part, the conscious decisions of Federal and state policy makers. Again, a supposedly race-neutral process (shifting money from humanities to disciplines like Economics and STEM), has the effect of benefiting white people at the expense of black and Hispanic scholars. On a more profound level, it probably also has the effect of defunding those intellectuals who spend the most time critically reflecting on social and racial problems in favor of “neutral” scientific technicians whose methodologies are unlikely to challenge the status quo.

Debates about affirmative action at the level of hiring, then, kind of miss the point. Structurally, in an age of academic austerity, the racial inequality is already baked into the cake. Debating about whether an individual History or English job should take diversity into account already obscures the question of why there are so few jobs available in those departments in the first place. Universities let individuals fight over the declining opportunities that remain, while the people who make the decisions about how many opportunities will exist seem perfectly uninterested in advancing the conditions of black or Hispanic students.

Affirmative Action has always been a bit of a red herring, making liberals feel good while doing little to address the substantial inequality of race and class that permeate American society. Nonetheless, at the graduate level affirmative action doesn’t need to be curtailed, but dramatically extended to actually include the vast majority of grad students and professors in disciplines like economics, philosophy, the applied sciences, and math.

Can both of these statements be true?

1) People of colour, women, the disabled, and members of the LGBT community face real, overt discrimination, along with structural inequalities through many or perhaps all stages of their lives, which hampers their ability to be admitted to selective schools and to compete in the academic job market.

2) Straight, white, able-bodied men are at a distinct disadvantage on the academic job market as compared to people of colour, women, the disabled, and members of the LGBT community.

They can’t both be true if we regard affirmative action the way president Lyndon B. Johnson did in his 1965 commencement address at Howard University. There, LBJ famously stated  “you do not take a person who for years has been hobbled in chains, and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race, and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe you have been completely fair.”

This is philosopher James Rachels‘ position. Rachels argued that affirmative action was not about advancing the under-qualified over the qualified, but simply about fairness, about leveling the playing field. When Harvard admits a poor Black student with a 1300 SAT score over a rich white kid with a 1400, it does this knowing that the white kid likely benefitted from tutoring, a safe neighbourhood, books in the house, and all sorts of advantages that the Black student may have been lacking. Thus the Black students’ 1300 is worth more than the white students’ 1400. It’s only fair.

Stephen L. Carter

But there is another way to look at affirmative action, of course. That way was championed in the famous 1978 supreme court case  Regents of the University of California v. Bakke. In the Bakke case, white med school applicant Allan Bakke was denied entry to UC-Davis medical school in favour of several African American candidates with lower test scores. The judges, who ruled partially in favour of Bakke and partially in favour of the university, struck down racial quotas as illegal and unconstitutional, but claimed the school could use race as a factor in admissions in order to achieve the goal of diversity.

This raises the question: which is it? Fairness or diversity? Or is it some combination of the two?

When talking about hiring in academia, the situation becomes even trickier. In his 1992 book, Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby, African American Yale law professor Stephen L. Carter provocatively states “I got into law school because I am black.” Though a conservative, Carter endorses some forms of affirmative action, though he thinks that affirmative action benefits should be reduced as people advance in life. Thus (I’m extrapolating) poor Black and Latino youth can receive benefits like Head Start and and scholarships to top high schools, and then some preferential treatment in college admissions. At the graduate school level, that preferential treatment should be diminished, in hiring, it should be close to non-existent. The idea being that eventually minority candidates have to stand on their own merits, independent of racial or ethnic background or gender identity or disability.

Carter’s view aligns with the LBJ and Rachels view of affirmative action as remedial, as a form of retributive justice. He doesn’t seem as concerned about diversity among faculty, or grad student population. The question remains, should we be?

Because if we should not, we get to a tricky place. First, there are awkward questions for hiring committees: is a Black man a better minority candidate than a white woman? This is becoming especially tricky as more and more humanities disciplines become feminized. This has already happened to English and Art History (and psychology in the social sciences). The data suggests that history is not there yet, though perhaps not far behind (though philosophy is). Unfortunately, history has shown us that feminized professions come to be disdained: think of elementary and secondary school teaching, nursing, social work, even clinical psychology.

