A brief addendum, in case anyone was wondering whether mocking a grad student's diss in the NYT could really be problematic.

In the last two days this (not especially popular) blog has received hits from the following search strings:

medieval theologian Duns Scotu [sic] citations

duns scotus use of citation

Duns Scotus citations thesis

duns scotus colombia [sic] footnotes

duns scotus citations (five times)

how duns scotus used citations

how the medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations

dissertation medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations

duns scotus citations dissertation (twice)

duns scotus citations taylor "new york times"

duns scotus citation citations

duns scotus citations thesis

duns scotus used citations

duns scotus citation columbia

dissertation duns scotus citations

columbia dissertation Duns Scotus citation ph.d.

So now I'm really curious. How did Duns Scotus use citations? I seriously kind of want to read this dissertation. I hope somebody publishes a monograph on this topic in the near future. Listen up, Oxford UP: there is public interest.

Incidentally, I am currently writing something on how Marianne Moore cites Duns Scotus. No lie.

Citations: Useless and Boring

Mark Taylor wants to end the university as we know it. I was thinking we were about due for another call for radical change from a tenured professor. I hadn't heard one since MLA. Taylor's essay has the unusual virtue, at least, of wanting to see the restructuring happen from the top down, rather than placing the burden of transforming the profession on disenfranchised grad students. But Taylor's proposals are incoherent.

He wants interdisciplinarity (radical!), but he confuses interdisciplinarity with adisciplinarity.

He wants to avoid the pitfalls of "overspecialization," but simultaneously advocates for hyperspecialization (one university specializing in French studies, another in German).

He acknowledges that universities could never get along without cheap grad student teaching, but also argues that there is "no market" and "no demand" for new PhDs. This is clearly incoherent. Given the choice -- and this is reflected in college ranking algorithms everywhere -- having real, tenured professors do the teaching is always preferred. The point of going to a four-year school in the first place is that it's considered best to learn from people who are active in the field, who are institutionally supported in doing research.

The fact is that there is a huge demand for trained scholars, but like the WalMart nation we are, we want them as cheaply as possible. The difference is that people don't kid themselves that the cheap plastic goods from WalMart are equivalent to artisan-made products in the way that universities try to insist that farming their teaching out to inexperienced-by-design, officeless, unsupported grad students is the intellectual equivalent to giving students small seminars with professors.

But I'm even more bothered by Taylor's cavalier treatment of research being done by young scholars in his own field. So far as I can tell, it's a byproduct of a deep suspicion of specialized knowledge and possibly scholarship itself. Taylor writes,

Unfortunately this mass-production university model [proposed by Kant] has led to separation where there ought to be collaboration and to ever-increasing specialization. In my own religion department, for example, we have 10 faculty members, working in eight subfields, with little overlap. And as departments fragment, research and publication become more and more about less and less. Each academic becomes the trustee not of a branch of the sciences, but of limited knowledge that all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems. A colleague recently boasted to me that his best student was doing his dissertation on how the medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations.

Taylor represents specialization as per se tending to uselessness -- as if knowledge were not an end in itself. So Taylor decides to make a joke out of some young scholar's work, using his position as a tenured professor at Columbia -- the kind who can get Op-Ed pieces into the NYT -- to ridicule his own field rather than attempt to inform the public about what it really does. Taylor pretends to be sympathetic to grad students, but to ridicule someone's dissertation in the pages of the New York Times is nothing but hostile. And, if he is talking about a real colleague's real student's real dissertation, unethical.

Taylor plunks the description down there as if it were supposed to be obvious that a dissertation on Duns Scotus's use of citations were trivial. But is it that there is something inherently trivial about this student's dissertation, or is it that Taylor himself is in the wrong gig? When a professor of religion cannot imagine why a dissertation on Duns Scotus might be important or useful, and when a scholar thinks that citations are necessarily trivial, then there's trouble. I'm not a specialist in medieval theology, but offhand, and as someone who studies modernism, I know that citation practices involve questions of authority and deference, intertextuality, bibliographic/genetic information about the author's sources, and philosophical positions on presence/absence that are probably fairly relevant to theology. I don't know enough about the project to evaluate it, but there's nothing about that description that should give anyone license to dismiss the project out of hand, unless that person is already hostile to the idea of specialized knowledge per se.

I get that impression, too, from another shot Taylor takes at citation in his recommendation that we abolish traditional dissertations in favor of multimedia projects for the post-print era. "[T]here is no longer a market," he writes, "for books modeled on the medieval dissertation, with more footnotes than text." Actually, there never was such a market, which is why we have university presses. The idea is that scholarly value might not be the same thing as market value.

