Careful reading

It sometimes happens that I comment on someone’s blog post, or someone’s comment on someone’s blog post, and then I go back and realize that I pretty much missed the point of what they were saying, or took a snippet of what they were up to out of context. Often this involves me saying what they were already saying as if they hadn’t said it. Or more frequently, if it’s a longer post, it may not be that I missed the point at any point in reading, but that I fixed myopically on a part of a whole to be what I commented on, not doing justice to something that’s actually quite rich. Sometimes by accident this leads to good conversation, but usually not.

We get trained to read hastily. In fact, the educated may be defined as people who read hastily unusually well. In my first graduate seminar the reading list for the first week was all 1000+ pages of Braudel’s The Mediterranean. We never had less than two full books a week after that, plus there was the reading for the research seminar. This is quite manageable, as it turns out, but not if one reads and savors and reflects upon each precious word. Or perhaps I am admitting a personal failing?

the kliban where the caveman pokes the book

The trick is to figure out what has to be read carefully, what can be skimmed, and what can be skipped entirely. Bayard argues in How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read that to be cultured is to be oriented toward the general field of knowledge, to know where books fit in relation to other books, to have a ‘feel for the game’ as Bourdieu would also put it. There’s always too much to read to actually be read; Bayard cites Musil’s General, who discovers that to read the contents of one library at a book a day would take ten thousand years, not counting the new books published during that time. Fortunately, as we become aware of more books our ability to categorize new ones on the fly becomes more efficient: “Oh, this is one of those.” “I see, she’s up to this here.” “Ah, this is a replication study of that other.”

humans at work

There are texts, often ‘difficult’ ones that have to be read with great care, although as my grad school anecdote illustrates they often aren’t. These are the primary orienting texts, the ones that define genres or research agendas or theoretical approaches. They sit at the nodes of networks of texts that may be quite wonderful but become increasingly optional as they fan out into developmental minutiae, idiosyncratic takes and contextual translations. With the latter once we figure out the derivation and the subtopic there’s usually little need to go farther, unless one has a personal investment in a particular snippet of conversation or needs that particular data-set for one’s own little contribution.

We are outraged when human beings are stereotyped this way. And yet each text is produced by a human being, a little jewel of communication hung out on the webwork of a billion such. I’m really sorry that I don’t read as carefully and engage as thoroughly as I might sometimes. As a producer of texts myself, I try to be modest in my expectations of others’ readings and to assemble, like some fabulous intertextual Frankenstein, a complete ideal reader from all the partial real ones.

guess which one is me!

Family values

Been a long day introducing all three of my introductory World History sections to structure/agency analysis, Rachel isn’t home yet, so I’m vegging out, grazing on bloggery and half-watching the Carolina Hurricanes play the New York Rangers. It’s intermission and the standard star interview with Eric Staal.

Staal has two brothers who also play hockey in the NHL, Marc with the Rangers and Jordan with the Penguins, who the Hurricanes beat recently. The interviewer wants to know why Eric seems to play with special intensity against his brothers’ teams. Eric chuckles and says something about being competitive and not wanting to be beaten by your siblings.

There you have it, the old sibling-rivalry cliché. One of many readymades in a routine sports interview. Hardly worth noticing, so why did I notice it?

Well, I’m also paying some attention to the Australian Open. Among the tournament’s attractions are the Williams sisters, two of the best tennis players in history, and normally it’s a great pleasure to watch them work. Yet I consider it merciful that Venus Williams was upset early, because now they won’t end up playing each other and we won’t have to listen to yet another tiresome rehearsal of how hard that is for them when they love each other so much and feel the pain of each others’ losses so keenly.

One situation, two diametrically opposite clichés: fun to beat siblings, painful to beat siblings. Both presented as if they’re self-evident.

The new philosophy

In a recent comment here, Mikhail grumps “I certainly am irritated at the whole mood of ‘let’s get over Kant but without really reading him, and anyone who asks for a closer analysis will be a downer who wants to ruin our great new philosophy party….’” Meanwhile, Graham Harman has an interesting brief post sketching the cast of characters in a cyclical history of philosophy.

