Summer Work

I’ve started to call my summer “research leave” to help my focus on doing what I need to do and to avoid getting complacent. This summer will he hectic, in a fun way, with a few different projects rubbing shoulders with one another and it help me develop a bit of stamina for what will likely be a busy fall and winter semesters.

For those of you who wonder how the average academic spends their research leave. Here’s what I’ll be up to.

1. “Teaching as a Response to a Campus Crisis”: This paper is due August 1, but I have a substantially complete draft of the text. I think I’ll send a draft of it to a couple buddies who have endured campus budget crises in their day and see what I can do to make it stronger and more useful. I don’t have a ton of time to work on this either this summer or when I get home. I’m hoping that I can be efficient.

2. “Mobilizing the Archaeological Report for the Future Interpretive Community: Linked Open Data, Analysis, and Publication”: This is a coauthored paper with David Pettegrew for the Journal of Field Archaeology. I think we’ll work a bit on it when we’re together this summer in Greece, but most of the work on this will have to wait until September. A manuscript for review will be due September 26th, I think. So we have some time!

3. Polis I: We’ve recently learned that we need to submit the first volume of our work at Polis on Cyprus to press by the end of December (so let’s say, December 1) or risk losing funding. This is adding a much needed injection of stress to our summer work on Cyprus, but it is what it is, and fortunately, we’re close to having our part of this volume complete. In fact, most of what we need to do is the fun stuff: re-read what we’ve written and give it a bit more polish and refinement. First thing is first, though, and that’s producing a proposal for the first two volume and getting them accepted.

4. PKAP II: ARRGGGHHH… this is our long simmering second PKAP volume which is 96% done. Seriously. 96%. It is so close to being done that we could reasonably send it out for review before the end of the summer, but it has gone from being the wolf closest to the sled to just another wolf in the forest. This is less than ideal from my perspective, since I invested a good bit of energy in this volume this fall and spring, but the risk of long simmering projects is that while they might produce the richest sauce in the end, they also risk being forgotten.

5. Larnaka Sewage System pottery: This is one of those OPP (Other People’s Pottery) projects that has a spring deadline for publication. We started the work this past summer and spent some time during the “non-research leave season” collecting bibliography and strategizing how to publish this salvage material in a meaningful and efficient way. We have two weeks in Larnaka to finish our work on this material and put together some kind of very rough draft of an article to submit in the spring. 

6. Slavic Pottery from Isthmia: Last summer, we started a project to study and contextualize the Slavic pottery from Isthmia. I think our first season was moderately productive. We not only studied the material from the Roman Bath (and framed some small additional research questions), but we also came to understand both the potential and challenges of working with Isthmia data and ceramics. This summer we plan to look beyond the Roman Bath, particularly to contexts associated with the Justinianic Fortress and use these to check our contexts and typologies developed from the material from the Roman Bath. My feeling is that we’re yet another season away from producing a significant publication of this material, but we should know more or less what we want to say by the end of this summer. 

7. Hexamilion Wall Exploration Project. This is a made up name for the work that David Pettegrew and I plan to do to document what might well be some new sections of the Hexamilion Wall. We received a permit to clear some vegetation and to do some documentation and we’ll just have to see what we find. I’m optimistic. What could be very interesting is if we can connect this work with the work we’re doing with the ceramics and stratigraphy at Isthmia.

8. Publishing Work: This summer is a summer of FIVE books, I think. The Corinthian Countryside, Wild Drawing: Street Art in Perspective, The Muslims of Darürrahat, Big Pandemic on the Prairie: The Spanish Flu in North Dakota, and Clell Gannon’s Songs of the Bunchgrass Acres. I’ve never had this many irons in the fire, but I’m very excited about this bumper crop of titles scheduled to appear this fall. I’m already beginning to think of ways to market this! 

