Going Public: Journalists and Academics

The great Anne Helen Peterson, who made the leap from academia to journalism, has a great piece on bridging that divide in her weekly newsletter.

On talking to journalists

My advice to the group of academics, then, was two-fold. First: recognize that both sides need to be more flexible. Understand that journalists have to have somewhat reductive headlines, and that they operate on deadlines. But also assert, at the beginning, that you are unwilling to provide a soundbite — and want, above all else, to insert nuance, instead of a flat argument, and if they can't deal with that (even if it's just three sentences of complication, instead of one declarative sentence) then you will not do the interview. It's not that academics should request quote approval, it's more that they should be able to reach an agreement with the journalist about the sort of argument to which they're affixing their good name.

And then, of course, write!

READ THE WHOLE THING!

Public Humanities in the Age of Trump

Today at the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto I will be giving a talk on Public Humanities in the Age of Trump. Details here.

It's been an intense period lately around right-wing attacks on academic freedom, not the least because I've encountered the worst sets of attacks of my career. They were exhausting, if never actually professionally or personally threatening (a factor of my privilege). Moreover, they have only firmed my resolve that "sustained activity based on scholarly expertise aimed at least in part at extramural audiences" is important.

I include my bolded definition here because we need to make our ideas about publicly facing scholarship much broader. It's not just writing essays, but "sustained activity." That includes community art and theater, teaching in prisons, and, yes, activism and protest. And then we need to count it for tenure, promotion, hiring, and grants.

Poster below. I love it. See you in Toronto.

Image description: The event details (see link above for accessible version)
plus Botticelli's Venus with Trump's face grafted onto it

Trawling for Historians?

Historians are receiving a weird email asking for their views on objectivity. Is this a right-wing trawl or a desperate student?

I don't know, but as I said last November:

It has never been more important for academics to speak, to write, to engage, and to push. I actually don't think it was less important a year ago, 5 years ago, 15 years ago, and so forth. It's always critical. But the rise of Trump mandates regular public engagement, while also elevating the risks of backlash.

So be careful out there. Write, tweet, talk, teach as if your words are being tracked by people who want to destroy you. But also write, tweet, talk, listen, and teach as if your words can make a difference guiding us through what I believe will be a difficult slice of American and global history.

Rewards for Public Historians

Good article at CNN Opinion urging historians to go public.

This is great news for the discipline of history, for history teachers, for history professors, and for public historians who interpret the past for visitors at museums, historic sites and other such venues. But let's not celebrate yet. We have work to do.
Historians need to take their role as public intellectuals seriously. True, op-eds often require a timely response to events that are unfolding. Yet, some events, like historical anniversaries, can be anticipated. We need to pay attention to contemporary conversations that have historical parallels or require a global context.

The author, Karen Cox, is a public historian with tenure at an R1 university [Edit: I misread, she's at UNC Charlotte not Chapel Hill. See the comments]. She, like me (as of 6 months ago), could afford to risk going public. Her analysis of the need is right on ... and now we need to keep moving towards building systems of both defense and reward.

• Defense: So people who are not R1 profs can take the risk of going public. 
• Reward: So going public can be molded into our academic value systems of what counts for tenure, promotion, grants, and hiring.

Lots of work to do!

Protecting the Public Academic in the Age of Trump

Ben Carson is not going to be Secretary of Education. This is good. I've been guessing Michelle Rhee or someone similar, which is not good. Honestly, there's no one that Trump would consider for any major cabinet position who I suspect I would endorse - that's why I didn't vote for him.

But as Carson's name was being floated, this quote on the DoE re-surfaced.

“I actually have something I would use the Department of Education to do,” Carson explained. “It would be to monitor our institutions of higher education for extreme political bias and deny federal funding if it exists.”

Meanwhile, yesterday MSNBC invited David Horowitz onto the air to defend Steve Bannon against anti-semitism and attack Keith Ellison (because for Horowitz all Muslims are immediately suspect. That's a separate blog post). Horowitz is well known to academics as the initiator of the late-90s attack on professors who dared to criticize Israel in public, who were deemed the indoctrinators of the young. It used to require sending conservative students to classrooms with video cameras, but now of course we all have video on our phones. Better yet, for their purposes, our discourse has often moved into public spaces like Twitter, where they can track us.

It has never been more important for academics to speak, to write, to engage, and to push. I actually don't think it was less important a year ago, 5 years ago, 15 years ago, and so forth. It's always critical. But the rise of Trump mandates regular public engagement, while also elevating the risks of backlash.

So be careful out there. Write, tweet, talk, teach as if your words are being tracked by people who want to destroy you. But also write, tweet, talk, listen, and teach as if your words can make a difference guiding us through what I believe will be a difficult slice of American and global history.

