Michael L. Satlow

Then and Now

academic

Shared, but How?

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What is a “ball”?  Does a ball exist when there is nobody around to see it?

Over the past couple of months I have been exposed to the thought of Bruno Latour.  Latour tries to thread the needle between seeing all of reality as a social or rhetorical construction and a strictly realist or objective approach.  For Latour, a ball is a “quasi-object.”  In the sense that it is a sphere made of some material and has a certain set of physical properties, it is an object.  But it is only in its interaction with humans that this sphere becomes a “ball.”  At the same time, as soon as a person interacts with such an object they are themselves transformed into a condition of “play.”  The relationship between person and object (or by extension, place or activity) is a reciprocal and interconnected one.  (I have much more to learn about Latour, and the example of the ball is not really his, but for a summary see here.)

Latour first came up for me this summer while I was attending  a conference entitled “Shared Ritual Practices and Divided Historiography: Media, Phenomena, Topoi” sponsored by the Dynamics of Jewish Ritual Practices in Pluralistic Contexts from Antiquity to the Present Research Centre at the University of Erfurt.  It was an interesting conference, not simply because it was full of excellent scholars discussing interesting ideas, but in a strange way also because I think few of us – or maybe I speak primarily for myself – knew exactly what we were supposed to be discussing.  What is a “shared ritual practice” and how are we to think about it in the context of “dynamics”?

Most of the participants took this to be a conference about Jewish rituals in a Christian or Roman environment (the program was heavily waited toward Late Antiquity and, somewhat less so, the Middle Ages).  Most of the papers that took “shared” as referring to such “trans-religious” rituals followed a historiographic trope that probably can be called the dominant one today in such studies: namely, that Jews tended to appropriate the rituals of the dominant cultures in which they lived and adapt them for their own use.  Probably convincing enough, but also a little flat.

Not all the papers took “shared” in this way, however,  Some (including my own) were more interested in understanding “shared” as referring to the rituals of rabbinic and non-rabbinic Jews.  How might we describe the “dynamics” of such rituals?  While nearly all scholars would reject a top-down explanatory model, in which rabbis advocated for new rituals and non-rabbis blindly followed, it is clear that we still have not developed a good and well-accepted model to replace it.

I was asked to talk on historiography and I had to flail around a little to avoid the well-trodden topic of the am ha-aretz, the group that the rabbis construct as a kind of contrast to themselves.  So instead I went for the other end of the spectrum, focusing on the hasidim ha-rishonim, the “pious men of old.”  There are six distinct traditions about them in classical rabbinic literature and scholars have usually argued that whether organized or real or not, the rabbis present them as a model to emulate.  In reviewing the traditions I argued that the evidence is actually far more ambiguous; in several cases, especially among later rabbis, the hasidim ha-rishonim seem to be intentionally dismissed as good role models for contemporary Jews.   They are the constructed “super-pious,” with whom the rabbis can think through whether it is possible to be too pious.  Previous scholars, I think, did not see this ambiguity in large part because through the Middle Ages and early modern periods Jews took the term hasid and hasidim as positive expressions of piety.  There was a bit of anachronistic projection.

This is where I am intrigued by Latour.  A person doing a strange set of practices isn’t pious; he (or she) is only pious when we call him (or her) that.  So too, some practices are denoted as “rituals” and laden with meaning and (most) others are not.  Can we treat practices, or “doings,” as quasi-objects and, if so, does that get us anywhere beyond traditional theories of ritual?  I’m not sure, but if you have any ideas I would be delighted to know.

 

Lazar Gulkowitsch

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In any given week of research I probably peruse scholarly articles and monographs of a dozen or more authors.  Aside from the few whom I might personally know, the vast number of these authors are little more to names to me.  I read, consider, accept or reject their arguments based on my opinion of their merits.  While I recognize that there are actual people behind these arguments – and while I try to read the fruits of their labor generously – they largely remain simply names on a page.   Their own stories are not relevant to the academic work of sorting, adjudicating, and building on their arguments.

Yet every once a while an author has such a compelling backstory that it becomes difficult to simply ignore the person behind the argument.  Gershom Scholem, for example, was such a force of nature that it is hard to separate the man from his writings.  There are not many such scholars and I am sure that each academic has their own list.  Of the hundreds or even thousands of authors a researcher might consider each year, though, only very rarely does the person behind the argument loom large.