9. The Slow Cooker. This fall, I’ve agreed to give a paper on my “slow cooker” idea of “Black Pseudoarchaeology.” Fortunately it is only a 10 minute paper as part of a larger workshop on Pseudoarchaeology at the ASOR annual meeting. Hopefully this gets me back to work on my next book project which will be a short book on pseudoarchaeological ideas and Black culture with particular focus on Black spiritual traditions, music, and literature. It’ll offer an alternate view to the whitewashing of the pseudoarchaeological discourse and hopefully encourage archaeologists to tread a bit more lightly when they encounter pseudo-science and pseudoarchaeological ideas in the wild. 

10. The Deep Freeze. Finally, I have a few ideas that have been shunted into the deep freeze for now. These are mostly digital projects especially related to our work at Polis. I would love, for example, to build out a digital framework and standards for publishing the archaeological data from Polis. We got a start on it may years ago so this wouldn’t be de novo. 

A Load of Links Related to the UND Budget Crisis Class in 2018

As readers of this blog know, I’ve been working on a paper for a volume on campus crises. This week, the volume feels all the more relevant (if not, to use everyone’s favorite academic term “urgent”).

I’m putting the final touches on the first draft of my chapter which will focus on how the budget 2016-2018 budget crisis at UND shaped what I did in the classroom. Here’s the rough outline of my paper:

Introduction
Teaching as Activism (here, here)
The Anatomy of the UND Budget Crisis
Teaching a Class on the University Budget
The Wesley College Documentation Project
Conclusion

With any luck, the conclusion will be done by the end of the week!

I came to realize that my writing about the UND budget crisis drew upon on a pretty interesting group of documents that my classes both produced and used upon. I know that I’ve shared a few of them here in the past, but now seems to be an appropriate time to share all of them.

First, here is the syllabus for my class on the UND Budget. 

History of North Dakota: Women’s Hockey, Higher Ed & the UND Budget

That class and the gradate reading seminar that I ran in the Fall of 2017 produced a pair of short, free, downloadable books:

Defending History: The Graduates Manifesto

 

Hawks, Hockey, and the Budget at the University of North Dakota

The class relied upon a document reader that was the product of a small graduate seminar. Joe Kalka, who was a student in that seminar (and the course that produced produced it. It remains a useful archival record of the budget situation on UND’s campus. We tried to stabilize the hyperlinks using the Internet Archive, but a number of the links don’t work. It nevertheless provides a basic survey of the sources that students in the UND budget class could use to  

Higher Education and Budgets Course Document Reader

We shared the first chapter of Andrew Larson’s thesis with the class as a general survey of the recent history of higher education grounded in some of the classic works on the field, but with an  

Andrew F. Larson, “Not Your Advisor’s Doctorate: The Doctor Of Arts And The Modernization Of Higher Education 1945-1970.” Unpublished D.A. Thesis, University of North Dakota, 2020. 

We also benefited from a couple of other documents:

William Caraher, “History at the University of North Dakota 1885-1970,” Unpublished 2009.

Louis G. Geiger, University of the Northern Plains: a History of the University of North Dakota, 1883-1958. UND Press, 1958

Of course, there have been several publications, both formal and more casual, out of our broader work on the UND budget:

Letters of Edward Robertson President Emeritus, Wesley College, From 1935.

Wyatt Atchley, “Images of Austerity,” NDQ 85 (2018), 124-125.

Melissa Gjellstad and Ryan Zerr, “Faculty Navigating the Age of Austerity: Affirming Roles and Renewing Alliances,” NDQ 85 (2018), 162-180.

William Caraher, “Humanities in the Age of Austerity: A Case Study from the University of North Dakota,” NDQ 85 (2018), 208-221.

William Caraher , Michael Wittgraf , Wyatt Atchley, “Hearing Corwin Hall: The Archaeology of Anxiety on an American University Campus,” Epoiesen (2021).

Wyatt Atchley, “Wesley College: Progressive Era Education in North Dakota.” Unpublished MA Thesis, NDSU, 2023.

