All I really have to say is that when I logged on to scotusblog at work, shortly after 9am Chicago time, and saw that DOMA was held unconstitutional, I felt elated. A little while later I discovered that gay marriage in California had been effectively legalized, through the Court's dismissal of the Prop 8 case.
After reading Russell Saunders's post at the League and the comments [click here], it was hard not to tear up a little.
There's a lot to be done--and there are still unanswered questions--but there's a time to address those and a time to celebrate. Congratulations to those who have the benefits conferred by these decisions, and congratulations to those who may not have the benefits yet, but now have stronger reason to hope.
Wednesday, June 26, 2013
Monday, June 24, 2013
Release of the ego
About a year and a half ago, I finished a BIG PROJECT at the library/archive at which I was working (and still work, incidentally). This project involved organizing the papers of n organization that had donated them to the library. The project itself was a three-year one, and I had worked on it for the last 2 1/2 years of the 3 years. I was not the only one to work on it, and as a graduate research assistant, I was not even the one who was in charge of the project.
At the time, I said the following:
Something that I didn't know until I heard about this issue is that repatriating (perhaps not the best word...."de-accessioning" is probably a better one) parts of a collection to the creator organization is not particularly unheard of. It might not be common, but it is apparently something that's done, and it's certainly not scandalous or even necessarily an adversarial process. It probably has something to do with whether the donor organization actually had the rights to the material and with whether we can all something the "so-and-so-of-so-and-so records" if it contains items that are not actually the records of "so-and-so-of-so-and-so."
But I notice that I tend to feel a bit territorial about the whole thing. I have somehow acquired the sense that this collection is "mine" because I processed it. The fact that patrons are referred to me when they have a question about the collection helps reinforce that sense that it's "my" collection.
I should know better. I got out of that collection what was promised me--a 2 1/2 year job with a tuition and fee waiver that helped me pay for grad school. And I got even more: subsequent employment at the same library, current (albeit temporary) employment at that library, a cv credit, and professional contacts. There was no representation made to me that I had a special "proprietary" interest in the collection, and because I work at a public institution, the collection really is public property.
Still, I note a sense of wanting to advocate for "my" collection and point out reasons why I think these items, which are in fact pretty inconsequential to the collection itself, ought to remain. On the merits, I might even be right, but it's not my call.
At the time, I said the following:
I do feel that I and my colleagues have accomplished something. However, this accomplished thing will not endure forever, even if we can assume that the collection is a static "thing" that has been created.Now, I learn that a very small number of items in the papers that had originally been donated might belong to another organization. And that organization has requested that those items be "repatriated" to its own records.
Something that I didn't know until I heard about this issue is that repatriating (perhaps not the best word...."de-accessioning" is probably a better one) parts of a collection to the creator organization is not particularly unheard of. It might not be common, but it is apparently something that's done, and it's certainly not scandalous or even necessarily an adversarial process. It probably has something to do with whether the donor organization actually had the rights to the material and with whether we can all something the "so-and-so-of-so-and-so records" if it contains items that are not actually the records of "so-and-so-of-so-and-so."
But I notice that I tend to feel a bit territorial about the whole thing. I have somehow acquired the sense that this collection is "mine" because I processed it. The fact that patrons are referred to me when they have a question about the collection helps reinforce that sense that it's "my" collection.
I should know better. I got out of that collection what was promised me--a 2 1/2 year job with a tuition and fee waiver that helped me pay for grad school. And I got even more: subsequent employment at the same library, current (albeit temporary) employment at that library, a cv credit, and professional contacts. There was no representation made to me that I had a special "proprietary" interest in the collection, and because I work at a public institution, the collection really is public property.
Still, I note a sense of wanting to advocate for "my" collection and point out reasons why I think these items, which are in fact pretty inconsequential to the collection itself, ought to remain. On the merits, I might even be right, but it's not my call.
Pensions! Pensions! Pensions!
Pension reform for public employees in Illinois is an unfortunate probability, but I think it is necessary.
I currently work in a quasi-temporary position at a public institution in Illinois--it's actually the same job I had as a graduate research assistant--and most of my non-student coworkers are classed as state employees and are subject to the pending pension reform. (Technically, I am a state employee, too, but I am not directly affected by any pending reforms because I'm not included in any retirement scheme, and if I were to become a full-blown employee today, I would already have been grandsonned out of the system.)
My coworkers are upset about the possibility that the state legislature might, and probably will, eventually reduce their pension benefits significantly
They have reason to be upset. They have worked for years under the promise of a pension and free health care in retirement (which, I understand, was part of the promise for state workers). They are not eligible for social security benefits. They are not to blame for the pension crisis, either: state lawmakers refused to fund the pensions during good times. And they believe "the media" and state politicians demonizes them as lazy, greedy persons. According to one of them, Governor Pat Quinn recently gave a speech to a high school graduating class in which he said something to the effect that the money the state owes on pension obligations could pay for each Illinois high school graduate to go to college. If he really did say that, that's a strikingly disingenuous statement. Even if the numbers match up, I find it hard to believe that if the state were suddenly to be absolved of its obligations, it would spend all the savings on higher ed for all.
If I were them, I would be upset, too. And I realize that what I am about to say is easy for me to say because I was not the one to whom promises were made. But.....I think some sort of reform and reduction of benefits is probably necessary for the state's fiscal health. I buy the claim that the state cannot afford to pay its bills, and that its bond rating stands to suffer. A lower bond rating might not seem like a big deal--and I confess I don't understand all of the economics behind it--but I imagine it makes paying for basic services very difficult and at some point someone is going to have to pay, and I suspect the people who will have to pay are going to be those least able to afford it: the poor who receive state-provided welfare benefits like food stamps and poorer taxpayers, who in Illinois's flat-tax scheme, stand to pay more and more of what they cannot afford. (Illinois does have an earned income credit, which "progressivizes" the state flat tax a bit, but on balance, it remains a flat tax.) I also suspect that some sort of sustainable reform is necessary to save the pensions. It does little good to get a pension now and then find that in 10 years, the pension be reduced even more dramatically than is now proposed or be abrogated altogether. 90 percent of a loaf is better than half a loaf, or no loaf at all.
Now, there's a lot I don't know. As much as I buy the claim that there is a real problem, I don't know how big or imminent the problem is. The message "we need to reform pensions" is very congenial to the message that "we need to break public employees unions," and although I'm on the fence about how much or whether I support public employee unions, I also need to acknowledge there is this other interest at play. Perhaps I am buying too readily into the right-of-center (but not, I insist, "right wing"....it's more credible than that) messaging, but my impression is that the spokespersons for the public employees don't question the basic premise that there is a problem, and these same spokespersons vow to challenge in court any reform that actually passes that in any way reduces benefits. (They're not necessarily wrong to do so. My understanding is that the Illinois constitution guarantees these pension obligations, and I imagine there might be federal issues involved, say, under the contracts clause, and their spokespersons' job is to promote the interests of the workers, not of the public.)
Also, perhaps there are reasonable opportunities to fix the "crisis" that are unexplored. A friend of mine, for example, believes that Illinois could just raise the corporate income tax. I'm skeptical for a lot of reasons--I have a lot of practical reservations about the utility of corporate income taxes in general, and I strongly suspect my friend doesn't even know how much tax receipts would increase--but maybe he's right. This isn't fair to public employees. But it might be necessary.
UPDATE, 7-2-2013: I've updated this post, primarily by adding in a few paragraph breaks and one or two qualifications to what I've written.
