Global Crisis

Laura Michele Diener is an associate professor of history at Marshall. She works on medieval textile history, and I first met her when she gave a terrific presentation on using textile creation in the classroom. Recently, though, I've become aware of her public writing on contemporary issues.

One of my theories about academics turning to public writing is that we don't have to limit ourselves to writing about our narrow subject areas. Yes, if something directly related to our formal expertise emerges in the news, we really should engage. But the process of becoming an expert, a teacher, a writer, a thinker, builds habits of mind and habits of articulation that can serve in countless endeavors.

Diener's experience exemplifies the possibilities. She's written two terrific pieces for Yes! Magazine  - First on mountaintop removal and second on rural women and domestic violence. In the latter, she writes:

Transformations like Howard’s are not easy to pull off in rural Appalachia, where poor roads, low incomes, and a fiercely traditional culture combine to leave women facing domestic violence in physical and emotional isolation. But a handful of nonprofit shelters and advocates have managed to make progress in this difficult setting.

The secret of their success seems to be listening carefully to the women they serve and then handcrafting programs for those women. The advocates have found that when it comes to domestic violence, a one-size solution does not fit all. It is important to consider community and culture in order to make real differences in the lives of domestic violence survivors, a lesson for shelters everywhere.

I spent much of the month of May visiting some of these rural shelters. Even though I’ve lived in West Virginia for eight years, as I drove into the state’s southern counties I felt like I was entering a different world. The six-lane highways turned into narrow roads curving around mountains. Trucks carrying lumber hurtled past me on the switchbacks. Densely green woods surrounded me with cool, still beauty, and the towns were few and far between. I lost cell service almost immediately. For me, the solitude seemed idyllic. But this kind of isolation can be deadly for a woman trying to escape from an abusive home, especially if she is responsible for children and animals.

I spoke with Diener and asked her a few questions about the process of writing these articles.

DP: How and why did you decide to start writing about contemporary issues in West Virginia?

LMD: I've been teaching Women's Studies classes at Marshall University since I arrived there in 2008. At first I kept those classes focused on ancient and medieval women, which is what I know best, but as I got to know my students, I realized what incredibly rich narratives they had to tell, and how rooted their experiences were in place. Through their stories, I started getting interested in contemporary regional issues such as the impacts of coal on the history and environment of Appalachia. 

To institutions: if you want the reputational currency of public scholars you'd better have institutional processes & courage to go with it

— Tressie Mc, PhD (@tressiemcphd) May 12, 2015

Almost a year ago, I wrote about Steven Salaita being un-hired by the University of Illinois. I argued:

I come to this topic not as a partisan in the specifics of Salaita’s situation but as an advocate for faculty engagement with the public. Over the last year, I have written periodic columns for The Chronicle about the ways that academics can and should write for general audiences. Recently, I even suggested that "sustained public engagement" of any sort should count for hiring, tenure, and promotion.
When I write about this topic, I often get told that the real problem is that academics are snobs. We like living in an ivory tower, goes the argument, and we look with disdain on getting our hands dirty in the public sphere. There’s plenty of snobbery to go around, it’s true, but the Salaita affair shows a different, and I think more powerful, force that keeps many academics from commenting on important contemporary issues: fear.

I am a believe in and advocate four public engagement. But I try to overlook or understate the risks that public engagement brings, and regularly ask for universities to do more to support us. Unfortunately, it's going the other direction.

We need more public writing, not less. We need to open pathways for more academics to speak out in public, not punish Salaita for doing so in ways that have provoked such strong feelings. But we can’t ask scholars to embrace the risks of engagement in a system in which partisan bloggers and local papers can push timid administrators to fire, or in this case unhire, academics who leap into public debates.

Now Tressie McMillan Cottom, one of the smartest people around, has written a must read essay - Everything But the Burden in the context of Saida Gundy. She writes:

I have written about institutional marginality and neo-liberal appeals for scholars to “publicly engage”. If I could rewrite that article today I would ask how it is that there have been at least a dozen articles written about toxic black feminism on social media and black twitter but almost no articles on things like Twitchy. But, I digress.
What I really wanted to point out is how yet again we have an example of how woefully underprepared universities are to deal with the reality of public scholarship, public intellectuals, or public engagement.