William Caraher, “Documenting Wesley College: A Mildly Anarchist Teaching Encounter,” in Teaching and Learning the Archaeology of the Contemporary Era. Gabe Moshenska ed. London: Bloomsbury, 2024. (You can download a pre-print of this article here).

Still More on Teaching as a Response to a Campus Crisis

As readers of this blog know, I’ve been writing a bit on a paper titled “Teaching as Activism during a Campus Crisis” for an edited volume. This paper will focus on a class that I taught in 2018 at the height of UND’s budget crisis. 

You can read more about it here or here or  here (and then follow the links to earlier postings).

The final section that I had to draft was a description of the actual crisis itself. I have to admit that time had dulled my memory of the budgetary causes of the crisis while preserving intact my memory of the anguish that the the budget cuts caused. This is my first effort to narrate, in a concise way, the confluence of events and individuals that caused such campus wide anxiety and inflicted such a deep wound on campus morale. 

As I tried to do this, I came back around to a sense that I had at the time. It wasn’t so much at our campus had a budget crisis, it was how various parts of campus responded to it. In particular, I was struck by how quickly and decisively the spirit of collaboration and shared governance dissipated. Perhaps administrators suppressed it by design and it reflects the idea that crisis management tends to be top down. Maybe it was 

In any event, my text here tried to capture some of the vectors which converged to cause the crisis:

The Anatomy of a Campus Crisis

The context for UND’s budget crisis was both unique and familiar. On the one hand, the university had largely avoided the financial crisis associated with the “Great Recession” owing to tax revenues generated by the opening phase of the Bakken oil boom. The earliest phase of the oil boom came on the heals of the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007-2008 and the larger economic downturn that it triggered. On the other hand, the University of North Dakota, like many mid-sized, public institutions, remains dependent on the state for a portion of its operating budget. When the state of North Dakota experienced a $1 billion budget shortfall in 2015, owing to the drop in oil prices, a particularly dry harvest, and an aggressive tax cut to companies and individuals, the state cut appropriations to UND as well as elsewhere on the basis of a budgetary formula. Another series of budget cuts occurred in 2018. UND like many state institutions had limited options when it came to increasing revenue as legislation limited the institution’s ability to raise tuition or increase fees. As a result, the only real solution to budget shortfalls on the state and institutional level was to reduce funding across campus largely through retrenching positions, but also through eliminating programs.

Like many institutions, the University of North Dakota is a tight knit community. Relative stability in leadership positions, a close relationship with the town and alumni—partly attributed to a successful and popular hockey program—and committed faculty and staff endowed the university with generally decent morale, a sense of purpose, and a collaborative spirit. In fact, the shared commitments of the extended UND community had helped it navigate a controversial change in nicknames that culminated in 2015 with the Fighting Hawks replacing the Fighting Sioux. The retirement of President Robert Kelley in 2016 and the naming of former governor Ed Shaffer as acting President of the institution came at the moment where the first round of budget cuts impacted campus. His brief term which saw a round of staff and faculty layoffs, ended with the naming of Mark Kennedy president. Unlike Shaffer who garnered respect across the region from his time as governor and his North Dakota roots, Kennedy was unpopular, inexperienced, and came across as aloof and unsympathetic. Shaffer and Kennedy relied on Provost Tom DiLorenzo to implement painful budget cuts and DiLorenzo’s sometimes awkward personal style further contributed to the unpopularity of the administration. Faculty had viewed DiLorenzo with suspicion after an abortive effort at “program prioritization” on campus in 2014 and his role in implementing a new MIRA (Model for Incentive-based Resource Allocation) budget model for the university at the same time. This model, which was complex and poorly understood by faculty and staff, seemed to harden barriers between colleges and foster competition for resources based on what appeared to be an impersonal and inflexible formula. Administrative, procedural, and leadership changes exacerbated the impact of the state level budget cuts by creating a sense of alienation from the institution.