Twenty years ago I encountered such a scholar who continues to haunt me.  His name was Lazar Gukowitsch.  He is hardly well-known.  He wrote in German in the first half of the twentieth century.  He did not produce much and only a single work of his was translated into English (or any other language, for that matter).  His major field was Hasidism and its roots, and he attracted a brief notice from Scholem, who dismissed his ideas.  His writings are also very hard to find; there are relatively few copies of them available in the United States, all on yellowing and crumbling paper.  In the course of some research into how to interpret the character of the “hasid” in Talmudic texts I was led back, through a chain of footnotes, to a few of his essays, especially Die Bildung des Begriffes hasid, “The Portrayal of the Conception of the hasid.”  Recently, for work that I’m doing now (and will discuss in my next post), I returned to this work.  It is not groundbreaking but does a nice job collecting sources and is a bit ahead of its time methodologically.

It is not his scholarship but his story that jolts me.  Twenty years ago I looked him up in a series of reference books because I was curious but today nearly all of that information is on his Wikipedia page.  He was born in Russia in 1898 and moved to Germany where he received his secular education (in Jewish studies and ophthalmology!), ultimately becoming a professor in Jewish studies at the University of Leipzig.  That was in 1932.

In 1933, along with most other Jewish academics, he was dismissed from his post.  The very next year, though, he got back on his feet in an unlikely place.  In response to the fall of Jewish studies in Germany, the University of Tartu in Estonia created an Institute for Jewish Studies.  They hired Gulkowitsch to be its first chair and he moved there with his wife and two children.  His most academically productive years were at Tartu.

But there were not many.  In 1940 the Soviets took over Estonia and the next year his chair was abolished.  Shortly after, the Nazis conquered Estonia and murdered him and his family.

The broad outline of Gulkowitsch’s story is not distinctive.  Many German Jews went east after the Nazi rise to power, most, like Gulkowitsch, futilely.  But the image of the refugee community rebuilding the academic study of Judaism in Estonia with barbarism raging all around is striking.  Did Gulkowitsch find solace in his work?  He apparently traveled during this period, including to the U.K.  Did he ever think about not returning to Estonia?  We may never know the answer to these questions, but I recently noticed that there is a file on him in the Archive of the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning at the Bodleian Library at Oxford (MS. S.P.S.L. 494/1 ).  Maybe someone will tell his story more fully.

His memorial page at Yad Vashem can be found here.  May him memory be a blessing.

The Dissertation: An Unnecessary Evil?

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In a piece recently published in Inside Higher Ed, Christopher Schaberg and Ian Bogost discuss their experiences trying to get academics to write for broader audiences and pinpoint ten particular challenges that academics have in reaching wider audiences.   They are certainly right that academics have challenges reaching a wider audience.  As one who has struggled, with mixed results, to make my own scholarship more accessible, I have long believed that this is a far more significant problem than academics usually admit.

The preference that many, probably most, scholars (particularly in the humanities) have for writing for their peers rather than broader audiences has had, to my mind, two rather severe consequences.  The first is that it leaves a vacuum for others with far less expert knowledge to fill.  There is, for example, a wide audience for writing about religion, even from a non-confessional vantage point.  When I refuse to write accessibly about religion because I am afraid of dealing with matters with which I do not have deep expert knowledge (which is necessary in almost all accessible writing) I leave the door open for others, with even less expert knowledge.  Someone will write these books and when scholars do not they have only themselves to blame for the (often flawed, from a scholarly perspective) knowledge that does become popularized.   From this the second consequence flows: the decline of the humanities.  It is difficult to blame people for thinking that the work of academics in the humanities is irrelevant when smart people cannot fathom the books of these very scholars.  And this leads down the road to, for example, arguments for the elimination of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Given the many advantages of having one’s ideas accessible to a broad public, why do so many academics – smart, well-educated, people with deep expert knowledge – have a hard time writing for a broad audience?  Why do academics struggle with the ten challenges identified by Schaberg and Bogost?

There must be a variety of causes but I suspect that one of the most important ones is the dissertation.  Virtually all scholars in the humanities complete a dissertation as their first sustained research project.  This project often takes years to complete and involves mastery not just of a narrow slice of knowledge but, more relevantly, of a particular way of writing.  For this piece of writing we are rewarded, first with a degree and then, if we are lucky, with praise and a job.  Most of us who presently hold secure academic positions attribute, at least to some degree, our success to our dissertations.  The result?  For continue to write things that resemble the form we labored so hard to master and that got us in the door; there is a powerful cycle of positive reinforcement.  More than twenty years after writing my own dissertation that form of writing still comes naturally to me.  Breaking free of it is a continuous challenge.

But here’s the rub: almost nobody likes reading a dissertation.  Even academics don’t like reading them, even if they acknowledge the importance of the substance of their arguments.  As Eric Hayot writes in The Elements of Academic Style: Writing for the Humanities,

[Dissertations are] narrow, boring, self-indulgent, and overwritten; they’re competent rather than scintillating.  If we told students up front that this was that they were setting out to do for the next couple years [sic], who in their right mind would ever want to write one?