Meanwhile, the libertarian intellectual wing at places like FIRE need to swivel their focus from their preoccupation with lefty students and "PC" culture, which was almost always nonsense, and fix their gaze firmly on the would-be authoritarians now running DC. Academic bodies - the AHA, MLA, ASA, CAA, APA, and whoever else - need to get their lawyers and committees engaged and proactively sketching out defenses of academic freedom that include tenure/promotion standards for public work. The more we make it clear that public engagement is protected intellectual activity, the safer it will be for marginalized people to engage in it.

Because we can't just elevate the voices of tenured white guys.

Go Public ... If You Can!: Michael Socolow Was Scooped

I write a lot about academia and public writing, fueled by my accidental stumble into a very public life (it's all about the 13th century! The 13th Century is a hot media property!). But then once you've got some op-eds, some practice at a public voice, then what?

It turns out that writing a book, as an academic, for a non-academic press requires making it through a lot of gatekeepers who are not pre-disposed to let you pass.

Here's a story from Michael Socolow via Inside Higher Ed. Socolow found an amazing, publishable, story of Olympics history. The kind of thing, he judged, that could become a movie and/or best seller. So he did the work and tried to sell it. And tried. And tried. And failed.

Years passed, and eventually a famous author (using, it turned out, some of his interview notes that he somehow obtained), wrote the best seller, leaving Socolow to write:

A lot of ink has been spilled recently about the need for academics to write for wider audiences. Much of the criticism presumes that academics prefer to write and speak in impenetrable rhetoric designed to limit communication to only people initiated in the cloistered world of scholarly interchange. I don’t doubt that this problem exists. But many critics have no idea how many scholars -- like myself -- have attempted to write for wider audiences but found ourselves blocked by gatekeepers in the publishing industry. Although I’ve published numerous essays and newspaper columns for wide public readership, and I believe my book proposal proved my ability to deliver clear, serviceable -- and even engaging -- prose, no publisher took a gamble on this first-time author coming out of academe.

The gatekeepers are many. I have no real solutions other than to name them honestly, to tell these stories, and to build better pathways for academics to work in public spaces.

I'm pretty confident anyone who wants to can find ways to share their research and expertise with mass audiences.

But that's not the same as reaping just profits for one's work.

This is my side gig. I don't know how to change that.

With/Out Discipline - Public Engagement and the PhD

I'm giving a talk at Western Michigan University today - With/Out Discipline - Public Engagement and the PhD.

In this talk, David explains how public engagement works in the modern media age, draws connections between his scholarship as a medievalist and his work as an activist/journalist, and argues that we need to find ways to support and protect academics who choose to participate in public discourse.

I did a lot of writing in The Chronicle and elsewhere for the first couple of years as I moved into public writing. When I put together this talk, I realized that I haven't done as much higher education writing lately, and certainly not work on public engagement. Thanks to my disability rights work, I've been busy just doing it, rather than theorizing about it. But I enjoyed getting back to that kind of writing for this talk, and especially reading the work of Jessie Daniels, Tressie McMillan Cottom, and others who think about this.

I'll post a few snippets from the talk tomorrow.

In the meantime, some of my writing on the subject, for anyone interested.

• My manifesto - It needs to count: Sustained Public Engagement - "But Does it Count?" (Chronicle.com, 6/23/2014)
• My Story - My Initial Public Offering (Chronicle of Higher Education, 7/22/2013)

Key pieces

• Avoiding celebrity culture and the prestige economy: A Thousand Neil deGrasse Tysons! (Chronicle Vitae, 7/21/2014)
• Public engagement from unexpected places: A Medievalist on Savage Love (Chronicle of Higher Education, 5/12/15)
• Public engagement requires protection from our institution: Don't Speak Out: The Message of the Salaita Affair (Chronicle.com, 8/21/14). Tressie McMillan Cottom just wrote a must-read piece on this too: Everything but the Burden.
• #FergusonSyllabus (Chronicle.com, 11/25/2014) - Even a medievalist has something to say.

Other essays on public engagement for both individuals and institutions.

• Yoni Appelbaum goes From Grad School to the Atlantic (Chronicle.com, 2/11/15). He wants your pitches.
• Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan, fights for the liberal arts and sciences education. University Presidents and Public Engagement (Chronicle.com, 12/18/2014)
• Colleges as institutions can engage on important issues. Here's - No Longer "Falling off the Cliff" - College for People with Intellectual Disabilities (Chronicle of Higher Education, 11/11/14). I make a similar case here - 
• Catholic Universities and Undocumented Students (Chronicle.com, 7/21/14)
• Two medievalists write novels. It, too, should count. Fictionalizing Your Scholarship (Chronicle of Higher Education, 10/13/2014)
• Writing about Sarah Palin's medievalism. Why and how it matters - A Medievalist on CNN (Inside Higher Ed, 7/2/2014)

What is a university?

• Faculty Members Are Not Cashiers: Why the 'customer service' lingo in academe is bad for students (Chronicle.com, 3/18/2014)
• The Learning-Centered University (Chronicle Vitae, 7/1/2014)

What Is Public Engagement?

