No, You Still Cannot be a Professor

The one post I still get comments and emails about is something I wrote three years ago: Open Letter to My Students: No, You Cannot be a Professor. It is a dark and intentionally strident post, meant to dispel any illusions that impressionable young people might have about joining a vanishing profession:

No, my esteemed student, you are not going to be a history professor. It isn't going to happen .... you are not going to win the lottery, you are not going to be struck by a meteorite, you are not going to be a professor. All of these things will happen to someone, somewhere, but none of them will happen to you.

The post went viral by the modest standards of this blog, with links from Reddit and MetaFilter and the Atlantic Monthly and eventually racked up over 100,000 page views. It still gets about 1200 views a month, and at least once a month I get an email from some plaintive undergrad, still trying to hold onto some thread of the dream, asking if my advice still stands.

Alas, it does, and this report from the American Historical Association confirms it. The number of academic history jobs has dropped again this year, for the second year in a row. "This decline is especially disconcerting when we consider that the overall economy has been improving and the US jobless rate declining. It raises the possibility that this downturn in academic positions for historians is not entirely attributable to the recession, but may be with us for some time." Here is the data in a chart:



Positions Advertised with the AHA

The thing to remember about this chart is that even the peaks represent a terrible job market, with hundreds of applicants for many jobs. There are far more new PhDs every year than there are jobs, and such has been the case for years, and so there are perhaps thousands of recent PhDs who have not landed a permanent academic position but have not stopped trying either. A friend of mine said "I used to tell students that earning a PhD and landing a tenure-track job was like running a marathon. Now I tell them it is like winning a marathon."

So no, my hopeful correspondents, you are still not going to be a professor. The good news is that there are jobs for people with historical training. You need to play all of your cards exactly right, and you need to be geographically flexible, but it can be done. Check out this great guest post by my recent MA student Lee Nilsson, on how he parlayed an MA in history into jobs at the Library of Congress and now the Department of State. There is life outside the classroom.

Invested in a system that renders us irrelevant

Perhaps you have seen this bit of academic click bait: 10 Reasons Professors Should Start Writing BuzzFeed Articles by Mark Marino. There isn't anything there really (and that is kind of the point), just a listicle with a few poorly-chosen memes with some halfway funny headings: "No one Believes that “The Next 450 Pages will Blow Your Mind!" and "The RT is the purest form of peer-review." This Chronicle of Higher Education article unpacks Marino's listicle with more gravity than perhaps is warranted, and includes a link to a meritorious example of an academic using social media, Post-Structuralism Explained With Hipster Beards: Part 1, by Chris Rodley. Now that is some worthy link bait.

The idea of academics publishing on Buzzfeed is both a great idea and nothing new. The calls for academics to engage the public with shorter, more accessible writing in different venues have been around for decades. With new platforms the old arguments get rehashed--often by people who seem perfectly unaware of how unoriginal they are being. Hell, tens of thousands of us have been doing exactly this sort of writing with academic blogging.

The argument also misses the essential truth--it assumes that the irrelevance of academics is because of the way we write. You know--bloated, impenetrable, designed for an audience of 40 people (and finding an audience of ten). This argument is wrong. The irrelevance of academic writing is not because of the way we write, it is because of the way we publish.

The illustration for this piece at the CHE--the Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka "tell me more" meme where he is saying "And I can read more about this in your 30 page article in JSTOR?" points at the real problem that prevents academics from finding a public audience. It isn't just the poor quality of so much of our prose, plenty of poor-quality prose sells like hotcakes. It is that there is NO FVCKING WAY for most human beings to get to our academic articles on JSTOR. Most people are not a currently enrolled student or a university employee, and are not willing to pay $20 to read a 30 page article. And even if you are one of the tiny portion of humanity that theoretically has access to JSTOR article, clicking on a link on a blog will still most likely take you to a pay wall. And you will back up, then go the website of your university, and use the godawful search engine there to find the article, and click through a half-dozen screens to get to the full text. Or not.

I think that actually a lot of people would be willing to wade through academic prose to learn more about topics that interest them if they would get to the damn prose in the first place. We could seed social media with abstracts of what we are doing--in the form of BuzzFeed listicles or whatever--and some people would follow the crumbs back to our academic writing. It would not take a lot of readers to double the readership of most academic article in the humanities, after all. But we cannot do it, because you can't provide an open, public link to most academic articles.

The problem is not how we write but where we publish. We are invested in a system of publication and copyright that renders us irrelevant.

A Corporate History of Washington Water Power--in Video

I just discovered this series of short videos about the history of Avista, formerly Washington Water Power, online at KSPS. There are ten in all, covering topics from the earliest years of the company to (my favorite) the cartoon advertising icon Reddy Kilowatt.

There is hardly a more historic company in the Inland Northwest than Washington Water Power. Established before Washington was even a state, the company has been at the center of everything from the Great Spokane Fire to the building of hydroelectric dams to modern architecture to Expo 74. In recent decades, as the company changed its name to Avista, it seemed to move away from its history as well as its former name.

Now, on the 125th anniversary of Washington Water Power, there is a renewed commitment to that history. The company produced a rather good 40 page booklet on its history, and has additional historical materials on the company website. And then there is the ten-part series of minute-and-a-half documentaries.

These are well-made, but very much from the company point of view. The first details the role of WWP in the Great Spokane Fire of 1889, it is interesting and full of wonderful images. I especially like this one about the 1940s Home Service Program, in which female WWP employees fanned out across the region to show homemakers how to use the latest electric home appliances. Others show early dam building, electric-powered streetcars, and other aspects of WWP history.