Efforts by the administration to explain the challenging situation through a series of town hall style meetings led to emotional outbursts especially as staff who had worked at the university for decades were laid off in an effort to balance unit budgets. Administrators who had fostered innovation, program development, and collegiality, found themselves quickly transformed into hardened budget warriors tasked with cutting costs and tempering faculty ambitions. Across the entire institution, an aloof and unpopular president, the poorly understood MIRA budget model, and its chief advocate, the provost, became scapegoats for financial challenges that went far beyond MIRA’s scope or interpersonal conflicts. Deans and associate deans shared this burden as faculty sought to both understand and mitigate the budgetary changes taking place across campus. In many cases, the lack of familiarity with the mechanisms, processes, and procedures (as well as the details of the budget cuts themselves) impaired the community’s ability to present viable solutions.  

Since the 1970s, UND had followed national trends and developed its administrative bureaucracy to accommodate federal regulations, an increasingly competitive funding environment caused by the reduction in state funds, and the needs of its growing student body (for a general history of the early phase of these changes see Robinson 1971). These changes had accompanied a gradual increase in professionalization in the administrative ranks. New positions with narrower responsibilities served the specialized needs of funding agencies, new students, and programs with increasingly elaborate accreditation requirements. While some faculty and students recognized these slow changes, the budget crisis of 2016 brought their sense of alienation from the inner workings of the university to the fore. The sense of alienation among faculty and students came to the fore with cuts to two high profile and outwardly successful programs—Women’s Hockey and music therapy—which galvanized student and faculty frustration as the authors of these cuts appeared to both take responsibility for their decisions and explain them as part of necessary budgetary calculations. This both personalized animosities and further alienated faculty and students as the processes and decision making appeared opaque and misguided.

More Again on Teaching as a Response to a Campus Crisis

As readers of this blog almost certainly know, I’ve been working on a chapter for a volume on campus crises. My chapter is titled “Teaching as Activism during a Campus Crisis,” and it is focusing on a class that I taught in 2018 at the height of UND’s budget crisis. Along side that class, I ran a one-credit, pop-up class on two buildings slated for destruction on campus. Many of the same students took this one-credit class as took the three-credit course on the budget. 

I’ve written about the one-credit class in a few other places recently, but I’ve only started to understand the class recently, and my little section in the chapter is my best effort so far. 

As I said yesterday, you can read more about here (and then follow the links to earlier postings).

The Wesley College Documentation Project

The other measure of the impact of the class on both its students and myself as an instructor came when we received word that the university administration had decided to demolish two of our campus’s historic buildings. These buildings were in poor repair, had suffered from years of deferred maintenance, and were empty at the start of the semester. One building had housed the university honors program and the other the large and thriving psychology program and as a result both buildings were broadly familiar to students in the budget class. The buildings originally housed a separate, but affiliated institution called Wesley College, which the University of North Dakota purchased in the early 1960s. Since being acquired by UND, these buildings served a range of functions from dormitories to laboratory spaces, classrooms, and faculty and staff offices. When news of the buildings’ destruction reached us, I proposed a one-credit “pop-up” class focusing on these two buildings and built around what I have called elsewhere “mildly anarchist” principles. While I have discussed this class in greater detail elsewhere (Caraher 2024; Caraher, Wittgraf, and Atchley 2021), this one-credit course was so closely bound to the budget class that it deserves some attention here. Nearly all the students in the budget class enrolled in it alongside some curious history students. The class met in an abandoned classroom in one of the buildings.

The planned demolition of these buildings added to the sense of crisis on campus. Not only was the rationale for the demolition of these buildings unclear to many students and faculty—even as students in the class came to understand the financialized logic of deferred maintenance on campus—but the actual state of the buildings and the former uses of the spaces inside their walls remained unevenly known. We were fortunate to find willing and eager collaborators in our campus’s facilities department who gave us virtually unlimited access to the buildings which had their power and water shut off and were in a state of pre-destruction abandonment. The facilities staff was also only too eager to talk to us about how the buildings worked and open traditionally off limits door to storage closets, offices, and pipe filled rooms. This meant that students (and, indeed, myself!) were able to roam the buildings freely.