They have reason to be upset. They have worked for years under the promise of a pension and free health care in retirement (which, I understand, was part of the promise for state workers). They are not eligible for social security benefits. They are not to blame for the pension crisis, either: state lawmakers refused to fund the pensions during good times. And they believe "the media" and state politicians demonizes them as lazy, greedy persons. According to one of them, Governor Pat Quinn recently gave a speech to a high school graduating class in which he said something to the effect that the money the state owes on pension obligations could pay for each Illinois high school graduate to go to college. If he really did say that, that's a strikingly disingenuous statement. Even if the numbers match up, I find it hard to believe that if the state were suddenly to be absolved of its obligations, it would spend all the savings on higher ed for all.
If I were them, I would be upset, too. And I realize that what I am about to say is easy for me to say because I was not the one to whom promises were made. But.....I think some sort of reform and reduction of benefits is probably necessary for the state's fiscal health. I buy the claim that the state cannot afford to pay its bills, and that its bond rating stands to suffer. A lower bond rating might not seem like a big deal--and I confess I don't understand all of the economics behind it--but I imagine it makes paying for basic services very difficult and at some point someone is going to have to pay, and I suspect the people who will have to pay are going to be those least able to afford it: the poor who receive state-provided welfare benefits like food stamps and poorer taxpayers, who in Illinois's flat-tax scheme, stand to pay more and more of what they cannot afford. (Illinois does have an earned income credit, which "progressivizes" the state flat tax a bit, but on balance, it remains a flat tax.) I also suspect that some sort of sustainable reform is necessary to save the pensions. It does little good to get a pension now and then find that in 10 years, the pension be reduced even more dramatically than is now proposed or be abrogated altogether. 90 percent of a loaf is better than half a loaf, or no loaf at all.
Now, there's a lot I don't know. As much as I buy the claim that there is a real problem, I don't know how big or imminent the problem is. The message "we need to reform pensions" is very congenial to the message that "we need to break public employees unions," and although I'm on the fence about how much or whether I support public employee unions, I also need to acknowledge there is this other interest at play. Perhaps I am buying too readily into the right-of-center (but not, I insist, "right wing"....it's more credible than that) messaging, but my impression is that the spokespersons for the public employees don't question the basic premise that there is a problem, and these same spokespersons vow to challenge in court any reform that actually passes that in any way reduces benefits. (They're not necessarily wrong to do so. My understanding is that the Illinois constitution guarantees these pension obligations, and I imagine there might be federal issues involved, say, under the contracts clause, and their spokespersons' job is to promote the interests of the workers, not of the public.)
Also, perhaps there are reasonable opportunities to fix the "crisis" that are unexplored. A friend of mine, for example, believes that Illinois could just raise the corporate income tax. I'm skeptical for a lot of reasons--I have a lot of practical reservations about the utility of corporate income taxes in general, and I strongly suspect my friend doesn't even know how much tax receipts would increase--but maybe he's right. This isn't fair to public employees. But it might be necessary.
UPDATE, 7-2-2013: I've updated this post, primarily by adding in a few paragraph breaks and one or two qualifications to what I've written.
Monday, June 3, 2013
The game of lifeboat: reflections on a dissertation defense
About 48 hours before my scheduled dissertation defense, I received word from my adviser and committee chair (the same person) that a couple of the other committee members had some "complex issues" with my dissertation draft. I didn't/don't have a full grasp on what those "complex issues" were, but over the next few hours, I came to believe that there was a real (small, perhaps, but real) possibility that I would fail the defense.
As it turned out, I passed the defense, with a (not uncommon for dissertation defendees) requirement that I revise my introduction and conclusion. The revisions were not particularly extensive, and they amounted to adding some relatively easy-to-add items rather than completely re-conceptualizing my approach to the project. (For the record, I wrote all my dissertation chapters before I had a strong idea of how I would bring them all together in my introduction and conclusion. That might not be the best way to go about it, but that's what I did. In a sense, the intro and conclusion--and especially the intro--had been the hardest part of the dissertation to write.)
Now, when I write "I didn't/don't have a full grasp of what those 'complex issues' were," I mean that there were probably a lot of conversations among my committee members--the three who were ready to pass it and the two hedgers who had reservations--and I wasn't privy to those conversations. I got a sense, during the actual defense itself, of what those "complex issues" were, but I strongly suspect that the revisions I eventually had to do probably reflected a compromise between the committee members who thought the dissertation pass-worthy and the two who had reservations.
Now, before I turn to what probably motivated the two professors with reservations, I will say a word about my dissertation and a few words about the three pro-"pass" people. About my dissertation. It had some real problems, and it wasn't a slam dunk dissertation. It was a bit clumsy and had way too much detail: two chapters were over 100 pages long and another was almost 100 pages. I didn't define my analytical categories very clearly, and I didn't define my historical actors very well, either. In short, had I taken more time to fine-tune the dissertation, "complex issues" wouldn't have been, err, issues.
As for the three pro-pass people, they all recognized that these difficulties with my arguments, but they were on board with passing me because they saw potential in the project. My advisor would never have let it go to a defense if he had not thought it worthy of passing. And the other two had worked with me in a greater capacity on the project than the two hedgers had. My dissertation was also written in a historiogrpahic tradition that these three professors were familiar with and the two hedgers were not as familiar with.
Now, what were the motivations for the two hedgers to raise objections, and why would they have waited until 48 hours before the defense when I had given them the defense draft to read about six weeks before? I'll answer the second question first and say I don't know, but they probably simply didn't begin reading it until a short while before the defense. I don't particularly blame them for reading later than earlier. I, too, delay reading things before, say, a conference where a paper is pre-circulated, in large part so the paper is still fresh in my mind when I go to the conference.
Is it fair to raise serious objections 48 hours before the defense? At first glance, it seems unfair. And the apparent unfairness likely provided one procedural argument for going on with the defense rather than, say, postponing it until the fall. I will have to confess, however, that if the objections had been raised, say, four weeks before the defense, with ample time to meet the relevant objections, I might have still been quite disconcerted and mopey and probably not fully able or willing to rise to the occasion. So whatever the purpose or the fairness, the late notice functioned as something on balance that was beneficial. Finally, as I said in the preceding paragraph, one cannot object to something one has not read, and the two hedgers had other things to do in the six weeks leading up to the defense in addition to reading a 500+ page dissertation draft. I'm not sure it's right for me to say that procrastination necessarily disqualifies one from raising objections.
In some ways, this all implicates the first question: what motivated the hedgers? I think some variant of one, two, or all, of the following three factors may have been at play:
Putting aside dudgeon, however well- or ill-justified, I was very distraught at the news about the "complex issues," and I did what is my wont: I foresaw the worst possible outcome. I told my advisor that I would prefer to drop out rather than postpone and that if I failed the defense, I would not opt to schedule a second one. This stance wasn't a bluff. I really was prepared to pull the temple down upon myself. I also adopted a very dramatic posture--not a bluff either, but an exercise in self-pity--when I told my advisor something like the following:
The Pride didn't stop there. I was too savvy to say any of this out loud, but I repeated over and over in my head the reasons why these professors--and not just those professors, but the entire department--were "betraying" me. Hadn't I given them years of service as a Teaching Assistant? Hadn't I been one of these professor's research assistants? Hadn't I volunteered to teach a class a few years ago when the professor for that course had suddenly become unable to teach that semester due to illness? Hadn't I been to innumerable department events? This list could, and probably did (although I don't remember all the specifics) run on.
Of course, in my hot fury, I probably didn't acknowledge the following. My stints as a TA gave me a tuition-and-fee waiver worth, at least in nominal terms, about $20,000, as well as a stipend I could live on in an expensive city. Being the one professor's research assistant has been a feather in my CV cap, and I also got paid for it. The class I "volunteered" to teach was also good for my cv--it was outside my area of expertise and having taught it gave me some street cred for that particular subject. I was also paid a generous stipend for "volunteering," and the position came quite auspiciously within about a week of my having been laid off from a part-time job. (Oh, by the way, one of the professors who eventually expressed reservations about my dissertation did a generous amount of work helping me prepare for that class, and he didn't get paid anything extra.) I got a lot from attending the departmental events--networking opportunities, a break from the academic drudgery, and free food, for examples. Finally,the department had given me plenty of free money. It gave me two fellowships--each about $5,000, and for a couple of years, it gave me what amounted to an extra amount of money in addition to the regular TA stipend.