Back in the job-search days I interviewed at the University of Illinois, a good experience even though it turned out I was up against Antoinette Burton, who was way out of my league. Ignorant at the time of my inevitable fate, as I recall I did a fairly good job talk pulling together some threads on the interactive formation of self according to the empiricist, hegelian and pragmatic traditions, under the rubric ‘prehistoric postmodernisms’. This idea was well-received overall, but it was the ancient historians who were most excited and wanted to talk a lot about the pre-Socratics. That was going back a little far for a modernist like me, yet it was a fun conversation and I was glad to find that the frame had such depth.

As I’ve remarked recently, finding repetition in history is subject to a variety of difficulties of fact and interpretation. Context matters, and we may also recall Marx’s quip in The 18th Brumaire that while the first time is tragedy, the second is farce. Still, while philosophers as such are under no obligation to take history seriously, for historians of philosophy it’s important that philosophical ideas claim universality unlike almost anything else in history, so taking philosophy seriously also involves putting decontextualized comparison in play. This procedure does reveal some striking similarities; it seems that folks have been asking roughly the same questions and coming up with roughly the same answers for a long, long time. Apparently none of them have been fully satisfactory.

For historians this is no worry; we find our kicks in context and we’re not so much concerned with what Truth Is as what people think it was at particular places and times. For reflective philosophers who aren’t just interested in joining an intellectual gang it may be more concerning, although in the several thousand years of recorded philosophy any number of soothing ideologies have been invented to cope with its disappointments. And there’s always context to make the difference. As for Mikhail, Graham asks “Could it be that philosophy is starting over again?” There you go, Mikhail. Just be patient. If you wait a couple thousand years, we’ll come back around to Kant again.

Therapeutic history

In #@%*! rainbows I talked about various familiar rationales/ ideologies/ marketing slogans for the study of history, and suggested some ways that they are unpersuasive. Among them was the idea that to change things in the present we need to know how we got here. I referred to this as the ‘therapeutic hypothesis’ and cited psychologists Watzlawick et.al.’s argument against it.

Their argument includes the observation that we cannot change the past, only our interpretation of it in the present. Any historian knows the latter happens all the time — it’s called ‘revision’. New information is discovered that snaps the old into a different alignment; new interpretive strategies reconfigure our understanding; new perspectives reselect, reprioritize and repurpose familiar evidence to produce striking new insights. Facts and meanings are in constant slow flux, punctuated by occasional major controversies and conceptual revolutions.

A more radical historiography suggests that in these interpretive revisions, the past ‘itself’ changes, since the past is nothing more (or nothing meaningfully more) than our perception of it. These discussions can get abstractly interesting but pragmatically murky and fruitless pretty quick. In practice, if our orientation toward the past is a search for ‘the Truth’, as it is for most naive history buffs and seems to be more substantively for Frank Furedi in his rant against the self-indulgence of historical victimology, we may still want to try to specify the conditions for the production of revision-proof historical knowledge. If our sense of truth is more conventionalist or gamey, at least we’ll want to agree on standards that allow us to recognize and produce ‘good, reliable’ history rather than ‘bad, unreliable’ history. But if our orientation to history is therapeutic, as Furedi notes, all of the Truth/ truth bets are off.

With a therapeutic orientation, what counts as ‘good’ history is history that helps people feel better in the present. History is then subject to denunciation and revision if it makes us feel bad (unless, as certain Christian ascetics do, we decide that feeling bad is actually good for us) or otherwise does us harm. Holocaust denial is one obvious instance of therapeutic history. So is what’s called ‘Whig history’, the idea that all of history has risen to its pinnacle in us.

Here’s another example of therapeutic history, and its perils. You may remember that not too long ago a young black woman came forward and accused white members of the Duke University lacrosse team of brutally raping her during a stripping performance at their house. This was subsequently proven to be a fabrication, but not before a rush to judgment had polarized the community, derailed the young men’s lives, brought the mentally-unstable accuser into a ruthless public spotlight, and so on. Just a real nasty little scenario all around.