No one.  For this reason I recommend writing your dissertation as a book and leaving the genre of the Dissertation behind entirely.  Don’t write your dissertation for audience of five; don’t do a literature review (a special genre of chapter that only exists in the humanities dissertation…); don’t produce merely technical competence.  Do create an original theory and/or a genuine argument.   Writing this way will save you an immense amount of time, and spare you years of mastering an intellectual form (the Dissertation) that is unpublishable and naive (and which, to book, you will only ever write one of in your entire academic career).  This doesn’t mean, of course, that your dissertation-written-as-a-book will be a good book.  But it seems much better to me to write a mediocre book than a great Dissertation since your goal in the long run is to write a good book, and it’s easier to get there from something that resembles it than something that doesn’t. (p. 42)

For Hayot, and increasingly for me, the dissertation is not simply a one-off exercise but it is actually pernicious.  It conditions its writers to write in a particular, inaccessible style that puts us on the road to the elimination of the NEH (okay, a little hyperbole on my part for rhetorical effect).

To begin the long course to rectifying this, we – and I speak here to my fellow senior academics who hold tenured positions, train graduate students, and make judgments about the hiring and promotion of our junior colleagues – must take the lead.  We should train our students to write books rather than dissertations and then make sure that those who write books, particularly accessible books, are rewarded accordingly.  Our future is in our hands and we will reap what we sow.

How to Turn Your Dissertation into a Book

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I will be conducting a workshop at the University of Zurich for advanced graduate students on turning their dissertations into books publishable by (mainly anglophone) university presses.  It will take place over two full days and is focused primarily on doing the intellectual work necessary to generate the draft of a book proposal.  I am pasting the syllabus below.

 

 

How to Turn Your Dissertation into a Book

Michael Satlow

Brown University

The purpose of this workshop is to introduce you to the process of turning your dissertation into a publishable book, particularly for an American or British press.  By the end of the workshop, you should:

  • Know how academic presses in the U.S. and U.K. work, and how they differ from European academic presses;
  • Understand the full process of having a book accepted and published;
  • Have clarified, or know how to clarify, the central message of your first book in order to make it publishable;
  • Have identified the likely audience for your book;
  • Have produced (or are prepared to produce) a draft of a book proposal

Prior to our workshop it would be best if you read William Germano, Getting it Published: A Guide for Scholars and Anyone Else Serious About Serious Books.  There are several editions and while I would recommend the third edition (which has more about digital publishing) any will suffice.  Eric Hayot’s The Elements of Academic Style: Writing for the Humanities might also be helpful to you.

 

We will spend most of the first day in structured conversation and most of the second day reading and commenting on each other’s proposals.  Prior preparation of a proposal draft was optional, although you’ll have time during the workshop to sketch out something from which you can work.  You will need access to each other’s proposals for this.  I am not familiar with the logistics available there (do we share on Olat?), but we can always set up a Google drive on the first day if this is necessary.

 

Below is our tentative schedule and goals.  Obviously this can change.  If I have violated any cultural norms or expectations (e.g., the Swiss never have lunch at 1) this is entirely out of ignorance and I will be happy to learn and correct them.

 

Tuesday, May 23

9-11:                Introductions and an overview of the publishing process

We will go over the publishing process, focusing especially on the first half of the process: identifying a press (series); making contact and submitting a proposal; the review process.  We will also address some other important issues, such as publishing and academic advancement; publishing in the digital age; the use of editors.

11-11:30:          Break and informal conversation

11:30-1:           The difference between a dissertation and book

We will review the difference between producing a dissertation and book and begin to brainstorm on how this applies to your own project.

1-2:                  Lunch

2-4:                  Identifying your message and audience: What is a book proposal?

We will begin with a full group discussion of the importance of being able to identify your audience and figure out how to present your research in a way that will be most effective for them.  We will also discuss the basic elements of a book proposal and the audience for this document.  The class will then be split into smaller groups of two or three in which you do this with each other.  We will then reassemble at the end for full group discussion.

4-5:                  Individual work on your proposals and individual consultations with the instructor

Wednesday, May 24

9-10:30:           Individual work on proposals and individual consultations with the instructor

10:30-11:         Break

11-1:                Small group work on proposals

1-2:                  Lunch

2-4:30:             Selected participants will present and workshop their proposals to the full group

4:30-5:             Wrap up, final questions, next steps

Evaluating University Teaching

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At most colleges and universities, the granting of tenure and promotion is based on achievement in three key areas: scholarship, teaching, and service.  Measuring scholarship and service is not exactly straight-forward, but is still a relatively clear process that usually involves some combination of tallying things up and soliciting input from both external reviewers and those who can comment on a candidate’s contributions.  Measuring teaching, though, is particularly difficult.  Student evaluations, upon which many such recommendations are based, are after all one dimensional and notoriously difficult to parse.  Is there a better way?