I am not a fan of the label: Public Intellectual.

I think it's used to valorize certain kinds of public activity - oped writing, essays in fancy literary magazines, prestige stuff - and not others. For me, activism, community arts (music, theater, fine arts, etc.), working with local farmers, volunteering, and more, are at least as valuable acts of public engagement as a fancy essay in the New Yorker. When scholars engage the broader public, however you define it, in ways inspired or informed by their expertise, they are being public intellectuals.

Today I'm joining a professor of communication, of social work, and our director of ministry to discuss this at Dominican, where I teach. One day every fall we cancel classes to hold a symposium around the concepts of Caritas et Veritas, the motto of the Dominican Order of Preachers. Program is here.

My panel is:

11:15am F. Public Intellectualism, Scholarship, and Engagement
John DeCostanza, Jacob Lesniewski, David Perry, CarrieLynn Reinhard
This panel will address public engagement, community-based learning, community-based research, public intellectualism, and public scholarship. Each panelist sees the ability, and indeed the necessity, of engaging with the public outside of the classroom and off the college campus as a primary indicator that they have managed to fulfill their calling as academics and professionals in academic settings.

Watch for tweets using the #PublicScholars hashtage today.

#SeriousAcademic Uses for Twitter - Me and BABEL

First, disclaimers: No academic who doesn't study social media should have to spend one second of time on social media. No academic using social media for fun and personal contacts should have to promote their work in any way on social media. Institutions that push academics to go public, moreover, as Tressie McMillan Cottom wrote last year, want "everything but the burden." They want the PR, but when things go badly, they will not support you. 

No one should have to go be an academic on social media.

That said, there's an annoying essay on Academics Anonymous at The Guardian proposing that social media has little value for academics. It's got the headline "I'm a serious academic," and while the author didn't write the hed, #seriousacademic has taken off on Twitter as a response. There's definitely an implied suggestion that "serious" academics write grants and do work, whereas the unserious tweet. Some quotes:

We are in the midst of a selfie epidemic. We document every moment of our lives – the places we visit, the people we meet, the things we achieve. And now this culture has infiltrated the world of academia.

Hooray, right? I mean that's fantastic. Documentation is what academics do, followed by dissemination. Alas, not what the author means.

Using social media to impress people that you know – as well as those that you have never met – has now become a professional concern for many academics. I see more and more of them live tweeting and hashtagging their way through events.

Aha, here's the problem. This author, in the full flush of snobbery, thinks that social media is fundamentally about ego, rather than about networking.

Then there are the staff who go further than just tweeting about lectures and conferences. In the wake of the EU referendum, I have seen many using social media to voice very strong opinions, often criticising the general public en masse. Given that taxpayer money forms a substantial portion of our research funding, this kind of outburst risks alienating the very people we are trying to engage with.

Expressing political views in public! How dare an academic offer their viewpoints where someone might hear them, rather than sipping sherry in the tranquility of the faculty lounge. Also, we don't have a faculty lounge, and if we did no one would use it, as we're all too busy grading.

But surely the dedication I show in the lab, and the subsequent data I collect, should speak for itself. I do not – and should not – have to parade myself online to please my employer or to stake my claim as a good researcher. Can’t we save the showing off for where it’s really needed, in the dreaded grant applications?

A witty close, perhaps, but the opening of this paragraph shows the flaw. For the author, social media is nothing but a space to show off.

Social media has changed my life, not the least because I became a journalist after I received tenure for quite traditionally "serious" work in 13th century Mediterranean culture.  I could write many pages on social media as an accessible location for disability activism, observations on the ways that marginalized professors (whether because they belong to a marginalized group or otherwise feel isolated in their institution due to location or field) use social media to feel less alone, and many other topics.

I thought instead, I would share one traditional medieval story on how the use of social media shapes my serious academic career.

Four or so years ago, I was in a hotel bar at a conference and I met Eileen Joy, a well-known medievalist, founder of Punctum Press, and one of the founders of BABEL - a group of mostly literary critics doing cutting edge work. She invited me up to a party that BABEL was hosting in a suite in the hotel. I went, I unseriously brought my guitar, played music with others and sang, and had a lovely night.

In a pre-social-media age, that would be that. Perhaps I'd see them again next year. They weren't in my slice of the sub-field, they didn't give papers on topics I chose to attend, and we weren't geographically close. Instead, though, I friended the people I met on Facebook and began participating in conversations on Twitter. I'm interested in medieval material culture. Some of the literary theorists are interested in objects. I read their work. I read the work they cited. I began to go to their conference papers. I presented my one theoretical idea - using vectors as a controlling metaphor to discuss narratives about the movements of objects - at a BABEL panel. As I became a disability rights journalist, they also served as my pathway to formal disability studies within academia. Some of their work infiltrated my footnotes in a recent article. I was invited to speak at a panel at one of their universities last spring.