She says: public scholarship means pissing people off.

She says: In academia, where twenty readers is a big deal, 200 angry emails can feel like a tsunami of public opinion (it isn’t). When three members of a committee can constitute a quorum, seeing 142 retweets of a negative opinion about your new assistant professor can feel like politics (it isn’t). Five whole think pieces at the online verticals of legacy media organizations can feel like the powers-that-be are censuring your institution (they aren’t).

Then she comes up with a series of steps you should take before publicly engaging. Demand your institution protects you if they want you to engage publicly. Read this one carefully.

I write about public engagement and the academy for the Chronicle and here on the blog. Mostly, I
have talked about the ways that formal non-academic writing (opinion essays, popular books, other media outreach) and community engagement (undocumented students) function within the core mission of an academic institution and career.

There are, though, more radical views. Recently, my friend and fellow medievalist Jonathan Hsy asked about how we might formally credit the work of building scholarly networks via social media, especially via Twitter. How might the live-tweeting of conferences function as a formal part of one's scholarly portfolio? Should it?

I think it should, or could anyway, but that we have work to do defining how to make that happen. I'm concerned that the effort to bring Twitter into the "put in your CV/tenure-file" fold might, in fact, not be enough.

When I talk about public engagement, I run into many different kinds of opposition, but two in particular. One is that when saying public writing or tweeting or whatever should count, some people hear that I mean EVERYONE should have to tweet for tenure. That is nonsense.  My goal is not to force anyone to eschew traditional scholarship or to degrade its value (far to the contrary), but rather to expand the frame of possible valorized forms of scholarly activity.

I likewise get the response that I am suggesting an opinion essay should count the same as a peer-reviewed scholarly essay - they do, after all, both have the word "essay" in their form. That is also nonsense, but I do believe that it ought to be possible for sustained forms of public engagement to form significant parts of a professional academic portfolio.

The key word here is sustained. Sustained public engagement speaks a level of activity that goes beyond single tweets or single groups of tweets, or single public essays.  If you make some non-traditional form of activity a sustained and intentional part of your scholarly life, then it should be able to count to some extent.

But as I wrote for the Chronicle in my manifesto on this topic, it turns out that many universities already have explicit pro-engagement language in their tenure and promotion documents. We do, because adopt the Boyer model of scholarship, which includes Scholarship of Engagement as a type of recognized activity. People promoting public engagement as something that should count don't have to go far.

But we do have to radically change the "real" systems of value that lie behind the formal tenure and promotion documents.

Part of the problem is that in our traditional metrics we claim to value all kinds of things - teaching, service, engagement, and traditional research. But at most universities, especially the elite ones that drive the prestige economy and create standards for the rest of us, tenure and promotion emerge from a very limited numbers of forms of productivity. Traditional, prestige-laded, scholarship.

So as much as I am committed to counting new forms of public engagement, including social media, I think there needs to be considerable work done from the side of just adding more forms of productivity the list of things that we really value. It can't be all about the peer-reviewed monograph. It can't be all about the journal article in the high-status journal. And while our documents say such things are possible, just try getting tenured, hired, promoted, or a grant without the traditional stuff as the core of a file.

Which is to say that my essays add to my file and make it better, but that the book is the reason it's a good file, and without the book ...

So what I worry about, is that we will add a whole lot of things, including social media activity, to the list of things that count but that in fact no one really cares about. I don't just want to add at the bottom of the prestige hierarchy, I want to be involved in unmaking the prestige hierarchy.

Hence my recent essay: Let Books be Books.

I have a new piece up at the Chronicle on public engagement in higher education. I've written about public engagement both here and on various sites before, but now I am starting a series of columns for the advice/careers section of the Chronicle. I will be writing about how both individuals and institutions could be engaging and are engaging, and some of the lessons we might draw from this. Next month, for example, I will discuss Catholic universities and undocumented students.

This piece, however, has been in the making for months, especially with my response to Nicholas Kristof.

