I recently had a lengthy and negative review essay published about a book that has, publicly, been received with acclaim in Medieval Studies but privately (and more in Jewish and Islamic Studies than English lit) been critiqued. The over the top enthusiasm for the book and the rush to treat it not as the first word but the last one on the subject, as a foundational text that must be accepted in whole moving forward, is what led me to treat the book in such detail. I knew that anything less would have no impact. (The review is available through OA at the journal’s web site through the end of the year, and a PDF is available on my academia page for after that.)
I knew that I was opening myself up to a lot of criticism, and I anticipated quite a bit of it exactly. I wasn’t surprised, for example, by people announcing that they were refusing to read it on the grounds that it’s racist for a white woman to critique a book on race written by a woman of color. I knew that was coming. Honestly, I also expected to take some flak for how I cited Peter Abelard, or for citing him at all since some scholars consider him to have been a rapist; and I was pleasantly surprised not to have that come my way.
What I didn’t expect were suggestions that as a white woman I had been handed an opportunity in the form of being allowed to write a review essay at all where a woman of color wouldn’t have been. I cannot deny the reality behind the charge: Many opportunities do go to white scholars that could just as easily and even should go to scholars of color. But I was still surprised because I don’t see this as an opportunity that was handed to me at all. In other words, it absolutely could have happened like that, but in this case it didn’t.
So without denying that I benefit professionally from white privilege, I thought it might also be helpful to walk through some of the steps I took to pursue this publication and a related, recent one . Academic publishing is not at all transparent; and at the beginning of my career I definitely didn’t know what I was doing or even how to figure out what I was doing in the arena of journal publications.
There are things I can do and try my best to do about systemic racism and there are things I can do about other problems in academic publishing that sit atop those structures. This blog post is meant to address the latter; it’s about the smaller, immediate, concrete issue rather than the much bigger one.
This post is a lightly edited version of a Twitter thread I wrote up earlier in a fit of pique over something I read in the New York Times. The author of the piece seems to think she has solved online education while managing to disparage faculty, ignore the realities of student body size and adjunctification at many institutions, overlook the temporary nature of the current situation, and spin out a very facile discussion about the cost and value of college instruction. Hence the pique. All the same, I think I managed to address some misconceptions that I know go beyond just the author of the piece, so I didn’t want my reaction to get lost in the ether of my Twitter feed. The original piece can be found by clicking here, and my walk-through is below:
An actual screen cap of college classes taught on Zoom.
“No one wants to pay $30,000 per semester for what they’ve been getting.”
“What they’ve been getting” was triage. Faculty had very little notice that we would be going online this semester (36 hours in my case).
“What they’ve been getting” is not what they will be getting in the fall because my colleagues and I are working dozens of hours above and beyond the work we normally do during the summer (and please note that most US college faculty are paid nine-month salaries, not twelve-month ones, but would never succeed in our professions if we didn’t work all year) to develop born-digital courses that will work. This extra work involves reading up on online education, taking webinars about how to use the technology available at our institution, participating in town halls on best practices for online education, making readings available digitally (sometimes with our camera phones because we can’t get into our offices to use scanners), and developing workarounds for the equity issues that crop up when our students have vastly different access to technology because of socioeconomic and geopolitical factors. And again, this is on top of the work we regularly do in the summer, when we are not paid: In my case, that’s writing an academic book, translating a popular book from Spanish, drawing up plans for the trade book I want to write, and finishing three articles.
In the spring we were working in emergency conditions; in the fall conditions will be sub-optimal (because what deadly pandemic isn’t?) but we will have planned for and adapted to them.
“A survey of college students in the spring found that about 75 percent were disappointed with the online learning experience during the lockdown.”
“I’ve learned that my family gets the best bang for our buck when our daughter engages directly with her professors, her classmates and the material.”
The current situation is, for sure, emphasizing a number of existing philosophical questions about what college education is, what it’s for, what it costs, and what it’s worth.