These developments: Footnotes, talks, conference papers, new reading topics - these are highly traditional "serious" features of academic life. I have social media to thank for them.

A Medievalist Goes Public - Laura Michele Diener writes for Yes! Magazine

Laura Michele Diener is an associate professor of history at Marshall. She works on medieval textile history, and I first met her when she gave a terrific presentation on using textile creation in the classroom. Recently, though, I've become aware of her public writing on contemporary issues.

One of my theories about academics turning to public writing is that we don't have to limit ourselves to writing about our narrow subject areas. Yes, if something directly related to our formal expertise emerges in the news, we really should engage. But the process of becoming an expert, a teacher, a writer, a thinker, builds habits of mind and habits of articulation that can serve in countless endeavors.

Diener's experience exemplifies the possibilities. She's written two terrific pieces for Yes! Magazine  - First on mountaintop removal and second on rural women and domestic violence. In the latter, she writes:

Transformations like Howard’s are not easy to pull off in rural Appalachia, where poor roads, low incomes, and a fiercely traditional culture combine to leave women facing domestic violence in physical and emotional isolation. But a handful of nonprofit shelters and advocates have managed to make progress in this difficult setting.

The secret of their success seems to be listening carefully to the women they serve and then handcrafting programs for those women. The advocates have found that when it comes to domestic violence, a one-size solution does not fit all. It is important to consider community and culture in order to make real differences in the lives of domestic violence survivors, a lesson for shelters everywhere.

I spent much of the month of May visiting some of these rural shelters. Even though I’ve lived in West Virginia for eight years, as I drove into the state’s southern counties I felt like I was entering a different world. The six-lane highways turned into narrow roads curving around mountains. Trucks carrying lumber hurtled past me on the switchbacks. Densely green woods surrounded me with cool, still beauty, and the towns were few and far between. I lost cell service almost immediately. For me, the solitude seemed idyllic. But this kind of isolation can be deadly for a woman trying to escape from an abusive home, especially if she is responsible for children and animals.

I spoke with Diener and asked her a few questions about the process of writing these articles.

DP: How and why did you decide to start writing about contemporary issues in West Virginia?

LMD: I've been teaching Women's Studies classes at Marshall University since I arrived there in 2008. At first I kept those classes focused on ancient and medieval women, which is what I know best, but as I got to know my students, I realized what incredibly rich narratives they had to tell, and how rooted their experiences were in place. Through their stories, I started getting interested in contemporary regional issues such as the impacts of coal on the history and environment of Appalachia. 

Then in January 2014, there was a chemical spill in the state capital that poisoned the water of 300,000 people in nine counties. People were left without water for weeks, and questions about water safety still remain. It was a horrifying situation. I wanted to know how the water crisis affected people differently, depending on their situation--their age, income-level, etc . . . Being someone who likes to research, I started traveling around, interviewing people and taking pictures. It was a way for me to get to know my new state and to make sure that people's stories were being recorded. Each person I met opened up new questions for me and I've been writing about these questions ever since.

DP: How different was the process of writing the domestic violence story from your historical research?

LMD: I started by speaking with people I knew through my work with Women's Studies. We held a Women's Studies conference at Marshall last spring and I listened to a fantastic paper by Mandy Sanchez, a sociologist at WVU, about rural women and domestic violence. Her paper was focused on the positive steps that a shelter in Cambridge Ohio were taking to reach out to rural women. Her research reminded me of some of the shelters we had been working with through Women's Studies, particularly SAFE in Welch, WV, and the idea for the article came to me during the conference. So, I immediately called Mandy, and asked for some references, and then I started calling around to different state coalitions on domestic violence. 

Once I made some contacts, I drove out to the organizations and met people for interviews. In that sense, my process was pretty different from what I do as a historian, because it was all about making connections with living people. One conversation would lead to another, because everyone would say, "oh, you must talk to this person." At the same time, my historical research process is not that different, just with books instead of people, where one book leads to another.
DP: How did you decide on Yes! Magazine? 

LMD: I went to a rally called The People's Foot that was organized by a number of local environmental organizations that was held to call attention to the environmental and health impacts of mountaintop removal mining. It was really inspiring and I wanted as many people to know about it as possible, so I decided to write an article and just searched via google for a magazine that might be interested. 

After that first article, my editor at Yes! asked if I would be interested in writing a story about Appalachian women. I knew I wanted to write something that addressed pressing issues but also demonstrated some of the positive work that people are doing. 

Go read Diener's work!

