For mine, the money comment on the thread about Robert Walker’s riposte to Mark’s culture article came from Pavlov’s Cat:
the argument (at least as framed by Walker) is really one about intellectual turf.
[Go read the rest of the comment too, cos it's all relevant to this.]
Disciplinary boundary policing often reflects two things (at least) – firstly, the fact that the academy (and society more broadly) is characterised by division of labour. No one can really be a polymath – and that clashes with the whole fiction of the cultured individual. Stuffing opera arias or Shakespeare quotes into heads doesn’t really do anything if it doesn’t inspire a love of genre and works. Secondly, it reflects some sort of dumb-assed alpha (usually) male desire to pretend to know everything about everything, and to appear to do so. Either as a defensive reaction to being too narrow an expert, or out of a condition of general ignorance masquerading as a renaissance individual with a patina of learning standing in metonymically for polymathery (polymathematics? polymathishness?). Not that I have anyone particular in mind (heh!), but that seems to be a thing in the blogosphere as well.
The actual mark of intelligence, surely, is critical thought, and knowing what one does not know. And, consequently, knowing when to cast a logical eye over an argument that’s not part of one’s own specialisation and when to shut the freak up. And, keeping a good sense of humour and a bit of irony in one’s perspective – not least about oneself.
That’s why I found this piece in Open Democracy by Goldsmiths College sociologist (yes, of music, among other things) Keith Kahn-Harris really interesting. Riffing off Pierre Bayard’s book How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, Kahn-Harris picks up on this series of questions:
How is it possible to be culturally literate when a) one cannot read everything; b) one forgets much of what one reads and c) one’s knowledge of any book is always partial? Bayard argues that a person should never be ashamed of the gaps in her or his literary knowledge, for this knowledge can only ever be incomplete. Talk about books is not inferior to reading books, but is in fact what constitutes literacy. Bayard urges his readers to treat books – read and unread – as the jumping-off point for discussion, for individual creativity, for the examined life itself.
Yay for that.
But he goes on:
There are so many works of literature in the world today that no one – not even the most learned professor – can hope to read more than a tiny fraction; this is even more the case with regard to the corpus of scholarly knowledge in the natural and human sciences. Why has this mismatch between reach and grasp developed, and what is the most fruitful way of living with – and talking through – it?
His answers – to what are important questions – are interesting ones. I don’t necessarily agree that a “respectful silence” towards what one doesn’t understand is a radical, or a necessary act, but surely a recognition of the problem, and having an open and questioning mind which can admit the partiality of its grasp of some spheres of human and natural understanding is a better precondition for conversation than dogmatism of any kind in the absence of real knowledge.
That’s what I reckon, anyway! 
I’ve read Bayard’s book, and it disgusted me. ‘Love thy ignorance’ is what it argues, not very convincingly, and when it claims there is no significant difference between reading a book and listening to someone else talk about it, it’s not acknowledging any yardstick of the value of knowledge and experience higher than cocktail party chit-chat.
Of the many reviews the book has attracted, a fair number have decided that it can’t *really* be about how reading a book leaves you no better off as to knowing about its actual contents, and must instead be a demolition of the idea that the elitist habit of reading is anything more than a status symbol. The rest of the reviews recognise that it is actually arguing that the status perks (it claims are) associated with reading are more important than any other reputed fruits of reading, and so one may as well just concentrate exclusively on projecting an air of being cultivated. It’s Stephen Potter fifty years after the fact, at six laborious times the length, and with a tenth of the wit and sharpness.
Bayard also says in the book that he hasn’t read some of the works he teaches – it’s not necessary, since he has the cultural capital to convince students he knows what he’s talking about. But he tells interviewers that this isn’t actually true, and he was simply making a point that it’s possible to create conditions where actual ‘reading’ is indistinguishable from ‘bullshitting’. Why does he give this advice in the book but not follow it in his own work, though? Presumably because he knows it’s dishonest nonsense.
What an odd thesis [he feels confident in saying despite not having read it].
Rather glad I am not at Uni these days.
Talking about something you don’t know anything about is always foolish because you’re always going to come across some-one who knows more than you eventually. Who, if they’re not polite will make you look a complete ass. That’sw my theory, anyway. Fortunately, because I’m a bit careful, I’ve avoided that situation.
But even in areas you’ve studied intensively – in my case WW2, Australian history from 1929-1949, 18C England, early colonial history from c.1788-1792, colonial Aboriginal history, and the American Revolution, there are enormous gaps in knowledge.If one spent all one’s time keeping up with reading the plethora of archives,primary sources, articles and books, one would never start writing. There has to come a point of diminishing returns, where you find you’re reading different versions of stuff you’ve read over and over again.I’ve been reading closely on the American Revolution for two and a half years now, and even drafted a chapter and a bit, and I thought I’d at least covered most of the basic reading, or had at least got most of the available books. Then just the other day, I came across ten more books I need to get. Ande I’ve hardly started on the articles yet.The problem is of course, if you don’t do as much reading as possible, its the book you don’t read that has the crucial information you really need. At lesast, thsat’s my fear.There comes a point where you have to say stuff it and stop note-taking and start writing. But I’m nowhere near that yet. Another two years I think.You know what I mean, I’m sure, as I’ve no doubt many of you have been through it, several times.
I don’t think there’s any problem with talking about topics you’re not well versed in — the problem appears when you start bluffing. Sooner or later you’ll start believing your own act.
I felt that this article was basically a plea for intellectual humility in the face of inevitable ignorance. Rather than pronouncing that we shoud love ignorance, Kahn-Harris is suggesting that we argue in good faith by acknowledging our limits, and that this would be a precondition for better, more useful intellectual exchanges:
“Arguments that acknowledge the possibility of being revised are more powerful, more robust and ultimately more long-lasting than arguments founded on arrogance.”
This seems to be at odds with Bayard – although I’m limited here by not having read Bayard’s book, while starting with the same questions. If we take Nabokov’s distinction between “the discovered wild fruit” and “the synthetic jam” (detail/image/obscure fact vs generalization/idea/clear symbol), Bayard seems to be suggesting that we become good at jam-making.
Mate, you seem to be pretty much up to speed in just about everything you post.
I commend your inquiring mind, and like most serious older researchers, you also bring to the table the important and often unrecognised component of life experience.
I don’t want to sound like an embryonic kulcha warrior sneering at the “elites”, but I think there is an unfortunate tendency on the part of some academics, particularly in the “soft” disciplines, to play “king of the kids” – it must be exhilarating when you posit a thesis which seems to make sense, tempting to amass a following, dangerous when you do not re-examine and test the thesis on a continuing basis, but are also the one who judges your student’s work and decides your student’s grades.
Correct me if I am wrong for I had not heard of the man until now let alone read anything he has written, but Bayard sounds like he could be a case in point.
Science has to a large extent overcome this tendency, because there are fairly universally accepted protocols on what constitutes good and valid research, and the principle of peer review is mandatory. However you would be deluding yourself if you did not acknowledge that the tendency exists in some parts of academia.
Peer review is pretty much mandatory in all academic fields, sorcerer. Non-peer reviewed articles are not looked upon kindly when publication records are examined. The “king of the kids” thesis looks like a reflection of prejudice rather than an examined position on the new humanities (and that’s what you’re talking about, I suspect). Also, the sciences are rife with methodological disputes and intrigue.
kahn-harris is not just into music, he is a metal head! w00t
ignorant schoolmaster? ranciere?
