FIELD NOTES HAS MOVED

Notes from the Field is now at http://katrinagulliver.posterous.com

or visit my main site, http://www.katrinagulliver.com

Who You Calling Dr?

I saw a recent episode of Criminal Minds, in which the character Spencer Reid (who has 2 PhDs – neither of them in medicine) explained to the mother of a victim, “I’m a doctor. I think in terms of rationality”. I would NEVER say “I’m a doctor” in that context, and I can’t imagine any of my colleagues doing so. It would seem both pretentious and misleading. It smacks too of hucksters selling self-help books. But in the media, look at the models we have for PhD holders: nerds suffering social arrested development (like those guys on Big Bang Theory – aren’t they professors at CalTech? Why are they still sharing an apartment?), Ross Geller (whose job was also used as a demonstration of geekiness – maybe because his dinosaurs didn’t come alive at night), and Spencer Reid – referred to always as “DR Reid”, which also makes it seem like he’s the only person in the FBI who went to graduate school. Really? Surely half the people there have PhDs in psychology, criminology, or forensics. And the mathematical savant on Numb3rs? It seems like having a PhD may enable someone to catch serial killers, but partly because he is not far from being that “Quiet, white man, of above average intelligence, who probably lives alone....” himself. And when an academic shows up on Law & Order, you just KNOW he was sleeping with an undergrad and strangled his wife. So the model we have is male and (at best) socially dysfunctional. Where are the women, and the PhDs who are not losers?

Also recently, I was thinking about the attitude to real people with doctorates in the media. Gordon Brown has a PhD (in history), and Barack Obama, while not a PhD, has a JD and taught at law school. What struck me was the difference in the way these academic credentials have been mentioned (or not) in the press. Gordon Brown is never referred to as “Dr” and his academic background was never played up much by either his supporters or detractors. On his supporters’ side, that’s less surprising – Old Labour not being overfond of “book learning”, but it wasn’t seized on as something to criticise either. Meanwhile, President Obama’s academic background is made much of by those for and against him, either to demonstrate his intelligent sophistication, or that he is a typical pointy headed intellectual.

Belated FEEGI Conference Report

Last week, I was at the FEEGI conference at Duke. The Forum For European Expansion and Global Interaction (www.feegi.org) has had me as a member for a while, but this was the first time I had attended the biennial conference. And it was GREAT!!

What set it apart from other conferences I have been to:

• The price (ie NOT hell expensive. Yes, AHA, I am looking at you... )
• The included food was impressive! No cold ham & cheese sandwiches, but a Lebanese buffet the first day, and Indian the second. And that was LUNCH.
• The fact that everyone went to everything. There were no simultaneous panels, so everyone spent all of the two days in the one room, watching the presentations together. This might sound claustrophobic, but I found the audience to be highly engaged. I got some very useful comments on my paper, despite being later in the program (around the time people are often either napping or heading to the airport).
• Despite covering an impressive swathe of world history (European expansion across the globe from the 14th to 19th centuries!) there seemed to be commonality and focus across the program. For the first time in a long time at a conference, I actually got something out of every panel I saw.
  

(and what made this truly astounding? It started at 8AM each morning. And everyone showed up!!)
So, how do they do it, and what lessons can be learnt? I’m organising a conference this summer and am keen to see what works (I’ve sat through some truly dire examples of what DOESN’T). Included lunch obviously helps, as that way people stick around and talk during the break, rather than running down the street to a sandwich shop (and not bothering to come back for the afternoon panels). And having somewhere to SIT for the lunch. Too many events I’ve been to involve trying to juggle a plate, a wine glass and a bread roll while standing up. OK, so I’m food obsessed: but it does seem to make a real difference. Just try telling the academics at a conference that there is no coffee... ;)
The coordinators obviously also went to some trouble to select the papers that complemented one another, to make strong panels. But isn’t that what all conference planners try to do?

There’s obviously a mysterious something else, that gets a crowd to stick around, and stay involved. I don’t know what the FEEGI trick is (was it in the coffee?), but I would like to see it at more conferences.