Therapeutic history is a subset of activist history more generally. The rush to judgment was fueled by righteous activists, many of them prominent members of the Duke faculty, who seized on the race, class and gender of the accuser and accused to stage the event as a microcosm of the oppression of poor black women by rich white men throughout U.S. history. Of course those bastards did it, so the thinking went, because people like them had been doing it to people like her for hundreds of years. I’d say these educated folks ’should have known better’; except that according to the knowledge-constructing priorities of activist history they acted with complete integrity, just as their knowledge of our oppressive history demanded.

The plot thickens. According even to non-activist standards of historical knowledge-construction it is true that lots of rich white men systematically oppressed lots of poor black women. In the context of the original righteous poo-storm, one of the most striking claims then was that the victim had suffered a double assault and a compounded harm: not only the rape itself, but the traumatic memory of all of those past rapes too.

When there’s harm, the law tells us to look for the harmer. For the assault in the present, it’s clearly the perps. But with respect to the historical assault it’s not clear they can be held accountable. What we actually need to know is who’s responsible for filling that girl’s head with the traumatizing history. That was optional. If it hadn’t been there, that part of the harm couldn’t have occurred. So from both a legal and a therapeutic perspective, once she got justice from her physical attackers her next move should have been to sue her history teachers and the historians they read for the pain and suffering their knowledge caused her.

The therapeutics of history are properly about enhancing our present. Therapeutically, insofar as the knowledge of history can cause us pain it must be suppressed. If ‘knowing where we came from’ entails stigma, or empathetic trauma, or carries forward reasons for self-doubt; if it’s a source of vulnerability in any way, then away with it. In fact, from this perspective insistence on recording and publishing painful truths is a kind of intentional infliction of distress. After all, there’s plenty of pain and injustice and strife in the present without piling on and reliving all of the old hurts too. So easy to fix. Just leave ‘em all out of the stories we tell and for our children it will be just like they never happened. Are we really so selfish that we can’t justify our lives to future generations without passing on our misery to them?

In all my classes I have a journal requirement – the idea is for the students to produce a field ethnography of the class as a social setting and learning environment, a document that a social historian of education 500 years from now would be delighted to find in the archive. (Again, I want the students to think about producing history, not just consuming it.) To get the students clear on the need to record their experience in detail I ask them to imagine that in the future, people learn by taking knowledge pills, so they will have no idea what any part of our teaching/ learning processes were like.

Most of the students really like the idea of knowledge pills – it seems so easy. A few tumble to the more orwellian possibilities of social control through control of the formulation, production and consumption of knowledge. But wouldn’t that make therapeutic history so much easier! We could all feel really good about who we are and where we came from, then.

Tell me I’m beautiful

OK, so this guy Graham Harman shows up, he’s from Cairo or something, wrote a book or two about Heidegger apparently, and all of a sudden after like two blogposts (he posts one every minute or two, at a staggering gem rate to boot) he’s the best thing to hit the blogosphere since html. Seriously, it’s like Shamu jumping into your goldfish bowl. And instead of eating up all the little fishies in sight, he’s like this totally nice guy, with all sorts of encouragement and uplifting thoughts and actual helpful advice for everybody, and it’s catching. I mean, he’s changed the game. Guy’s a Dude.

Neat stuff. He’s totally got the Prof Whisperer thing down.

Bloggery, like any creative product, can have an emotional ambiguity about it: a sense that not just ideas but persons are in play. In a typically wide-ranging post Rob at Marginal Utility has recently talked about this in relation to artistic amateurism and professionalism. When faced with someone’s homemade labor of love he suspects that “the desired and appropriate response is ‘That’s great that you are doing that. Yay, you!’” In contrast, “professionalism is the cue to audiences that they are allowed to engage seriously with a work….” The professional difference, he argues, is not so much whether there’s filthy lucre involved but

a matter of creating something that isn’t merely an extension of one’s ego, a matter of wanting to give a social life to some idea or thing that can then circulate independently from us. Amateur culture often fails to achieve that separation, doesn’t rise to a level where it can be seriously criticized because it seems that its primary purpose is to secure recognition for the maker.

