The "Education" Thread

There's significant overlap between goals and obligations in this career. For example, I wanted to have a couple book reviews published, so I sought out a couple journals that were looking for reviews. Now they're obligations, haha.

And publishing continues to be my main goal. Cooking up a book proposal is the next major step, but I'd also like to have an article or two on literature and science. I got a revise/resubmit request for one (on postwar fiction and scientific perspectivism), and I recently submitted another on late-20thc fiction in the age of the Anthropocene. Getting those in print are goals.

As far as teaching goes, I'll be off from teaching courses for a year or so. My first year at Harvard, I'll just be a thesis advisor, meaning I'll be working with roughly five undergrads on their honors theses. Hopefully I'll start teaching a course my second year.
 
This didn't feel quite relevant enough for the Mort thread--maybe the Dak thread, but it's particular to academia, so I figured what the hell.

Anyway, I'm not a huge fan of Pinker, but this piece is perceptive. I don't agree with all of his criticisms of every rhetorical strategy, but I think his overall point is sound.

But the familiarity of bad academic writing raises a puzzle. Why should a profession that trades in words and dedicates itself to the transmission of knowledge so often turn out prose that is turgid, soggy, wooden, bloated, clumsy, obscure, unpleasant to read, and impossible to understand?

The most popular answer outside the academy is the cynical one: Bad writing is a deliberate choice. Scholars in the softer fields spout obscure verbiage to hide the fact that they have nothing to say. They dress up the trivial and obvious with the trappings of scientific sophistication, hoping to bamboozle their audiences with highfalutin gobbledygook.

Though no doubt the bamboozlement theory applies to some academics some of the time, in my experience it does not ring true. I know many scholars who have nothing to hide and no need to impress. They do groundbreaking work on important subjects, reason well about clear ideas, and are honest, down-to-earth people. Still, their writing stinks.

The most popular answer inside the academy is the self-serving one: Difficult writing is unavoidable because of the abstractness and complexity of our subject matter. Every human pastime—music, cooking, sports, art—develops an argot to spare its enthusiasts from having to use a long-winded description every time they refer to a familiar concept in one another’s company. It would be tedious for a biologist to spell out the meaning of the term transcription factor every time she used it, and so we should not expect the tête-à-tête among professionals to be easily understood by amateurs.

But the insider-shorthand theory, too, doesn’t fit my experience. I suffer the daily experience of being baffled by articles in my field, my subfield, even my sub-sub-subfield. The methods section of an experimental paper explains, "Participants read assertions whose veracity was either affirmed or denied by the subsequent presentation of an assessment word." After some detective work, I determined that it meant, "Participants read sentences, each followed by the word true or false." The original academese was not as concise, accurate, or scientific as the plain English translation. So why did my colleague feel compelled to pile up the polysyllables?

A third explanation shifts the blame to entrenched authority. People often tell me that academics have no choice but to write badly because the gatekeepers of journals and university presses insist on ponderous language as proof of one’s seriousness. This has not been my experience, and it turns out to be a myth. In Stylish Academic Writing (Harvard University Press, 2012), Helen Sword masochistically analyzed the literary style in a sample of 500 scholarly articles and found that a healthy minority in every field were written with grace and verve.
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Most academic writing, in contrast, is a blend of two styles. The first is practical style, in which the writer’s goal is to satisfy a reader’s need for a particular kind of information, and the form of the communication falls into a fixed template, such as the five-paragraph student essay or the standardized structure of a scientific article. The second is a style that Thomas and Turner call self-conscious, relativistic, ironic, or postmodern, in which "the writer’s chief, if unstated, concern is to escape being convicted of philosophical naïveté about his own enterprise."

Thomas and Turner illustrate the contrast as follows:

"When we open a cookbook, we completely put aside—and expect the author to put aside—the kind of question that leads to the heart of certain philosophic and religious traditions. Is it possible to talk about cooking? Do eggs really exist? Is food something about which knowledge is possible? Can anyone else ever tell us anything true about cooking? … Classic style similarly puts aside as inappropriate philosophical questions about its enterprise. If it took those questions up, it could never get around to treating its subject, and its purpose is exclusively to treat its subject."