But Taylor's evidence that academic books are arcane and useless is apparently that they come with a scholarly citational apparatus, which Taylor gently exaggerates for maximum mock-value: "more footnotes than text." Can he be serious? Citations are part of academic standards of intellectual honesty (quite a different thing from intellectual "property"). Citations acknowledge the research that one has done, and help others do their own research. Citations refer other scholars to one's sources and expand on points of contention in the field. Citations are fundamental to good research, but Taylor only alludes to citations as jokey stand-ins for what he sees as the problem with the university as we know it. There seems to be something deeper at work here than the usual discontent with How Things Are.

Calls to reform academia are fairly common. I've made some myself. Inherent in the genre is a tension between wanting to do away with large and entrenched structures and an awareness that much of what is good, and indeed foundational, about academia has been produced by those same structures (like, say, disciplinary methodologies). Taylor registers those tensions in moments like his proposal for interdisciplinary problem-based research groups.

A Water program would bring together people in the humanities, arts, social and natural sciences with representatives from professional schools like medicine, law, business, engineering, social work, theology and architecture. Through the intersection of multiple perspectives and approaches, new theoretical insights will develop and unexpected practical solutions will emerge.

A Water program sounds like an interesting, nay, even exciting idea. But as Taylor himself acknowledges, this would hinge on bringing together multiple disciplinary perspectives, not eradicating disciplinarity. That means it wouldn't work out to "[a]bolish permanent departments," as Taylor proposes at the beginning of the section, because methodological perspectives do not happen in a vacuum. I suspect more and more that the Humanities Are Dead (TM) essay cannot be coherent.

It is, on the other hand, perfectly possible to write such an essay without mocking a colleague's grad student in the pages of the New York Times.

Doris Day in Calamity Jane: a woman's touch, indeed.

With Miss Moore a word is a word most when it is separated out by science, treated with acid to remove the smudges, washed, dried, and placed right side up on a clean surface.

     --William Carlos Williams, "Marianne Moore," in Imaginations, ed. Webster Schott (New York: New Directions, 1971): 318.

Williams praises the woman poet, even calls her scientific: but he still manages to do it in a way that emphasizes how good she is at cleaning. Oh, modernism.

"Oh crap" breakthroughs

I hate it when clarity dawns ... and reveals to you that the last ten pages you wrote are exactly wrong wrong wrongity wrong.

Such is life, alas.

Textbook affordability

Apparently UC Berkeley has assembled a task force on textbook affordability. (No evidence yet, so far as I can see, of a task force on not raising student fees every year while simultaneously cutting course offerings and freezing faculty hires so that a higher proportion of undergraduate courses are taught by non-tenure-track academic staff.)

The task force doesn't seem to have come to any earth-shattering conclusions yet; for instance, the "Why are textbooks so expensive?" section of the web site concludes that textbooks are expensive because their prices have risen. Imagine that.

The recommended actions all involve adopting cheaper textbooks or finding cheaper sources for textbooks (e.g. used). Ludicrously, they suggest allowing students to use older editions of a textbook and combing through different editions to identify the differences. We call that kind of labor "collating," and it is an enormously tedious process only worth undertaking in an editorial or scholarly capacity -- say, to establish a variorum of the poems of Marianne Moore. Performing many hours of tedious unpaid labor is not really a solution for the high price of textbooks; it just relays the cost to the instructors (who are increasingly employed contingently, which, you may have heard, does not really leave them with hours of leisure time for combing through multiple editions of textbooks). And that's quite apart from the fact that older editions may contain significant problems -- something particularly common for literature anthologies.

What seems to go unrecognized in the task force's recommendations is the fact that publishers' tendency to issue new editions every few years is designed to prevent the resale of used books from replacing, or significantly undercutting, the purchase of new ones. No matter what, there will rarely if ever be enough used books to accommodate a given class, and some students will be left in the lurch paying an unacceptably high price for a new textbook. Encouraging the use of used textbooks cannot address that problem; moreover, it won't cause publishers to lower prices.

Perhaps we should be talking not just with instructors and students but also with publishers. I was fascinated to read the California legislation urging publishers to adopt measures that are likely to undercut their sales (like performing the aforementioned collating on instructors' behalf, or publishing supplements rather than new editions). I don't think it's likely that publishers will adopt these policies, but it would benefit everyone, I think, to stop thinking of college students as a necessarily privileged class that can bear incessant gouging. What we need are not piecemeal tactics (like assigning old editions) but rather a thorough reconsideration of the economic system that surrounds academia, one that reconceives the college student as a member of the scholarly community, rather than a customer demanding (and paying for, at the highest rate we can charge) goods and services therefrom.