None of this is to deny that there may be a "there" there. Academic departments in general have a sometimes deserved reputation for abusing their graduate employees. Even when what happens can't actually count as "abuse," academia is in many ways an exploitative industry, and some departments are happy to take on new grad students, use their labor, and say "it's been good to know you" when the students drop out. (In fact, even the "good" departments do this because they are part of the system. Don't get me wrong. I'm no Marxist and I believe a lot of the pay raise agitation pursued by my own graduate student union is misguided and, frankly, selfish, entitled, and tone-death. But academia does have a labor problem, and I'd advise anyone considering going to think once, twice, and thrice before taking the plunge.) Still, there's no denying I got a benefit from all my alleged "sacrifices" and "service."
And further, even if I adopt the most severe construction of how the department might have "betrayed" me, I'd have to admit the following: none of what the department did or didn't do necessarily means that my dissertation was well-written, well-argued, or pass-worthy.
And still further (and to repeat), I passed the defense with what turned out to be minimal revisions. The actual defense was cordial, focusing much more on where I needed to improve and how I might go about doing so. I'll confess that despite the cordiality, it wasn't a particularly pleasant experience. And when it was over, I was ready for it to be over. But I passed.
Now what lessons can I take from the process?
I said in an aside above that I probably don't intend to pursue a career in academia, but if I do, I have at least one lesson ready at hand. Namely, it's to remember how it feels to go through what I went through. And this lesson is particularly useful when it comes to teaching.
Counting my time as a masters student and as a PHD student I have TA'd for what must be at least a dozen classes, and I have taught as an adjunct three classes. Occasionally, I've had to fail students. The most common reasons are plagiarism or a refusal to do enough of the work. I don't think I've ever failed someone who tried and just didn't get it (or at least, I hope I haven't).
I will say I never enjoy failing people, but when I have failed students, at the back of my head are some of the same reasons my two professors with reservations had: there are certain standards that need to be enforced and certain hoops that need to be jumped through. I'll add to this and say that for some students, the minimal passing grade (a D) or the "acceptable" passing grade (a C) might not be a good grade for what they need. Maybe they need to keep their GPA up to get off academic probation. Maybe, again, they just don't get history (in a similar way that I didn't get physics).
My point is not to lower standards. I'm not sure exactly what I think of grading systems. I personally did well as an undergraduate student under the traditional grading, but I've come to question how useful they are overall in what a good education should be. But as long was we work in that system, they need to serve to at least some extent as proxies for standards.
My point, rather, is to remember not to be cavalier about it. It's easy for TA's or instructors to, when they're alone with other TA's or instructors, talk poorly of specific students or students in general, and sometimes to make fun of particularly infelicitous things they may have written in their papers or on exams. I know at least two people who occasionally post such things on Facebook, which, even if we leave aside the very real legal and privacy concerns (I don't believe they anonymize their Facebook posts enough for a discerning student to recognize him- or herself in them), is usually at least a questionable thing to do.
There is room, I think, for some degree of gallows humor and for venting when it comes to student writing and the challenges of teaching. But there's even more room to remember that students, even if they're seeking education for the "wrong" reasons like a credential, are human beings. There is also room to remember that I already have what these students presumably want: a bachelor's degree (and more). From their point of view, I had already "arrived" even before my dissertation passed (and when I was an MA student, even before I had a masters), in the same way that my committee members had already "arrived" by having their dissertations completed and having--I believe all of them--obtained tenure.
That's at least one lesson. Another is to be wary of a creeping "lifeboat" syndrome. After flailing in the water for ten years in a doctoral program, I've been extended a hand--five pairs of hands, and many more, to be accurate--to land safely on board. Now that I am there, I ought to guard against the temptation to be hyper-vigilant about who's qualified to be my future boat mates. I ought to remember that even if I am a diamond, I was once (and probably still am) in the rough myself (sorry for the cliche). I ought to remember where I was.
As it turned out, I passed the defense, with a (not uncommon for dissertation defendees) requirement that I revise my introduction and conclusion. The revisions were not particularly extensive, and they amounted to adding some relatively easy-to-add items rather than completely re-conceptualizing my approach to the project. (For the record, I wrote all my dissertation chapters before I had a strong idea of how I would bring them all together in my introduction and conclusion. That might not be the best way to go about it, but that's what I did. In a sense, the intro and conclusion--and especially the intro--had been the hardest part of the dissertation to write.)
Now, when I write "I didn't/don't have a full grasp of what those 'complex issues' were," I mean that there were probably a lot of conversations among my committee members--the three who were ready to pass it and the two hedgers who had reservations--and I wasn't privy to those conversations. I got a sense, during the actual defense itself, of what those "complex issues" were, but I strongly suspect that the revisions I eventually had to do probably reflected a compromise between the committee members who thought the dissertation pass-worthy and the two who had reservations.
Now, before I turn to what probably motivated the two professors with reservations, I will say a word about my dissertation and a few words about the three pro-"pass" people. About my dissertation. It had some real problems, and it wasn't a slam dunk dissertation. It was a bit clumsy and had way too much detail: two chapters were over 100 pages long and another was almost 100 pages. I didn't define my analytical categories very clearly, and I didn't define my historical actors very well, either. In short, had I taken more time to fine-tune the dissertation, "complex issues" wouldn't have been, err, issues.
As for the three pro-pass people, they all recognized that these difficulties with my arguments, but they were on board with passing me because they saw potential in the project. My advisor would never have let it go to a defense if he had not thought it worthy of passing. And the other two had worked with me in a greater capacity on the project than the two hedgers had. My dissertation was also written in a historiogrpahic tradition that these three professors were familiar with and the two hedgers were not as familiar with.
Now, what were the motivations for the two hedgers to raise objections, and why would they have waited until 48 hours before the defense when I had given them the defense draft to read about six weeks before? I'll answer the second question first and say I don't know, but they probably simply didn't begin reading it until a short while before the defense. I don't particularly blame them for reading later than earlier. I, too, delay reading things before, say, a conference where a paper is pre-circulated, in large part so the paper is still fresh in my mind when I go to the conference.
Is it fair to raise serious objections 48 hours before the defense? At first glance, it seems unfair. And the apparent unfairness likely provided one procedural argument for going on with the defense rather than, say, postponing it until the fall. I will have to confess, however, that if the objections had been raised, say, four weeks before the defense, with ample time to meet the relevant objections, I might have still been quite disconcerted and mopey and probably not fully able or willing to rise to the occasion. So whatever the purpose or the fairness, the late notice functioned as something on balance that was beneficial. Finally, as I said in the preceding paragraph, one cannot object to something one has not read, and the two hedgers had other things to do in the six weeks leading up to the defense in addition to reading a 500+ page dissertation draft. I'm not sure it's right for me to say that procrastination necessarily disqualifies one from raising objections.
In some ways, this all implicates the first question: what motivated the hedgers? I think some variant of one, two, or all, of the following three factors may have been at play:
- Professional conscience. They had/have real concerns for the state of their profession, for the reputation of their department and university, and for my own personal reputation as a scholar. If they passed a dissertation that in their view had certain weaknesses, they probably believed that I would have a harder time as an aspiring scholar if I were to try to shop myself off on the academic market. And even if (as seems likely but is not yet definite) I don't pursue such a career, they probably want me to be proud of what I've written.