It’s easy to see why academics fall into self-conscious style. Their goal is not so much communication as self-presentation—an overriding defensiveness against any impression that they may be slacker than their peers in hewing to the norms of the guild. Many of the hallmarks of academese are symptoms of this agonizing self-consciousness
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Probably needless to say, I don't have as big a problem with the self-conscious style as Pinker seems to--but still, I think he's right.

https://www.chronicle.com/article/W...kMZFTzwqW6NGzSk_meVcAunksfiyvuoTt6fdl4Ph00h2s
 
Agreed, and I think his point on self-conscious writing is pretty insightful. Show-boating is a thing too, but I suspect this is more common.

Ideally, I reflect on something a former philosophy professor of mine prefaced a discussion on the Phenomenology of Spirit with: let's try to explain Hegel to grandma. It's not always possible to do so, and with certain audiences one can feel compelled to use the specialist lingo, but I still try. History programs have a pretty diverse group of people in them and I think that helps me in writing intellectual history, the advantage to that being the frequency of situations in which I have to explain writers who aren't read anymore and concepts which aren't in direct use any longer. For that same reason, I'm typically not baffled by articles in my field, but rather the sources I've got to work with. Conversely, I've found my eyes glossing over non-historical theoretical work on my topics.
 
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I think it's tougher for the new generation of academic writers (people just finishing their doctorates and those who got jobs within the past five to seven years or so) to get away with showboating in their work. Rather, it's the older generation who tend to showboat, primarily because they're so well-established that editors don't put up a fuss. But with younger, unknown writers, editors don't put up with bullshit--in my experience, at least. The editors I've interacted with have always called out the places in my writing where my verbiage gets the better of me.

I find that publications in literary studies from the last ten years or so exhibit a marked shift in style and clarity from those that preceded them. The publications from the late '80s and '90s, in the era of high poststructuralism, got bogged down in a lot of jargon. That's not to say there isn't any value in them (as Pinker states, it's typically the case that they do have interesting things to say), but that the value is shrouded in dense layers of self-reflexivity and irony. That kind of writing has really fallen out of vogue in recent years, and even professors now are ushering grad students away from that style (even if students are still forced to read a lot of the older material, for good reason).

Finally, have to give a shout out to Pinker citing Helen Sword, a fantastic writer whose research is fascinating.
 
So let us assume it is "self-consciousness." It doesn't come about in a vacuum. Either the style is taught directly, or it is taught indirectly ("self-conscious writing"). It's not just manifesting and being approved ex nihilo.
 
Einherjar86 said:
...and? I'm not sure how my post or Pinker's article suggests it's spontaneous.
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Not directly they don't, but they don't address where the "self-consciousness" comes from, if that were the reason. I think it is simply taught as a style, whether by certain professors, or by mimicry of what is read, or by the rewarding of what's been accepted by gatekeepers, or any and all of the above.
 
The Decline of Historical Thinking

guessing that this article is going to be about lazy students and lazy majors too scared to do the work of historians :)

edit, nevermind boring premise

“Yes, we have a responsibility to train for the world of employment, but are we educating for life, and without historical knowledge you are not ready for life,” Blight told me. As our political discourse is increasingly dominated by sources who care nothing for truth or credibility, we come closer and closer to the situation that Walter Lippmann warned about a century ago, in his seminal “Liberty and the News.” “Men who have lost their grip upon the relevant facts of their environment are the inevitable victims of agitation and propaganda. The quack, the charlatan, the jingo . . . can flourish only where the audience is deprived of independent access to information,” he wrote. A nation whose citizens have no knowledge of history is asking to be led by quacks, charlatans, and jingos. As he has proved ever since he rode to political prominence on the lie of Barack Obama’s birthplace, Trump is all three. And, without more history majors, we are doomed to repeat him.
 
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~85%+ of the public is generally historically ignorant, and that has been the case for some time (and probably in greater degree the further back one goes). The author is engaged in the sort of presentism which he, on the surface, is admonishing. What has actually declined is acceptance of the prevailing present narrative as presented by established media outlets like The New Yorker.
 