This last point reminds me of Patchen Markell’s argument in Bound by Recognition that there is an important difference between an ideal of recognition and an ideal of acknowledgment. The former, he says, requires of us an impossibly comprehensive understanding of the Other. And it’s based on a mistaken, doomed and counterproductive attempt to control the irreducible contingencies of human existence and interaction, in part by locking down static ‘recognizable’ identities that foreclose complexity, freedom and change and thus torture their occupants like procrustean beds. In contrast acknowledgment means taking us each seriously as whole, dynamic beings without any pretense of understanding each other fully or addressing each other completely in any given interaction; without attempting to pin us down or foreshorten us to any given batch of traits or performances.

What does acknowledgment actually look like? Maybe the relations of professionals. And what Graham does.

UPDATE: The blog has had a couple of its biggest days ever, most of it legit as far as I can tell, but lots brought by my weird sense of humor. See, if you do a Google image search for “Shamu,” this blog comes up first. What are the chances that someone looking for a picture of Shamu is also looking for my little pearls of wisdom? If that’s you, welcome and do please come again!

Btw, my other most popular post is the one that comes up on an image search for “garbage barge.”

Ukelele perspectives

Just in case you haven’t run across these magnificent folk yet, here’s the Ukelele Orchestra of Great Britain doing what they do – whatever that is. Stick with them as the arrangements build.

And here’s the also magnificent Kate Bush, doing what she do too – whatever that is. I’m never sure how seriously to take her, and there’s no disambiguation here.

#@%*! rainbows

You can’t teach people ideas right the first time, because it’s never the first time. They always have other ideas already that are ‘in the way’ of the new idea you’d like them to entertain.

I’ve mentioned Gramsci’s point about this before, worth repeating, from the Prison Notebooks, Q 24,

The unitary … elaboration of a homogeneous collective consciousness demands a wide range of conditions and initiatives. … A very common error is that of thinking that every social stratum elaborates its consciousness and its culture in the same way, with the same methods, namely the methods of the professional intellectuals. … It is childish to think that a ‘clear concept’, suitably circulated, is inserted in various consciousnesses with the same ‘organizing’ effects of diffused clarity: this is an ‘enlightenment’ error. … When a ray of light passes through different prisms it is refracted differently: if you want the same refraction, you need to make a whole series of rectifications of each prism.

This principle of cultural diffusion, which turns out to include the professional intellectuals after all, is being nicely illustrated by the marketing of some possibly-new, possibly-valuable philosophical ideas, under the headings of speculative realism or object-oriented philosophy, e.g. at Larval Subjects. The prism hasn’t gotten rectified yet for Mikhail, as illustrated there and at Perverse Egalitarianism. So it goes.

Closer to home, when I teach our general education world history classes I find it’s really easy to waste a whole lot of all of our time if I just act as if the students are on board with the value of the project. I teach those imaginary students, the real ones produce just enough of a simulation to let me stay in my fantasy world, everyone does a brain dump after the final, and on we get with our lives. Then there are the disillusioned colleagues who try to ‘teach’ by brute force, like they’re gutting and stuffing turkeys; or the tinkerbells who just ignore everyone but the few nerds who already believe in our neverland.

There’s nothing self-evidently valuable about the humanities. As Weber said in “Science as a Vocation,”

… they give us no answer to the question, whether … cultural phenomena have been and are worth while. And they do not answer the further question, whether it is worth the effort required to know them. They presuppose that there is an interest in partaking … of the community of ‘civilized men’. But they cannot prove ’scientifically’ that this is the case; and that they presuppose this interest by no means proves that it goes without saying.

History has done some marketing, but it hasn’t been very thoughtful or effective. To preserve our livelihood it hasn’t really been necessary. Mostly we’ve been successful in preserving a fait accompli as part of the historically elitist liberal curriculum by leveraging collegial omertà on the one hand and the cultural goodwill of petits bourgeois with all their social-mobility eggs in the education basket on the other. It also helps that ‘histories’ are part of the narratives of identity-construction for new groups challenging for access to higher education, and sometimes we hitch our wagons to those engines. But it’s a bumpy ride: troubling such mythologies is one of the first tasks of critical historiography at the university level. We’re professional killjoys over here.