The class itself centered on this unprecedented access to the space. Since the university had contracted with an architectural historian to prepare formal documentation of the buildings in keeping with standards established by the Historic American Building Survey, I encouraged the students to consider other ways to document and think about these abandoned and soon-to-be-demolished buildings. The students, with little experience in architectural history or archaeological methods, took to documenting rooms and offices with attention to signs of contemporary use and past reuse. Armed with notebooks, their phone cameras, and their own curiosity they explored formerly off limits lab spaces, faculty offices, and facilities areas. I moved from room to room with the students discussing what they were seeing, finding, and figuring out, and we also discussed ways to take our work further. One student, for example, took the initiative to photograph the buildings using film (and often expired film) as part of a personal photography project designed to capture the building’s abandonment as a manifestation of the campus’s budget. Other students became interested in archival and historical records for the previous functions these buildings served when they were the site of Wesley College. Finally, some students became especially eager to disclose the traces of the buildings’ former use hidden by drop ceilings, institutional carpeting, and drywall. In some cases, they pulled down drop ceilings to expose wall scars or, in one case, the remanent of a coffered ceiling that would have added to an elegant touch what would have been a formal sitting room when one of the buildings served as a dorm. With the help of facilities they also stripped back the commercial grade carpeting to reveal the remains of a terrazzo floor with inset mosaics in the same room. In a room above this well-appointed sitting room, the students discovered the names of four students etched in the glass of what was originally a dormitory window in 1910, 1911, 1913, and 1914. While three of these former students went on to long and seemingly prosperous lives, one died in the Great War. While these students If the work in the budget class focused on producing a guide for students to understanding more clearly the inner workings of the increasingly professionalized university administration, the efforts in the two former Wesley College buildings were open-ended and experiential.

The students themselves gravitated to questions that involved the opening of spaces traditionally off limits to them. They spent time in abandoned faculty offices, laboratory spaces, and facilities areas. They were especially fascinated with caches of obsolete technology and the tangled masses of cables and interconnects that characterize forms of academic “boomsurfing” where faculty save technology acquired on research grants as a way to stretch the value of episodic resource booms (Purser 2017). They also sought to actively strip away contemporary accretions that obscure the older history of the building as if to reveal hidden processes. This extended from the buildings themselves to the archives where they dug through both the records of Wesley College and the later history of the programs and departments that these buildings housed. This work paralleled their interrogation of both the history of higher education and the contemporary financial mechanisms that support the allocations of funds across the university. 

If the results of the budget class were a small book, the results of what we called the “Wesley College Documentation Project” were more diverse. The photographs taken by Wyatt Atchley were published as part of a discussion of austerity in a volume of North Dakota Quarterly, the century old little magazine that found itself particularly embattled by the same campus-wide budget cuts (Caraher 2018). The students also helped coordinate a ceremony designed to recognize that one of the two buildings was a memorial to Harold H. Sayre who died in the Great War. His father who funded the construction of the building in 1908 requested the administration at Wesley College to honor his late son on their campus. They discovered this connection through archival research which also produced a poem written by Sayre’s pilot who had survived the crash in France that took Sayre’s life. We included this in the program of an event attended by the commander of the local Air Force base, the university president and other officials, and many interested members of the community. The presence of a bagpiper made the event even more poignant. Finally, Michael Wittgraf, a professor in the music department, recorded a piece of music that drew upon the acoustics of the buildings as one of the rooms was originally built as a recital hall. A video accompanying this piece spliced photos and videos of the building’s with the music to convey the sense of anxiety pervasive on campus. 