Here are the points I make today:

1. First, academics of all sorts are already deeply engaged with the public in many different ways.
2. Second, many universities explicitly recognize public engagement as a category that may count toward hiring, tenure, or promotion.
3. Third, in the United States and in academe itself, the widespread perception is that most faculty members do not engage with the public—either because they don’t want to or because they know they won’t be rewarded for it.

1. Be smarter than me. What does your institution count?
2. Start disciplinary conversations. I think this might be a great function for the MLA, AHA, AAR, CAA, etc. They have no power over institutions, but that's not the step here. The step is to persuade other faculty that we could do more to count and measure public engagement.

• Patricia Limerick, president of the Organization of American Historians, recently put out a call to locate scholars who do public work.
• In response, Matthew G. Schoenbachler, professor of History at the University of North Alabama, wrote that all such efforts are just “pro bono - the entire academic system of incentives and rewards militates against such activities.”
• My university includes “scholarship of engagement” as one of the types of scholarship that count for tenure or promotion, a phrase that emerged from the expansive taxonomy of scholarship pioneered by Ernest Boyer of the Carnegie Foundation. 
• Syracuse employs the phrase “publicly engaged scholarship” in their tenure and promotion documents.
• The University of Illinois uses “public engagement” and “public service,” recognizing the problem of categorizing diverse acts of engagement in our standard tenure and promotion framework.
• Other universities categorize such activity solely as service. Portland State, for example, uses the phrase “community outreach.” 
• Community colleges routinely link service to tenure and promotion, with the potential for that service to be outside the university. At the Central Oregon Community Colleges, for example, full professors will “regularly serve the community as an expert resource.”
• Also, I link to this (now slightly outdated) study on shifting workloads.

I've been at the 49th International Congress on Medieval Studies, held annually at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, MI. It's an extraordinary event - over 3000 medievalists come to this small town and lovely campus and, over four days, work on everything from the most micro-specialized topic to giant sweeping questions about the academy and the nature of knowledge. Often followed by merriment and music.

I talked about being a medievalist on CNN.com - how it happened and why it mattered. Below is a version of my remarks with some supporting links and some of the images.

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GOING PUBLIC

I’m here to talk about my experience writing about the Middle Ages for mass media. I’m not a popular historian – in the sense of writing about my subject field for a general audience. Instead, I write popular essays for places like CNN, the Chronicle and the Atlantic some of which are about the intersections between the Middle Ages and now. I see these intersections everywhere.

I began by writing about the medieval echoes at play in Benedict’s surprise resignation and the intentional medievalism of Pope Francis – I often say to my students that the church is firmly in a 13th-century moment. I’m going to tell you a little bit about how that happened, what I wrote and why, and then shift to current events. But first what I really want to say is this:

As medievalists, as intellectuals, you have authority to weigh into public conversations. To the extent possible, to the extent that you can find a platform, to the extent that you feel safe – I think you should do it.


In February of 2013 Pope Benedict retired abruptly. He announced it in Latin, and an Italian Vatican reporter who happened to know Latin broke the news to the world. Go Latin! In general, it caught the media off-guard, media platforms were looking for content, and the content quickly turned to the medieval. Reporters were asking questions about whether Popes had ever retired before, how does papal retirement work, what comes next, what’s the canon law on the subject, and so forth. For a few weeks, medieval history was hot.

A lot of the commentary focused on Pope Gregory XII, who was indeed the last to retire, but who did so in the context of the fifteenth-century Council of Constance as part of a deal to get two anti-popes deposed, Gregory to retire, and a new legitimate Pope elected to unify the church. Hardly analogous to Benedict. I started looking at the late 13th-century canon law on the subject [all before breakfast], much of which was organized by the man who became Boniface VIII. Boniface became pope after his predecessor, Pope Celestine V retired in order to return to a life of contemplation.

Why does this medieval history matter today? Well, Benedict’s statement announcing his retirement echoed Celestine’s own bull of retirement. Benedict visited Celestine’s shrine twice as Pope. Benedict and Celestine are even featured on the wall of the church in L’Aquila.


