Author Archives: jdresner

Change Happens

There are two endings to the story of Don Quixote. [Spoilers for a 400 year-old book and 60 year-old musical]

In both versions, Don Quixote is a country gentleman, Alonso Quijano, who loses his grip on modernity, or reality if you prefer, and lives as if he is part of the age of honorable knights and romances, castles and giants, magic and noble women. He is sometimes humored, sometimes even encouraged, but also beaten and defeated by people of evil intent (or just jobs to do). His sidekick, Sancho Panza, endures a great deal as well in the hopes of promised rewards and status. It is a comedy based on the idea that there are no longer any knights or nobility in the world, but living as if there are produces absurdity and drama.

In both versions, Don Quixote is defeated by his relatives and friends, forced to face reality, abandon his fantasies and identity, and return home for a time before he passes away.

The Man of La Mancha, the musical based on Cervantes’ book and life, ends in a tragic triumph: Don Quixote, having been broken by reality and returned home, is revived by the visit of his squire and lady, ultimately reprising “The Impossible Dream” with them (and the whole rest of the cast), reclaiming his name and declaring that his adventures will continue, and then dying. This was the version I grew up with: the noble, if mad, pursuit of virtue could provide solace for the world, and inspiration. Even the worst of society – the illiterate, the criminal, the poor – could see the value in striving for grace and healing; in fact, perhaps could only see it through the intervention of someone oblivious to the mundane, gross realities of life. [Or not oblivious, perhaps, so much as impervious, a choice, according to the character Cervantes]

Don Quixote, the original novel, ends in a complete defeat for romance and virtue in the modern world: Don Quixote, having been beaten and forced home without being disabused of his fantasies, falls ill and returns to his original identity, ultimately repenting of his adventures, banning his daughter from marrying any man who reads chivalric romances in his will, and dying as Alonso Quijano. There is no dramatic redemption, no constituency of loyal retainers, only a reassertion of modernity, sense, and cold, hard reality.

I’ve been thinking about those two endings lately. I’ve always identified a bit with Don Quixote (as well as Charlie Brown, but that’s a discussion for some other time), seeing myself as something of a dreamer, an idealist who believes in the power of truth, thoughtfulness, the perspective of knowledge and experience, and the value of seeing the world as a collective endeavor. Being an academic, and a historian at that, almost seems like an overdetermined result.

Now I am stepping away from that mission, that quest, that impossible dream: after nearly a lifetime in schools as a student and teacher, I have resigned my position at Pittsburg State effective this summer. The reasons are personal, family-related, and not terribly relevant, but an opportunity arose and we are taking it, though the risks and uncertainties are substantial.

The risks and uncertainties of staying in academia as a historian at a public institution in Kansas are also substantial. I don’t have to rehash the current discourse over generative language tools, the political climate of conservative revanchism, the fiscal collapse of universities, and a public sphere buffeted by algorithms and editorial distortions and attention-seeking. Kansas legislators considered a bill this last session that would have weakened or eliminated the protections of tenure, and there’s no reason to believe they won’t try again; funding has not kept pace with inflation and tuition is vulnerable to fluctuations beyond our control both demographic and political. The state now has a ban on “gender identifying pronouns or gender ideology…on state employee’s email accounts and any other form of communication” which is going to render my student information form illegal, not to mention my Canvas display name. Good thing they never discovered my social media feeds.

I remain convinced that the critical method of history is the most fundamental and powerful tool we have against propaganda and ideology, that a historically informed citizenry is vastly preferable to any alternative, that the truth matters and that we are nowhere close to answering all of the interesting and troubling questions that lie in our narratives, our analyses, and our archives. I have not abandoned the dream of a better, more historically sophisticated and humane world, though I am not at this time convinced that it can be achieved in our institutions of education.

But for all the tilting at windmills I’ve done – assigning whole books, discussion boards, having students write reviews and comprehensive final essays, hoping to break through the myths of samurai and geisha and mandarin and emperors with actual writings and lives, blogging and public writing – I don’t see a chorus of inspired folk around me. I don’t hear my students echoing the lessons I tried to teach in later semesters, or any kind of ripple effect. There are folk teaching history who have those kinds of successes and influence, but I don’t see it myself.

Not that I don’t have some students enthusiastic about history, even some who come back for more than one world history requirement. I feel some qualms, honestly, about the ones who apply for our master’s program in the hopes of a career in education or public history, or as a way-station to a doctorate; I tell myself that things may change by the time they are done, that it may be worth more than just the satisfaction of study and learning.

I don’t know what I’ve left behind or how to judge my work, but it feels more like the book: modernity wins, the sordid, concrete exercise of power and money, while virtue and striving are left behind. I said to my colleagues,

My thanks to you all for a productive and friendly environment, and support in our times of difficulty, as we have endeavored to make the world a better, or at least more comprehensible, place for our students and communities.

I say the same to my online communities, just as much my colleagues in this collective exercise that blends the faculty lounge with the public square, where we can commiserate as well as educate, or at least correct. I’m not really going away, but I’m going to have to adjust to being out of the cycle of semesters and academic years, to having no contemporary experience to share, to having no educational agenda in my consideration of new scholarship or technologies. I’m going to need a new schtick when my jokes don’t land on social media, since “This is why I don’t tell jokes in class” will not be true anymore.

Change happens because history is people.