- A course in academic give-and-take 101. All scholars who present their work to a public, even when that "public" is the other two co-presenters and moderator at an otherwise empty Saturday-morning conference session, have to face reasoned objections and challenges from others. One hopes such challenges are raised in the spirit of conviviality and helpful suggestions, but at any rate scholarship entails (ideally) discussion, and discussion has to be more than the in-person equivalent of a blog commenter's "+1." By raising objections, the two hedgers were participating in this tradition. They had serious reservations about what I had written and wanted to challenge me to rise to the occasion and meet their objections. I suspect (but I don't know) that they would each have preferred to see me postpone the defense and revise for a later date, but this was part of the process of scholarly negotiation.
- The Seul dieu est parfait approach. I had a professor of French once who said he never gave "perfect" scores on exams or papers because "seul dieu est parfait" (Only God is perfect). He also intimated that this was the practice in the educational system enjoyed by the French patrician elite, to which he belonged. I wouldn't say that these two hedgers would always raise objections--or last-minute objections--but I do suspect that their default is to object to any dissertation that doesn't reach some very high standard, the goal being to make what is already good even better, and what is not so good at least a little stronger. (A less charitable way to put this can be found in my idea for a headline in The Onion: "Area Professors Suspended for Hazing.")
Putting aside dudgeon, however well- or ill-justified, I was very distraught at the news about the "complex issues," and I did what is my wont: I foresaw the worst possible outcome. I told my advisor that I would prefer to drop out rather than postpone and that if I failed the defense, I would not opt to schedule a second one. This stance wasn't a bluff. I really was prepared to pull the temple down upon myself. I also adopted a very dramatic posture--not a bluff either, but an exercise in self-pity--when I told my advisor something like the following:
Things have worked out pretty well for me so far in life, and if this bad thing happens, then it's not the end of the world.That sentiment, of course, expresses a very important truth (and as my wife's friend told her before the defense, regardless of the outcome the sun would still rise the following day). But the maudlin height of my statement--made to my advisor who was trying to help me navigate the upcoming defense--was inappropriate and, as I said, self-pitying. It was an expression of Pride: an idolatry of the self, in the name of accepting martyrdom in an anti-Pierre Corneille world, and a defiant statement that I would rather reign as an ABD than serve as a "doctor."
The Pride didn't stop there. I was too savvy to say any of this out loud, but I repeated over and over in my head the reasons why these professors--and not just those professors, but the entire department--were "betraying" me. Hadn't I given them years of service as a Teaching Assistant? Hadn't I been one of these professor's research assistants? Hadn't I volunteered to teach a class a few years ago when the professor for that course had suddenly become unable to teach that semester due to illness? Hadn't I been to innumerable department events? This list could, and probably did (although I don't remember all the specifics) run on.
Of course, in my hot fury, I probably didn't acknowledge the following. My stints as a TA gave me a tuition-and-fee waiver worth, at least in nominal terms, about $20,000, as well as a stipend I could live on in an expensive city. Being the one professor's research assistant has been a feather in my CV cap, and I also got paid for it. The class I "volunteered" to teach was also good for my cv--it was outside my area of expertise and having taught it gave me some street cred for that particular subject. I was also paid a generous stipend for "volunteering," and the position came quite auspiciously within about a week of my having been laid off from a part-time job. (Oh, by the way, one of the professors who eventually expressed reservations about my dissertation did a generous amount of work helping me prepare for that class, and he didn't get paid anything extra.) I got a lot from attending the departmental events--networking opportunities, a break from the academic drudgery, and free food, for examples. Finally,the department had given me plenty of free money. It gave me two fellowships--each about $5,000, and for a couple of years, it gave me what amounted to an extra amount of money in addition to the regular TA stipend.
None of this is to deny that there may be a "there" there. Academic departments in general have a sometimes deserved reputation for abusing their graduate employees. Even when what happens can't actually count as "abuse," academia is in many ways an exploitative industry, and some departments are happy to take on new grad students, use their labor, and say "it's been good to know you" when the students drop out. (In fact, even the "good" departments do this because they are part of the system. Don't get me wrong. I'm no Marxist and I believe a lot of the pay raise agitation pursued by my own graduate student union is misguided and, frankly, selfish, entitled, and tone-death. But academia does have a labor problem, and I'd advise anyone considering going to think once, twice, and thrice before taking the plunge.) Still, there's no denying I got a benefit from all my alleged "sacrifices" and "service."
And further, even if I adopt the most severe construction of how the department might have "betrayed" me, I'd have to admit the following: none of what the department did or didn't do necessarily means that my dissertation was well-written, well-argued, or pass-worthy.
And still further (and to repeat), I passed the defense with what turned out to be minimal revisions. The actual defense was cordial, focusing much more on where I needed to improve and how I might go about doing so. I'll confess that despite the cordiality, it wasn't a particularly pleasant experience. And when it was over, I was ready for it to be over. But I passed.
Now what lessons can I take from the process?
I said in an aside above that I probably don't intend to pursue a career in academia, but if I do, I have at least one lesson ready at hand. Namely, it's to remember how it feels to go through what I went through. And this lesson is particularly useful when it comes to teaching.
Counting my time as a masters student and as a PHD student I have TA'd for what must be at least a dozen classes, and I have taught as an adjunct three classes. Occasionally, I've had to fail students. The most common reasons are plagiarism or a refusal to do enough of the work. I don't think I've ever failed someone who tried and just didn't get it (or at least, I hope I haven't).
I will say I never enjoy failing people, but when I have failed students, at the back of my head are some of the same reasons my two professors with reservations had: there are certain standards that need to be enforced and certain hoops that need to be jumped through. I'll add to this and say that for some students, the minimal passing grade (a D) or the "acceptable" passing grade (a C) might not be a good grade for what they need. Maybe they need to keep their GPA up to get off academic probation. Maybe, again, they just don't get history (in a similar way that I didn't get physics).
My point is not to lower standards. I'm not sure exactly what I think of grading systems. I personally did well as an undergraduate student under the traditional grading, but I've come to question how useful they are overall in what a good education should be. But as long was we work in that system, they need to serve to at least some extent as proxies for standards.
My point, rather, is to remember not to be cavalier about it. It's easy for TA's or instructors to, when they're alone with other TA's or instructors, talk poorly of specific students or students in general, and sometimes to make fun of particularly infelicitous things they may have written in their papers or on exams. I know at least two people who occasionally post such things on Facebook, which, even if we leave aside the very real legal and privacy concerns (I don't believe they anonymize their Facebook posts enough for a discerning student to recognize him- or herself in them), is usually at least a questionable thing to do.
There is room, I think, for some degree of gallows humor and for venting when it comes to student writing and the challenges of teaching. But there's even more room to remember that students, even if they're seeking education for the "wrong" reasons like a credential, are human beings. There is also room to remember that I already have what these students presumably want: a bachelor's degree (and more). From their point of view, I had already "arrived" even before my dissertation passed (and when I was an MA student, even before I had a masters), in the same way that my committee members had already "arrived" by having their dissertations completed and having--I believe all of them--obtained tenure.
That's at least one lesson. Another is to be wary of a creeping "lifeboat" syndrome. After flailing in the water for ten years in a doctoral program, I've been extended a hand--five pairs of hands, and many more, to be accurate--to land safely on board. Now that I am there, I ought to guard against the temptation to be hyper-vigilant about who's qualified to be my future boat mates. I ought to remember that even if I am a diamond, I was once (and probably still am) in the rough myself (sorry for the cliche). I ought to remember where I was.
Thursday, May 9, 2013
That's Mister Corneille to you!
Well, my dissertation defense was yesterday.....and I actually passed!
