PicoBlog

Welcome to Making History, a newsletter about how historians make history. And how do historians really make history these days? By wasting their time on the internet. Here’s a few glimpses from this week at where all those hours went. To subscribe, go here. It’s free!

And you thought Tim Barker’s reviews were mean.

The talk of the profession this week is a review by one untenured professor of another untenured professor’s book, published by Harvard University Press, on the hot topic of the Chinese state bureaucracy. There is a lot of discussion about whether the “brutality” of this piece is really necessary. One wonders about the role of gender (the author is a woman, the reviewer a man); the significance of national heritage and/or linguisitic nativity (I don’t know the writers but the author is Maura Dykstra, the reviewer George Zhijian Qiao); and the intensity of intra-academic rivalry (the author is in the Ivy League, the reviewer at a liberal arts college). But then I read something like the following and I find myself turning to other explanations:

Has the author simply mislabeled [these sources] in a rush? One would hope so, but the citation for a different document … sources it to a “database" — … a “database” that I have never heard of (221). On checking the link provided in the bibliography … I could not find the database in question. Looking at the actual document, I realized the mistake: the cited … document appears as a photocopy of the original, printed on stationary with the letterhead “Zhongyang yanjiuyuan lishi yuyan yanjiusuo cang mingqing shiliao.” In a purported history of the archives, Dykstra has mistakenly invented an archival database based on a letterhead.

I don’t know about you, but I struggle to imagine how the reviewer could have made this point politely.

“If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” This seems to have become the rule of the game in the historical profession — a huge shift from the norms of just a few decades ago. Then again, who wants to go back to living in the kind of fear that was commonplace from, say, the 1960s to the 1990s? Who really misses that kind of bro-y atmosphere?

As much as we may appreciate moves toward a more congenial scholarly culture, I find it hard to believe the rarity of this kind of review is a byproduct of the rarity of these kinds of historical mistakes — a reflection of the health of today’s academy. In place of the fear of a devastating review, we have the far more thoroughgoing fear of total social and economic precarity.

To be clear, I have no expertise whatsoever in the topic in question, and the author will apparently respond at length in the next issue of the journal. The field of modern Chinese history may also be particularly vicious.

Who knows whether we should take anything from the level of criticism that has begun to appear in additional commentary. (“The argument here is bold … It is also deeply flawed in its conceptual, evidentiary, and methodological bases. The problems run so deep that it is not possible to enumerate them all in a short review.”) I look forward to the author’s response.

Whatever the facts of the matter, there’s one thing I think everyone following along at home can agree on.

The specifics of Chinese bureaucracy aside, what I do know for certain is that we live in an era when the sole path to scholarly success runs through making arguments so sweeping and so original that the actual evidence put forward typically can’t support the claims — or else the evidence has to be made up.

Most historians, a meek lot, seem to prefer the former course, staking out a few grand argument in an introduction and a conclusion, sandwiched between a tame series of chapters, heavily grounded in archival research, with little to no relation to what the author claims to have shown. Meanwhile, the most celebrated senior scholars in the field get away with levels of sloppiness, or habits of just making things up, that can easily lead a young historian to think: The big names are getting away with it — why not just say that I, too, have the goods to back up the argument I’m making? Or to believe, once you’ve begun making that argument, and colleagues and peer reviewers keep going along (though perhaps not all), that you must actually have the evidence to support it. If what you’re saying isn’t true, after all, how could you possibly keep getting published, keep getting hired, keep getting promoted.

Again I want to make clear I am not prejudging this particular author. Instead, I want to suggest that the questions raised by this whole debate only begin to hint at the systemic problems that are readily apparent in the field I know best, modern US history, and that should also be expected to appear in any profession that finds itself amid total economic and social crisis.

One does not have to share a positivist faith in the onward march of historical knowledge to fear the contemporary historical profession confronts its own “replication crisis.” Just consider the far more prominent scandal currently playing out in the world of behavioral economics — a domain where career outcomes are far less dire than in the field of history. Should we expect anything better when academic jobs are much harder to come by, when the prospects for economic survival outside the academy are much worse, and when sources, hidden away in archives around the world, are far harder to check?

One obvious solution to these problems is to up the brutality, or more optimistically the honesty, of scholarly debate — a blood sport for which I will admit I have a certain taste, and which has the pleasant side-effect (primary effect?) of justifying the habitually censorious approach that I take to my own writing. What’s more fun than watching a hungry crowd fight over the scraps of a fallen world? Perhaps, as I wrote in the New York Review of Books in 2019, fighting for another one:

The political theorist Wendy Brown, in Undoing the Demos, offers a model of the kind of rhetoric that would go much further to argue for higher education as a necessary public good. After World War II, she writes, “extending liberal arts education from the elite to the many was nothing short of a radical democratic event”; a new offer of college to all should not hinge on economic results but on the promise to bring about “an order in which the masses would be educated for freedom.” If these words anticipate the revolution in public language that we need in order to advance toward social democracy for both teachers and students, Christopher Newfield, in The Great Mistake, provides a helpfully detailed vision for how to get there. Market-oriented thinking has fatally undermined the grounds on which public investment in higher education can be defended, he argues. Champions of an egalitarian university—publicly minded unions, mobilized students, or enlightened administrators—must show through every reform how higher education already does or can be brought to serve the public good, by, for instance, shedding outside contracts with self-interested businesses, reducing tuition and debt to provide broad-based opportunity, or pushing back against racial and gender inequalities. Sanders’s and Warren’s proposals point in this direction, and while the barriers to success in the event that either enters the White House will remain enormous—the US Senate not least among them—one has to hope that if their plans were to approach passage, the cancellation of student debt and the elimination of tuition at public institutions would be combined with an additional set of policies, and a new political language, that would not only reduce students’ financial exigencies but also bring equity to the academic workplace and radically lessen the way higher education drives inequality in the US. This can only be achieved by building movements, not simply making plans, and in this respect Sanders clearly has an advantage. If something like this vision succeeded, the university would become neither an engine of inequality nor a growth machine for human capital; it would represent a foundation for an economically and culturally progressive egalitarian democracy—achieved as much through the efforts of teachers, students, and staff as through the passage of any particular law or the election of any political leader. If the adjunct crisis can be not just mitigated but solved, this is how it will happen.

A more equal university is also a less fraudulent university. “Faculty working conditions are student learning conditions,” as the slogan goes — and so are faculty writing conditions.

A debate like this is an amazing litmus test. Do you find yourself thinking: There but for the grace of god go I? Or: Why don’t I have the courage of this reviewer? Both responses reflect anxieties about one’s own relationship to scholarship and truth. But neither quite amounts to solidarity.

Now for this week’s links:

• The art historian Annie Bourneuf with an absolutely astonishing essay on the etching hidden behind Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, the model for Walter Benjamin’s famed “Angel of History.” This is the kind of thing that makes you believe in scholarship as a way of life.

• Old Vulcan proverb: only Biden can visit a picket line. A signal of labor’s strength or of labor’s weakness?

• Several friends of the stack are starting a podcast on the history of the CIO. Not to be missed!

• This isn’t your parents’ marriage market.

• Did Lincoln believe in meritocracy?

• The “no homo” version of the history of McCarthyism — more relevant than ever with Oppenheimer, who could in no way possibly remotely have been a commie — of course not! — no way! — in theaters.

• A fascinating series you may have missed on the history of leadership: part 1, part 2, part 3.

• If you still have any capacity for joy, get yourself to the rerelease of Stop Making Sense while you still can. As everyone’s favorite historically informed political commentator Jamelle Bouie remarks, with some understatement, “I nearly lost my fucking mind watching this movie.”

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