In a sense, I’m “lucky.” In Jewish studies, I compete almost exclusively against other white candidates. I do compete against women though. But when I apply for US history jobs, it’s a different ballgame. And nearly every white person I know in academia, male or female, has a story about a minority candidate being hired immediately, or being sought out by many schools, or generally receiving some form of preferential treatment in hiring. These stories are of course told when only white people are around. This evidence is anecdotal, and I’m certain stories where the reverse is true occur regularly, though I don’t hear about them.

This phenomenon extends beyond the walls of the Ivory Tower. I’ve overheard grumbling about prestigious summer internship programs that admitted a disproportionate number of Black and Latino candidates, where the application process consisted only of writing an essay and checking a box for race, ethnicity, and gender. A white male medical student recently told me that his chief rival for residencies was African American, putting him (the white male) at a disadvantage. At the same time, he acknowledged that his chosen speciality was an old (white) boys club, and he thinks that women and non-whites would have a hard time fitting in.

So with race acting as a double-edged sword, I’m fairly confident that the first statement I made at the beginning of this post is true. Discrimination is real and must be countered. The second statement, that affirmative action rigs the game against whites and Asians, and especially white and Asian males, certainly feels true, though the data don’t yet bear it out. But suppose it is true: is there anything to be done about this? Is there a fairer, better way that still accounts for diversity? I’m not sure. Maybe Stephen Carter’s principle is correct, that diversity should still be accounted for, as a tie-breaker between equal candidates. But who knows? Any suggestions?

This struggle over affirmative action is part of a much larger problem. At major history conferences, it is highly encouraged to have women and people of colour on your panel proposal in order to get those proposals accepted. It seems more like a requirement than a suggestion. This raises several questions: How far should we take the quest for diversity? How essentialized has the female or minority point of view become that it needs to be reflected on each and every panel?

I asked a friend of mine whether analytic philosophy conferences had a similar requirement/suggestion in place. He replied that if they did, there would be no philosophy conferences. That is how dominated the field is by white men. This raises another question: is analytic philosophy like history? Is it necessary to have the perspective of women and non-white minorities on matters of analytic philosophy? Or is analytic philosophy “universal” enough that the gender and ethnicity of those who study it is irrelevant? And what about literature and other fields in the humanities?

In asking all these question, I’m forced to wonder: am I just being a whiny white male, ignorant or in denial of my own privilege? I’m not into political correctness, for the most part, but I don’t think I’m a racist, sexist, bigot. I do see race and gender, but I try not to pay attention to those categories when, for example, I’m grading. So why should I pay attention to them when putting together an academic panel?

I’m not trying to be hyperbolic (okay maybe a little) but I’m trying to figure out where I fit in to this discussion as a progressive minded straight white man with a dedication to equality and justice, an understanding of the history of discrimination, yet also with a commitment to objectivity, to the fact that good scholarship can come from anywhere and anyone.

So there is clearly a problem here. But I’m really not sure how to solve it.

Elizabeth Warren, Native American?

The recent non-scandal/controversy of Elizabeth Warren’s claim to be of partial Native American descent has been an annoying distraction from a glaring truth: Warren will be an awesome senator, probably the most progressive voice on the senate this side of Bernie Sanders. I really hope she defeats Scott Brown this November.

But the non-scandal/controversy is also a useful example for academics in the humanities of something we’ve long known: race is a social construction. That’s not to say that race doesn’t exist, but merely to say that it is malleable: sometimes individuals have the agency to fashion their own racial identities, sometimes society will thrust racial identities upon them. As NYU historian Jonathan Zimmerman wrote on Warren and race:

this story is important, nevertheless, for what it tells us about contemporary America. Like Warren, more of us are choosing new racial identities or — more commonly — mixed ones. That’s good news, because it reminds us that “race” itself is a fiction. It exists, of course, but only in our minds.