“Mandatory” to the extent it is practised. It’s going to be in the “hard” sciences because in medical research for example you are dealing with people’s lives. And how often are publication records examined, what methods are used to assure validity, and how do you test a thesis in, say, English as distinct from the way you test it in Psychology?
No, it looks like a reflection of a qualified but older person, who has the experience of dealing with a bright young student (my son’s girlfriend at the time) in despair because she didn’t know whether she was following the accepted line, whether there even was an accepted line, whether her essays were going to be marked down because she was following or not following some pathway which she could have imagined, whether she had misread or was going to misread the question…try it sometime Klaus.
Many academically qualified people with kids currently at Uni could relate to that.
And what the hell is “an examined position on the new humanities”?
No wonder I went into IT.
“And how often are publication records examined, what methods are used to assure validity, and how do you test a thesis in, say, English as distinct from the way you test it in Psychology?”
The fact that you have to ask these questions should have been a red-flag for you when starting out on these unbecoming generalisations. My point is that there is very little point in publishing in non-peer-reviewed contexts for academics in any field – jobs, research funding, reputation etc are all at stake, and can all be lost if peer-reviewed articles are not produced with regularity – so your implication that scholars in the humanities could get by without other experts reviewing their work is misinformed. Now you have changed the terms of your objection to the broadly epistemological, and frankly I don’t have the time or energy for a game of stoush-football where the goal posts are going to be moved at each comment.
An ‘examined position on the new humanities’ would be the opposite of a prejudicial one.
I sympathise with your son’s girlfriend, but I could not possibly comment on her particular situation, except to suggest that by citing her situation as evidence for a general argument about the humanities, your position looks even more prejudicial than it already did.
Sorcerer,
Thanks for the compliment. But believe me, I’ve met a few academics who are heaps brighter than me whom I look on with awe, and have read even more.
Re peer review. In my experience in the humanities all articles published in reputable journals are peer-reviewed. Sometimes, they send them back requesting rewrites. All theses are peer reviewed. And most published books are peer reviewed by anonoymous readers expert in the field before publication and subject to peer review via various critics after publication, most of whom have some idea what they’re talking about, or at least know how to read critically even if threy’re not expert on the topic.
Re following a ‘line’in essays.I would like to think good academics would accept a rebuttal of their arguments so long as that rebuttal is done with intellectual rigour. Though I grant you some probably don’t.
Well, as a very experienced University teacher, I only have a limited amount of sympathy for the student in sorcerer’s story. In normal situations (ie where the teacher is not a shithead) these types of anxieties are normal for new university students entering an environment where learners are expected to be more independent than they are at school. Similarly a lot of first-year students view university as a test situation rather than a learning one. I sympathise with students who are worried they’re doing it wrong only until they have settled in – after that I expect them to accept that they simply need to do a certain amount of finding their own way and managing their own educations.
It is the first week of semester right now, and I’m telling students to ask questions about matters they are uncertain about. I would expect a student worried about following the approved line or some such notion to openly ask for clarification. And then I would expect her to believe it when she’s told that there IS no approved line.
By the way – not sure if this is relevant, but Pierre Bayard’s book is not scholarly and I very much doubt it’s been subjected to peer review. All the signs point to it being aimed at the same sort of market Lynne Truss, Clive James et al are writing for.
I know that was the case with a couple of lazy academics in my time as an undergraduate, it was no secret and it was the subject of much hilarity.
We were also familiar with the peer reviewed work of the more productive. Most of it was clear, lucid, relevant and useful for our own research and writing.
As an academic, to what extent would you say is that the current case? if you teach, to what extent do you allow “contrarian” views, provided an argument is logically presented?
Why? And “unbecoming” by whose criteria?
Which means?
“Prejudicial” in whose judgement? “Noise” is the opposite of “silence”. It tells us nothing about the characteristics of either.
From my observations, any reign as a ‘king of the kids’ type maxes out by the time you’re about 35 — absolute tops, 40 — and by then any such person has either become disenchanted or failed to secure a tenured job and therefore has, either way, left the academy in any case. It’s certainly a phenomenon, usually experienced by the coolest and most good-looking staff member(s) — that is, the ‘kids’ are complicit in handing these people power over them on a plate, for stupid reasons.
I should think it’s been exacerbated in recent years by the mandatory student assessments (ie their assessments of you), in which students have been known to give academics 1 out of 5 because they didn’t like their clothes. (I once had one student rate me a 2 and write in the comments box ‘She’s a good teacher, but she always looks tired’.) Given that these assessments are formally factored in to one’s annual performance review, there’s pressure on to go into ‘king of the kids’ mode simply in order to survive.
I agree with Laura’s comment above about the appalling nature of that Bayard book, not least because the effort involved in ‘creating conditions where actual reading is indistinguishable from bullshitting’ would probably take more effort than reading the damn book already, thereby indicating that one is stupid as well as dishonest.
There’s a very funny David Lodge novel called Changing Places in which someone invents a game especially for literary academics called Humiliation; in each round, someone names a work of literature and you have to put your hand up if you’ve read it; people who haven’t read it get a point for every person who has. At the end, the person who has failed to read the most books, ie to humiliate her/himself, wins the game. One character, once he has finally grasped the point, insists that he has never read Hamlet, thereby winning the game, but it gets back to his tenure committee and he is duly refused tenure. There’s a lesson in there for all of us.
Can I just say that in my 17 fulltime years as an academic in an English department, a discipline usually considered ’soft’ by people who have never been in one, but in reality more like a shark pool, anyone in my department who pretended to have read something they hadn’t would have been sprung within a week at the latest and have worn the humiliation for the rest of her/his career. Which would probably not have been very long.
“Re following a ‘line’in essays.I would like to think good academics would accept a rebuttal of their arguments so long as that rebuttal is done with intellectual rigour. Though I grant you some probably don’t.”
All my examples are from Nabokov at the moment, but I read that he once failed a student because they disagreed with his poor opinion of Dostoevsky!
In my experience of marking I have often accepted rebuttals, and given quite good marks to them when well-argued and demonstrating they have read and understood the material – ie the course readings – they are disagreeing with. I have taught mostly in gender studies, and all senior staff who I’ve discussed marking with take this position. This is hardly a representative sample, of course.
Some academics appreciate dissent at a personal level for the simple reason that, when faced with an enormous pile of meekly compliant essays, the dissenter’s piece may be the only one to break the tedium.
I’m aware, at this point, that we are well off-topic. Apologies for derailing the thread. To return to the topic of sorcerer’s original comment, and thus to the topic of the thread, I have to agree that Paul Burns is the model of intellectual humility on this blog.
“Given that these assessments are formally factored in to one’s annual performance review, there’s pressure on to go into ‘king of the kids’ mode simply in order to survive.”
This parallels the way that enrolments dictate course survival. It doesn’t always mean that the better courses continue to be taught. A certain amount of selling yourself and your course to students emerges. I’ve had students who were disappointed that a particular course was a far more humble affair than was implied by the blurb, which was understandable, although I did wonder what exactly they expected to cover in three months.
Seconded.
In the free and frank Bahnisch/Walker exchange of views, the phrase ‘intellectual turf’ came to mind as soon as Walker started trashing sociology. Invoking his own specialist knowledge of music immediately afterwards was pretty silly; it’s fair enough to say you know a lot about a subject, but not when you have just trashed someone else’s subject.