But that, of course, would also involve the University of California refraining from constantly raising fees while also lowering the quality of instruction. Students are not widgets.

There is a reason one of these lists is not like the others.

Pitch received from my alumni association:

One of these lists is not like the others.

The U of C is a leader in Nobel Prizes, Fulbright scholarships,
and Peace Corps service...

* Nobel Prize Winners
* 82 UCHICAGO
* 77 COLUMBIA
* 76 HARVARD
* 34 YALE
* 32 PRINCETON
* Total Number of Nobel Prizes awarded to students, alumni, faculty, or affiliates of the University.
SOURCE: WWW.NOBELPRIZE.ORG


* Fulbright Scholars
* 122 UCHICAGO
* 115 YALE
* 96 PRINCETON
* 68 HARVARD
* 66 COLUMBIA
* Number of Fulbright Scholars* since 1998-99.
SOURCE: US.FULBRIGHTONLINE.ORG
*When available, the number of undergraduate recipients is used


* Peace Corps Volunteers
* 63 UCHICAGO
* 43 YALE
* 42 COLUMBIA
* 42 HARVARD
* 42 PRINCETON
* Number of graduating seniors who volunteered to serve in the Peace Corps over the last two years.
SOURCE: PEACE CORPS


Alumni Giving
* 60% PRINCETON
* 43% YALE
* 41% HARVARD
* 36% COLUMBIA
* 32% UCHICAGO
* Percentage of undergraduate alumni who give back to their alma mater.
SOURCE: 2008 US NEWS AND WORLD REPORT


It's time to move alumni giving into the top ranks too.

Indeed. Time to tap the doubtless overflowing coffers of those alumni researchers, grad students, and Peace Corps volunteers.

Progress

Later it struck me that the best history of painting in London was the National Gallery, and that the best history of literature, more particularly of poetry, would be a twelve-volume anthology in which each poem was chosen not merely because it was a nice poem or a poem Aunt Hepsy liked, but because it contained an invention, a definite contribution to the art of verbal expression.

--Ezra Pound, "How to Read"

Pound is here advocating rewriting the history of literature on the model of (one version of) the history of science: as a progress narrative, not unlike the march through various models of the atom that constituted your tenth-grade chemistry book's sole nod to history. (Okay, perhaps it mentioned Boyle as well.)

This forward-moving model of history, from triumph to triumph, depends in part on repudiating the literary judgment of Aunt Hepsy, which is of necessity a matter of mere taste, and probably bad taste at that. That Aunt Hepsy (a spinster, a Hepzibah Pyncheon?) liked a poem carries no weight with Pound. Poetry is important stuff, the stuff of progress, and that clearly has nothing to do with the opinions of old women.

Modernism's "new realism" depended in part on masculinizing poetry through the authority of science/scientism. What did this mean for modernist poets like Marianne Moore, who were genuinely interested in science but who, by reason of their social station, were increasingly coming to resemble Aunt Hepsy as the years passed?

Ezra Pound, "How to Read," Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T.S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1968) 17.

"Ilse and I had a fight yesterday about which we'd rather be Joan of Arc or Frances Willard. We didn't begin it as a fight but just as an argewment but it ended that way. I would rather be Frances Willard because she is alive."

--L.M. Montgomery, Emily of New Moon

L.M. Montgomery, Emily of New Moon (1925; Toronto: Seal, 1992) 156.

Proofreading

It's not what it used to be. (TM)

Steven Shapin, The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008).

Helpful tips from my cell phone user's manual

Do not attempt to operate your phone charger if it has received a sharp blow, been dropped, thrown from a speeding motorcycle or is otherwise damaged; doing so may damage your phone.

Emphasis added.

Composition students are invited to rectify the faulty parallelism.

T-Mobile. Getting Started. TM1524 GH68-18756A. p. 27.
(The MLA guidelines for citing a cell phone user's manual are frankly insufficient.)

Who is "the reader"?; or, What you get for prohibiting the word "I"

It must be exasperating to be a composition student. I am not saying this sarcastically; I mean it. At Cal, I'm blessed with smart, high-achieving students who got where they are today by following rules. They showed some imagination, but not too much imagination, and assiduously followed rules, and thereby got high marks and other official stamps of approval. This wasn't simply a matter of following stated rules, although that was part of it; often they also had to negotiate unspoken codes of comportment. They learned "test-taking strategies," a term that openly acknowledges that standardized tests are a game that can be won through generalized test-taking maneuvers; if the tests were truly effective as tests, then the only possible strategy would be to possess the appropriate depth and breadth of knowledge. They learned rules, sometimes explicit rules and sometimes rules that had to be figured out the hard way. They figured out at an early age that if they failed to follow rules, they could be punished all their lives. And they were not told which rules could be broken safely, or when.