The other effect the Warren controversy has had is to bring up the issue of affirmative action again, as Warren is being accused of having used, or as her detractors say, invented her partial Native American ancestry to get her faculty jobs at Penn and Harvard. Though I don’t really care what Warren did here one way or the other, I am interested in the question of affirmative action. Starting tomorrow, over the next fews days, PhD Octopus will have a series of posts on affirmative action in academia. Mine will be posted tomorrow morning. Hope you all enjoy.

William Cronon

In this month’s issue of Perspectives on History, American Historical Association president William Cronon wrote an excellent piece on the need for professional historians to be trained for breadth along with depth, to be able to synthesize large amounts of material and ask (and maybe answer) big questions, along with the rigorous but narrow analysis that is typically embodied by dissertation research.

As an aside in this article, Cronon wrote “William James’s provocative 1903 essay, ‘The PhD Octopus,‘ should still be required reading for all scholars.”

Since that’s the name of our little blog, I tend to agree. And what exactly does “The PhD Octopus” say?

James began his essay by telling of a “brilliant” graduate student in philosophy who had been teaching English literature at another university when it was discovered that he did not have a PhD, the “three magical letters” that were a requirement for a teaching position at the university. When the department told the student about the situation, he returned to the Harvard philosophy department and wrote a thesis. Yet James, a member of that department and dissertation committee, noted that they could not pass him.

And so James noted:

Brilliancy and originality by themselves won’t save a thesis for the doctorate; it must also exhibit a heavy technical apparatus of learning; and this our candidate had neglected to bring to bear. So, telling him that he was temporarily rejected, we advised him to pad out the thesis properly, and return with it next year, at the same time informing his new President that this signified nothing as to his merits, that he was of ultra-Ph.D. quality, and one of the strongest men with whom we had ever had to deal. 

To our surprise we were given to understand in reply that the quality per se of the man signified nothing in this connection, and that the three magical letters were the thing seriously required. The College had always gloried in a list of faculty members who bore the doctor’s title, and to make a gap in the galaxy, and admit a common fox without a tail, would be a degradation impossible to be thought of. We wrote again, pointing out that a Ph.D. in philosophy would prove little anyhow as to one’s ability to teach literature; we sent separate letters in which we outdid each other in eulogy of our candidate’s powers, for indeed they were great; and at last, mirabile dictu, our eloquence prevailed. He was allowed to retain his appointment provisionally, on condition that one year later at the farthest his miserably naked name should be prolonged by the sacred appendage the lack of which had given so much trouble to all concerned.

This anecdote hits home because I’m about to embark on a college teaching job without my PhD in hand. Like many of my peers, I’ve had virtually no pedagogical training en route to my degree, except for learning by doing as a teaching assistant and as instructor in various courses along the way.

William James

Thus we see how Cronon’s and James’ theses are related. The typical PhD program in history, if it trains teachers at all, prepares us for teaching other students how to write a dissertation. What prepares us for breadth are the the A and the B in ABD (all but dissertation): our course work, often including large surveys of the literature of the field, and our comprehensive qualifying examinations.

It stands to reason, then, that the PhD in the humanities, under its current formulation, is not really necessary to teach at the college level. I made a similar observation in this sad post on the fate of the humanities in American universities.

In response to that post, over on Facebook, my friend Liora suggested that graduate school in the humanities should function in two tracks, sort of the way that MDs and MD/PhDs function for medical school.

The idea would be that most schools offer a three or four year degree (call it an MA, or whatever) that includes pedagogical training to teach comprehensive survey courses at the college level, and a shorter, master’s thesis that could be converted into a publishable article. The graduates of these programs would teach at the college level. The universities that offered these programs would not need to have funded doctoral programs.