I’m participating in a translation workshop this month (more on this soon). It’s mostly Spanish and English, with some French, Italian, and a little German, as well. One of the first exercises was to translate and analyze three existing translations (including one by Silvina Ocampo) of a poem by Emily Dickinson. It would never (at least not now, maybe in the future) occur to me to translate into anything other than my native language. (There’s that great quip of Gregory Rabassa’s, that when someone asked him how he knew his Spanish was good enough to translate Spanish texts into English, he replied that the question was never that, but always whether his English was good enough.) But for an exercise, for a first try at translating out of English, Dickinson’s agramaticality is very liberating. There’s lots I’m not sure of in what I’ve done, but here’s the poem and my attempt:
We mostly don’t have little free libraries in Manhattan, at least not downtown, but I came across one yesterday that has evidently been hit hard by the lockdown. It has a pretty big personality, plus onion chives.
It’s not really clear how my institution is going to proceed for the fall semester and nor is it clear that I’ll be teaching in the fall. (One of the options that has been floated is to treat AY 20-21 as if it has three semesters rather than two semester plus a summer session, with faculty teaching in two of three; I volunteered to teach in the summer instead of the fall if we go that route.) But of course the possibilities for online instruction are at least simmering on my mental back burner and proceeding at a rolling boil on #pedagogytwitter.
One of the recent controversies has been over whether it is permissible to require students to turn on their cameras in Zoom seminar or whether that’s an invasion of privacy. Having taught my lecture class this semester to a whole screen full of blank boxes, I am definitely going to require that cameras be on. I can’t imagine an entire semester in which I don’t have the visual cues to tell tell how my teaching is landing, whether students are with me, or whether they understand what’s going on — especially when it’s a new group of students I won’t have at least had some face-time with at the beginning of the term. For seminars, there’s no way to even try to build rapport among the students if they only know each other as small gray rectangles . And in terms of accessibility, cameras-off is a challenge for students who read lips; I had a lip-reading student this semester and almost every time a student asked a question, I had to stop and remind them to put on their camera because even though I made a general announcement at the start of online instruction, it didn’t seem to stick. I understand that some students might not want other people to see their homes, be it for self-consciousness about socio-economic class, general concern for privacy, or any other number of reasons.
So in my syllabus language that requires cameras to be on, I’m going to explicitly state that they can use a background if they have privacy concerns relating to their classmates or me seeing into their homes. And I’m going to feature it, both so that students with privacy concerns don’t feel singled out and to make instructional use of the tools available. I haven’t quite worked out the details, but I’m planning to make an extra credit assignment to choose a background that somehow relates to the week’s reading or theme and keep a short record of the rationale for each choice. I hope it’ll be a way for students to engage while making the most of a sub-optimal situation.
I taught from the Zoom Mosque of Córdoba for one class session this semester.
I posted this on Twitter and it seemed to strike a chord I figured I’d post it here, too, just so that it doesn’t get lost in the constant churn of social media:
I’m hitting that particular kind of writing despair where my own over-familiarity with my materials gives the false impression that this is all obvious and that my book won’t contribute anything that everybody doesn’t already know. It’s an illusion, but it’s a pernicious one.
And I’ll just add two more quick thoughts to my 280 characters: 1) This happens a lot earlier in the process of writing a book that it seems like it should. 2) I absolutely felt like this with the last project and with other substantial articles I’ve written since, but I think the feeling is more acute with the current book project because I’m writing about authors and texts (Salman Rushdie! Yehuda Amichai!) much more widely known and so it aggravates the sense of simply pushing the things that everyone already knows around on a plate.
I finished teaching this week; I may reflect more on remote instruction over the summer as I start preparing for the fall semester, but for now I need some distance and time to recover from a semester that had already shaped up as one of the most difficult I’ve had even before the global health crisis took hold. And for the time being, I’m not doing any planning for the fall because we don’t really know what it’s going to look like. But I am really worried.
We have gotten a few emails from the administration with contradicting messages about plans for fall instruction, ranging from proceeding as normal to being able to opt out of teaching in the fall and teaching regular courses next summer instead. It makes sense that there aren’t concrete plans yet because there is so little that is known about COVID-19 still and it’s so unclear what will happen in terms of disease spread as states and cities lift lockdown orders.
I’m in the age group that’s seeing this charming consequence of the disease. I’m really scared of getting sick once campus becomes more densely populated in the fall.