It’s further complicated by the fact that music, like literature but (more or less) unlike sociology, is something that all kinds of non-specialists are passionate about at various levels. Most people have a substantial emotional or social investment in their own tastes in music, literature, film and visual art regardless of how much, if any, formal training they’ve had. So when/if one has had a lot of training, experience or expertise in either producing or consuming those artforms, one needs to tread very, very carefully in claiming that said knowledge and expertise actually have value, because people get so touchy about their own tastes and views.
There’s something very Australian about all this. I think the cultural cringe is still alive and lurking.
I think you may find schools differ. My children went to a school where they were made to be independent learners in senior years. I know other schools spoon-feed their kids for the HSC, to the extent of making them rote-learn prepared responses, often to increase their own market cachet and to get as many students into Uni as they can. Then the students are thrust into situations where they have to take responsibility for their own learning.
It happens at TAFE too, never fear.
Maybe the teacher was a shithead. Or maybe he/she (“she” in this case) was young herself if she were a graduate student, faced with a large number of students in a tutorial situation, which is something we did not have to contend with, not formally trained in education and faced with a larger continuum of ability and diversity than would have been the case in earlier years.
This is a legacy of governments so worried about ill-informed public opinion and the “standards” lobby that they are using standardised tests to rank babies in Kindergarten. Also the HSC looms hugely in the minds of these kids, in NSW anyway. Any wonder that the paper chase is on once they get to Uni.
But speaking as a parent, I had to tell my pair when we discussed their post-school future that love of learning was great, but what counted with employers and the market, and ultimately what decided whether they ate or not, were the bits of paper. So do the paper first, then indulge the love of learning. Nice if you can do both at once, but not always possible.
Ah so even an unregenerate pre-po-mo dinosaurial classical academic education wonk can read and understand it?
Off-topic, yeah, well. Re student evaluations, I’ve had different students tell me, at various times, that they think the questions are puerile, they dislike the implication that education is a simple service, and they feel weird answering questions about whether they’re learning the things they should be learning. I also got an evaluation last year which said I needed to attend to the grooming of my eyebrows on a more regular basis.
With respect, sorcerer, even students who come out of Steiner schools or who have taken the IB are totally unprepared for the challenges involved in negotiating and sifting the resources of a first-rate research library.
But obviously some are, otherwise you would be failing everyone in their first year. Or are marketing issues operating here?
There is good reason to argue that so-called “evaluation instruments” capable of eliciting such a response are in breach of OH&S and the Anti-discrimination Act
Nah. That’s what the organised library tours are for.
In answer to the plaintive student question ‘Why did you fail me?’, I used to say ‘I didn’t fail you; you failed.’ It was a way of discouraging, as early as possible, the notion that the student was not to be responsible for his or her own grades.
And people say grammar doesn’t matter. Pfft.
‘… not to be held responsible …’
*makes more coffee*
“‘I didn’t fail you; you failed.’”
Thanks for that one PC – it’s now filed under “things to say to students who think their fees have bought them a degree”.
Of course, I haven’t read Bayard’s book, so I can’t comment on it. I’m not particularly interested in reading it, either, but I did think what Kahn-Harris wrote made a lot of sense, and I agree with Klaus K’s reading of it.
It’s up there with my other favourite from Dr Cat: “It’s not that it’s boring, Chenille; it’s that you are bored.”
…students… are totally unprepared for the challenges involved in negotiating and sifting the resources of a first-rate research library
But obviously some are, otherwise you would be failing everyone in their first year. Or are marketing issues operating here?
Why would I be failing people for not already having skills they’re in the very process of learning? In early work I don’t expect them to be expert researchers / critics / close readers but I expect them to have a try, and as they go on and gain experience, to continue setting their goals higher and learning from their own successes and failures. Even in thirteen-week units where assessment is basically tied to two assignments it’s possible to design those assignments so as to measure how much the student has come along in the interval between first and second, as well as measure each student’s performance against the others.
Yes, I read Hahn-Harris as engaging positively and courteously with the Bayard in order to disagree with it beyond a certain point. It’s not a technique that we in the blogosphere are very familiar with.
(I should add that I too have not read the Bayard and should have said so earlier; I was responding to Laura’s summary, which I have good reason to trust. But my not having said so at once probably supports his argument. Oh well.)
Annoyingly I can’t find the exact quotation but there’s a character in AS Byatt’s Possession, an intellectually modest scholar of talent and substance, who thinks of his own knowledge as headlights in a vast fog of things unknown, lighting up only what is immediately in front of him.
The Thoughts of Dr Cat
And I thought I was the only person who said things like that to students.
“Chenille”??
Jaysus…we need a law in this country like the French have about children’s names…
Yep, and it’s a technique I think the blogosphere would “do well” to practice!
Also, I thought it was a bit fun for us to discuss a book most of us haven’t read about discussing books that you haven’t read…
Well said, Laura:
an academic should not expect students to arrive fully-formed, with all skills; but equally an academic should be able to devise exercises (and library tours) and examples of good [and bad] practices, from which students may learn new skills or hone partly-formed skills.
Just as a workman should not blame his tools, an academic shouldn’t whine too much about the damage Year 12 did, or teh internet, or teh binge drinking for that matter…. Ladies and gents, it’s in your hands: 13 weeks isn’t long but much can be achieved.
sorcerer@ [23] – I haven’t seen the evaluation form, but there’s this possibility: amongst the dreary and naive questions, there may have been an extra space in which students were invited to “make any other comments”. While the quoted comment was unkind, and irrelevant to the subject studied or the way it had been taught, my guess is that the BENEFITS of having an open question may easily outweigh the RISKS. It may be on that open question where a student makes a deft response that an open-minded teacher gains from.
Especially if, as Laura said [20] some students find the questions puerile. And the poor young things, facing SEVERAL evaluation “instrumnents” at the end of each semester – no wonder some of them let off steam or grasp at whimsy
Really?
>
Avveroes? Da Vinci? Thomas Jefferson? Benjamin Franklin? Mary Somerville? Jared Diamond?
>
Deniz Tek of Radio Birdman?
>
As human knowledge explodes and specialisation spins out ever finer webs we may find such individuals as the Persian scientists and philosopher Nasīr al-Dīn al-Tūsī rarer and rarer. However there are still people who can excell in more than one field even if the field is within generally the same mode of human endeavour (Frank Sinatra? David Bowie?).
>
Still I find the notion that the ‘cultured individual’ is a fiction to be somewhat puzzling in the face of a mountain of contradictory experience.
>
An excess of testosterone no doubt.
Just on this.
I was reading Hillary Clinton’s bio the other day – when she and Bill were both teaching at law school, by all accounts she was the better teacher, but he the more popular. She had comments on evaluations about her clothes…
Mark and a colleague actually did a survey and wrote a book chapter on this – seeking to replicate an American study which found that women were the ones copping personal comments on evaluations and men very rarely, and that there was a correlation between dumb comments about clothes or appearance and negative assessments generally.
It’s in a book, and not online, and so to read it you’d have to navigate a university library.
The book is called “Playing the Man”:
http://www.biblioz.com/lp25763549842_1719
Read more carefully, Adrien. The whole point is that it may have been possible to be a polymath in the age of Da Vinci or whenever, but it’s not now. Diamond is open to the exact charge Kahn-Harris makes about Dawkins – writing about something that is not within his area of expertise but ignoring existing literature from specialisations where there is expertise in the questions he’s addressing. Not that I’m saying Dawkins isn’t a smart fella, but you seem to have missed the point.