What Institutions Owe Public Scholars

To institutions: if you want the reputational currency of public scholars you'd better have institutional processes & courage to go with it

— Tressie Mc, PhD (@tressiemcphd) May 12, 2015

Almost a year ago, I wrote about Steven Salaita being un-hired by the University of Illinois. I argued:

I come to this topic not as a partisan in the specifics of Salaita’s situation but as an advocate for faculty engagement with the public. Over the last year, I have written periodic columns for The Chronicle about the ways that academics can and should write for general audiences. Recently, I even suggested that "sustained public engagement" of any sort should count for hiring, tenure, and promotion.
When I write about this topic, I often get told that the real problem is that academics are snobs. We like living in an ivory tower, goes the argument, and we look with disdain on getting our hands dirty in the public sphere. There’s plenty of snobbery to go around, it’s true, but the Salaita affair shows a different, and I think more powerful, force that keeps many academics from commenting on important contemporary issues: fear.

I am a believe in and advocate four public engagement. But I try to overlook or understate the risks that public engagement brings, and regularly ask for universities to do more to support us. Unfortunately, it's going the other direction.

We need more public writing, not less. We need to open pathways for more academics to speak out in public, not punish Salaita for doing so in ways that have provoked such strong feelings. But we can’t ask scholars to embrace the risks of engagement in a system in which partisan bloggers and local papers can push timid administrators to fire, or in this case unhire, academics who leap into public debates.

Now Tressie McMillan Cottom, one of the smartest people around, has written a must read essay - Everything But the Burden in the context of Saida Gundy. She writes:

I have written about institutional marginality and neo-liberal appeals for scholars to “publicly engage”. If I could rewrite that article today I would ask how it is that there have been at least a dozen articles written about toxic black feminism on social media and black twitter but almost no articles on things like Twitchy. But, I digress.
What I really wanted to point out is how yet again we have an example of how woefully underprepared universities are to deal with the reality of public scholarship, public intellectuals, or public engagement.

She says: public scholarship means pissing people off.

She says: In academia, where twenty readers is a big deal, 200 angry emails can feel like a tsunami of public opinion (it isn’t). When three members of a committee can constitute a quorum, seeing 142 retweets of a negative opinion about your new assistant professor can feel like politics (it isn’t). Five whole think pieces at the online verticals of legacy media organizations can feel like the powers-that-be are censuring your institution (they aren’t).

Then she comes up with a series of steps you should take before publicly engaging. Demand your institution protects you if they want you to engage publicly. Read this one carefully.

Twitter and Tenure

I write about public engagement and the academy for the Chronicle and here on the blog. Mostly, I have talked about the ways that formal non-academic writing (opinion essays, popular books, other media outreach) and community engagement (undocumented students) function within the core mission of an academic institution and career.

There are, though, more radical views.

Recently, my friend and fellow medievalist Jonathan Hsy asked about how we might formally credit the work of building scholarly networks via social media, especially via Twitter. How might the live-tweeting of conferences function as a formal part of one's scholarly portfolio? Should it?

I think it should, or could anyway, but that we have work to do defining how to make that happen. I'm concerned that the effort to bring Twitter into the "put in your CV/tenure-file" fold might, in fact, not be enough.

When I talk about public engagement, I run into many different kinds of opposition, but two in particular. One is that when saying public writing or tweeting or whatever should count, some people hear that I mean EVERYONE should have to tweet for tenure. That is nonsense.  My goal is not to force anyone to eschew traditional scholarship or to degrade its value (far to the contrary), but rather to expand the frame of possible valorized forms of scholarly activity.

I likewise get the response that I am suggesting an opinion essay should count the same as a peer-reviewed scholarly essay - they do, after all, both have the word "essay" in their form. That is also nonsense, but I do believe that it ought to be possible for sustained forms of public engagement to form significant parts of a professional academic portfolio.

The key word here is sustained. Sustained public engagement speaks a level of activity that goes beyond single tweets or single groups of tweets, or single public essays.  If you make some non-traditional form of activity a sustained and intentional part of your scholarly life, then it should be able to count to some extent.

But as I wrote for the Chronicle in my manifesto on this topic, it turns out that many universities already have explicit pro-engagement language in their tenure and promotion documents. We do, because adopt the Boyer model of scholarship, which includes Scholarship of Engagement as a type of recognized activity. People promoting public engagement as something that should count don't have to go far.

But we do have to radically change the "real" systems of value that lie behind the formal tenure and promotion documents.

Part of the problem is that in our traditional metrics we claim to value all kinds of things - teaching, service, engagement, and traditional research. But at most universities, especially the elite ones that drive the prestige economy and create standards for the rest of us, tenure and promotion emerge from a very limited numbers of forms of productivity. Traditional, prestige-laded, scholarship.

So as much as I am committed to counting new forms of public engagement, including social media, I think there needs to be considerable work done from the side of just adding more forms of productivity the list of things that we really value. It can't be all about the peer-reviewed monograph. It can't be all about the journal article in the high-status journal. And while our documents say such things are possible, just try getting tenured, hired, promoted, or a grant without the traditional stuff as the core of a file.

Which is to say that my essays add to my file and make it better, but that the book is the reason it's a good file, and without the book ...