I’m not content with mere existence or ideological stupors, and I like to be more selective about how I waste my time. So, right from the beginning of class I accept that most of the students don’t see the point and there’s no reason they should. I can teach them by stealth even so, and still do, but I’d like to create the possibility for a more active buy-in. So I ask them why we study history, and when they give me the stock answers, I see if they really believe them.

1. We study the past so we won’t repeat our mistakes.

OK: leaving aside that history is generally ‘them’, not ‘us’, why do I eat a whole bag of Snickers every year a couple weeks before Halloween? Why do some of us tend to keep ending up in the same disastrous relationships over and over? Maybe memory fades; maybe we’re not entirely convinced it’s a mistake; maybe we’ve got some deeply-embedded habits or compulsions that aren’t immediately subject to rational dissuasion. Whatever, the relationship between knowledge of the past and changing its patterns is not immediate.

How about the war in Iraq – are we repeating the mistakes of Vietnam? Well, was Vietnam a mistake? Was the mistake going in, or not going in hard enough, or not staying the course? Let’s say we’d ignored the hippies, gone hard and stayed; it would have gone differently, but how? Would it have gone better, or much worse? How can we know? And from what perspective? Is there maybe more to learn about Iraq from Snickers and old girlfriends than Vietnam? Are the similarities only apparent, and the effective variables all different?

2. The past causes the present, so to change things now we need to know how we got here.

This I call the ‘therapeutic hypothesis’. It doesn’t work with any of the examples in 1. I like the answer from Watzlawick, Weakland and Fisch, Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution (1974) best:

There are two possibilities: 1) The causal significance of the past is only a fascinating but inaccurate myth. In this case, the only question is the pragmatic one: How can desirable change of present behavior be most efficiently produced? 2.) There is a causal relationship between the past and present behavior. But since past events are obviously unchangeable, either we are forced to abandon all hope that change is possible, or we must assume that… the past has influence over the present only by way of a person’s present interpretation of past experience. If so, then the significance of the past becomes a matter not of ‘truth’ and ‘reality,’ but of looking at it here and now in one way rather than another. Consequently, there is no compelling reason to assign to the past primacy or causality in relation to the present… [and the only meaningful question is again the pragmatic one] (p.86, footnote).

Here we are in the present no matter what. At this point I mention the time machine I’m working on. A couple more empty paper-towel tubes and macaroni glue-ons and it will be up and running, I think. Then we can go back and fix things up so they work out alright. Until then, if we need the past to change the present we are well and truly screwed.

3. To know who we are we must know our roots.

Really? As I addressed in the last post, knowing my roots does very little useful work for me in knowing myself. I’m not a jerk like my German grandma (maybe in a different way); I’m not brilliant like famous historical white people Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein; I know bupkis about ‘my’ Scottish culture; and unlike my great-grandpa I did not discover a glacier. To know who I am I look in the mirror. Then I check in with the people who know me. It’s certainly helpful to know that I grew up in semi-rural eastern Pennsylvania; that my immediate family is riddled with academics; that I lived in Italy for two years as a kid. This personal history is quite different than tracing my bloodlines back to Charlemagne.

The identity myths of peoples are certainly effective in creating and maintaining group solidarity, as any anthropologist since Durkheim knows and has been argued more recently by Stuart Hall and Gayatri Spivak. But these “strategic essentialisms” are troubled by what Anthony Appiah calls “imperialisms of identity,” in which real human beings are trapped within the boxes they’ve created for themselves. Furthermore, for better or worse, strategic mythology is not critical historiography.

I think all of these advertising clichés for history have some truth and can be rescued with a little care and nuance. The point is that in their iconic forms they’re only superficially convincing, and therefore tend to be recycled as dogma rather than really believed. Students can produce them on demand, but don’t actually buy them. This gets the butts planted in the seats, but it does not produce a disposition to learning. On the contrary, what the students really believe is that history is useless. This is therefore the real starting point for actually teaching history rather than just going through the motions. I’ve mentioned before how I try to turn this starting point to advantage.

Group love

In a nice long review article in The New Yorker I just came across a quote that resonated deeply with me:

I have never in my life ‘loved’ any people or collective…. I indeed love ‘only’ my friends and the only kind of love I know of and believe in is the love of persons.