“Yes, I read Hahn-Harris as engaging positively and courteously with the Bayard in order to disagree with it beyond a certain point. It’s not a technique that we in the blogosphere are very familiar with.”
Indeed, and it is one of the things I like about doing academic work. These ways of engaging are given more time and space to emerge (and it’s not exclusive to academic work either, but that’s where I find it). Not everybody uses that time or space well, of course.
Oh I should read more carefully. Sorry. I shouldn’t've said something as dumb as:
Next time I’ll read more carefully.
Everyone is open to those charges Kim. I’m always suspicious of people whose response to an argument is to charge the speaker with ignorance of the experts in the field without recourse to actually addressing the actual content of the argument. I haven’t read The God Delusion but I know Dawkins tends to stop short of making authoritative claims about fields in which he has no knowledge.
>
Dawkins battle with fundamentalists is well known and grounded in the field of evolutionary biology. This field has been scandolously misrepresented by such as Ann Coulter and he has been personally attacked. To respond in kind is human nature. Dawkins is perfectly entitled to do battle in the arena of competing cosmologies and calling God a dellusion is something that one does not require a knowledge of critical theology or the sociology of religion to participate in. Just ask any group of teenagers sharing a spliff.
>
That said Dawkins does get a tad emotional when it comes to religion so perhaps Kahn-Harris is right. I don’t know because all I’ve got is a sweeping statement about Dawkin’s sweeping statements. There is nothing concrete.
>
Kahn-Harris makes no specific criticisms of Dawkins’argument. To be sure he’s right that this world of competing expertese in various esoterica is bewildering and does cut into our capacities to make sound decisions. But a little skepticism can go a long way. One such is that if someone cites the importance of certain fields without actually providing a reasoned argument, indeed instead of providing a reasoned argument, that is cause for alarm bells.
>
As for Prof Diamond, the last time I looked Guns, Germs and Steel was quite influential amongst professional historians like, say, David Caeser. Kahn-Harris likes maps he should try Maps of Time. Terrific book. And I don’t recall any sweeping statements made by Diamond indicating any ignorance of related fields. In fact the man goes out of his way to respectfully address and precis contrary theses regarding his arguments. Something I don’t see much of these days.
>
Hahn-Harris’s argument that one cannot become an expert in the fields of, say, astrophysics and paleoanthropology, hence the fading of polymaths like Da Vinci has a point. But the existence of generalists becomes more important not less in a world stuffed with ever more specialised fields of expertese. To be such one doesn’t need to be able to analyze the genome of three hundred butterfly species in order to discuss such work, one just needs to know where the results of people who perform such analyses can be found and to be able to read the abstracts and conclusions of the work.
>
But I digress.
>
What point was that exactly? My point was something about the ‘fiction of the cultured individual’. I’ll have to paste that in my scrapbook of anecdotes for the Annals of the Allies of their own Gravediggers.
>
After all what does a Humanities Academy actually do?
I agree with Adrien about the importance of generalists: in my case reading various generalist books by Albert Einstein, George Orwell, etc was invaluable. Einstein also wrote specialist (technical) papers, several in 1905 they tell me. But it was his GENERALIST books…. and I thank him for making the effort.
Orwell was a specialist in contemporary history: what care I for his quibbles with the Left Book Club and the left factions/militias in Spain? It was the generalisations in his generalist novel “1984″and his appalling children’s book “Animal Farm”, which I found absorbing and invaluable. His “Collected Essays” I saw later.
BTW, several poster have mentioned the writings of Clive James. Do you find him deficient? As a non-humanities ‘general reader’ I don’t disdain his efforts. I’d be interested to hear contrary opinions on him.
“‘I didn’t fail you; you failed.’�
Thanks for that one PC – it’s now filed under “things to say to students who think their fees have bought them a degreeâ€?.
FDB, pity there aren’t more Ted Steele files.
——————————————————
The realm’s finest minds have gathered. The feast is in full swing; badinage fiesty, conversation invigorating. Some eyebrows have been plucked, others remain unkempt, however nifty threads are worn by all.
In the tower, a lonely academic burns the midnight oil, agonising that all will be “just so� for tomorrow’s candidates for instruction.
Falstaff sits slouched at the banquet, he is not cringing. He responds to a proprioreceptive reflex by drawing back full stretch, then burps and laughs heartily to the merriment of (almost) all.
Yes, life’s rich gumbo tabled alongside cerebrally refined consommé can induce postprandial bliss of a kind that pre-packaged stodge can not.
“Ahhh, j’aime beaucoup les framboises frais. Magnifique! Et maintenant, passez la confiture, s’il vous plait…….merci.�
A toast, all, to booklearnin’s infinite frustration, richness and complexity!
With all this fun talk of reading and not-reading books, it’s time for a little proto-bubblegum punk rock break, comin’ straight to you from the mysterious alien world of 1977!
“I’m writing about the
Book I read! I
Have to sing about the
Book I read! I’m
Embarrassed to admit, it
Hit the soft spot in
My heart — when
I found out you wrote the
Book I read!”
(Talking Heads 77)
This thread so far has been delightfully cordial and different from the increasingly snippy tone that’s developed on a few other threads of late. But signs of incipient snark have begun to appear here, so… time for a cheerfulness break! Everybody dance! Do the Barracuda! Do the Shy Tuna! Do the Camel Walk! Do the Escalator!
Okay, enough of that already. Back to your respective arguments.
– j_p_z, wondering if there’s a “Hula Hoop” asana…
Ambigulous, no one (least of all Kahn-Harris or me) is dissing generalists. Just making the point that generalists aren’t specialists!
Adrien, as often happens, you have written a very lengthy comment and I can’t make out what your main point is. It really would be helpful if you were to try to be more precise and concise.
However, you seem, again, to have missed mine.
No, why?
For a start, Kahn-Harris is using Dawkins as an example of something he wants to talk about, not talking about Dawkins’ substantive argument. It is just true that Dawkins ignores the existence of large literatures on religion. Dawkins can of course ignore the sociology and anthropology of religion if he likes, but he’s going to miss out on insights into why people believe, and what religion is. It kinda suits him to do so, but it’s intellectually dishonest. And he can ignore theology, but again, what is the object of his critique?
Dawkins seems to arouse strong views, so I’d be most reluctant to see this thread sidetracked into a pro/anti Dawkins stoush, but I’d invite you to read Kahn-Harris, not argue against what you think he’s saying.
I think the test of a well-read person is to be able to use Dawkin’s and Coulter’s names in the same paragraph but to never be mistaken as to which should be accorded respect and esteem.
I think the tension between specialists and generalists will always be with us, Kim. You ain’t dissed dem guys, but others hev!!
Dr Jacoby in Chronicle of Higher Ed http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i18/18b00501.htm
“the test of a well-read person is to be able to use Dawkin’s and Coulter’s names in the same paragraph but to never be mistaken as to which should be accorded respect and esteem.”
That’s a trick question, right? Clever.
I was going to mention Lodge’s ‘Humiliation’, but I see you got there first, Pav!
I love his description of the way it sets two contradictory impulses at war amoung the acas. Hehe.
Me, Ive never read any Habermas. No intention of doing so either.
I did read Kahn -Harris. I think I’ve made that very clear, I’ve addressed his points. He could’ve cited one example where Dawkin’s ignorance would’ve been clarified by the knowledge of theology or whatever. Instead he’s criticizing his sweeping statement by making a sweeping statement. He makes some good points too.