So what I worry about, is that we will add a whole lot of things, including social media activity, to the list of things that count but that in fact no one really cares about. I don't just want to add at the bottom of the prestige hierarchy, I want to be involved in unmaking the prestige hierarchy.

Hence my recent essay: Let Books be Books.

Sustained Public Engagement

I have a new piece up at the Chronicle on public engagement in higher education. I've written about public engagement both here and on various sites before, but now I am starting a series of columns for the advice/careers section of the Chronicle. I will be writing about how both individuals and institutions could be engaging and are engaging, and some of the lessons we might draw from this. Next month, for example, I will discuss Catholic universities and undocumented students.

This piece, however, has been in the making for months, especially with my response to Nicholas Kristof.

Here are the points I make today:

1. First, academics of all sorts are already deeply engaged with the public in many different ways.
2. Second, many universities explicitly recognize public engagement as a category that may count toward hiring, tenure, or promotion.
3. Third, in the United States and in academe itself, the widespread perception is that most faculty members do not engage with the public—either because they don’t want to or because they know they won’t be rewarded for it.

If you read this blog, you knew point 1 already. Many of you are, in fact, the very evidence of point 1. Academics are already in public, not just as writers, but as organizers, activists, outreach coordinators, and so much more. 

Point two surprised me. I set out to write this column as a screed, to shout, "count this!" In fact, many universities have ways of counting it, though standards and types vary. 

Point three, then, is the conundrum. If one and two are true, shouldn't we all know it? What's going on? 

I think we have a problem of discourse. We somehow perpetuate the idea both that academics don't do public engagement and that specialized scholarship is useless to the broader world, neither of which is true, though they function very differently. 

Here are two steps I think we might take.

1. Be smarter than me. What does your institution count?
2. Start disciplinary conversations. I think this might be a great function for the MLA, AHA, AAR, CAA, etc. They have no power over institutions, but that's not the step here. The step is to persuade other faculty that we could do more to count and measure public engagement.

I finish with the following:

The myth of the ivory tower dismisses the public academic as an aberration and the specialized scholar as detached. Neither is true. But we do have a problem with how we define, count, and value many types of public engagement. If we can improve this and tear down the mythic tower, we can make sure that all of our varied but important types of work get the credit they deserve.

And now, the sources I cite in the piece.

• Patricia Limerick, president of the Organization of American Historians, recently put out a call to locate scholars who do public work.
• In response, Matthew G. Schoenbachler, professor of History at the University of North Alabama, wrote that all such efforts are just “pro bono - the entire academic system of incentives and rewards militates against such activities.”
• My university includes “scholarship of engagement” as one of the types of scholarship that count for tenure or promotion, a phrase that emerged from the expansive taxonomy of scholarship pioneered by Ernest Boyer of the Carnegie Foundation. 
• Syracuse employs the phrase “publicly engaged scholarship” in their tenure and promotion documents.
• The University of Illinois uses “public engagement” and “public service,” recognizing the problem of categorizing diverse acts of engagement in our standard tenure and promotion framework.
• Other universities categorize such activity solely as service. Portland State, for example, uses the phrase “community outreach.” 
• Community colleges routinely link service to tenure and promotion, with the potential for that service to be outside the university. At the Central Oregon Community Colleges, for example, full professors will “regularly serve the community as an expert resource.”
• Also, I link to this (now slightly outdated) study on shifting workloads.

Going Public - A Medievalist on CNN.com

I've been at the 49th International Congress on Medieval Studies, held annually at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, MI. It's an extraordinary event - over 3000 medievalists come to this small town and lovely campus and, over four days, work on everything from the most micro-specialized topic to giant sweeping questions about the academy and the nature of knowledge. Often followed by merriment and music.

I spoke at a session on writing about the Middle Ages for multiple audiences. Ellen Arnold, Ohio Wesleyan,  spoke about the extraordinarily creative assignments she's given to her students (creating pop-up physical and virtual museums, for example). Matthew Gabriele, Virginia Tech, revealed to us the mysteries of the sub-reddit "Ask Historians." Laura Saetveit Miles, Univ. Bergen, talked about being a feminist and medievalist in future public writing.

I talked about being a medievalist on CNN.com - how it happened and why it mattered. Below is a version of my remarks with some supporting links and some of the images.

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GOING PUBLIC

I’m here to talk about my experience writing about the Middle Ages for mass media. I’m not a popular historian – in the sense of writing about my subject field for a general audience. Instead, I write popular essays for places like CNN, the Chronicle and the Atlantic some of which are about the intersections between the Middle Ages and now. I see these intersections everywhere.

I began by writing about the medieval echoes at play in Benedict’s surprise resignation and the intentional medievalism of Pope Francis – I often say to my students that the church is firmly in a 13th-century moment. I’m going to tell you a little bit about how that happened, what I wrote and why, and then shift to current events. But first what I really want to say is this:

As medievalists, as intellectuals, you have authority to weigh into public conversations. To the extent possible, to the extent that you can find a platform, to the extent that you feel safe – I think you should do it.