This was Hannah Arendt, accepting an accusation that she lacked love of the Jewish people. To express the thought, I have nothing to add: I agree completely; which is perhaps ironic in the context of the reviewer’s argument that Arendt’s deep commitment to impersonality was actually the product of her personal biography.

I mean, of course it was. Biography always explains where ideas came from and never explains why one person’s idea is persuasive to someone else who didn’t share the details of their life.

In my world history sections I’ve been doing my usual sales schtick where I ask why we study history, then break down the familiar, unpersuasive advertising-copy answers to arrive at the (foregone, for so many of the students) conclusion that history is useless; only to revive it, like a phoenix from the ashes, by arguing that history’s uselessness is the very best thing about it.

That’s another post; here I’m interested in one particular way the conversation about the “knowing where we came from” cliche’ went. We were talking about my multiethnic background and whether it was somehow significant about me that among my mongrel northern European ancestry was some fashionable Scottishness. Is that ‘my culture’ somehow, given that to have any of it other than the reddish beard and bad skin for sun I’d have to learn it like any other foreigner? Why Scottish rather than German, which is also in there — except that there’s no useful resonance in being German? And what to make of my closer heritage from my German grandma, who was a jerk? Perhaps all Germans are jerks? I’ve got some attention now, needless to say.

Arendt was German, of course, and so was Einstein, and not a jerk by all reports. I’d rather hitch my wagon to those guys, you betcha, brilliant mind over here like all of Hannah’s and Albert’s peeps. Or to the great-grandpa on the other side of the family who discovered the glacier. Wait, am I supposed to be personally proud of that? Why? I do find pennies sometimes, and I don’t mind being cold every so often. Can I get a little respect over here?

There are ways in which Arendt’s radical individualism and suspicion of group entanglements can read like Ayn Rand Lite, and as both a historian and a sociologist I do know how deeply and intricately structured our agency is. Still, I am so sympathetic, intellectually and emotionally, to Arendt’s insistence on committing her affection and loyalty only specifically: how do I know in the abstract if any given affiliation carries enough substantive similarity to warrant the same response from me? My regard is an accomplishment, not an entitlement; it has to be earned. This is why I refused offers to join fraternities in college: I’m not interested in being friends with people I don’t like just because we wear the same sweater. If you’re a jerk you don’t stop being a jerk because we live in the same house.

Along the same lines I also sympathize with Arendt’s scorn for the mischief collective identity can cause, as for example in the banning of Arab parties from upcoming Israeli elections because their opposition to the current war is taken as support for terrorism. No doubt some Israeli Arabs have indeed sold out their critical intelligence for blind allegiance to ‘their people’. And now we have proof positive that they are joined in this procedure by at least a few Jews.

How to plagiarism-proof your essay assignments

A short, droll post by Kathy at Edge of the West concerning an instance of the “plagiarism-industrial complex” has, as is the wont of that site, produced a lively and interesting discussion in the commentary. Much of it concerns the merits of the commercial plagiarism-detection services, including their helplessness to detect truly “artisanal” plagiarism. If you’re willing/able to pay enough to have someone else do boutique work for you, and you’re careful never to submit any of your own work for damning comparison, that will probably work for you. Getting other people to do your work for you being the chief advantage of wealth, after all.

(Sad/amusing aside: a number of us suspect one of our best students of the past decade of ghosting papers — not for money but as a favor for friends. Oddly enough, this special critter was a compulsive perfectionist and almost never turned in its own work no matter what inducements we tried — and we became pretty creative — so if we’re right, we only got to enjoy its gifts at an odd second-hand.)

I’ve made a couple of brief comments there about why I don’t use the plagiarism police. For one thing, I think inconveniencing and anxietizing the honorable to intercept the dishonorable is an ugly way to live. For another, on (quixotic) foucauldian grounds that participating in the creation of docile bodies through the installation and extension of surveillance regimes is profoundly self-defeating. But my main reason I’ve only been able to sketch there, and want to elaborate here: I don’t use the plagiarism police because my assignments are functionally plagiarism-proof.