>
#38 in point form:
What was I trying to say about that I wonder? I’m sure it wasn’t important or even relevant. See I miss the point. I should sht up and listen to people who’ve got a PhD. What do I think this is? It’s not one of those pissy little undisciplined fields where some schmo works at a patent office in Geneva can write three bits of something and change human cosmology forever.
>
Shocking I mean he wasn’t qualified.
Can I just say that in my 17 fulltime years as an academic in an English department, a discipline usually considered ’soft’ by people who have never been in one, but in reality more like a shark pool, anyone in my department who pretended to have read something they hadn’t would have been sprung within a week at the latest and have worn the humiliation for the rest of her/his career. Which would probably not have been very long.
While the “shark pool” comment is spot on, for a more rigorous, real, and hilarious take on this situation, y’all should read Michael Wilding’s Academia Nuts. Wilding is a retired Professor of English at Uni. of Sydney. He gives a savage and alarming account of the debasement of the discipline at the hands of careerist culture/gender/postcolonial/whatever studies set. He is brilliant on the shockingly low levels of scholarship required to get ahead in such politically-correct charged environments.
Re the advice about my eyebrows, yes it was in the ‘any other comments’ field on a mostly multiple-choice survey of startling banality. Maybe because I’ve been hanging out on the internet for a while I have a pretty good idea of how seriously to take anonymous personal remarks. The sad thing is that this stuff goes on one’s permanent record. I do in fact have my eyebrows waxed every three weeks or so, I guess whoever it was just thought I should have done them thinner.
About Clive James: well, I just plucked him out of the air as a comparable example of and erudite person and professional critic who writes for readers outside the specialist field mainly occupied by academics, whose books can be found in any reasonable bookshop, isn’t published by a university press or in reviewed journals, gets notices in the weekend arts sections and so forth. I meant no reflection on his stuff by that characterisation.
I don’t particularly think peer review and other academic gatekeeping practices are that useful as guarantors of quality literary critical work.
Pierre Bayard could certainly be read and understood by a ‘pre-post-modernist’ (as translated by Jeffrey Mehlman, he’s got a nice friendly style) but his approach basically constitutes the most pissweak form of postmodernist relativist rhetoric. He also has a very annoying cod-freudian trick of attributing all forms of social embarrassment to bad things that happened to us in our childhood and are thus beyond the reach of rational scrutiny.
Diamond, Adrien, may have his theses discussed by professional historians and make some provocative interventions which stimulate new thoughts and debates, but that ain’t the same as writing in his own field of expertise. Like I said, I’m not dissing him. I’m not going to argue the toss on Dawkins because past experience suggests we’ll be here forever stoushing about Dawkins and lose sight of the actual point.
Lefty E, just quietly, you’re not missing much. Except a lot of headaches. “Communicative reason”, my bum!
Bayard has a chapter on Changing Places. It’s called “On Not Being Ashamed.” He says that the lesson of the Humiliation game is that Howard Ringbaum should not have been ashamed not to have read Hamlet, because as an academic he has probably picked up enough of the right kind of talk to pass adequately. “Even without having had access to its contents, he is perfectly well equipped to gauge its position within the collective library.” (125)
Diamond already has done exactly that. Most historians haven’t made that kind of impact. Respectfully I put it to you that it doesn’t matter what Diamond spent his undergrad years studying. What matters is the quality of the work. Gun, Germs and Steel is an outstabnding example of a contribution to a field that comes from outside the field. It is already influential, not to mention commercially very successful to boot.
>
The idea that ‘people in the field’ (harumph, harumph) will somehow consider whther or no Mr Diamond (harumph harumph) is worthy to be called an historian is pure credentialism. Good historians, anyone good in their field for that matter, are not threatened by the contributions of ‘outsiders’. Credentialism is the last refuge of the mediocrity.
I sensed as much Kimski.
Social theory: Give me Bourdieu, Honneth, maybe some Foucault (just for the laughs. I reckon he’s hilarious!) and the rest … yawn.
Basically, I prefer empirical work these days. Life’s too short for boring sermons from the secular theologians of critical theory.
dammit, Id rather study theology – at least they have followers.
The point is Laura that it’s irrelevant. That stupid shallow response you received, and others that have been quoted tells me straight away its owner is stupid and shallow. Does such a person belong in a learning community? Are they capable of producing work with any more serious intent or impact than a semi-literate instant message?
The University has a lot to answer for. Open ended survey questions tend to produce data that is fairly useless for research purposes anyway. It’s too hard to quantify.
And the students use the cover of anonymity to insult someone who obviously is better qualified than they are in any number of ways. I know it says probably more about their immaturity than it does about you or your teaching but they don’t know that
I think it’s time they found out.
Kim
Adrien is spot on re Diamond. In fact Guns, Germs, and Steel would be on the syllabus of most undergraduate World History courses. Diamond’s book gave a huge boost to the evolving sub-discipline of Environmental History. I had to write a review of G,G, & S in first year History. There are few, if any, single books that have so influenced the way I now think as a budding historian.
I read Edward Said’s Orientalism the year after. Said’s shtick is in many ways at the opposite end of the spectrum to Diamond, but only about ten percent as useful for the historian-in-training. Diamond succeeded much more in grazing outside his speciality than did Said.
You’ve completely missed what I’m actually arguing, Adrien. Maybe that’s partly my fault for not being clearer, but there doesn’t seem to be much point in my defending propositions I’m not putting forward.
Not all students are 18 or 20 or whatever, sorcerer. And you don’t think older people judge women by their appearance? That comes as a surprise to me, for one.
I have taught older students, of all ages and from diverse backgrounds. They tend to be more focused and engaged in their learning than in superficialities. An open question like that would elicit a polite and relevant response.
“He gives a savage and alarming account of the debasement of the discipline at the hands of careerist culture/gender/postcolonial/whatever studies set.”
As opposed to the rigorous and reflective scholarship of many of the Leavisites or the New Critics? The treasured image of a golden age for English as a discipline seems rather more convenient than accurate.
You have a very rosy view of gender relations in our society, then, sorcerer. Older students might not be so asinine as to make such comments on an evaluation form, but I’d be very surprised if there aren’t a lot of 50 year old men around who judge women by their appearance.
They may well do so…outside the classroom. Inside the classroom I have not personally encountered any sort of sexist schtick from men. They all know why they are there and what roles we have and we get on with the job.
And hopefully enjoy what we are doing.
And I did hold a “post-course evaluation” with two classes of male builders at the local pub. Lots of beer and cheer. And fortunately it was the night the coppers were on strike.
I’m sorry Kim I didn’t mean to say that you are arguing for credentialism. I can see how you would read that and I’m honestly not saying that. Apologies.
>
I’m just a bit spurious on this policing of disciplinary boundaries. Surely the issue is the value of the content not the background of the writer. The humanities will always have vaguer criteria for legitimate contribution than science. Without a higher degree in astrophysics it’s going to very difficult for me to write a paper on the subject. But if I did write a worthy paper on the subject it would probably get published. I wonder if an Academic journal in the Humanities would be so openly disposed to receiving a dissertation of historiography. And if not what the reasons would be.
