Blogs > Cliopatria > Things Noted Here and There

Apr 18, 2006

Things Noted Here and There


by Cliopatria


Congratulations to winners of the 90th Annual Pulitzer Prizes: in Fiction, Geraldine Brooks for March, a novel whose main character is the absent father in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women; in history, David Oshinsky's Polio: An American Story, which edged Jill Lepore's New York Burning and Sean Wilentz's The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln; in biography, Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, over Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking and Megan Marshall's The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism; and, in General Non-Fiction, Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya, which won over Tony Judt's Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 and George Packer's The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq. The Pulitzer Prize Board also awarded a special citation to Edmund Morgan,"for a creative and deeply influential body of work as an American historian that spans the last half century."

What time and Saddam Hussein did not destroy of ancient Babylon,"Operation Iraqi Freedom" apparently has and covered over. Any apology, however sincere, hardly seems equal to the tragedy of it.

John Gravois,"Mob Rule," CHE, 14 April, describes the research of sociologist Kenneth Westhues on"mobbing" in academic communities. Several of us at Cliopatria have been on the receiving end of it. Gravois uses the experience of Liberty & Power's Jonathan Bean as a case in point.

I'll be away from Cliopatria for the remainder of the week, attending the Organization of American Historians' convention in Washington, DC. The other Cliopatricians will improve on my usual posts, however, and you can catch up on your reading of History Carnival #29, Carnivale #14, Thomas Bender's"No Borders: Beyond the Nation-State," and Cliopatria's symposium on Bender's article. If all of that doesn't suffice, have a look at what Ahistoricality calls"Pure Blogging Art." "Blog" at Unqualified Offerings has a thread that nears a thousand comments. Some of the Cliopatricians are contributors. Every cliche -- left, right, or muddling middle -- is there, somewhere. Read it and you've read most conversations on the internet – except for those at Cliopatria, where cliches are eschewed, of course.


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Jason KEuter - 4/19/2006

I have observed this phenomenon as a public school teacher as well. Many of the same institutional characteristics that encourage mobbing are in place there as well; the behavior is most pronounced among older staff members who feel that younger staff members are somehow insufficiently submissive.

There is a key difference, however, between "higher" education and k-12: unions. K-12 teachers can generally fall back on union contracts to protect their jobs and put enough pressure on adminnistrators to turn them into allies to stop the mobbing. They don't always do this, but the language of most contracts gives them the ability to do so.

I don't imagine that university professors will adopt this approacch any time soon, however, as it would be a blow to their status. Most want to be recongnized for their brilliance but most generally don't feel that they are, so they accumulate laurels - the most important being their tenured position. Were they to employ a union contract to prevent themselves from being abused, then they would be subject to the same kind of attacks public school teachers face: namely, they have their jobs not because of some individual merit but because no one can fire them because of their union contracts. Well, the unseemly side of "higher" ed is that most enjoy their honored positions for reasons not related to those they trumpet most loudly - or prefer to have their intimidated colleagues trumpet most loudly.

One additional comment - many professors orchestrate similar mobbing acts within their classrooms.