I might blog about the process a little more later, but for now, a few comments:
First, I hope I don't become one of those people who insists on being called "doctor." That's for health care professionals, not historians.
Second, there were a few very last minute hiccups. At the time (about 36 hours before the defense) they seemed very momentous. Now, they seem inconsequential, amounting only to a few small and very doable revisions to the dissertation. That part of the experience, and the very poor way I handled it, is still a little raw for me to go into much more detail. But I might blog specifically about this later.
Third, this experience is one example that although liberal arts professors probably have a certain ideological disposition that blinders them in favor of certain conclusions and analyses and against others, they usually (at least in my case) do their jobs fairly. I won't go into detail, but I framed my dissertation around a set of ideas that three of my five committee members, and perhaps all five committee members, are predisposed to disagree with. And while they criticized my use of these ideas, they based their criticism on the very real fact that although I discuss those ideas in the introduction and conclusion of my dissertation, I don't bring them up or demonstrate their applicability in the remaining 500+ pages. In other words, they set aside their ideological biases and treated me fairly.
I might blog about the process a little more later, but for now, a few comments:
First, I hope I don't become one of those people who insists on being called "doctor." That's for health care professionals, not historians.
Second, there were a few very last minute hiccups. At the time (about 36 hours before the defense) they seemed very momentous. Now, they seem inconsequential, amounting only to a few small and very doable revisions to the dissertation. That part of the experience, and the very poor way I handled it, is still a little raw for me to go into much more detail. But I might blog specifically about this later.
Third, this experience is one example that although liberal arts professors probably have a certain ideological disposition that blinders them in favor of certain conclusions and analyses and against others, they usually (at least in my case) do their jobs fairly. I won't go into detail, but I framed my dissertation around a set of ideas that three of my five committee members, and perhaps all five committee members, are predisposed to disagree with. And while they criticized my use of these ideas, they based their criticism on the very real fact that although I discuss those ideas in the introduction and conclusion of my dissertation, I don't bring them up or demonstrate their applicability in the remaining 500+ pages. In other words, they set aside their ideological biases and treated me fairly.
Saturday, April 20, 2013
The Volokh Conspiracy is not truly a "libertarian" blog [UPDATED!]
One of the first blogs I've ever started reading was the "Volokh Conspiracy." It had, and probably still has, a reputation as a libertarian-oriented site whose authors are libertarian oriented lawyers and legal scholars. It was my introduction to thoughtful libertarianism. Indirectly, it was through VC that I stumbled upon the belated "Positive Liberty" blog, when Jon Rowe made a comment and I clicked on his url link. From PL, it was only a few steps to the League of Ordinary Gentlemen. The League is perhaps not a libertarian blog properly speaking, and some of the libertarian commenters have left (to the detriment of the comment-culture there), but I respectfully submit it's still a solid blog.
In other words, VC introduced me to libertarianism and blogging culture. And so I kind of have a soft spot in my heart for it.
But its libertarian bona fides have never been absolute, and they're are now still less "bona" than before. I offer two examples, one old, one recent.
The old example is Paul Cassell. He has been an author there, albeit an infrequent one, for as long as I've been reading it and probably longer. That intrepid defender of liberty devotes much of his legal scholarship to overturning Miranda rights and to support for the death penalty. Maybe there are arguments to be made in the favor for both propositions, although I disagree with those arguments. But I find it hard to call those propositions "libertarian" by most stretches of the imagination.
About the only "libertarian" line consistent with those propositions is that in order for a happy and free citizenry to enjoy the blessings of economic and civil liberty, that citizenry needs to have confidence that fraudsters and violent criminals shall be dealt with quickly and fairly. And in fairness to Cassell, part of his argument against Miranda is that it can have poor consequences for the accused. So, I'll give the law-and-order libertarian his due and just admit that I'm not sympathetic to his argument and confess I lack a j.d. degree.
The new example is Eugene Kontorovich. He is a recent addition, and maybe he's been there for about a year. One occasional topic is Israeli policy in the Palestinian territories. This is such a fraught, emotional issue, that although I'm inclined to criticize his position, which strikes me as too dismissive of Palestinians' claims, I am also nevertheless inclined to admit that I don't follow the situation closely enough to know even most of the basic facts. And I should admit the following as well. That's a rough area of the world.. Israel is a liberal democracy, and it exists in an international situation of perpetual war or quasi-war, with some neighboring states observing official policies of eliminating Israel. And the governing faction in part of the territories is also officially dedicated to eliminating Israel. In light of those facts and the numerous difficulties, it's not so easy for me to determine whether the putative libertarian commentator is truly Scottish.
However, Mr. Kontorovich has just published a post about the recent tragedy in Boston that, unless he was being satirical or ironic, suggests a dangerous dismissiveness of the individual rights libertarians hold dear and a dangerous allocation of collective responsibility that ought to disturb anyone, liberal, conservative, or libertarian. After discussing the citywide lockdown the police instituted to capture the suspect and after complaining (plausibly) that the lockdown has dangers of its own for civil liberties, he writes the following:
You see, if someone is Chechen, they are automatically suspect, perhaps especially because they are Islamists. And even if most of us don't know anything about Chechnya, we all know "Islamists" are bad and dangerous.
What is the "politically correct approach to counter-terror"? I suspect it requires such leftist approaches as assuming that people are innocent until proven guilty and that people haven't committed a crime until they have taken at least one overt act in furtherance of a crime. On the other hand, Korematsu v. U.S. is still technically a valid legal opinion,* and recent innovations in dealing with people whom the president has named an "enemy combatant"--along with extra-judicial, extra-battlefield killings of U.S. citizens--has demonstrated that the "politically correct approach to counter-terror" doesn't have a lot of practical weight to it.
Perhaps Mr. Kontorovich will protest that when he mentions "terrorists['] profiles and motives" and the "talking frankly" about them, what he means is that law enforcement, in order to prevent crimes, has to develop schemas--"profiles"--of who is likely to be a criminal. To a certain degree, I think that's reasonable. If someone is acting suspiciously and if someone is part of a group [see update below] that is dedicated to violence or violent overthrow, then perhaps that is a sign that law enforcement can take proactive steps to prevent a future crime. The issue is indeed messier than the snarkiness of my preceding paragraph might suggest. And sometimes there are real tradeoffs between "security" and "liberty," and if one really values the latter, one needs to surrender a certain measure of security.
That's all easy for me to say. I don't live in Boston, and neither I nor (to my knowledge) anyone I know has been the victim of a terrorist attack. I have never even been the victim of so much as a mugging. Who knows what position I might take if I had good reason to believe my security were threatened? To be honest, I'm not positive I'd take the side of "more liberty." For example, although I understand the concerns about TSA and "security theater," I don't personally find it onerous and I'm glad they're there, even though the concerns are more plausible than not.
But whatever the hypocrisies or resort to the idol of fear I might indulge in, I do suggest this: these are not positions that a libertarian, qua libertarian, ought to permit. They might be positions that a libertarian, qua imperfect human being, might be forgiven for assuming while afraid for her or his safety, but they are not consistent with what I understand libertarianism to be. And a blog whose authors, even if they are in a minority, endorse these positions is not a truly libertarian blog.
UPDATE [4-21-13]: By "group," I mean "organization" and not, for example, "ethnic group." Even when used to mean "organization," special scrutiny for some "groups" raises legitimate first-amendment and freedom of assembly concerns.
UPDATE #2 [4-22-13]: Here is the link to Mr. Kontorovich's blog post.
*A few years after the Iraq war, probably sometime in 2005, I was at a bar one evening hanging out with some friends. We got to talking with one of the other bar patrons, who was a fairly robust supporter of the war and of other incidents to that war and the Afghanistan war. The conversation eventually turned to Guantanamo and why he believed there was nothing wrong with the indefinite detentions. His justifications (I paraphrase): "We did the same thing to the Japanese during World War II." It's hard to argue with that logic.
