On teaching and publishing

This is the text of a presentation I gave in one of my classes. We were to discuss the book or books that influenced our decision to enter the field of history. I was not sure how this would be received, but the response was mostly positive, if troubled by the great difficulties faced by a professor in the classroom. Students who do not seem to care about learning are perhaps even more of a problem than the bureaucracy of the Academy. Yet as will be seen, I think that if we are sincere we can make this work towards the best.

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First off, I have a confession: I am not here just because I want to study and write about history. To use our egotistical terminology, there are “untrained” historians who are perfectly capable of studying on their own, going to public archives, and writing important books. Some may rightly be considered hacks. But others may be quite legitimate and influential. They aren’t in the club, so we look down upon them: but this is like saying that someone is incapable of writing profound theological treatises without formally attending seminary. Maybe I’m an iconoclast, but that’s how I see it.

With that in mind, here are the two books that I see as crucially influential for me. One is a now-classic professional work of history—T. Harry Williams’ 1969 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of infamous Louisiana governor Huey Long. The other is a 2005 publication on the current situation of American universities, Declining by Degrees.

So back to my confession, with a clarification: I do want to study history, but that is secondary. If I had started college with another related major, such as Classics or Political Theory, I could just as well be in a graduate program for another field. I picked history for personal interest, and soon I saw that I wasn’t bad at sharing and writing about it. Last year I did primary source work for the first time and turned it into what I thought was a pretty good senior thesis. But even so, I’d be lying if I said that I’m here because I want to discover lost texts from Early Modern Britain, or prove that Steven Pincus doesn’t get the whole picture of the Glorious Revolution, or otherwise redefine the field. If others want to do that, I wish them the best. But what is to me the most important aspect of all this is undergraduate teaching. We all know the cliché “publish or perish.” If I don’t toss this grad school plan out of intellectual frustration, I’ll write a dissertation, turn it into a book, get hired by whatever university has their British historian die that year, and, ideally, get tenured some time later and live in a small house not too far from campus and raise a family. But these are selfish aspects of what I plan to do, which is something quite different from who I am. Who I am is what defines my ultimate goals in this field.

Declining by Degrees discusses an apparent crisis in American universities, a crisis that would make it more difficult for me to get that tenured position and more likely to be stuck teaching five classes at three institutions at the same time. It addresses quite a few problems that I agree are valid concerns, including the treatment of education as a consumer product, in which students are the customer, professors are the hired labor, and the president is the cigar-smoking CEO. This environment is what I want to fight. I’m just in history because you have to choose your battles. But even though writing and publishing are important, they are not necessarily the most effective means of improving education. Call me an idealist, you wouldn’t be wrong, but I see publishing as lagniappe, and it risks becoming self-indulgent, gaudy embellishment for big egos. Frankly, I don’t want to have everybody lined up outside my house, checking out the flashy curtains. I’d much rather them come to my office hours with questions about why English Protestants were afraid of Catholics in the late Stuart period, and more importantly, why this matters for the study of humanity.

Asking these questions on this level, that of the general American young adult, is of greater importance than writing for other people in the field. But please understand that I am not downplaying the significance of publishing. Evidently not, with this second book on the table.

T. Harry Williams is legendary at LSU, not just for his written legacy but also for teaching. One of the first stories I heard in my old department was about how so many people wanted to take his classes that they would listen to his lectures from out in the hall, even though they were not enrolled. People wanted to learn from this guy. He got undergraduates excited about learning, undergraduates who had no intention of becoming historians themselves. He made it matter. Or, better put, he helped people to see that it matters, to see that knowing about history can be intrinsically edifying for the individual. But he died in 1979. I wonder how he would do today. Would people still line up in the hall, hoping to hear snippets of a class they weren’t even taking? Somehow I doubt it. This is where Declining by Degrees really hits home. My high school emphasized the intrinsic value of education—which should be a lifelong process—as part of the formation of the individual; but now it is a means to an end, a tool to get a better-paying job. The system has not countered this cultural trend. This book maintains that students then get what they want through grade inflation, while profs turn to what the universities tell them to do: the old adage again, publish or perish. If one is really writing things that are useful, like Huey Long here, that’s great. But publishing a book just to get tenure or fluff out a C.V. is a disservice to everyone. Libraries will buy it because it seems “scholarly,” others in your field will read it because they feel like they should, everybody will scratch one another’s backs through wasted time and money, and then the undergrad who didn’t really learn anything but instead memorized his notes to get his credits, graduate, and go into marketing is the one who missed out. One day he’ll say, upon hearing someone mention the Versailles Treaty at a cocktail party, “Oh, yeah, I heard about that once.” But when prompted he won’t be able to say anything else.

T. Harry did better than this. He certainly published, but he could work both fields. His research entered the classroom. The classroom then entered his research. It all worked together. I don’t mean to deprecate historians today—I think that very many do manage to incorporate the two, with nods to any faculty who may be with us—but it’s something we should actively think about. And think about before we become TA’s next year. Perhaps the system is at a point now where the professor has to work extra hard to achieve this ideal. If so, then it is worth it to fight back and talk to people outside our field, people without advanced degrees. And this should not require dumbing down anything—universities should keep expectations and standards high, or raise them from their current mediocrity. I firmly believe that people can rise to high standards, even if our cultural environment makes it seem like students just don’t care. We can’t lower the bar just so everybody can reach it; then nobody will imagine a world where the bar might be higher. We can’t focus on those few who already seem to care, or who want to go to grad school in our field, and give the rest up for lost. Instead we have to reach out and help all students rise, but at the same time, with no delusions of grandeur based on the letters that will follow our names. We have to remember that we are here to serve. The Academy should not be a haven for the selfish. It should offer the betterment of individuals and, by extension, society. This is education. It is up to us to save it. Thank you.