Newsworthy Archives – Page 3 of 33

January 10, 2024January 10, 2024

The End of History (as we know it) Part One

Viewing history close-up is problematic; Image from jesusgilhernandez.com

Historians are all agitated, for good reason. They’re being squeezed between two forces: a highly politicized and polarized atmosphere and a steady decline in the number of students majoring in history. But are students really ditching history? And is this climate of bashing historians even unique? This variation of an intergalactic trash compactor makes a familiar grinding sound; we’ve been here before. If you want to understand what’s going on with History as a discipline, you have take a broader view and look at…(you know it’s coming) the whole history.

This topic arose during a three-day conference of the American Historical Association that kept me wandering through the rabbit warren of the Hilton in downtown San Francisco last week. By the time I was done musing about the concerns of historians–and listening to some fascinating discussions about how AI was affecting teaching, whether women had a Renaissance, why Senegalese soldiers were recruited in World War I, and how to get published–I was full of thoughts. So many thoughts about the purported slump of the history profession that I decided it warranted two separate posts.

In this post, let’s talk about whether the number of history majors is, in fact, in a tailspin.

The Disappearing History Major

There’s been plenty of hand-wringing over the decrease in the number of history students. The decline of students was part of a trend that the Chronicle of Higher Education article had noted back in 2018: “Why Are Students Ditching the History Major?” This study of the change in college degrees awarded over a span in the 2010s showed history at the bottom–a 34% drop in degrees awarded. Science and engineering crested the top, which is why you shouldn’t mention the word STEM to history department administrators unless you want to hear a stream of invective on how they are sucking up all the resources and how they get churn out published articles by rearranging the names on the same data sent to different journals. (Hearing that from my graduate history adviser and knowing how hard my son, the physics major, worked on his articles created some major cognitive dissonance!)

This study from 2018 and its continuing trend prompted other articles by the American History Association which wondered whether the decline has ended, is extended, has reversed, or has backed up and run over itself? The conference held two sessions on the topic, which I confess I didn’t attend because I wanted to learn about the complex use of the word “medieval” in South Asian History and how gender and power was reflected in the Byzantine “apple affair.” But trust me, the AHA is still worried about it.

September 10, 2023September 10, 2023

Why I Need to Write About Aristotle

I’ve been futzing about for a few days, trying to decide whether to write a post that centers on Aristotle, “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer.” My big hang-up is frankly … audience. How much are y’all going to balk if you read the word Aristotle in the first sentence? And yet I can’t write my film review without mentioning him. So I’ve been stuck between the urge to get these ideas out and the knowledge that we’re living in a time of anti-intellectualism.

It’s like a seesaw effect. We don’t even know what we think about smarts. There are constant little tests nestled in among Corgi pictures on the interwebs that tell you to “solve this puzzle and your IQ is 180.” Which anybody with some kind of education knows is patently false because that’s not how IQ works and nobody has IQs over 170 except that little kid they found in Nepal once. (OK, I checked the Internet; there are a few people now with IQs over 170. But not because they can do some little puzzle.)

Meanwhile, we don’t even care if people learn how to write anymore because we have ChatGPT and other tools coming that will just write stuff for us. As if Chat knows. I think of ChatGPT as like a rather stupid, random World Book Encyclopedia. If you happen to go to the right page and copy the right bits word for word (or verbatim–we used to use that word in a business context until we were told people didn’t know what it meant, so we had to replace it with “word for word” because people can’t learn what words mean anymore)… If you go to the right page and plagiarize it, you might just get away with it. But what if you have to combine things? And if you’re not learning because all you ever do is copy things other people wrote, then you just wander through school and come out as dumb as you started.

August 12, 2023August 14, 2023

Lahaina, What We Know

Lahaina Banyan Court Park this week, photo via US Civil Air Patrol.

They have not yet identified who struck the match. In the horrific fire that has burned the town of Lahaina, killed at least eighty, and destroyed buildings more than a century old, the cause of the blaze has not yet been identified. The New York Times has posted a picture of the destruction and provided lengthy coverage which includes the category: What We Know.

In the Paradise fire, the deadliest fire in California history, it was PG&E’s errant powerlines that sparked the 2018 conflagration that wiped out a town which had no warning. A man in Arizona was charged for starting a wildfire by burning toilet paper. A woman had left a campfire unattended. We like to find accountability, the “single neck to choke” as the business people say. It’s better if a single person or company can be found at fault. But, for Maui, we have to go upwind to understand cause and effect. We have to go back to find causes in stages, to the resorts, the developers, the bombing, the ditches, the plantations, and the money. We have to follow the money, if we want to follow the fire.

Intended Consequences: Climate, Drought, Tourism

The cause of the fire, according to the latest news being disseminated was Climate Change. A hurricane nearby was sending unusually high winds, and Maui had been suffering under an extended drought. “Brush fires” were the cause, though inspectors may still go back through the debris to find an origin zone. It is easy to chalk everything now up to Climate Change, that anonymous boogieman that is lurking under the bed. Where could he possibly have come from? Absent from the phrase is the modifier “Human-Caused,” since this is not the work of any boogieman.

What We Know is where Lahaina was just weeks ago. In a knock-down, drag-out water dispute between tourists, resorts, people who live there, indigenous, and corporate interests, and a government that doesn’t want to deal with the controversy or its own sordid past. Negotiations had deteriorated, which happens when there isn’t enough to go around any more.