>
Often valuable contributions to more generalist fields can be made by outsiders. The films of Peter Greenaway were mentioned in this salon recently. Greenaway came from a fine art background and for this reason his films are very distinctive. I remember reading an excellent piece of criticism on The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover by an architect well-read in the classics. The observations of correllations between Dante’s Inferno and the set design of the restaurant were not the sort of thing that many of the more cerebral pieces on the film by ‘professional’ film critics picked up upon. These latter tended to voice certain banalities re the film as an allegory of Thatcherism. Even the geneological approach to history suggested by Nietszche and exploited by Foucault was absent altho’ for me it was paramount.
>
For example, consider the presence of Franz Hals’ Banquet of the Officers of the St. George Militia Company in the film’s dining room set. This seemed to me a geneological comparison on bourgeois society. In the painting we have the bourgeoisie as a revoltionary, stoic new force: a citizen army. In the front of it we have the decadence of the philistine gangster Albert Spica whose money allows him to wax lyrical about a cuisine he knows nothing about and doesn’t even appreciate. Film critics, however, are not normally well versed either in philosophy or in the history of fine art and to many of them it appeared simply a pretty picture with lots of red to match the foreground decor.
>
But I digress.
>
I’m actually not entirely certain what your take on these issues actually is. But the thing that sticks is this concept of the ‘fiction of the cultured individual’. After all if it is a fiction then what is study of the humanties in aid of. I make my living putting people’s complex and/or muddled notions, information and identity into coherent, concise – if you can believe it:) – messages. My skills are essentially reading and writing with visual literacy and knowing a little bit about a great deal thrown in. That makes me a generalist, yes? Besides what I’ve just said I think the generalist is simply a cultivated individual. I’m puzzled to find that I am not, in fact, real.
Yes, Adrien, but you’re not pretending (I don’t think) to have some encyclopedic acquaintance with all knowledge worth knowing and all the bon mots (themselves often used as a patina to suggest cultural capital) worth retelling, are you? So you’re not fictional! (I think, hard to tell on blogs…)
Nah that’s Strokey. Or his catamite Greenpus.
Well there’s two points there.
(a) Is a higher degree in astrophysics necessary to write an article about it for the general reader? Think science journalism or science “communication” – which are specialisations themselves but don’t necessarily require doctoral level study?
(b) Isn’t the point also that genuine expertise in the humanities and social sciences is often devalued because everyone reckons they know about the subject matter?
Can’t see why not – if it engaged with the existing literature and debates. And was good enough and fitted in with what the editors wanted. Most journals use double blind refereeing.
Ah so by the ‘fictional cultured person’ you’re talking about someone who pretends to be an expert in everything. Well that ain’t me. I enjoy talking about nothing it’s the only thing I know anything about.
>
No but I was talking about contributing an article to a specialist journal not writing for a popular audience. It’s concievable tho’ highly unlikely that a person outside the academy could develop some startling incite into astrophysical issues. If s/he did so and wrote it up, it would like be accepted because the litmus test in scientific matters is fairly clear. As it isn’t in the hunanities, to wit:
True and it’s the bain of the Arts academy. After all there is no way of proving that Eddie Sixpack’s spelling error-ridden blog saying: “I reckon Chop Chop’s da grousest writer eva” is inferior to Northrope Frye extolling the virtues of Emily Bronte. With ‘harder’ fields like sociology or history there are methods the absence of which can demonstrate a lack of rigour. However it is easier for a layperson to become proficient at those methods than it is to become expert in quantum mechanics.
>
I’ve been reading ‘rogue sociologist’ Sudhir Venkatesh’s Gang Leader For A Day which has been referred to by ‘popular economists’ like Steven Levitt and Tim Hardford. Venkatesh’s approach is ethnographic. That is to say he eschews statistical data in favour of interpersonal interaction and observation. This kids me that I could’ve written the book. I’m aware of course that had I attempted to do so I probably wouldn’t've been looking at the right things. But it is possible that I could’ve looked at the right things and written just as good a book.
>
My book however would not be a ‘work of sociology’ it would be a non-fiction memoir. Even if it was exactly the same my lack of postgrad credentials in the field would’ve excluded me from making a contribution in a way that would not have happened had I written The Structure of Evolutionary Theory without benefit of a doctorate in biology.
“How to talk about stuff you know nothing about” by Me.
>
1. Log on to internet.
2. Open blog window
3. Open google window.
>
“I wonder if an Academic journal in the Humanities would be so openly disposed to receiving a dissertation of historiography. And if not what the reasons would be.”
There are some journals that refuse contributions from students (which I struggle to find a legitimate reason for) although I don’t know how those journals treat independent scholars. They’re not representative, however, and I haven’t encountered many restrictions on who can contribute outside of those few examples. The most part the piece would be evaluated on its merits as historiography, assuming it were sent to a journal that published works of historiography. Also, the peer-review process is usually blind. I know several independent and non-affiliated scholars who publish academically, although for a number of reasons to do with how grants are administered, they do find it harder to secure funding for research.
I should add: a doctorate in a relevant area means better money as a casual tutor, and most permanent appointments list a doctorate as desirable or (increasingly) as a requirement. So it’s in relation to employment that you could speak of credentialism, and that is probably true across the university.
Mmmmm Klaus and Kim I may stand corrected, and gladly so. I reckon that it’d be interesting to test my speculations re credentialism on a range of journals. The results may surprise us.
a doctorate in a relevant area means better money as a casual tutor
And for this very reason it is impossible to get sessional work at many institutions once you have been awarded your thesis.
Go for it, Adrien, but if my experience is anything to go by, you’d better set aside two to three months to work up a publishable academic journal article. Can’t say for astrophysics, though. Perhaps they can be dashed off in the time it takes to write a blog comment.
The idea of “peer review” in the postit so-called “New Humanities” does not make sense. When do these types engage in scholarly “research?” From everything I have read, their shtick is basically a form of ideological posturing and rhetoric. They are hardly areas that require “research” to be “peer-reviewed.” Sheesh, we are not talking archaeology, neurophysiology, medieval history, or biochemistry here.
Two to three months of fairly solid work is about right, Kim, for a typical 5,000+ word article. Factoring in casual teaching, thesis work, conference papers, and non-academic jobs, I’ve averaged closer to one per year the last few years.
Worth noting also, Klaus K, that it needs to break new ground – either in terms of new empirical research, or a new theoretical take or perspective. I’ve got a feeling some people think it’s just “what my view on field x or problem y” is…
Yes, new empirical research, or a new perspective is a necessary part of it. The research process may start with an opinion or a feeling about a field or problem, but it can’t finish at that level. You’ve got to be prepared to have your whole initial take on your objects or your texts shifted by that process. I’ve had a few dead-ends along the way.
Well, I’m about 6 weeks and 5500 words into the first draft of my first article (whether it will actually be published is another question, of course!) Seems like it’s taking forever to get done, good to know I’m in the right ballpark.
A slightly tangential aside: I actually do have a postgraduate qualification in astrophysics, but you wouldn’t catch me trying to publish in the field — I’ve been away from it for too long and I’m not up on the literature any more. Which would be the real problem with somebody uncredentialled trying to publish in the field. Not so much because it’s inaccessible (it’s all pretty much freely available on the web now), but because you need to have a LOT of free time to keep up with it all. Plus, of course, a LOT of free time equipping yourself with the requisite understanding to understand it in the first place (ie, the equivalent of a PhD). It’s pretty much prohibitive unless you’re working in the field. (Plus, you know, they don’t hand out telescope time to random people; so you’d almost certainly have to be a theorist-type to begin with to have any hope of producing interesting new work outside the academy.)
