Peter Conn

Meh. I had no specific expectations for this Great Courses lecture series, so I can’t say I was disappointed, but I have to admit that I didn’t get much out of it. (I think I picked it up on an Audible BOGO offer. I'm such a sucker for sales...)

The premise is that in each lecture the author will explore how a specific American best seller reflects the era in which it was written. He starts with the Puritans (The Bay Psalm Book) and goes through David McCullough's biography of John Adams, which was published in 2012. New England bookends, I guess. In a final chapter he talks about recent trends in best sellers, focusing on franchise authors such as John Grisham, Tom Clancy, Michael Crichton and Danielle Steele. A common thread among these contemporary books, he thinks, is a fascination with information - details about law, medicine, technology and glamorous living.

Unfortunately I can't say his commentary added much to my appreciation of the 22 books he discusses, or my understanding of how they reflected their time. Most of it seemed painfully self-evident, at least to any reader with a decent understanding of American history. It seemed clear that the author was reading directly from notes, and although his delivery wasn't particularly bad, it was choppy and not particularly engaging. He did pique my curiosity about [b:The Woman Warrior|30852|The Woman Warrior|Maxine Hong Kingston|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1541333110l/30852._SY75_.jpg|1759] and I've added it to my TBR.

One last comment: The author omits a few 21st century developments that, I think, have changed the landscape of reading in the 21st century: ebooks, audiobooks, and the use of social media (primarily Goodreads but others as well) as a means of direct interaction among readers. At first I thought maybe the timing was a problem, but all of those media were around, even if only in a fledgling state, at that time. I tend to think he probably just updated his teaching notes to add in the McCullough book. He extols Oprah's book club at great length, but seemed to feel the big book club time had passed. Ha!… (more)

A morally insistent yet non-hysterical article in which Conn surveys the current state of career paths in the academic humanities (awful), talks about the way institutional imperatives like accessing research funding and fostering a prestige brand twist the logic of graduate education away from dealing with the problems identified, and offers, tentatively, some solutions, most of which boil down to "shrink grad schools." It's a compelling case, although I'd offer at least three alternatives:


a) provide massively more funding, while being bold and upfront about the lack of career possibilities and insisting on the value of humanities grad work nevertheless (universities can afford this, and it will keep their whole research/tenure deal going, and if people are prepared for it as many will surely still do a PhD as go abroad to build shelters and whatnot);


b) in a longer-term and larger-scale project, encourage the development of a class of humanities "technologists"--editors, lecturers, researchers, even markers--who fill the roles now occupied by grad students, but do it as a career. I think plenty of people would be happy to get a PhD and earn $20 an hour marking, while having time and opportunity to follow their own intellectual pursuits--and a less shitty, less snooty academic culture would be as eager to provide them a venue in the form of a conference structure, etc., as it is for current grad students;


c) end tenure, while making sure salaries remain decent and FOS protections remain strong. Basically, what all of these have in common is that the MBAs that run the schools would have to come to terms with the possibility that there may not be such a thing as infinite maximum growth, and the professors and emeriti in academic and institutional positions of significance would have to let go of a little bit of their grotesque privilege and $$$. University professor is one of the most pleasant jobs imaginable for the few/proud/geeky who like it, and they can afford to let the big house go.

One of my humanities yeoman buddies just offered a fourth option: You get tenure, but anybody gets to spit on you whenever they want and you can't spit back. Essay appeared in the Chronicle Review of Higher Education for April 6, 2010.… (more)