Given the clear impact that Celestine’s example had provided for Benedict, I had an easy medieval story to write, and I wrote it for CNN.

Over the next few weeks, I kept writing in the run-up to the conclave, after Francis was elected, and even throughout the first few months of his papacy. I felt that a lot of reporters were mis-reading Francis’ early statements. It turns out that my PhD in medieval history makes me a good interpreter of papal texts; go figure.

I used these writing opportunities, as much as possible, to educate readers about the Middle Ages.

Here’s my favorite example – an essay in which I suggested ways to think about the upcoming papal election, but in which I really wanted to say that voting is medieval. Medieval people, as you all know, loved making groups, writing bylaws, and voting for stuff. They did it all the time. The College of Cardinals, no less than a faculty senate, offers a direct continuation of that tradition of medieval voting.

These are the kinds of stories that I think we can, and again as possible, should all write. We all have these moments that we observe a relationship between our scholarly subjects and modern conversations, whether about politics, religion, the environment, or culture. I’ve become an evangelist for writing local op-eds, national pieces, blogging, talking to school groups, participating in library reading groups, anything that might combat myths about the Middle Ages, get our perspective out of academia and into broader discourse.

Here is where current events take over my talk. I had planned to speak about the institutional challenges facing academics who want to do public engagement – namely; that our professions don’t see it as something that counts.

But then something happened that drove me to write a very different kind of piece about the Middle Ages.




There’s Sarah Palin at the 2014 NRA convention. She made an incredible speech. I’ve watched it many many times in whole and in part, and few demagogues in history could do much better. She knows her audience. She owns them.

The minute I heard these words – waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists – I started thinking about forced baptisms in both Visigothic and late medieval Spain, Saxony under Charlemagne, and in the context of massacres after the First Crusade and during the Black Death. I remembered Palin’s invocation of “Blood libel” after Representative Giffords was shot. So here was an extraordinary thing – a modern demagogue claiming the traditions of both Christian persecutor and victim.

I decided that this situation really did call for a medievalist.

This piece was published last Thursday, on May 1. I want to point out a few features of how I wrote about the Middle Ages.

First, I explicitly claimed my authority as an historian.

I quoted an episode on forced baptism from the Chronicle of Mathias of Neuenberg – a reference I actually chose from a Facebook thread I started on forced baptisms in medieval history. And hey, whatever you think of Sarah Palin, getting 14th century German chronicles time on CNN.com is pretty cool, right?

I described the ways she evoked both fear and dominance in her audience, making them afraid on the one hand, claiming absolute moral authority on the other, and assuring them that with the proper weapons, they could safe. In followup blog posts, I would describe her language as a form of militant Christianity.

I then looked back on her use of “blood libel,” which I defined as a medieval myth, as evidence of her consistent pattern of wanting to be both the unjustly victimized Chosen people and the Christian triumphalist. That rhetorical move is very familiar to medievalists who study the Crusades, for example.

I ended with a nod to apocalyptic thought, a subtext I see running throughout her work.

In my reading, Sarah Palin’s medievalism is evident throughout this speech and her speeches and writing over the years. Throughout, she echoes some of the worst moments in medieval history.


I’m a little nervous about showing you this, here, at Kalamazoo. More nervous than I was about writing it in some ways, because you are my peers. This is not a political conference and I know many of you won’t agree with my take. Moreover, I’m not just being an educator in this piece. I’m not just revealing the ways in which medieval history informs modern events. I’m not acting as a professor in public. I've left the safe spaces behind.

No, in this piece for CNN I am using my status and knowledge as a medieval historian to make an explicitly political argument that a modern politician is dangerous.

Here’s the thing.

I think she’s dangerous.

Moreover, it is my knowledge of the medieval past that has led me to that conclusion. What is our obligation to society as scholars when we draw such conclusions? What is one to do with such a thought other than to share it?

I’m not here to try to persuade you to adopt my politics, but I am here to say that our historical knowledge gives us a perspective that is valuable and usually missing in public discourse. Our status as academics, for all intellectualism can be derided, gives us entry into local and national conversations.

You have the authority to weigh in.

Please use it responsibly.

Thank you.