Derek Amidst the Po-Mo crowd

I am currently spending a month as a participant in a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute at Ferrum College in southwestern Virginia. The theme of the program is “Regional Studies and the Liberal Arts: Appalachia Up Close.” As a historian of the American South I wanted to be able to take a closer look not only at the idea of regional history but at a particular (sub)region that I wanted to be able to fit into the framework of Southern history. While I will write more in the future about my experiences here, suffice it to say for now that I am more convinced than ever that Southern Appalachia properly is part of the South.

One of the strengths of the program is the group of Institute Fellows (or whatever we are called). We are all college or university professors and we come into the program with an array of interests and strengths. My colleagues are smart, engaged, oftentimes funny and insightful. They say provocative things. They are well read and are committed to good teaching and in some cases to solid scholarship. I enjoy being around them most of the time. It is an intellectual community where ideas in general seem to be taken seriously.

And sometimes already they drive me insane. Part of the problem is disciplinary. While I embrace interdisciplinarity, the majority of the folks here are English Literature types, and they bring with them their talk about postmodernism, discourse, and a whole lot of other jargon. It makes my brain hurt. There are a few other disciplines scattered in, including sociology. There are only three historians among the group of us. This is a problem. Especially when they get going on anything history related. I’ve endured a lot of foolishness about “facts,” used, of course, in quotation marks, sneering about truths, insistence that it is all “just texts,” and other non-sequiters, nonsense, and nonstarters. Some insist that you can learn history just as well – better! – from a novel. I find it amazing that many of them would effectively dismiss the historical profession – even, maybe especially, when it comes to issues of the past. It’s a level of arrogance that has not yet been substantiated by a compelling level of argumentation.

Three examples: We had the renowned poet and novelist Robert Morgan came to the seminar the other day. His novels utilize historical backdrops and in some cases are categorized as historical fiction. Like most historians, I value good fiction, and I often use it in the classroom. But it is what it is. Literature can serve as a social/cultural document. It can evoke a mood or convey an idea. But it is not a substitute for reading actual works of history. I have heard all sorts of arguments here about how novels are easier for students to handle, how it draws them to historical questions in a way that a monograph does not. Perhaps. But beyond the fact that maybe our chief goal in a university or college setting should not be about giving our students the easy way out, none of the people conveying these sentiments actually teach history. In effect they are purporting to speak authoritatively to pedagogical issues in history classrooms. In my classroom.

For his part, Robert Morgan argued that literature endures where history does not. I took issue with this, and we began a good conversation, though then he amended his statement to include those nonfiction writers who are not history PhDs because some historians resent the successes of some of those who in another era may have been known as “talented amateurs.” It seemed a bizarre argument at the time – not only was he claiming fiction, he was also, in effect, claiming history. As I think about it, it is an even more bizarre argument now. Morgan is currently working on a biography of Daniel Boone. I imagine it will be wonderful. I expect that if it is, historians will value it. If it is not, most of us will not.

But the last straw was when one of my colleagues asked Morgan about how to integrate novels into a college history class alongside “more traditional” sources. I am still puzzled about this – why, precisely, are we asking a novelist (and writing professor, though one who only teaches upper level seminars and grad students in creative writing and not even English surveys) about how college history professors should be teaching our discipline? Underlying all of this is a bizarre and, as most of us know, simply wrong, conception that somehow historians are not writers that has been pervading the seminar. Anyone else read any lit-crit lately? And apparently that we are not good teachers either (I keet hearing about how bored students are with history. Funny – every place I have ever been, history is an incredibly popular major).

Second example: We are reading Crandall Shifflett’s book Coal Towns: Life, Work, and Culture in Company Towns of Southern Appalachia, 1880-1960. When one of the professors leading the seminar, the historian, said something to the effect of how Shifflett has a “neutral” take in Coal Towns there was an audible dismissive gasp that came from a visitor, a Folklorist. It has become more and more apparent to me that for some of my colleagues, in order to be “neutral” a source has to agree with them. Shifflett’s book is controversial to be sure. It is a revisionist work, and to my mind a welcome one. But if we must use terms like “neutral” this book qualifies. Its argument basically is that in company towns, people managed to negotiate space for their lives, to eke out happiness, even amidst a system that was at its base exploitative. That while things may often have been difficult, there was more to people’s lives in coal towns than simply grim conflict between worker and employer. He argues further that despite the romance of the agrarian lifestyle, most people welcomed modernization, that life on the rural farms was far from ideal, and that the coming of modernization to Appalachia was not a bad thing and that the people themselves valued it.

These are not unreasonable arguments. They have their flaws. There are also some issues with sourcing and the like. But because it does not echo some sort of “Coal Mines are Evil!” argument, a cartoonish view of history, it does not pass ideological muster among some of my peers. I was able to make some solid defenses of Shifflett’s book in seminar today, but the debate was shut off so that we did not blow our best material today. Shifflett is coming in tomorrow – my guess is that today was our best bet, because we have some tin soldiers in the seminar – they’ll talk a big game today. Tomorrow when they have a chance to confront Shifflett? Not so much.

One final anecdote: At breakfast this morning one of my colleagues was telling a story from one of her classes. Effectively the question on the table in the class related to whether or not it would be right or even acceptable for a man to steal food from another individual in order to feed their family and if someone would be justified in responding with violence in protecting their property. Reasonable issue, reasonable question. Then she told of how one of the women in her class answered with a resounding “No. I’d feel completely justified in shooting them.” This is not an answer I would give, nor one I agree with. But surely a student has the right to say it. My colleague concluded her story with, “I felt as if I had failed her.”

I chimed in at this point – I asked why on earth she had failed a student who decided to make a different judgment than she would as to the issue at hand. She said that it was because the student had given such an “anti-intellectual” argument. She further said that what was most vexing was that she asked the student “Have you ever gone hungry” (the personalization of issues represents a sort of solipsism in the classroom that drives me mad, but never mind that for now) and the student responded (it was nearing 5:00 and class was at an end) “Yes, I’m hungry now.” Never mind that the question really ought to be largely irrelevant (one’s stance on the issue is dependent upon one’s level of nourishment? Class background is destiny?). It was not the most politic of answers, but I know college students – my guess is that she was being ironic. Or at least a smart ass. Or maybe she just did not like the implication from the professor that she was wrong, that in answering a question she had failed some moral test. Who knows? In any case, this was the evidence for the student’s anti-intellectualism.

One of my other colleagues (an avowed Marxist) was actually much more assertive about how dreadfully wrong the student was. She maintained that if a student comes in to a course with preconceptions and they do not change their mind (on all issues, or just where the professor thinks they should? If she had come into class and said on day one that such a theft was acceptable and said the same thing on the last day would that have been a failure too?) I told her that it sounded an awful lot as if “anti-intellectual” meant “something I do not agree with” (see “neutrality” above). I’m still not certain, unless it was a class being done by strict Socratic method, how the one student giving an answer in a college class, and a rather unpopular opinion one might surmise, was being anti-intellectual. I guess her compliant classmates were doing all the heavy lifting with their pregnant intellectual silences. Suffice it to say I would not want to be a student in a classroom with some of my fellow seminar participants.

I’ve spoken to enough of my colleagues to know that a good number are not like this. (The historians have been great. We rule.) It will be an interesting remaining couple of weeks. I promise that on the whole my impressions of my colleagues are quite positive. But Robert Morgan reminded us the other day that it is tension, not placidity that makes for good fiction. As a general rule, wouldn’t you know, so it goes too for Rebunk.