Role Reversal

Something I wrote for an online Chinese History class:

There’s a kind of reversal exercise that is getting more common: it’s worth thinking about. What would American history and society look like if it were written the way that we write histories of other cultures? What would the history of the Civil War look like if we talked about it in terms of tribalism, religious sects, honor culture, caste systems, and magical thinking? What would an analysis of US history that took Puritanism or Methodism as critically as Chinese histories take Confucianism and Daoism? Remember: Harvard and Yale were seminaries until the 19th century; we still haven’t had a non-Christian president, and we added “In God We Trust” to the currency and “Under God” to the pledge in the mid-20th century. What if, instead of focusing on ‘pioneers’ and activists and breakthroughs towards a more perfect union, we focused on conservative and subversive forces and how each crisis revealed deep-rooted problems and how we failed to actually solve them most of the time?

Comment Elsewhere: Certainty

Context here:

Most comments on blogs – particularly well-read blogs on controversial topics – are not part of a conversation, nor do they add anything beyond a sort of “me too” vote to one side or the other. Hardly anyone actually reads previous comments before posting – I’ve skimmed through, reading more closely what caught my eye – because that’s not the point. The point is to express ourselves, vigorously and publicly: like doing cartwheels in a grocery store, to get noticed briefly and acknowledged, but not really to engage.

So I’m often loathe to comment on well-commented pieces, on the grounds that nobody cares, that what I’d say has probably been said, etc. But Aaron, if you’re still reading comments (Sorry, really), here’s something that hasn’t really been touched on directly here (though I do seem to remember it coming up on twitter).

Sources lie. But they’re all we have.

This is what I tell my history students (http://www.slideshare.net/jdresner/two-things-about-history-and-history-teaching) and it’s one of the most fundamental things about doing history: Sources lie deliberately, sometimes. Sometimes by omission. Sometimes accidentally. Sometimes because of their particular perspective, or because they made a mistake. Sometimes they lie because they are lost to us; a kind of 5th amendment right of history, to destroy materials.

In spite of that, we *have* to *use* our biased, incomplete, poorly written, fragmentary sources to come to some conclusions about the world. Absolute certainty about anything other than big events is rare; absolute certainty about causality or human experiences is damn near impossible. Sometimes even “preponderance of evidence” (The American civil court standard) is just not reasonable.

We have to be careful about filling in gaps in our knowledge with “likely,” or “logical,” or “reasonable,” suppositions. Human beings are many things, but they often aren’t logical or reasonable, and they often do unlikely things. That doesn’t mean that we can’t come to conclusions, but it means that we have to learn to be comfortable with uncertainty, epistemological humility. We acknowledge that we have built our arguments on possibly shifting ground. And we move on. We build other arguments on those arguments, and so on. Unless some new source or new perspective comes along and changes them. Then we go back and revise.

Nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong with uncertainty, as long as we acknowledge it. And nothing wrong with living our lives by the fruit of our uncertain conclusions, as long as we’re satisified with the evidence and arguments that we have.

Certainty is nice, but rare. In its absence, resolve to work towards a better world keeps us moving in the right directions, more or less.

Test Three Results

As with the first test, each question was worth up to 4 points, for a possible total of 36. The highest score in the class before extra credit was 30, a little lower; the median was a C+, and the distribution of grades was much more towards the center. The grade scale works out like this:

Grade starts at distribution
A+ 30
A 28.5 7%
A- 27
B+ 25
B 22 30%
B- 20
C+ 18
C 14 45%
C- 12
D+ 10
D 7 17%
D- 5
F under 5 1%

If you answered 9 questions, but failed to answer one from each chapter, I took a 2 point penalty off your grade. (If you didn’t answer all 9 questions, I did not)

If you want to discuss your performance, and how you can improve it next time, feel free to come by my office hours. If you want to dispute your grade, feel free to do so in writing.

I will be in the office for a good portion of tomorrow, Thursday, at least from 10-3; if you want to pick up your test on Friday, let me know because I haven’t set a schedule yet.

Test Two Results

As with the first test, each question was worth up to 4 points, for a possible total of 36. The highest score in the class before extra credit was 32 again; the median was a C+, which is OK but lower than the first (and the distribution of grades shows this); again, nobody who took the test failed. The grade scale works out like this:

Grade starts at distribution
A+ 32
A 30 15%
A- 28.75
B+ 26.25
B 23.25 25%
B- 20.75
C+ 18.25
C 15.25 40%
C- 12.75
D+ 10.25
D 7.25 20%
D- 4.75
F under 4 0%

If you answered 9 questions, but failed to answer one from each chapter, I took a 4 point penalty off your grade. (If you didn’t answer all 9 questions, I did not)

If you want to discuss your performance, and how you can improve it next time, feel free to come by my office hours. If you want to dispute your grade, feel free to do so in writing.

Continue reading →

Test 1 Results

One of the reasons it takes so long for me to grade tests is that I grade by questions or chapters, which means that I can be more consistent across tests. It also means that your grade on each question is independent of your grade on the other questions: it’s entirely possible to get 4 points on some, and zero on others, depending on how well you’ve understood and expressed everything.

Each question was worth up to 4 points, for a possible total of 36. The highest score in the class before extra credit was 32; the median was a B-, which is good, and nobody who took the test failed. The grade scale works out like this:

Grade starts at distribution
A+ 32
A 30 20%
A- 28.75
B+ 26.25
B 23.25 35%
B- 20.75
C+ 18.25
C 15.25 35%
C- 12.75
D+ 10.25
D 7.25 10%
D- 4.75
F under 4 0%

If you answered 9 questions, but failed to answer one from each chapter, I took a 2 point penalty off your grade. (If you didn’t answer all 9 questions, I did not)

If you want to discuss your performance, and how you can improve it next time, feel free to come by my office hours. If you want to dispute your grade, feel free to do so in writing.

Continue reading →