Overall, the videos feel more like historically-tinged advertisements for Avista than historical documentaries. This is local history through the rosiest of lenses. An episode named The Fight for Survival even details how WWP fought off the "threat" of becoming a public utility district in the 1950s. Thus was socialist tyranny averted. And the two videos that deal with dam construction have literally no mention of the environmental impact of such projects, or the terrible blow they were to native peoples. None of the videos show any awareness of the larger historic picture of their times--the Great Depression, Cold War culture, or any of the other topics that could have enriched these pieces and made them more interesting.

I suspect that what happened here is that the videos were produced with internal expertise and an outside advertising firm--but they forgot to hire a historian. Still, perhaps these are petty complaints about what are after all a set of 90-second infomercials. It is good to see Avista once again interested in and promoting its own heritage.

The Twilight of Columbus Day

This clip from John Oliver reflects pretty well our new understanding of Christopher Columbus:



You probably saw where Seattle just officially ditched Columbus Day in favor of Indigenous Peoples' Day. Of course this has been denounced by some on the right as "political correctness" (by which they generally mean "being polite to non-whites").

The charge ignores the fact the Columbus Day is itself a product of political correctness from an earlier era. For most of the 19th-century, Columbus did not occupy a particularly high spot in our historical pantheon. He was certainly in every textbook, but he was lumped in with Cortez and other Spanish conquerors and explorers. Columbus only became an American hero with the rise of the Italian-American community, who by the early 1900s had gained enough economic and political clout in their new home to organize and demand a holiday of their own. Columbus Day became a national holiday in 1937. This pattern--a group is discriminated against, slowly gains acceptance, and uses its political power to push for its own holiday--is of course exactly what gave us Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and now Indigenous Peoples' Day.

Growing up in Connecticut, Columbus Day was kind of a big deal. With our strong and politically active Italian-American population, the day was observed as a general celebration of Italian culture. It was in no way controversial--though it should have been. The current unpopularity of Columbus is not a result of any new information about the man coming to light. We have always known, from his own writings, about the taking of slaves and slaughter of civilians. We just did not used to care, or thought that his skills as a navigator someone balanced things out. This period of willful blindness has come to an end, and we cannot go back.

A hundred years from now some history student will be sifting through some letters and diaries of the 20th century and find references to "Columbus Day?" and wonder--what was that?

Archives Open House in Cheney this Saturday

Did you know that the world's first built-from-the-group-up digital archive is in Cheney? It is true, and this Saturday, October 11 from 10 a.m. until 2 p.m. you can get special behind-the-scenes tours to see where the magic happens.

The state had money back in 2004.

Our facility is home to both the Digital Archives and the Eastern Region Branch of the Washington State Archives. This state-of-the-art facility opened it doors in 2004. Downstairs, the Eastern Region Branch preserves precious physical historical records--everything from court transcripts of frontier-
era divorces and murder trials to glass plate photographs of turn-of-the-century Spokane parks. We also have maps and marriage licenses and property record cards and naturalization papers and city council meeting minutes and--well, you get the picture. Archivist Lee Pierce will take visitors into the deep storage to show off some of the treasures that we protect.

 Upstairs, the building houses the Washington State Digital Archives, which preserves almost 150 million digital records for state and local government. You may already know our website (digitalarchives.wa.gov), this is a chance to get to know us a little better. There will be tutorials of how to use our website, featuring some of the more fascinating and lesser-known digital records, tours of the buildings, and Network Administrator Harold Stoehr will even lead a back-room peak at the thingamajigs and whatchamacallits that keep the website up and running.

 The archives are located at 960 Washington Street, in Cheney, Washington, and you can call us at (509) 235-7500. General tours of the facility will start at 10:15 and at 1, the backroom tour of the Digital Archives begins at noon. Or just stop by for a look around. We will see you in Cheney!

Step 1: Hire a Historian!

So this came across my Facebook feed today: Native America Project: Indian Fur Trade and Trading Posts - Google Maps. Naturally, I clicked:


View Native America Project: Indian Fur Trade and Trading Posts in a larger map

A good ten years back at the Fur Trade Conference I met a couple of gentlemen who had used a GIS program to map every fur trading post in North America. The huge print they brought with them was intoxicating in its detail. I asked if I could find it online or if they would share the file. They said no--they had put a lot of work into it and meant to charge for access. When I saw the link above I thought is was that project, available at last.

Alfred Jacob Miller - The Lost Greenhorn

No such luck. This map is just a mess. For my backyard, the interior Pacific Northwest, the majority of the information is wrong. Spokane House, the fur trading post, is in two different places. The interpretive text is dry and somewhat inaccurate and seems to have been copied from Wikipedia. The military fort of Fort Spokane is mixed up with Spokane House, the description is completely wrong. Fort Okanagan and the Nez Perce people are misplaced.

Historian friends, how does this map do in your regions of expertise?

Sadly, this sort of thing happens all the time in public and digital history. Exhibits, interpretive panels, and digital projects are created by technicians who are experts in presentation. Then fuss over color schemes and illustrations and interactivity. Then they pull some content off Wikipedia or some terrible regional history book published in 1950 to fill in their interpretive captions and metadata fields. Garbage in...

Friends, hire a historian. We know things, and can save you a lot of wasted effort. It is not even like we cost a lot of money!