Many institutions of higher education have grappled with this problem.  Some time ago I led an ad hoc committee commissioned by three academic units at Brown to consider how we might better, more fairly, and more transparently evaluate teaching.  I posted that report here.  It took a long time for those recommendations to wind themselves down into policy but recently one of the commissioning units of the original report did exactly that, revising its “Standards and Criteria” document (each academic unit has its own set of criteria for tenure and promotion) to accord with the ad hoc report.  In the interest of transparency (and should this be useful to anyone else) the revised section (very slightly redacted) is below:

B. Teaching
Assistant professors will be assigned an on going mentor with whom to discuss issues of pedagogy and personal development as a teacher. We recognize that excellence in teaching can take different forms. All candidates for promotion are expected to address in their statements their own goals, definitions of teaching excellence, and how they assess and reflect upon their effectiveness.
The following evidence will be used by the review committee to evaluate teaching effectiveness:
1) A teaching statement which includes the candidate’s teaching philosophy, classroom approach, and reflections on effectiveness;
2) Completed course evaluations from all the courses taught by the candidate since the date of hire or the last promotion;
3) Syllabi for all the courses for which there are course evaluations;
4) Teaching observation reports, to be completed at least once each year. These will follow a protocol: the faculty member whose teaching will be evaluated will attend a class meeting of the senior faculty member conducting the evaluation; an initial conversation between the two faculty members follows, including consultation about which course and course meeting to observe; then a review of the syllabus before the class meeting, the observation itself, the writing of the report, and the sharing of the report with the faculty member being evaluated;
5) A teaching portfolio that documents teaching effectiveness (including the candidate’s teaching statement, comments on student papers and revised papers, and annotated syllabi; Sheridan Center guidelines for the preparation of a portfolio might be consulted).
In their determination of the value of the candidate’s work submitted for evidence, the review committee will consider such matters as:
1) Quality of course design: Do the courses have appropriate learning goals and are they constructed in a manner that advances those goals? Do they demonstrate knowledge of the state of the field and do they include appropriate assessment techniques? The main evidence used for determination is class syllabi.
2) Contributions to curricular development: Does the candidate seek to create courses that contribute to our curriculum and/or that students might find attractive? Is the candidate willing to teach beyond her/his specialty if necessary? The main evidence used for determination is the candidate’s history of offerings and responsiveness to annual reviews.
3) Advising and mentoring: Has the candidate been willing to advise students on whichever levels are most appropriate? Has the candidate been an effective mentor and thesis advisor (where relevant)? Does the candidate mentor graduate teaching assistants? The main evidence used for determination is institutional data (i.e., the number of advisees); student evaluations; and the candidate’s statement.
4) Professionalism: Does the candidate demonstrate appropriate behavior in the classroom (e.g., comes to class prepared; does not belittle students)? Does the candidate treat graduate teaching assistants with respect? The main evidence used for assessment is student evaluations, classroom observation reports, and the candidate’s statement.
5) Professional development: Is the candidate self-reflective about his/her teaching and does she/he seek to improve it? The main evidence used for assessment is the candidate’s statement and (if provided) the teaching portfolio.
6) Effectiveness of teaching: We recognize that effective teaching and learning takes many forms and that it is very difficult to evaluate, especially in a relatively short time frame. Nevertheless, to the extent possible we would like to know whether students are learning in the candidate’s courses and the extent of that learning. Does the candidate teach in a manner that is inclusive? The main evidence used for assessment is the candidate’s statement; observation reports; student evaluations; and (if provided) the teaching portfolio.
7) Contributions to scholarship on pedagogy: This is not expected of all candidates but active participation in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SOTL) counts to the candidate’s credit.
8) Leadership: Does the candidate help to support and foster an environment that supports the learning and assessment of colleagues? While not expected of all candidates, activities that demonstrate leadership might include helping to observe others and/or organizing sessions about pedagogy.

It should be noted that in my opinion, at least, the goal of evaluation is not strictly evaluation: it is to help to  support a community of practice in which educators support each other in our common mission.  Teaching is hard and involves, in ways that scholarship and service don’t, making oneself vulnerable (a reflection on that here) and ideal work environment is one in which faculty feel free to discuss their failures and well as successes and to help each other to become better.  Evaluation, at its best, is simply a natural outgrowth of sustained reflection and practice.