I know exactly why high school writing teachers prohibit the use of the word "I," and if I were in their situation I'd do the same thing. It's a fence around the Torah; it's the blinking "don't walk" signal long before the oncoming cars get a green light.

But now my students truly don't believe that they are allowed to use the word "I," even in the context of assignments for which they clearly need it. They know intellectually that "I" is not the real evil, but the years of training have done them in.

So now it's "the reader," a fictional character by means of which we can obfuscate the difference between "I" and "everybody." Alas.

Nineteenth-century scientist of the week: Elliott Coues

Elliott Coues, 1842-1899

Coues was an ornithologist, naturalist, and (according to Wikipedia) army surgeon. I first ran across him in Frederic A. Lucas's The Story of Museum Groups, a guide leaflet from the American Museum of Natural History.



Museum groups, or "habitat groups," are free-standing groups of stuffed animals, usually dioramas in which specimens are placed in a more or less naturalistic position, with an artificial background that simulates the animal's habitat. Here is one currently on display at the AMNH:


(You can read all about this diorama here.)

Coues is quoted in the leaflet as a representative of the anti-museum group old guard, saying "as late as 1874" that

'Spread eagle' styles of mounting, artificial rocks and flowers, etc., are entirely out of place in a collection of any scientific pretensions, or designed for popular instruction. Besides, they take up too much room. Artistic grouping of an extensive collection is usually out of the question; and when this is unattainable, halfway efforts in that direction should be abandoned in favor of severe simplicity. Birds look best, on the whole, in uniform rows, assorted according to size, as far as natural classification allows. (Lucas 5)

For Coues, there was something anti-scientific about the habitat group; he felt that specimens should be displayed according to their taxonomy rather than their ecological contexts. So, for instance, an ostrich would be displayed next to an emu, not next to warthogs (as they actually were at the AMNH in the 1940s). If I recall correctly, the Musée d'Histoire Naturelle at the Jardin des Plantes is in large part arranged taxonomically even today, for instance. (But then, they also had a quite goofy exhibit on dragons in the basement when I visited.)

Coues isn't particularly best known for his views on museum groups; they were common enough views in the nineteenth century. He's better known for his commitment to classification and his interest in westward exploration (he edited Lewis and Clark's journals, for example), and of course his extensive studies of birds.

Like many other scientists of the period, Coues was interested in spiritualism, and he was also a member of the American Society for Psychical Research. He was for many years committed to the notion of "biogen," a "substance of mind," or "soul-stuff," in which, according to Coues, the vital principle resided (Coues 14-5). As best I can gloss it, it was vitalism with a spiritualist twist. The idea was not welcomed by the scientific community at large, but in 1885 Coues wrote,

I know that I have made a great discovery which conservative science will properly be slow to acknowledge. I also know that I can demonstrate the thing. Meanwhile, people may call me what they please, and I say proudly, with Galvani, 'they may call me the frog's dancing-master -- but I know that I have discovered one of the great forces of nature.' Galvinism [sic] is an accepted scientific fact: so will Biogen be in due time, and sooner perhaps than even I suppose. (qtd. in Cutright and Brodhead 304)

Famous last words. This is yet another example of the way that science and its protocols fluctuate and are subject to dispute.

Here's his obituary in The Nation.

Coues, Elliott. Biogen: A Speculation on the Origin and Nature of Life. 3rd ed. Boston: Estes and Lauriat, 1884.

Cutright, Paul Russell, and Michael J. Brodhead. Elliott Coues: Naturalist and Frontier Historian. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2001.

Lucas, Frederic A. The Story of Museum Groups. 4th ed. Guide Leaflet Series, No. 53. New York: American Museum of Natural History, 1926.

ETA: Apparently students who are given chocolate give more positive teaching evaluations. Oh, for crying out loud.

ETA (again): I appear to have been linked by "Your Unique Portal to the Conservative Blogosphere." It must be very unique, because last I checked, nineteenth-century spiritualist ornithologists were not a conservative issue, or a political issue at all, for that matter. In fact, this blog is in no way a part of the "conservative blogosphere," unless we are talking about conserve in the jam/jelly sense, in which case, well, maybe.