Howzat? There are a couple of key strategies that I’ll get to in a second, but let’s start with an ethos. You have to be loyal to students learning, not to covering content. It’s not impossible to do both, but starting with the second tends to fubar the first. And you have to give up the idea that there is essential content every student must master. Standardization of content outcomes is the single greatest stimulus and enabler of plagiarism there is. What you’ve got to want is for students to learn critical uptake, thinking and production skills in relation to content, where the skills are essential and the content is contingent. If you’re stuck with essential content, you’re stuck with some plagiarism. Take a moment to make sure there’s no way to get unstuck. I’ll wait.

OK. The first thing to notice is that shifting your loyalty to students learning (note: ’students’ learning’ is a different subject) changes the moral environment of the classroom. Why? Because now what you care about is each student, not the material; which, if you communicate this properly and consistently, creates a social psychology of reciprocal obligation among you. It’s just much harder to cheat on someone who cares about you than someone who’s using you as a means to other ends (reproduction of content outcomes). There’s nothing magical or foolproof about this, however, so if you stop here as some of the more touchy-feely teacher ed. fads do you’ll still get plenty of plagiarism; maybe more, once they figure out what a lightweight you are. Furthermore, although it’s good and right to care about the students as whole people, it’s essential to care specifically about their development as thinkers and doers, which means they don’t get to derail the process or skate to passing grades just by dropping by your office to chat about the weather or tearing up over their abusive childhood.

As thinkers and doers students in my experience are a pretty mixed bunch. The ones who already have some critical uptake, thinking and production skills are rarely the plagiarizers, especially once you get them on the hook by caring about them. They can do the work cheaper and better themselves without plagiarizing. So once you’re caring about students learning and you get the moral environment sorted out so they care back, plagiarism becomes obviously something the ones who do it are driven to by missing elements in the necessary skillset. The task then becomes filling in those skills. Essays shift subtly from being a ritually formalized way to test content knowledge to being part of a longer process to develop practical intellectual capabilities. (It helps a lot to ’sell’ those skills. All but the geekiest of them, who will become us later, think the various specific contents of the humanities are useless, they’re right, and trying to argue otherwise is counterproductively delegitimating.) This process orientation means among other things that for students at all but the elitest schools there will probably have to be lots of explicit instruction on how to write papers as a way to organize and communicate thought, including not just rules and recipes but rationales; peer reviewing of drafts (I do both intro paragraph and full draft); and a rewrite option, at least for the first paper until they get their chops together.

Classroom time has to make the same subtle shift. There are probably a lot of ways to do that. What works for me is to teach content through skills. So for example in World History I might want to cover some modern African history in relation to the Atlantic complex. Let’s say the skill we’re working on today is reading critically, and we happen to be doing that this time around using a 16th-century letter from the King of Kongo to the King of Portugal. This letter is a pretty subtle little piece of work, with a lot of information to be gleaned about culture and politics in Kongo; activities and attitudes of Portuguese merchants there; early phases of the slave trade; and so on. Of course we’ll need to crack the textbook to fill in some context to better understand what the Portuguese were doing on the coast of Africa, why they were welcomed by the Kings of the Kongo in the first place, what the slaves might have been needed for, etc.

Small groups and competitive/cooperative reporting are good ways to get most of the students involved and invested in the process of puzzling it all out. Classroom work has to be personal and recursive, including for example lots of interaction with the groups during their investigations and pauses to allow students who don’t know answers to find them or think them through, so that each student develops a personal class voice and habit of analysis that carries over to written work. Reasons and foundations always have to be specified, by them and us. Expectations should start high and get higher, so there’s always something of value to be accomplished for every student to be proud of. It’s a lot easier to convey the importance of scholarly apparatus to respect and communicate other people’s authority when the students are in touch with their own. I’ve done this directly with classes as large as fifty, by the way, and with discussion sections for classes in the hundreds.

And still all this is not enough to plagiarism-proof your essay assignments, although it’s a pretty good start. To knock out the last lingering vestiges of moral depravity, bad habit and performance anxiety, the last line of defense is to make it harder and riskier to plagiarize effectively than to write the paper straight. Here’s one way to do that with actual pedagogical value: design essay assignments that are unique to each class, its discussions and resources.