New Twitterstorians Enter the Fray

@KristyDermody – Museum curator based in Adelaide
@profblmkelley – Blair Kelley, historian recently quoted in the New York Times!
@SIMuseum – Staten Island Museum
@HistorySA
@MuseumofSamoa
@exploratorium – Exploratorium, San Francisco

Despite #followamuseum day, some museums are not getting much Twitterlove... Support your local museum (and one on the other side of the world!)

Jacob's Golden Ladder Gets Slippery at the Top...

Stepping late here into the churning waters of the job market debate in history. Marc Bosquet has effectively critiqued the AHA’s data (and their “supply side” economic focus). One of the comments on Historiann’s blog added a pertinent point which is often overlooked in this long-running debate. Kathleen Lowrey said

“If you were 24 years old and choosing between a few years reading and writing and thinking on a self-chosen schedule vs. a 40 hour week yea until death as a cubicle critter, you might take the gamble of grad school, too. Cake now vs. no cake ever (cake being leisure time, self-direction, feeling one’s existence is meaningful, being surrounded by interesting like-minded people) — I’d probably make the same choice.”

The “cake now” vs “cake never” attraction of graduate school is, I believe, a strong factor. I certainly met PhD students who said that they only enrolled “because I got funding” and three years of salary (in the UK) was too good to turn down. Not to overgeneralise, but these were also people who seemed ambivalent (or flat out uninterested) in their academic research, and in a number of cases never finished anyway. So in a sense they got a free 3 year holiday: and when it’s offered like that (there is no punishment for not completing, for simply walking off at the end of the three years having taken the money and produced nothing), it’s hardly surprising people take it up. I also met people who – faced with (realistically) spending up to a year after their undergraduate degree looking for a job – decided to enrol for a Masters degree at the same time, so their “jobseeking” year also accrued them an additional qualification. Of course, if they were performing well in the Masters course they would be encouraged to apply for PhD places, and this is one track by which people end up in humanities PhD programs. It wasn’t their original plan, but when a funded opportunity appears, weighing that against scouring the want ads while living back with one’s parents makes a PhD sound like a pretty good option. In fact, at that post-BA stage, a funded PhD place can be the “bird in the hand” over the unknown outcomes of the general job market.

But the other element raised, that fresh graduates of 22 see their options as “wage slave” vs the intellectual world of academia, is a key one. The undercurrent in graduate school (at least as I experienced in the humanities) is that it is a noble vocation, an “independent” way of life (in the same sense of “indie” films versus blockbusters, and you can well imagine the kind of cultural snobbery that goes with it). People who left academia to pursue another job were described as “selling out”. So there is a strange contradiction, between an attitude that regards academia (in the humanities) as some kind of free, creative realm, but then turns around at the end to complain that the time spent in grad school did not provide a professional qualification that would lead directly to a job.

...and heaven’s walls too high to hear the trouble down below

Is some of the problem that (some) senior people don’t understand what the job market is like now? It seems hard to believe anyone could be unaware, but some of the advice circulating while I was a PhD student suggests that this really is the case. I knew people who simply applied for 12 hypercompetitive postdocs and were surprised not to get one, and senior profs who talked about Junior Research Fellowships and British Academy Postdocs as a natural progression, as if they were easy to come by.
I’ve also heard from people serving on search committees who were SURPRISED to get 100+ applicants for a position. How long ago was your last interaction with the job market if that’s a surprise?

Trains and cities and observations

I am on the Coast Starlight, Amtrak’s service from Seattle to Los Angeles. This train features the Pacific Parlour Car (yes, that is PARLOUR with a U), a lounge car for sleeper passengers featuring a bar, some dining tables, and some cool swivel armchairs for looking out the windows. These carriages are originals from the 1950s, restored and brought back into service for just the Coast Starlight. There is also an afternoon wine and cheese tasting (which I hadn’t known about before boarding, so was pleasantly surprised. My previous Amtrak experience was short commuter journeys on the East Coast). This journey really puts European rail travel into true, crummy perspective. Even the so-called “First Class” on the Eurostar is nothing like this good (and the basic class Eurostar “dining car” - which involves being sold some microwave noodles – wouldn’t be so annoying if the tickets weren’t actually more than I paid for this trip, which includes a bed and all meals).