In other words, VC introduced me to libertarianism and blogging culture. And so I kind of have a soft spot in my heart for it.
But its libertarian bona fides have never been absolute, and they're are now still less "bona" than before. I offer two examples, one old, one recent.
The old example is Paul Cassell. He has been an author there, albeit an infrequent one, for as long as I've been reading it and probably longer. That intrepid defender of liberty devotes much of his legal scholarship to overturning Miranda rights and to support for the death penalty. Maybe there are arguments to be made in the favor for both propositions, although I disagree with those arguments. But I find it hard to call those propositions "libertarian" by most stretches of the imagination.
About the only "libertarian" line consistent with those propositions is that in order for a happy and free citizenry to enjoy the blessings of economic and civil liberty, that citizenry needs to have confidence that fraudsters and violent criminals shall be dealt with quickly and fairly. And in fairness to Cassell, part of his argument against Miranda is that it can have poor consequences for the accused. So, I'll give the law-and-order libertarian his due and just admit that I'm not sympathetic to his argument and confess I lack a j.d. degree.
The new example is Eugene Kontorovich. He is a recent addition, and maybe he's been there for about a year. One occasional topic is Israeli policy in the Palestinian territories. This is such a fraught, emotional issue, that although I'm inclined to criticize his position, which strikes me as too dismissive of Palestinians' claims, I am also nevertheless inclined to admit that I don't follow the situation closely enough to know even most of the basic facts. And I should admit the following as well. That's a rough area of the world.. Israel is a liberal democracy, and it exists in an international situation of perpetual war or quasi-war, with some neighboring states observing official policies of eliminating Israel. And the governing faction in part of the territories is also officially dedicated to eliminating Israel. In light of those facts and the numerous difficulties, it's not so easy for me to determine whether the putative libertarian commentator is truly Scottish.
However, Mr. Kontorovich has just published a post about the recent tragedy in Boston that, unless he was being satirical or ironic, suggests a dangerous dismissiveness of the individual rights libertarians hold dear and a dangerous allocation of collective responsibility that ought to disturb anyone, liberal, conservative, or libertarian. After discussing the citywide lockdown the police instituted to capture the suspect and after complaining (plausibly) that the lockdown has dangers of its own for civil liberties, he writes the following:
Yet such freakouts are nothing compared to what is in store if the the Marathon bombing means that Chechen jihadis has come to U.S. shores. The Chechens mounted one of the most vicious terror campaigns ever against Russia in the 1990s, blowing up apartment buildings, and launching massive attacks on theaters and even schools. They are known as among the most violent and dedicated terrorists in the world. They can be found fighting in Libya, Syria and every other major jihadi campaign. Though usually they have to sneak into the target countries, rather than coming on a visa as the Boston bombers apparently did.)
Russia only succeeded in suprresing the Chechen Islamists with extremely brutal tactics that would never find support in the U.S – essentially leveling the Chechen capital. Yet dealing with such a threat would also be impossible with a politically correct approach to counter-terror that, for example, turns away from talking frankly about the terrorists profiles and motives.
You see, if someone is Chechen, they are automatically suspect, perhaps especially because they are Islamists. And even if most of us don't know anything about Chechnya, we all know "Islamists" are bad and dangerous.
What is the "politically correct approach to counter-terror"? I suspect it requires such leftist approaches as assuming that people are innocent until proven guilty and that people haven't committed a crime until they have taken at least one overt act in furtherance of a crime. On the other hand, Korematsu v. U.S. is still technically a valid legal opinion,* and recent innovations in dealing with people whom the president has named an "enemy combatant"--along with extra-judicial, extra-battlefield killings of U.S. citizens--has demonstrated that the "politically correct approach to counter-terror" doesn't have a lot of practical weight to it.
Perhaps Mr. Kontorovich will protest that when he mentions "terrorists['] profiles and motives" and the "talking frankly" about them, what he means is that law enforcement, in order to prevent crimes, has to develop schemas--"profiles"--of who is likely to be a criminal. To a certain degree, I think that's reasonable. If someone is acting suspiciously and if someone is part of a group [see update below] that is dedicated to violence or violent overthrow, then perhaps that is a sign that law enforcement can take proactive steps to prevent a future crime. The issue is indeed messier than the snarkiness of my preceding paragraph might suggest. And sometimes there are real tradeoffs between "security" and "liberty," and if one really values the latter, one needs to surrender a certain measure of security.
That's all easy for me to say. I don't live in Boston, and neither I nor (to my knowledge) anyone I know has been the victim of a terrorist attack. I have never even been the victim of so much as a mugging. Who knows what position I might take if I had good reason to believe my security were threatened? To be honest, I'm not positive I'd take the side of "more liberty." For example, although I understand the concerns about TSA and "security theater," I don't personally find it onerous and I'm glad they're there, even though the concerns are more plausible than not.
But whatever the hypocrisies or resort to the idol of fear I might indulge in, I do suggest this: these are not positions that a libertarian, qua libertarian, ought to permit. They might be positions that a libertarian, qua imperfect human being, might be forgiven for assuming while afraid for her or his safety, but they are not consistent with what I understand libertarianism to be. And a blog whose authors, even if they are in a minority, endorse these positions is not a truly libertarian blog.
UPDATE [4-21-13]: By "group," I mean "organization" and not, for example, "ethnic group." Even when used to mean "organization," special scrutiny for some "groups" raises legitimate first-amendment and freedom of assembly concerns.
UPDATE #2 [4-22-13]: Here is the link to Mr. Kontorovich's blog post.
*A few years after the Iraq war, probably sometime in 2005, I was at a bar one evening hanging out with some friends. We got to talking with one of the other bar patrons, who was a fairly robust supporter of the war and of other incidents to that war and the Afghanistan war. The conversation eventually turned to Guantanamo and why he believed there was nothing wrong with the indefinite detentions. His justifications (I paraphrase): "We did the same thing to the Japanese during World War II." It's hard to argue with that logic.
Friday, April 19, 2013
Naming the nameless
In Hermann Hesse's novel Journey to the East,* the protagonist/narrator, "H.H.," contemplates writing about what to him was an incredible, lost experience. He has great difficulty doing so, and he says the following [p. 47]:
There have been peaks and valleys along the way, and I have on several occasions considered giving up altogether. But intellectually speaking, one of the most difficult parts has been determining what it all means, what are its bounds, what is is "about." It is certainly "about" some things that are at least rouglhy definable--coal dealers, antitrust laws, city-coal ordinances, prosecutors, trade associations, newspaper magnates, mayors, unions, presidents, and (I swear it's true) gangsters--but over the last few months, as I have written my introduction and conclusion, I have been forced to decide the larger, big question issues:
But the principal goal in a dissertation is to establish how it contributes to the historiography, along with, perhaps, a stab at demonstrating how marketable it is generally and demonstrating the ability to undertake a long-term study using primary sources. And I have had to establish my dissertation's relationship to the historiography as I constructed my introduction and conclusion.
My grasp of historiography is weaker than it should be. I really have only myself to blame for this. I simply haven't devoted the time I ought to have in mastering it. Neither is the historiography requirement a "gotcha requirement," a mere technicality and "last hurdle" before a good student can get her or his PHD. From day one in graduate school, we are impressed with the need to learn historiography. Knowing what other historians have done--what they've studied, what arguments they make, who they agree and disagree with--is part and parcel of professional history and most non-research-oriented grad seminar (in other words, almost all graduate courses stress learning the historiography). So the requirement that I make my dissertation relevant to the historiography comes with the decision to write it and with the decision to finish grad school.