The simplest trick is to require students to write source-supported essays, to use only the course texts as sources, and to use more than one. By ‘require’ I mean if they don’t do it, they fail. This has the pedagogical value of forcing them to: engage with good sources you selected on purpose; mine available sources thoroughly rather than skipping around superficially; crosscheck sources rather than taking one at face value; synthesize information into their own analysis rather than just doing stock book reports; and appreciate the difference between mere opinion and informed opinion. All of these skills are supported by the reading work in class. By the way, this doesn’t help much if you don’t mix up your course texts. Publishers’ text ‘n’ source suites are a nice convenience for lazy teachers and plagiarizers alike, as is keeping the same texts and topics year after year. And stay away from stereotypical topics and sources. The easiest and most tempting paper in the world to plagiarize is yet another reaction paper on famous poem/article/book/event X. When you can google your topic and the first hit is a plagiarism site, maybe it’s time for a rethink.

The idea is to make it vanishingly unlikely that they’ll find any mass market boilerplate that adequately addresses your assignment. Here’s an example of such an assignment: “Using only the course texts for evidence, analyze the relation of agency to happiness in rural Ming China,” where the course texts are a primary source reader from one publisher and a world history text from another. (Research comes later in the term once skills and habits are better, but course texts are always required.) What would it take to plagiarize this? Most of the standard strategies – cutting and pasting generic information on China, e.g. – would result in an incoherent, nonresponsive paper that would fail on its own merit without getting into plagiarism detection. Furthermore, they’d fail without regular and accurate citation of the course texts. (I usually get about a third with this error, innocent or otherwise, in the first batch of papers. I don’t even read papers with epic fails, I just hand them back to be fixed. Obviously you have to know, communicate, and enforce your standards for this to work.)

OK, here we are at the end of this post and I have to confess, it’s still not impossible to plagiarize under all these conditions. Easy, in fact, for the resolute scallawag. Here’s how. As mentioned above, they can pay an artisanal plagiarizer big bucks for completely customized papers. At least three of them, in my classes, which would only be prohibitive for really rich scoundrels if all my colleagues were also plagiarism-proofing their assignments. Or if the determined rabscallion wants to save that bling for beer, they could scour the ‘nets for snippets of information about agency and happiness in Ming China, stitch them together with topically-relevant analysis, then invent plausible citations to the course texts. To do that, all it would take is to understand the assignment and its rationale, properly identify relevant information, produce focused and coherent analysis, and know the course texts well enough to target the fake cites effectively. And at that point they might as well write the A paper those skills indicate they’re capable of writing.

Wordle syllabus

Once again I pushed my syllabi through wordle.net and gave them to the students on the first day instead of the conventional one. Here’s World History [pdf] (intro gen ed):

Here’s Historian’s Apprenticeship [pdf] (sophomore historiography seminar):

Seen together the similarities outweigh the differences; field generalities, of course, and there’s lots of the same assessments boilerplate in both, and I also use some of the same instructional tools across classes. This comparative analysis was not available to the students in each class, however.

My first point was to knock them instantly out of the expectation of having their education catered. Some assembly required here – ‘active learning’. They’re used to a textbook and lecturer chewing up knowledge and jamming it down their throats like baby birds. We talked about making the transition from consumers of history to producers of history. In this sense the wordle of the syllabus is like lots of archives – what you need is there, but it’s not organized in a familiar or immediately meaningful way.

They got right away that putting information in order is critical. How to assign importance to disparate bits of data was a longer conversation in each class. With a little prompting they were able to reason out wordle’s extraction of common linking words and sizing by frequency. We talked about whether frequency is invariably a sign of importance, and if so, what kind (in this case, generalities about context).

As I persisted and didn’t cough up a conventional syllabus (I’ll do that before drop/add ends), they got more into the puzzle and motivated to try to figure out the course from the wordle. At this point they began to notice that what they most wanted to know was scattered in the smaller words, and that they brought different perspectives, agendas and assumptions to their ‘readings’ of those.

It’s a gimmick, but it does the trick for starting them thinking like historians.