The most recent email was for faculty teaching in the core curriculum, suggesting that one option might be to split lectures (typically 80-120 students) in half, with half the students attending each lecture in person and half by video to leave enough room in lecture halls for appropriate social distancing; the groups would alternate so that every student could attend lecture in person once a week.
That seems plausible on paper but it doesn’t seem to take into account any of the out-of-classroom factors. The weather has been beautiful for most of this week. It was eighty degrees and sunny over the weekend and I stayed indoors the whole time because there were too many people outside to be able to keep a distance. Even today, when the temperature was much lower, there were loads of people gathering in Washington Square Park, effectively the heart of campus, riding bikes and skateboards, running, and doing other activities and without masks or sufficient space between them. I worry that mitigation strategies like keeping classrooms half full won’t be sufficient when thousands of students return — even if a smaller than usual number return — and are going to parties, lining to get up into buildings, walking down the narrow streets of campus and the Village, and hanging out in the park.
This is worry from a place of lacking information. But I’m not sure that the information exists to be able to make the right decisions, not yet anyway. But what I do hope is that the people who are charged with making those decisions take a walk through the campus and the neighborhood on a nice day this spring or summer and think about where all the additional bodies are going to go.
One of the ways that organizations have tried to maintain some kind of social connection during the shelter-in-place order is by creating Zoom book clubs. This is it!, I thought to myself. I can finally socialize in a way that is based around something I’m comfortable doing — reading!
But going to a book club as an academic is hard. I analyze text for a living. I read for a living. I ask questions about what I’m reading and explain it to people for a living. And all of those facts of my life mean that it would be very easy for me to dominate a conversation about books and talk over people’s heads. It’s not that I’m necessarily smarter, just that I have the tools to do this kind of thing a little bit more refined and in a little bit more regular use than most people. I make it a goal to blend in, but it doesn’t usually work. Even before the shelter-in-place order, I attended a book club meeting in person at a local bookstore. I shared at thought about the structure of that month’s novel, a thought I considered to be totally innocuous. I guess it wasn’t. Everyone was blown away by my insight (imagine me rolling my eyes here as I retell the story), and I had blown my cover.
The offending brow.
This week I tried a Jewish book club for people in their 20s and 30s, run by the synagogue I’m thinking about joining. Even though I found the book to be hopelessly superficial, I was resolved to behave myself like a civilian and try blend in. But my eyebrows betrayed me when one of the women in the group, during a conversation about lashon hara as discussed in the group’s book, said that she knew it was a solidly Jewish value because she hadn’t met any Jewish religious leaders who would ever engage in the practice. When the rabbi insisted that I verbalize what my eyebrows were already evidently saying by jumping about six inches above the top of my head (they do that of their own accord — traitors!), I said, “Well, it’s just that I was thinking about Ovadiah Yosef…” The woman looked kind of embarrassed. I felt terrible. I don’t think my eyebrows cared.
The offending book.
This exchange happened after a first one: The rabbi leading the group talked about imitatio dei being a Jewish value and I cringed. Apparently enough for it to be visible on Zoom. My overactive eyebrows are fairly substantial and therefore hard to miss when they jump up my face, even on a tiny screen and across a bad internet connection. The rabbi asked why I reacted so strongly to that, and I said that it just seemed like a very Christian way of formulating things. He insisted that it isn’t, that a phrase at the beginning of this week’s parsha — קְדֹשִׁ֣ים תִּהְי֑וּ כִּ֣י קָד֔וֹשׁ אֲנִ֖י יְהוָ֥ה אֱלֹהֵיכֶֽם׃ — is proof that imitatio dei is also a Jewish concept. We ultimately left it alone.
But I didn’t like it. The phrase, to me, evoked the idea of behaving in a god-like way within a salvific framework that is not operative in Judaism. So I did what any academic who has just been a total pain in the arse in a book club would do: I found a couple of articles and read them. Both are Jewish Studies-related and both use the phrase imitatio dei without comment. The second one I’ve linked to here, the one by Harvey, a noted historian of Judeo-Islamic philosophy, is published in an academic/Orthodox Jewish context, namely in the journal of the Rabbinical Council of America.