My impression is that in the humanities (where I am now), it would be easier in your spare time, if you wanted to, to keep in touch with what is happening in your field once you’ve got your PhD and gone to work at McDonald’s (where I’ll probably be in 18 months). That would be much harder in astro, because there’s so many more papers being published on a given topic. (Seriously, check out the difference in sheer bulk between an annual issue of Astronomical Journal, say, and any major history journal. They’re minnows by comparison.) For the ‘uncredentialled’, I think it would be that much harder for somebody coming in to astro without going through the PhD first, to even work out what questions can be sensibly asked.
Final note: in astro (as in much of physics), as I understand it, the old peer-review journal model is on the way out. Everybody publishes their papers to arxiv.org, where it is open to everyone to read and critique. Eventually they go to a proper journal, because that’s what all the ranking metrics measure, but that’s no longer where the action is. And there’s little gate-keeping at arXiv, in fact they’ve had problems with cranks, but I’m not sure if there have been many brilliant papers by non-PhDs on dwarf galaxy luminosity functions or high-redshift quasars …
Adrien, could I get you to enlarge on what you personally mean by ‘credentialism’? I may be misunderstanding you.
Brett, thanks for the insight into the world of academic astrophysics. Interesting the direction that publication is moving in that field. I do wonder what sort of new publishing arrangements will emerge in the humanities. eJournals have sprung up, and although many are still peer-reviewed in the traditional two or three reader sense, the turn-over is generally faster. Whatever the changes, I’m sure there’ll be a great deal more anxiety in parts of the humanities than in astrophysics. It seems like the sort of thing that scholars nearing retirement will decry, and young scholars will worry about.
Some eJournals are interesting – the new medium has certain advantages over the old (as much as I prefer the crisp white achieve-iness of a hard copy publication)
eg some Ejournals have thematic special issues, which accumulate over time, eventually becoming a sort of refereed, edited book. Cant do that in regualr hard copy.
Im not sure the academy really takes them seriously at this point, though.
On emerging publication patterns in the humanities:
The internet has obviously improved the circulation of manuscripts and work-in-progress. Researchers are putting up such work on their webpages and encouraging comments.
There have been a few new eJournals in philosophy recently. Philosophers Imprint began a few years ago and from the first issue contained excellent articles by leading figures. Another is the Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, which has attracted articles by notable philosophers.
In semantics, there is semanticsarchive.net, which is a similar forum to that of arXiv.org for the hard sciences. Researchers are posting their work there, even though much of it ends up eventually in a reputable journal. There’s also a brand spanking new eJournal, called Semantics & Pragmatics, edited by two leading young scholars, and which should publish its first issue soon.
One thing that I think this has lead to is that topics are “hot” for shorter periods of time. (Sub-)Disciplines seem to be moving at a faster pace.
Well, the sooner we move to a self-regulating, auto-refereeing code of conduct mode the better. Get us in line with other major industries.
Enough with the dead hand of government! Down with DEST!
As we know, good quality articles will survive in the marketplace etc.
“Im not sure the academy really takes them seriously at this point, though.”
It depends who you talk to, but at the institutional level I think that major international print journals are still treated better. I haven’t yet had my publication record evaluated or otherwise used against me, so the exact mechanics of this are outside my experience.
Somewhere like borderlands ejournal can be good for material on recent events/new books etc, but I’m still wary of it as I’ve encountered some fairly low-quality stuff on occasion. I’m not sure that ‘timeliness’ is always a good thing for some kinds of humanities research, especially when you get about a dozen ‘timely’ pieces side by side and without enough variation to justify the individual existence of each article.
Adrien circa 47 op cit ibid inter alia et al wrote
“I should sht up and listen to people who’ve got a PhD. What do I think this is? It’s not one of those pissy little undisciplined fields where some schmo works at a patent office in Geneva can write three bits of something and change human cosmology forever.
Shocking I mean he wasn’t qualified. ”
Let’s hear it for Albert Einstein: under-qualified, humble, clever, and willing to talk to the general public and write for us all, as well as working at the highest levels in his chosen field for about 35 years. Turned down the Presidency too. Invoked The Almighty but didn’t spit in Her Face.
Thanks Laura circa 49, I’m interested in opinions of Clive James from persons like you, with specialist knowledge. I find him meaty. I’d be worried if he was a mountebank charlatan that my bs-detector had failed to detect. Must go and check its batteries
Laura @ 49, I shouldn’t be too concerned that an anonymous, unkind and irrelevant comment has gone on your record: anyone with commonsense would ignore it. The remark reflects on the idiot who wrote it, not on you. Still, I do agree that these “student evaluation questionnaires” can have many shortcomings – worth a separate thread, LP?
cheerio
Yes, that’s what arxiv.org is for.
Not self-refereeing, but open refereeing.
(Sometimes reality is stranger than sarcasm)
The idea that there is a ‘line’ students must follow to get grades is just a cop-out by intellectual weaklings who couldn’t argue their way out of a paper bag.
I’ve stormed out of lectures and insulted the course-coordinator and chief marker of subjects for which I’ve subsequently got Distinctions or HDs. Those put-upon academics are clearly far more professional in their conduct than I!
“Im not sure the academy really takes them seriously at this point, though.�
At least where I work, you get the same points for a refereed piece in a little journal as in a big-deal one – if you can show the impact of the piece in the little journal has been greater (as is surprisingly often the case, because of differences in circulation patterns) then the little publication might even get a better ranking.
But if it’s pure snob factor you need (as in for cv purposes) then the American journal with stars on the board, thousands of subscriptions and a 10% acceptance rate is the one you need.
Agreed Laura, impact is an important factor in this. I’ve chased up information on the impact of articles when working as a research assistant, and it’s interesting to see where the heat is in terms of citation.
“But if it’s pure snob factor you need (as in for cv purposes) then the American journal with stars on the board, thousands of subscriptions and a 10% acceptance rate is the one you need.”
Indeed, and the academics I’ve worked with who publish a lot tend to mix up the two, sending ‘likely’ pieces to the major American (or European) ones in the expectation that it will sometimes take two years to get published. (I had one piece personally that, from submission to publication took eighteen months, but I’ve heard about stuff taking longer.) In the meantime they send other pieces to journals with higher turnover.
The ‘following a line’ confusion is a particular problem when teaching theories involving political engagement. I’d occasionally get blokes enrolling in feminism-based subjects simply in order to be deliberately contrarian (though I think what they really wanted to be was the ram in the paddock) and then be very disappointed — often drop out — once I’d run my usual line, which was that they were not required to believe this stuff but they were definitely required to understand it.
This was also a useful sheep-from-goats exercise, as a surprisingly large number of students couldn’t get their heads around the difference between understanding and belief.
Klaus – this article http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3768/is_200301/ai_n9169196 took FOUR YEARS from submission to publication.
“I’d occasionally get blokes enrolling in feminism-based subjects simply in order to be deliberately contrarian (though I think what they really wanted to be was the ram in the paddock)”
I have found some interesting tensions in the classroom between the different varieties of ‘men in feminism’, and I’ve had male students who were quite upset or in other ways resistant to the idea of having a male tutor in gender studies.
Yes, I learned some time ago the value of that particular distinction, Dr Cat. The understanding and belief thing is simply an honest reflection of the teachers own position, in any case. It would be rare to teach a whole semester full of things you totally agreed with.