Obviously I'm biased and will literally have skin in the game in this if I choose to pursue a career in academia--it's precisely this latter point that pushing me away from my niche topic of historical understanding in 1920s Germany to a broader, transnational topic that spans nearly a century (we'll see how that works out). While I share Dak's assertion of presentism to some extent and often argue along similar lines on related presentist questions like Fake News today and yesterday, I've gotta defer from him on this point. History majors are in decline. I was one of five or six history majors in my graduating class. I believe my brother's graduation at different university down the road from my alma mater had no more than ten. During my time TAing at SU, I had no more than three history majors out of about 120 students--the numbers are typically pretty disproportionate for the introductory surveys, but still.

The discipline is undergoing a crisis and it's one that is directly related to the age-old debate in the United States regarding college-level education; namely, what's it good for and could it even be bad? Proponents of industrial education in the 19th century were highly skeptical of any notion that love of knowledge could be a good reason, and the long history of American anti-intellectualism loves to raise it's ugly head every generation or so. More recently, the has translated in part into more students turning to STEM, but I would argue that has more to do with the further professionalization of fields such as medicine. There's at least a small percentage that are lost to the identity disciplines, like African-American or Women's studies (these disciplines were created in part by previous fractures in the field). I think where history is really losing to are the social sciences like psychology, communications, and the like. I wouldn't be surprised if you had a small army in your psychology ranks at your graduation ceremony, Dak. Regarding this flow to the social sciences, I think it has less to do with student perceptions as to the usefulness of learning about history and their projected fears of employer perceptions on the un-usefulness of history. It's the problem of viewing education from a utilitarian point of view. I can't tell you how many times I had middle-aged customers back when I worked in pharmacy how much they had wanted to study history, but then didn't. I think for most, they could have studied history, and then gone on to have careers just as successful as what they already had--you've gotta go to graduate school for that anyhow.

These problems aren't exactly new though. Peter Novick in That Noble Dream, a history of the objectivity question in the American historical discipline, ended his work on a rather pessimistic note, relating an atomistic, fractured discipline with declining numbers of students filling its lecture halls. That was in 1988.
 
Black Orifice said:
There's at least a small percentage that are lost to the identity disciplines, like African-American or Women's studies (these disciplines were created in part by previous fractures in the field). I think where history is really losing to are the social sciences like psychology, communications, and the like.
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These degrees don't get you jobs, either. I really think it's about avoiding work, as History requires more work than other social science discipline, in my experience.
 
Black Orifice said:
I wouldn't be surprised if you had a small army in your psychology ranks at your graduation ceremony, Dak. Regarding this flow to the social sciences, I think it has less to do with student perceptions as to the usefulness of learning about history and their projected fears of employer perceptions on the un-usefulness of history. It's the problem of viewing education from a utilitarian point of view. I can't tell you how many times I had middle-aged customers back when I worked in pharmacy how much they had wanted to study history, but then didn't. I think for most, they could have studied history, and then gone on to have careers just as successful as what they already had--you've gotta go to graduate school for that anyhow.
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Oh there were/are tons of undergraduate degrees conferred in psychology every year, and many many at the Master's level as well. The former because it's mostly a bullshift degree (unless you take the research track, which only a few do), and the latter because it's necessary if one actually wants to work in anything related to psychology, because the BA/BS is pretty much worthless for actually working in the field. Many undergraduate psych majors are not doctoral level quality students, and of the many that could be, there just simply aren't enough doctoral slots to accommodate them all.

History is, from the outside looking in, far more rigorous than a psychology major. Also more informative about humanity. But since the majority stop with the BA, and both require graduate work, psych is going to be more popular due to the ease of the major. Echoing Caplan, it's an undertaking in signaling, not an attempt to become less ignorant.

I've been banging the drum for a dramatic cut in college enrollment, and that will continue. At least half of the current US student body has no business in the university. Unfortunately, perverse economic incentives and culture pressure are pushing people into a failing enterprise while accumulating debt in an institution that must endlessly water down the material.
 
So I got a 98 in anatomy for the last quarter which leaves me with a B for the semester and thus exempt from the exam. Everything else is fucked though, other than a B for the last quarter in geometry
 
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