I realized that it was the very Latin-ness itself of the phrase that was what was bothering me, which is strange. Rationally and in every instant of my professional life I know very well that languages aren’t inherently confessional: Jews in the MENA speak Arabic, Arabic-speaking Christians use the word Allah to mean God when they pray, a large swath of the population in medieval Spain were native speakers of a Romance language, regardless of their faith tradition, etc. I’m often aware of the King Jamesiness of contemporary Jewish liturgies in English and it catches my attention, but ultimately I see it as an example of Anglophone Jews using the language that has evolved for us to talk to and about God.*
So what to make of this reflexive jolt of Latin = Christianity? It was valuable for me to read and react to things that I think about a lot professionally, but as a completely non-academic reader who wasn’t expecting much out of the book or the discussion. My low expectations let me just react without thinking about it, because I wasn’t expecting to be thinking about anything. I don’t know that we can ever deliberate sit down and try to read like a civilian, but there is something to be said for being surprised into it or by it. Reading reflexively is reminder of something that sometimes gets lost in textual criticism: that pure reaction is a part of reading that provides another path by which to seek meaning in a text.
All the same, I’d like the lockdown to be over soon. I think I prefer my old, familiar ways of being terrible at socializing. And honestly, a social life conducted entirely the internet has been pretty rough for my eyebrows.
*I have a review essay forthcoming in which I discuss the use of phrases from the KJV to describe medieval Jewish communities in contemporary English-language scholarship. I’m critical of it there, but to me there’s something different about Jewish liturgists making a deliberate, intellectual choice to integrate through theologically non-problematic words and phrases and non-Jewish academics imposing theologically very problematic words and phrases on their Jewish subjects. I mention this here because I’m expecting a lot of criticism for the review essay and I don’t want inconsistency on this position to create extra room for more; the two contexts are quite different.
I took my sophomores to the Valley of the Fallen this winter following a visit to El Escorial. The purpose of the day was to talk about how imperial ambitions are constructed through art and architecture across time, and the pairing of those two monuments is a great illustration of the phenomenon. Franco was consciously mirroring the location, style, materials, and design of King Philip II’s palace when he commissioned his mausoleum-monument that would ultimately be built by prisoners of war.
Our visit was less than two months after the disinterment of Francisco Franco, and so I also wanted to show the students the ways that the conversation about historical memory is slowly starting to shift. Photography isn’t permitted inside the monument and there were three guards assigned to our group (because we were being led by Francisco Ferrándiz, an anthropologist whose progressive views and activism are unpalatable to the staff there) so I couldn’t take even a surreptitious photo of the shiny, new, blank marble slab with nothing below it. (The surveillance aspect of the visit was striking, both to me and to the students in the group, who were very cognizant of being closely observed.)
People still venerate the grave of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of the Spanish Falange, whose body will eventually be moved into an anonymous grave on the site along with other people who were killed in the Civil War. I don’t need to digress into a tangent about my willingness or not to sidestep certain rules, but what I don’t feel bound to observe, for sure, are rules designed to preserve nostalgia for fascism; and the one surreptitious photo I did manage to take was of Primo de Rivera’s tomb — in low light and shot quite literally from the hip while trying to keep 28 19-year-olds from wandering off — specifically so I could query one particular detail at a later date: The ribbon around one bunch of roses left by a mourner is in the colors of the flag of the republic: red, yellow, and purple. I still don’t know the answer to the question why, but I like to think that some contrarian florist knew the destination of the bouquet and adorned it with the flag of Spain’s second republic, the democratic government that fell at the end of the Spanish Civil War, and of the republican government in exile.
It’s hard not to wonder and worry about the state of democracy right now with lots of proposals being floated for managing the coronavirus that seem likely to put privacy, civil rights, and even the upcoming elections at risk. So it’s worth taking a step back to celebrate the survival of even fragile, new republics, and the contrarian florist-citizens who insist upon their survival.
Just something simple but pretty to look at in bad times. Dust jacket of a 1951 translation of a talk given by Bialik in 1913, when he was still based in Odessa. It’s pink Italian paper laid out on a screen mold; “PMF Italia” is watermarked on the opposite corner.