Travelling by train often involves seeing the oldest parts of a city, the historic core where the main station was built. Seattle’s King St station made me wonder – were there other big stations too at some point? (the name “King St” - as opposed to “Union Station” or even just “Seattle Station” suggests a need to differentiate it by location from other stations in the same city). The station itself is undergoing restoration, which is part-way through now. There is an opportunity to peek up where some ceiling panels have been removed and see the original ceiling, another 15’ or so above. This beautiful plaster moulded ceiling was covered in a 1967 “facelift” which involved a lower suspended ceiling and fluorescent lights. Fortunately the original was not erased, so it is possible for it to be brought back. It is a great shame – an urban tragedy – that the same could not be said for New York’s Penn Station, where a beautiful original was obliterated to build a concrete cavern with the soul and charm of a multistorey carpark in a bad neighbourhood.

San Diego to Boston and All Points Between - thoughts on the AHA

About a week ago, I received an email (from a group I had never heard of) inviting me to move my AHA panel from the Hyatt. The issues were the hotel owner’s stance on gay marriage, and some labour issues. They weren’t offering alternative venues, but suggested that some people were using their own hotel rooms (I am not expecting a huge audience for my paper, but I was hoping for a better crowd than 3 people sitting on my bed). Shortly thereafter, I received a message from the AHA saying much of the message was disinformation, there is no labour dispute at the hotel, and repeating the outcome of discussions at the last AHA meeting: the hotel was booked years ago and pulling out at this stage would be more financially damaging to the AHA than to the hotel. A series of panels on the history of marriage will be held at the Hyatt.

Tenured Radical and others have discussed this proposed boycott and why it was not going to work for the AHA financially. This series of sessions on marriage being held at the Hyatt also generated some H-NET discussion, with a couple of responders saying they expected the panels to take one side of the debate (no papers endorsing an anti-gay marriage perspective). I don’t know yet but I suspect this will be true. And that’s unfortunate. I am in support of gay marriage, but I don’t think this is the type of thing on which the AHA should have a position.

I don’t know Mr Manchester or have any particular interest in his views, but as I understand it he participated in the elections as a citizen, legally exercising his democratic right to support a particular viewpoint, and donating money to the cause he supported. After all, it’s not just Doug Manchester holding a certain opinion, evidently thousands of Californians agreed with him. The subtext I’m sensing is that the Hyatt has become the focus for a lot of anger from AHA members who were unhappy with the passing of Proposition 8. If the Proposition had not passed, I don’t think anyone would be suggesting boycotting the hotel.

The more general complaint I’ve heard about the AHA in terms of its location is the cost: I think I’m paying more for my hotel this year than I did last year (which was New York at New Years). I will be interested to see how much attendance is down due to the economic downturn (as opposed to the lower attendance which is apparently typical whenever the AHA is on the West Coast).

I have been told that the reason we go to cities like Philly or Boston is that they are much cheaper than, say, Miami in January. But the cities that have hosted the recent meetings and are on the calendar for the next few years seem to offer a fairly unimaginative shuffle, with New York and DC on high rotation. (I understand the Washington meeting of 2008 was a last-minute replacement for New Orleans, but perhaps they could have moved the 2014 meeting away from DC).

2005 - Seattle
2006 - Philadelphia
2007 - Atlanta
2008 - Washington, D.C.
2009 - New York
2010 - San Diego
2011 - Boston
2012 - Chicago
2013 - New Orleans
2014 - Washington, D.C.
2015 - New York
2016 - Atlanta

I don’t know how the AHA chooses the destinations: does it depend on local members campaigning for it, like the Olympics? Obviously it has to be a city where a local organising committee can make arrangments, so a city with a density of members does make sense (also because all the people living and working in New York or Boston can make a good base, whereas at another city a higher proportion of attendees have to come in from outside). I get all of that, but it would be good to see some other cities getting into the mix. Baltimore? Savannah? Providence? Memphis?