Will you be submitting anything to Literature Film Quarterly again, Laura? I felt that 18 months was getting a bit much, but four years would have left the line well behind for me.
Well, behind the scenes, the academies just went through (an entirely pointless, and now redundant) exercise in ranking international journals. That could only mean one thing in terms of the Research Quality Framework.
happily, however, looks like Kim Carr wants to dump the RQF model being proposed under Bishop.
Which was excellent for me – as I had been predicting its du7mping, and telling everyone at my uni they were wasting their time doing up endless RQF reports for this model.
In fact, I was just being lazy, and couldnt be arsed doing them. Now I look prescient!
I know it’s a pedantic irrelevancy, but the cartoon picture of Einstein-as-outsider is so misused that it really deserves to be pulled up.
Einstein was perfectly well qualified to write his papers; he had been studying physics at the Polytechnic for nearly a decade and was in the process of (finally) receiving his doctorate. (Indeed one of his three ‘miraculous’ papers was largely based on his doctoral dissertation.)
The question is not why was a patent clerk able to write these papers, but rather why was a doctoral student with a teaching degree not able to obtain a university post? Indeed he was the only graduate from the polytechnic that year who did not.
The answer of course lies in social dynamics. Although a highly motivated and independent student, Einstein had managed to annoy most of his teachers, in particular his first supervisor Weber, for a range of reasons, some interesting some less so.
Agon in the academy!
Lefty E
You bloody star! Prescient, discerning, non-gullible, an intellectual giant. (Me too. – strains arm while patting own back vigorously…)
The RQF was riddled with difficulties and sillinesses. And yet the admin persons and Deans etc, had to take it seriously while it existed.
All praise to Kim Carr for dumping it….
but I wonder what he’ll replace it with?
Piece in today’s Higher Ed GG, Ambi – its a whole new ERA (Excellence in Research for Austraya) of acronymical excellence.
Upshot seems to be peer review, and metrics like citation data, expert review panels based on research clusters – rather than reams of nebulous bullshit about “impact”.
And well done yourself. After 10 years in the system, you do get a nose for irrelevant hype about latest white elephant.
But as for “had to take it seriously” – did they? Plenty of unis didn’t bother. Mine appeared to be just sucking up to Nelson/ Bishop when they took it on.
Losers!
Sort of OT, except this is aq book thread, sort of, but I got to tell some-one. Just finished my book review of Geoffrey Gray’s A Cautious Silence. The Politics of Australian Anthropology. An enthralling and intriguing work. Recommend it highly to anyone interested in anthropology, sociology, Aboriginal Studies, or history. Should be published in the on-lone journal, Australian Studies in the next couple of months. (Have other book reviews there too.)
Nice one Paul…come on everyone, don’t be shy. Give us your linked pearls
Hmm I wonder if an “on-lone” journal (yeah I know it’s a typo) is for either work no-one will publish or sites which publish everything
Channelling Richard Glover here…
Sorcerer,
Australian Studies is the on-line book review journal of the Menzies Institute for Australan Studies, King’s College London. They also have another journal for articles on line, which is also a print journal. Sorry I can’t lonk cause I always have problems with that, but they’re both easy enough googled.
Is this where the review will appear, Paul?
http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/ras
I see some of your other reviews in the archive there. Congratulations, BTW, on finishing your review. I look forward to reading it.
Sorry you can’t lonk either…I’d have loved to have seen it
Anyhoo…
I love the noise the boffins make
When they earnestly discuss
A piece of writing few have read
One wonders at the fuss
Some cannot help but “lecture” us
Classroom habits do die hard
Others are more modest
And others try us hard
I do suspect some knowledge wonks
Want us worshipping at their feet
Humbly tasting pearls as swine
With them as the “elite”?
Conscious or unconsciously
Those who practice thus
Must recall even Socrates
Would have dialogued with us
But not at LP, surely not
We do not do such things
Nor should we punish those who err
On minor, petty things
For Death Beasts, trolls or idiots
we can put up a shield
But genuine inquiring folk are
But fellow toilers in the field
‘I do suspect some knowledge wonks
Want us worshipping at their feet
Humbly tasting pearls as swine
With them as the “eliteâ€??’
Yep, this was my main reason for being involved in academia, to extract ‘worship’ from non-academics.
That, and the money of course.
Klaus,
Thast is the site.
Martin B #94 -
Yes perfectly true. However his PhD thesis was probably the most conventional thing he submitted for publication in that very successful year. And his educational track record was hardly an undeniable success. He was working at the patent office ’cause he couldn’t get a job teaching.
>
Outsider, not. It’s an argument. So I was lazy and dishonest.
Schwoitenly. By credentialism I generally mean the notion that competence in something requires institutional authorization and/or certification. Used in the way I have – with negative connotation – I mean it in the instance when it is taken too far, applied unnecessarily or is nothing but a means to obstructing competition.
>
Naturally I wouldn’t want to eliminate it altogether. I have encountered one or two libertarian purists who advocate anyone being able to practice medicine: degree, registration or otherwise. This would be disastrous.
>
On the other hand I’ve encountered some ridiculous applications of it that seemed designed purely to create jobs for TAFE instructors. A while back in my shit-job days I completed maybe two hundred Health and Safety courses 99% of the content of which was obvious to anyone with half a brain. The best example of extraneous certification was a one-week course in computing that basically taught one what a keyboard was and how to access a website. I wonder how that cost.
>
My commentary here is pretty much in aid of provoking a debate about this issue. I’m not actually arguing that Humanities academics don’t have real jobs or that I could whip up an astrophysics paper in three weeks. I wanted to be an astrophysicist once upon a time but don’t have the maths head. It’s the increasing division of labour. I’ll never be a Renaissance man.
>
>
I just wonder to what extent credentialism prevents more open discourse in our society. And also to what extent credentials legitimize banalities or downright stupidity. Here I’m thinking of a psychologist I once worked with who was Obnoxio the Clown personified. He was finally formally spoken to about his uncanny ability to offend everyone on an hourly basis. His response was that he’d done a course on interpersonal relationships at Uni and received high marks. Therefore we didn’t know what we were talking about.
>
Often I read the discourse of ‘intellectuals’ in the popular press and get the impression that they’re being published not for what they say (which is banal) but for their title.
Ahhh….that’s beautiful, sorcerer.
Thanks v. much!
“I just wonder to what extent credentialism prevents more open discourse in our society. And also to what extent credentials legitimize banalities or downright stupidity.”
To some extent and sometimes, would be my reply, but that’s hardly more than a feeling, and I’m happy to agree that it’s a bad thing where it occurs, and very bad if it occurs more often than I am assuming.
Thanks EC and PC
How about three mandatory Child Protection courses in three months (one for each of the employers I was working for) plus a mandatory form to fill out for each employer every time you are likely to come within a jackasses cooee of any little blighters under 18?
Haven’t the bureaucrats heard of national databases
At the end I was ready to go out and start a new career as either an abortionist or a serial killer
Actually we could access the database but to do so in our department requires an application to the assistant under-secretary’s assistant who will forward this in triplicate for consideration at the biannual oversight committee’s working party to develop guidelines for the proposal of the establishment of an advisory committee to the council’s executive assistance working party advisory unit on reducing unnecessary administrative layers and paperwork.
>
it’s simply quicker to make you do the course.
Well argued. The best one can do to be ‘accurate’ in a conversation topic is to speak as little as possible.