So like H.H.'s historian, I have had to look at my work from over the past five years or so--the time from when I finished my prospectus to now--and decide what meaning to attach to what I've done, to decide on how to name the nameless. I have had to look at the story I have written and determine what it is bound by and what it signifies.
That's a hard thing to do. Why, for example, should I begin my study in the 1880s and why should I end it in the late 1930s? On the one hand, the answer is easy. Because I am studying antitrust, the 1880s are a "logical" starting point because most state-level (in the U.S.) antitrust laws were enacted during the 1880s and 1890s, Canada's federal-level law was enacted in 1889, and the U.S. federal-level law was enacted in 1890. The late 1930s are a good stopping point because that's the era of the New Deal (in the U.S.) and the Canadian variants of the New Deal (there was a brief, and abortive, federal New Deal in Canada, but what I focus on are the provincial-level "little new deals," especially the one in Ontario implemented under the province's "Industrial Standards Act" of 1935). And the end of the 1930s comes with World War II, and since I'm too lazy to go into wartime economy (World War I was a bear to figure out and I simply didn't want to go into the weeds of wartime price controls, etc.).
And yet, these starting and stopping points are not as obvious as they might seem. For the starting point, I can't help but notice the many, many antecedents to what eventually became antitrust statutes (and in some cases, antitrust provisions of state constitutions). These antecedents included laws and legal doctrines against conspiracy, the evolution of incorporation laws and corporation practice, common-law prohibitions against "restraints on trade" and common-law and statutory prohibitions against practices known as "forestalling, regrating, and engrossing" that formally date back at least to Queen Elizabeth I and informally date back even farther to the time of the Black Death in Europe. In fact, some of the principals underlying antitrust go back to attempts by Emperor Diocletion in the Roman Empire to institute price-controls. In further fact, they also arguably go back to the institution of "government" and the state itself, if one supposes that the (or "a") primary purpose of government is to regulate the terms of business competition.
For the end point, "World War II" is also in some ways arbitrary. In my study of Ontario (i.e., Toronto as an example of what happens in Ontario), I actually get into the early World War II years because that's around the time that the Industrial Standards Act becomes important for the coal dealers I study. (Keep in mind that Canada entered the war just a few days after Germany's invasion of Poland in September 1939, while the U.S. entered the conflict formally only after Pearl Harbor in December 1941, although Roosevelt had begun positioning the U.S. to enter the conflict at a much earlier date.)
It's also arbitrary because the coal dealers I study didn't simply adopt different interests or concerns right when the war started, never to look back. Coal remained and remains and important part of the U.S. and (to a lesser extent) Canadian economies, although it is worthwhile to note that throughout the twentieth century, householders' reliance on coal for heat and energy decreased steadily, especially when it comes to use of coal in household furnaces.** Antitrust didn't disappear after World War II, either, and although one of the principal arguments of my dissertation is that there was never an antitrust "movement" in most meaningful senses of the word "movement," there was still--and there is still--much agitation in the name of "antitrust" or, more broadly, "antimonopoly."
Still, in my study, I had to place a limit somewhere. And in writing my intro and conclusion, I had to justify those limits. And I've chosen to do so along the "easy" reasons I cite above. My point is, though, that there's no true limit to my study. (However, I wouldn't be surprised if my committee insists that a "true enough" limit would be, say, 250 pages and not 582!) I had to, in a sense, impose an arbitrary starting and stopping point. I had to invent a "unit" of time--a period that scholars of U.S. antitrust usually call the "formative era" (c. 1890 to c. 1914) and the post-formative era of "associationalism" (1910s-1920s) and direct government regulation in the 1930s. The obvious program for the latter is the temporary suspension of antitrust laws under the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, but I also consider later innovations to be just as important even though I focus on the Recovery Act (I'm referring, for example, to welfare-state programs, to the AAA, to the Wagner Act, and to the Robinson-Patman Act).
There are other limits that I have placed on my dissertation while writing it and that I have had to justify in my intro and conclusion. One is, for lack of a better term, spatial. I look specifically at what I call two "markets" for coal--Chicago and Toronto--and I define "market" as a site of regulation. So, I look at how federal, state and provincial, and city and county regulations affect the way members of the coal industry (primarily coal retailer, but also sometimes operators, miners, wholesalers, and teamsters) compete(d) with each other. Another limit is industry-specific: the coal industry as opposed to industries that aren't the coal industry.
I won't go, here, into my justifications for looking at this industry or at those sites--or "markets"--as opposed to other industries or other markets. Neither will I go into my conclusions about significance, other than to say I see a very disturbing tendency among the subjects I study to invoke antitrust in the service of exacting arbitrary punishments on people who are unpopular. But my point is to note that I have had to place names and limits on what I have studied.
There is a certain mystery to historical study that cannot be fully grasped or elucidated. I cannot "capture" the past in my study--all I can do, really, is study it and place limits on it, and analyze--or more accurately, offer suppositions about--the meaning of those limits.
To return to The Journey to the East, H.H., toward the end of the novel, finds that the great, mystical experience he has undergone--a journey to the east as a member of some inchoately defined "League"--has been narrated by at least two other persons in addition to him. And although his story and the other two stories recount the same events, their constructions on the meaning of those events vary so widely as to call into question the whole enterprise of narrating the past at all. H.H. reads these histories as part of a challenge offered to him by the "League" of which he had been a member and wished to rejoin. He needs to consult the "League's" files about himself. And what he finds is the gradual effacing of his own self into the image of the "League's" president, who, depending on how you are inclined to interpret Hesse's work, may indicate a Christ-figure or a Buddha/Enlightened One figure (or some other construct). This is the loss of the ego, the surrender of all stories, back to the timeless and boundless and nameless.
And that, I think, is the true lesson we take from history. It's a lesson in humility and demolition of the ego, of our attachedness to the ephemeral world and the fluid past. I'm under few illusions that my dissertation is a great epic--it's one of scores, perhaps hundreds, to be finished in history this year alone, and it's one of thousands to have been written in history over the past decades. And all that is assuming that my dissertation is passed by my committee, something about which I'm hopeful but also something I don't wish to assume too soon. But it has been an exercise in finding and naming the nameless, and in reflecting it all back again to that which cannot be named.
*Hermann Hesse, The Journey to the East, trans. Hilda Rosner (1932; translated edition, New York: The Noonday Press, 1956).
**Coal is still important because it can be burned in energy producing plants, which provide the energy to heat, or more frequently, to provide electricity to households.
I imagine that every historian is similarly affected when he begins to record the events of some period and wishes to portray them sincerely. Where is the center of events, the common standpoint around which they revolve and which gives them cohesion? In order that something like cohesion, something like causality, that some kind of meaning might ensue and that it can in some way be narrated, the historian must invent units, a hero, a nation, an idea, and he must allow to happen to this invented unit what has in reality happened to the nameless.Perhaps I risk jinxing something by saying this, but I have just finished this process for my dissertation. Over the last few days, I have had six copies of the 582-page monstrosity printed up and have given a copy to the members of my committee. If my defense, in May, is successful, I shall soon receive my PHD in history.
There have been peaks and valleys along the way, and I have on several occasions considered giving up altogether. But intellectually speaking, one of the most difficult parts has been determining what it all means, what are its bounds, what is is "about." It is certainly "about" some things that are at least rouglhy definable--coal dealers, antitrust laws, city-coal ordinances, prosecutors, trade associations, newspaper magnates, mayors, unions, presidents, and (I swear it's true) gangsters--but over the last few months, as I have written my introduction and conclusion, I have been forced to decide the larger, big question issues:
How does what I wrote contribute to the field of history?