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In February of 2013 Pope Benedict retired abruptly. He announced it in Latin, and an Italian Vatican reporter who happened to know Latin broke the news to the world. Go Latin! In general, it caught the media off-guard, media platforms were looking for content, and the content quickly turned to the medieval. Reporters were asking questions about whether Popes had ever retired before, how does papal retirement work, what comes next, what’s the canon law on the subject, and so forth. For a few weeks, medieval history was hot.

A lot of the commentary focused on Pope Gregory XII, who was indeed the last to retire, but who did so in the context of the fifteenth-century Council of Constance as part of a deal to get two anti-popes deposed, Gregory to retire, and a new legitimate Pope elected to unify the church. Hardly analogous to Benedict. I started looking at the late 13th-century canon law on the subject [all before breakfast], much of which was organized by the man who became Boniface VIII. Boniface became pope after his predecessor, Pope Celestine V retired in order to return to a life of contemplation.

Why does this medieval history matter today? Well, Benedict’s statement announcing his retirement echoed Celestine’s own bull of retirement. Benedict visited Celestine’s shrine twice as Pope. Benedict and Celestine are even featured on the wall of the church in L’Aquila.

Given the clear impact that Celestine’s example had provided for Benedict, I had an easy medieval story to write, and I wrote it for CNN.

Over the next few weeks, I kept writing in the run-up to the conclave, after Francis was elected, and even throughout the first few months of his papacy. I felt that a lot of reporters were mis-reading Francis’ early statements. It turns out that my PhD in medieval history makes me a good interpreter of papal texts; go figure.

I used these writing opportunities, as much as possible, to educate readers about the Middle Ages.

Here’s my favorite example – an essay in which I suggested ways to think about the upcoming papal election, but in which I really wanted to say that voting is medieval. Medieval people, as you all know, loved making groups, writing bylaws, and voting for stuff. They did it all the time. The College of Cardinals, no less than a faculty senate, offers a direct continuation of that tradition of medieval voting.

These are the kinds of stories that I think we can, and again as possible, should all write. We all have these moments that we observe a relationship between our scholarly subjects and modern conversations, whether about politics, religion, the environment, or culture. I’ve become an evangelist for writing local op-eds, national pieces, blogging, talking to school groups, participating in library reading groups, anything that might combat myths about the Middle Ages, get our perspective out of academia and into broader discourse.

Here is where current events take over my talk. I had planned to speak about the institutional challenges facing academics who want to do public engagement – namely; that our professions don’t see it as something that counts.

But then something happened that drove me to write a very different kind of piece about the Middle Ages.

There’s Sarah Palin at the 2014 NRA convention. She made an incredible speech. I’ve watched it many many times in whole and in part, and few demagogues in history could do much better. She knows her audience. She owns them.

The minute I heard these words – waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists – I started thinking about forced baptisms in both Visigothic and late medieval Spain, Saxony under Charlemagne, and in the context of massacres after the First Crusade and during the Black Death. I remembered Palin’s invocation of “Blood libel” after Representative Giffords was shot. So here was an extraordinary thing – a modern demagogue claiming the traditions of both Christian persecutor and victim.

I decided that this situation really did call for a medievalist.

This piece was published last Thursday, on May 1. I want to point out a few features of how I wrote about the Middle Ages.

First, I explicitly claimed my authority as an historian.

I quoted an episode on forced baptism from the Chronicle of Mathias of Neuenberg – a reference I actually chose from a Facebook thread I started on forced baptisms in medieval history. And hey, whatever you think of Sarah Palin, getting 14th century German chronicles time on CNN.com is pretty cool, right?

I described the ways she evoked both fear and dominance in her audience, making them afraid on the one hand, claiming absolute moral authority on the other, and assuring them that with the proper weapons, they could safe. In followup blog posts, I would describe her language as a form of militant Christianity.

I then looked back on her use of “blood libel,” which I defined as a medieval myth, as evidence of her consistent pattern of wanting to be both the unjustly victimized Chosen people and the Christian triumphalist. That rhetorical move is very familiar to medievalists who study the Crusades, for example.

I ended with a nod to apocalyptic thought, a subtext I see running throughout her work.

In my reading, Sarah Palin’s medievalism is evident throughout this speech and her speeches and writing over the years. Throughout, she echoes some of the worst moments in medieval history.

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I’m a little nervous about showing you this, here, at Kalamazoo. More nervous than I was about writing it in some ways, because you are my peers. This is not a political conference and I know many of you won’t agree with my take. Moreover, I’m not just being an educator in this piece. I’m not just revealing the ways in which medieval history informs modern events. I’m not acting as a professor in public. I've left the safe spaces behind.

No, in this piece for CNN I am using my status and knowledge as a medieval historian to make an explicitly political argument that a modern politician is dangerous.