At the same time, a group of “top schools” (the Ivies, Stanford, Chicago, Berkeley, etc.) would offer fully-funded six or seven-year degrees, which would include the same as the former, plus a book-length dissertation. Additionally, people who did the three or four-year track at “lower-ranked” schools could then transfer into these longer programs based on their performance in the MA track. The graduates of these six/seven year programs would then be employed at the same level universities, basically to train the people who will eventually become like them.

I think Liora’s suggestion is great. I don’t know if this workable. But it seems better than the status quo, which fetishizes both the PhD and the dissertation to detrimental effect. Don’t get me wrong, I love my dissertation topic and research, and I’m going to finish. But I do this with the recognition that my project is not really related to my ability to teach, and that the current system which leaves so many people without doctorates without jobs, or even on food stamps, is unsustainable and unacceptable.

Barack Obama’s recent endorsement of same-sex marriage has brought talk of American “culture wars” back to center stage. As my friend and fellow US intellectual historian Andrew Hartman has written, the culture wars never really went away. Indeed, the Occupy Wall Street movement merely opened up another front on that battlefield, uniting economic and cultural forces in new and profound ways. Issues of gay rights, abortion access, and immigration restriction mingled with questions over government size and spending, healthcare reform, and military policy, even as numerous members of both “sides” seemed to be acting against their economic interests.

In addition to these thoroughly American culture wars, however, another set of culture wars looms, one that may be even more bitterly contested, and more complex, than the American version. I’m talking about the Jewish culture wars which are currently taking place in both the United States and Israel.

The Washington Post has already called attention to Israeli version, which has made headlines with Israel’s new national unity government coalition which includes the ruling right-wing Likud Party and its chief rival, the “centrist” Kadima. Though the pretext for this alliance is to deal with the Iranian threat, the first order of business for the new government is domestic, namely the question of whether Israel’s haredi (ultra-Orthodox) citizens should be drafted into military service. About 10% of Israel’s population, most haredi men do not serve in the military, and instead are exempted from the draft to study Jewish texts at religious schools known as yeshivas. Both Likud and Kadima, though in many ways right-leaning, are secular oriented parties. Even Israel’s conservative Prime Minister Binyamin “Bibi” Netanyahu seems intent on at the very least conscripting the haredim into some form of national service, if not directly to the military.

This issue extends beyond the religious Jewish community. Aside from the Druze and some Bedouins, Arab/Palestinian citizens of Israel do not serve in the military. A change to the law of military conscription may very well also affect them.  As Yossi Klein Halevi writes, “some form of national service is essential in strengthening the Arab case for equality in a society whose Jewish men devote three years to the nation’s defense and then continue in reserve duty into their forties.” Ironically, the bringing together of Israel’s right-wing and centrist parties might achieve some progressive reform at the level of Israeli citizenship and move the country in a more inclusive, secular direction.

This clash of religious versus secular Jews in some ways mirrors the domestic American Jewish struggle over US policy towards Israel and the Middle East. Here in the US, there is a conservative Jewish establishment, represented by AIPAC and much of the institutional, organized Jewish community, that advocates unfaltering support of the Israeli government, and an aggressive policy towards Iran and anyone else deemed a threat to Israel, including numerous Palestinian factions. On the other side, liberal Jews have formed organizations like J-Street in an effort to advance a more dovish policy towards Iran, along with encouraging the resumption of peace talks among Israelis and Palestinians.

In the United States, it’s not clear where these two sides of this divide would fall on the Israeli domestic debate over military service. It’s possible that both American sides of this dispute would likely endorse any Israeli government attempts to draft haredim and Palestinian Israelis into national service, the AIPAC supporters because of their hawkishness, the J-Street crowd because of its negotiation-oriented strategy. Yet I could also see some religious Zionists in America – Jewish and Christian, arguing that the haredim play an important role in Israeli/Jewish life by studying and praying. The battle lines, if there are to be any, have not yet been drawn.