Why should anyone in their right mind even read it?These questions are supposed to be related. Historians read the works of other historians because those contribute to a "historiography," something often defined as "the history of history," but perhaps is more usefully conceived as "a conversation among those interested in the past about the past." Non-historians might also be interested in "historiography," too. They (along with, perhaps, historians) can also have additional reasons for reading the works of historians. Some of these reasons are a desire to engage a story, to learn about a specific event or to specific facts, to be seen as the type of person who reads history, or to look for the unexpected and expand one's knowledge.
But the principal goal in a dissertation is to establish how it contributes to the historiography, along with, perhaps, a stab at demonstrating how marketable it is generally and demonstrating the ability to undertake a long-term study using primary sources. And I have had to establish my dissertation's relationship to the historiography as I constructed my introduction and conclusion.
My grasp of historiography is weaker than it should be. I really have only myself to blame for this. I simply haven't devoted the time I ought to have in mastering it. Neither is the historiography requirement a "gotcha requirement," a mere technicality and "last hurdle" before a good student can get her or his PHD. From day one in graduate school, we are impressed with the need to learn historiography. Knowing what other historians have done--what they've studied, what arguments they make, who they agree and disagree with--is part and parcel of professional history and most non-research-oriented grad seminar (in other words, almost all graduate courses stress learning the historiography). So the requirement that I make my dissertation relevant to the historiography comes with the decision to write it and with the decision to finish grad school.
So like H.H.'s historian, I have had to look at my work from over the past five years or so--the time from when I finished my prospectus to now--and decide what meaning to attach to what I've done, to decide on how to name the nameless. I have had to look at the story I have written and determine what it is bound by and what it signifies.
That's a hard thing to do. Why, for example, should I begin my study in the 1880s and why should I end it in the late 1930s? On the one hand, the answer is easy. Because I am studying antitrust, the 1880s are a "logical" starting point because most state-level (in the U.S.) antitrust laws were enacted during the 1880s and 1890s, Canada's federal-level law was enacted in 1889, and the U.S. federal-level law was enacted in 1890. The late 1930s are a good stopping point because that's the era of the New Deal (in the U.S.) and the Canadian variants of the New Deal (there was a brief, and abortive, federal New Deal in Canada, but what I focus on are the provincial-level "little new deals," especially the one in Ontario implemented under the province's "Industrial Standards Act" of 1935). And the end of the 1930s comes with World War II, and since I'm too lazy to go into wartime economy (World War I was a bear to figure out and I simply didn't want to go into the weeds of wartime price controls, etc.).
And yet, these starting and stopping points are not as obvious as they might seem. For the starting point, I can't help but notice the many, many antecedents to what eventually became antitrust statutes (and in some cases, antitrust provisions of state constitutions). These antecedents included laws and legal doctrines against conspiracy, the evolution of incorporation laws and corporation practice, common-law prohibitions against "restraints on trade" and common-law and statutory prohibitions against practices known as "forestalling, regrating, and engrossing" that formally date back at least to Queen Elizabeth I and informally date back even farther to the time of the Black Death in Europe. In fact, some of the principals underlying antitrust go back to attempts by Emperor Diocletion in the Roman Empire to institute price-controls. In further fact, they also arguably go back to the institution of "government" and the state itself, if one supposes that the (or "a") primary purpose of government is to regulate the terms of business competition.
For the end point, "World War II" is also in some ways arbitrary. In my study of Ontario (i.e., Toronto as an example of what happens in Ontario), I actually get into the early World War II years because that's around the time that the Industrial Standards Act becomes important for the coal dealers I study. (Keep in mind that Canada entered the war just a few days after Germany's invasion of Poland in September 1939, while the U.S. entered the conflict formally only after Pearl Harbor in December 1941, although Roosevelt had begun positioning the U.S. to enter the conflict at a much earlier date.)
It's also arbitrary because the coal dealers I study didn't simply adopt different interests or concerns right when the war started, never to look back. Coal remained and remains and important part of the U.S. and (to a lesser extent) Canadian economies, although it is worthwhile to note that throughout the twentieth century, householders' reliance on coal for heat and energy decreased steadily, especially when it comes to use of coal in household furnaces.** Antitrust didn't disappear after World War II, either, and although one of the principal arguments of my dissertation is that there was never an antitrust "movement" in most meaningful senses of the word "movement," there was still--and there is still--much agitation in the name of "antitrust" or, more broadly, "antimonopoly."
Still, in my study, I had to place a limit somewhere. And in writing my intro and conclusion, I had to justify those limits. And I've chosen to do so along the "easy" reasons I cite above. My point is, though, that there's no true limit to my study. (However, I wouldn't be surprised if my committee insists that a "true enough" limit would be, say, 250 pages and not 582!) I had to, in a sense, impose an arbitrary starting and stopping point. I had to invent a "unit" of time--a period that scholars of U.S. antitrust usually call the "formative era" (c. 1890 to c. 1914) and the post-formative era of "associationalism" (1910s-1920s) and direct government regulation in the 1930s. The obvious program for the latter is the temporary suspension of antitrust laws under the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, but I also consider later innovations to be just as important even though I focus on the Recovery Act (I'm referring, for example, to welfare-state programs, to the AAA, to the Wagner Act, and to the Robinson-Patman Act).
There are other limits that I have placed on my dissertation while writing it and that I have had to justify in my intro and conclusion. One is, for lack of a better term, spatial. I look specifically at what I call two "markets" for coal--Chicago and Toronto--and I define "market" as a site of regulation. So, I look at how federal, state and provincial, and city and county regulations affect the way members of the coal industry (primarily coal retailer, but also sometimes operators, miners, wholesalers, and teamsters) compete(d) with each other. Another limit is industry-specific: the coal industry as opposed to industries that aren't the coal industry.
I won't go, here, into my justifications for looking at this industry or at those sites--or "markets"--as opposed to other industries or other markets. Neither will I go into my conclusions about significance, other than to say I see a very disturbing tendency among the subjects I study to invoke antitrust in the service of exacting arbitrary punishments on people who are unpopular. But my point is to note that I have had to place names and limits on what I have studied.
There is a certain mystery to historical study that cannot be fully grasped or elucidated. I cannot "capture" the past in my study--all I can do, really, is study it and place limits on it, and analyze--or more accurately, offer suppositions about--the meaning of those limits.
To return to The Journey to the East, H.H., toward the end of the novel, finds that the great, mystical experience he has undergone--a journey to the east as a member of some inchoately defined "League"--has been narrated by at least two other persons in addition to him. And although his story and the other two stories recount the same events, their constructions on the meaning of those events vary so widely as to call into question the whole enterprise of narrating the past at all. H.H. reads these histories as part of a challenge offered to him by the "League" of which he had been a member and wished to rejoin. He needs to consult the "League's" files about himself. And what he finds is the gradual effacing of his own self into the image of the "League's" president, who, depending on how you are inclined to interpret Hesse's work, may indicate a Christ-figure or a Buddha/Enlightened One figure (or some other construct). This is the loss of the ego, the surrender of all stories, back to the timeless and boundless and nameless.
And that, I think, is the true lesson we take from history. It's a lesson in humility and demolition of the ego, of our attachedness to the ephemeral world and the fluid past. I'm under few illusions that my dissertation is a great epic--it's one of scores, perhaps hundreds, to be finished in history this year alone, and it's one of thousands to have been written in history over the past decades. And all that is assuming that my dissertation is passed by my committee, something about which I'm hopeful but also something I don't wish to assume too soon. But it has been an exercise in finding and naming the nameless, and in reflecting it all back again to that which cannot be named.
*Hermann Hesse, The Journey to the East, trans. Hilda Rosner (1932; translated edition, New York: The Noonday Press, 1956).
**Coal is still important because it can be burned in energy producing plants, which provide the energy to heat, or more frequently, to provide electricity to households.
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