Here’s the thing.

I think she’s dangerous.

Moreover, it is my knowledge of the medieval past that has led me to that conclusion. What is our obligation to society as scholars when we draw such conclusions? What is one to do with such a thought other than to share it?

I’m not here to try to persuade you to adopt my politics, but I am here to say that our historical knowledge gives us a perspective that is valuable and usually missing in public discourse. Our status as academics, for all intellectualism can be derided, gives us entry into local and national conversations.

You have the authority to weigh in.

Please use it responsibly.

Thank you.

A National Women's History Museum Without Historians of Women

In the New Republic, historian Sonya Michel has written a scathing indictment (with a response and followup) of the "National Women's History Museum," a group dedicated to making a real museum on the Mall in D.C. 

According to the piece (and many other historians, including - full disclosure here - my mother), the NWHM has gone out of their way to distance themselves from actual professional historians, instead presenting an out-moded, superficial, amateur, and often inaccurate face of women's history.

The story is important for its own sake, but it also reveals a much longer contest over the stories we want to tell about discrimination, progress, and the relevance of such issues in today’s society.

Since its founding, the NWHM operated without any input from scholars. Finally, though, a few years ago, some very important scholars were invited to form an advisory board and to help the NWHM with their project. Sadly, that collaboration has now ended.

“Last month,” Michel writes, “Joan Wages, the president and CEO of the National Women’s History Museum, abruptly informed me and my fellow historians on the museum’s Scholarly Advisory Council that our services were no longer needed. For three years, we had been trying to help Wages’ nonprofit organization develop an overall vision for the institution it hopes to build on the National Mall.”

Why this abrupt end to the collaboration? Michel suggests that while history is often messy; these people wanted to tell a clean, simple, positivist story. She continues:

In mid-March, the museum announced that it had launched a new online exhibit, “Pathways to Equality: The U.S. Women’s Rights Movement Emerges,” in conjunction with the Google Cultural Institute. Never informed that the exhibit was in the works, much less given an opportunity to vet it, we were appalled to discover that it was riddled with historical errors and inaccuracies. To pick just one example: Harriet Beecher Stowe was described as having been “born into a family of abolitionists” when, from the time of her birth through her young adulthood in the 1830s, her family actively opposed the abolitionist movement. “Pathways to Equality,” noted Kathryn Kish Sklar, the nineteenth-century specialist who pointed out the error, “could have been written by a middle-school student.”

Let's not undersell middle school students. Many, in fact, work well with experts (their teachers and parents) to fact-check.  

Michel suggests that at the core is a strong difference between fundamental conceptions of what history, especially women's history, is, does, and is for. She writes:

According to the large-font text, the central theme of the museum was to be the struggle for women’s rights and the triumph of the suffrage movement.

The historians found the focus on “great women” and the acquisition of formal political rights to be outdated and much too narrow to capture the manifold ways in which women have shaped U.S. history. We were also dismayed to note that nearly all of the women pictured on the brochure were white, and several (Mary Wollstonecraft, Olympe de Gouges) not actually American. This sort of thinking about history typifies the NWHM style. Its approach is encapsulated in this statement on its website: “Women's history isn't meant to rewrite history. The objective is to promote scholarship and expand our knowledge of American history.” While most women’s historians would agree with the second part, we would disagree with the first. We have set out to rewrite history. [My emphasis]

This, I think, is the most important detail of Michel’s piece. Beyond the politics and perhaps personalities, there is a fundamental difference on the purpose and nature of history between the enthusiastic amateur and the professional scholar. It’s a split that goes far deeper than the issues at play with the NWHM.

Women's History and many other fields that have emerged in the profession more recently – queer studies and disability studies, for example – have pushed us all, sometimes uncomfortably, to re-examine the past, our own understandings, and to re-structure whatever "master," or perhaps "mistress” (as Judith Bennett writes) narratives of history survive the process. That's as true for my field (medieval) as for U.S. history.

Within contemporary American society, the position of American women in our history remains a subject of intense debate. Michel’s piece coincides with continued debates about paycheck fairness, rape culture, voter suppression, the right of women to have access to birth control, and the rapid proliferation of anti-choice legislation.

These political issues match up with a flurry of articles about whether people interested in gender equality should talk about deep structural problems, bias, and sexism, or whether what women really need to do, in order to achieve equality is to be more confident (or “lean-in”).

Experts in women's history are able to place such contemporary questions in a broad historical context, linking sexism and discrimination now and in the past. That's threatening to a bland positivist master narrative of progress from the "bad old days" before the vote to the good times now.

We need to bring that uneasy re-examination of ourselves, our historical memories, and the stories we tell into the public space. It is the chief work - not fact-checking - of the publicly engaged historian, and it’s clear that there are lots of women’s historians ready to engage.

But we need partners to do it.

It's too bad this organization seems unwilling to risk opening the door.