And there is still another front of the American Jewish culture wars that has been making headlines, this time within the haredi community. Recently, horrifying stories have emerged from the haredi neighbourhoods in Brooklyn, NY about how child molesters are being protected, or turned over to religious authorities rather than secular police. This NY Times piece contains this stunning quote from haredi Brooklynite Pearl Engeleman:

“There is no nice way of saying it. Our community protects molesters. Other than that, we are wonderful.”

I had just finished teaching a historiography review session for my undergrads who are taking the exam in a little over a week when I was emailed this story about a new mapping tool for the ancient Roman world.  Maybe it was just because I had been talking about Braudel, but I couldn’t help but see the comparisons – and the possibilities for ‘total history’ in new digital tools.

Scott Weingart pinpointed what makes this technology so exciting in his blog review of ORBIS:

ORBIS is among the first digital scholarly tools for the humanities (that I have encountered) that really lives up to the name “digital scholarly tool for the humanities.” Beyond being a simple tool, ORBIS is an explicit and transparent argument, a way of presenting research that also happens to allow, by its very existence, further research to be done. It is a map that allows the user to engage in the process of map-making, and a presentation of a process that allows the user to make and explore in ways the initial creators could not have foreseen.

In other words, it’s not just a digital archive for historians (as so many digital tools in the humanities are), or a useful interactive database, like the Slave Voyages Database, that generates so much controversy in part because the user is not involved in the process of formulating the data.  And it’s not like the virtual Rome project, which basically just allows the user to see what Rome would have been like.  All of these are very cool, but it’s the interactivity of the research that is particularly cool about ORBIS.

I hope people use this for teaching as well as for research.  And personally, I think it’d be great if someone put this together for the British Empire.  Or for West African trade…..

Today is the day of the London mayoral election.  Ken and Boris are squaring off over who gets to claim credit for throwing money at London, and who gets to avoid blame for transport failures. And I, a taxpaying resident of London, who regularly uses public transport, do not get to vote.  

As I’ve previously written, studying African colonial history can help to prepare you for the weird and wonderful rules of citizenship, and remind you that there is no ‘natural’ truth to this stuff – it’s all a series of compromises and contingencies.  So in the UK, citizens of Commonwealth countries, the Republic of Ireland are allowed to vote in all elections, and the European Union are allowed to vote in local, supralocal (today’s), or regional assembly (Scottish parliament, etc) elections.  So (some) former subjects of the Empire are treated locally as citizens.  And current members of the EU are treated (sometimes) as citizens.  

Americans in Britain usually get told in this kind of situation that we fought a war and so if we wanted those rights we should have stuck around in the Empire, etc etc.  But since the Republic of Ireland gets these rights, that seems a little false in this case.  On the other hand, the US doesn’t let foreigners vote at all.

So why does this always come back to colonial history?  Well, growing up in the US, the story that you get is that the British Empire was bad because it taxed its subjects without allowing them to have elected representation.  And there’s a general feeling across the board that part of what makes imperialism so damaging is that it is run by unaccountable autocrats.  And a lot of that comes down to tax extraction again, and the idea that the taxes being bullied out of Africans or Indians were not being used to develop the local infrastructure, education provision, etc, but were being used to build parks and public works in London and Manchester.  

In other words, there is an immigrant class of most countries today that is not represented in the system in which they’re paying tax.  And when a lot of public vitriol is directed at this class, and silly policies are put into place, it becomes clear that their under-representation creates a delightful new way to ‘other’, and to exploit from the inside.

We like to think that all of the great voting struggles were overcome by the anti-colonial revolutions, the civil rights and anti-apartheid movements, women’s suffrage…. we like to think of the West as being complete democracy and of being the only way that modernity could have happened.  But as I’ve said in previous posts, there are a lot of different ways that things could have turned out (and could still), and the assumption that immigrants should not vote is just that – an assumption, not a ‘truth’.  As the inclusion or exclusion of different types of immigrant in various countries shows, citizenship, and the rights and responsibilities that come with it are invented, and could easily change again.