The connection between the class’s exploration of the Wesley College buildings, the various efforts to make the history of these buildings public, and the budgetary crisis on campus was not direct. Without a doubt, the spirit of the budget class, particularly its interest in revealing the administrative working obscured by decades of professionalization, paralleled student excitement to enter spaces typically closed off to students and to remove accretions designed to make the spaces of these buildings more useful on the contemporary campus. The sense of melancholy surrounding the demolition of a building intended to memorialize a fallen soldier and son seemed to reinforce the sense of sadness experienced by the students as they encountered the palpable tension between the intensely contemporary budget crisis and the longer history of the institution. The Wesley College buildings, despite decades of adaptation and neglected, became physical manifestations of their less tangible sense of loss and change on campus.

More on Teaching as a Response to a Campus Crisis

On Tuesday, I posted some text from my new project “Teaching as Activism during a Campus Crisis.” I explained in my post then that this project has a sense of urgency fueled in no small part by an August 1 deadline! 

Wednesday was a chaotic day punctuated by the dogs annual visit to the vet, an afternoon playing hooky on my gravel bike, a faculty meeting, and then a night class. This means that I didn’t get as much writing done as I would have liked. 

That said, I did get a bit done. To understand the context for this, you probably need to go back to Tuesday’s post, but some of it will make sense without it:

Of course, the special competence of faculty as teachers framed an approach to rallying social change that was anything but open ended. The original teach-in organizers had the kind of moral and political clarity and social authority that is often, but not always, absent in the complexity of contemporary college crises. Contemporary campuses encounter crises in a diversity of ways that reflect the plurality of “stakeholders” in the neoliberal university. Faculty over the last fifty years of have increasingly come to recognize the need for foreground the empowerment of students prompted in no small part by the rise of campus activism provoked by interventions such as the Vietnam era “Teach-In” and its predecessors in the Civil Rights movements. 

While each generation produces a new canon of literature on student empowerment, my efforts to empower students on our campus found inspiration in Ira Shor’s classic work Empowering Education (1992). He began his work with anecdote about the first day of a new semester teaching “English One” at a New York public college. The students were surly and unresponsive until Shor asked them bluntly what was going on. At that point, the class became surly and responsive and explained that they were angry about the English writing test required for all first-year students. The class went on to explain to Shor that they felt the test to be unfair. Shor leveraged their frustration both to build an empathetic relationship with the students and to encourage them to channel their anger into the goals of the course. He admitted that despite the students’ ability to articulate their views, they stopped short of wanting to become activists themselves. 

What Shor recognized, however, is that giving students space and time to voice their anger and frustration started a process where they worked together to articulate their concerns. He was also giving students the critical tools to express their ideas in more compelling ways. As scholars have long argued, perhaps nowhere more compellingly as in Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970 in English), teaching critical engagement during crises provides a basis for empowerment. While it goes without saying that largely middle-class honors students at a regional state university are a far cry from Freire’s Chilean peasants, the systems and structures that these students encountered on a daily basis, however, nevertheless relied upon the kind of hegemonic discourse that reproduces asymmetries of power across the institution. Thus activist teaching in and concerning the contemporary university often involves unpacking and understanding the complex institutional strategies designed to support the university’s functions. These strategies and the way in which they structure relationships (and power) on the university campus became the object of critique throughout our class on the 2018 budget cuts at the University of North Dakota. 

Even a mid-sized college campus represents a complex institution. Christopher Newport argued that the growing complexity of the contemporary public college campus is a symptom of the increasing privatization of public universities. For Newport, this involves the shift from collaborative to transactional modes of interaction across the institution. The financialization of interactions across the institution, for example, reconfigures curriculum from a collaborative responsibility to produce prepared and well-rounded students, to a competition for resources across campus. While advocates of this kind of competition imagine this as a way to produce efficiencies through a “marketplace of ideas,” instead it has intensified commitments to the professionalized standards of expertise and competence that often produce “silos” across institutions and hinder collaboration and cooperation. The logic of competition-born efficiency extends throughout our institutions not only fortifying claims to discreet professional competences, but also creating barriers to “shared governance.” For students and faculty, this can often mean that we are on the outside of a byzantine bureaucracy looking in even as the fate of programs, departments, and services crucial for both our own and our students expectations hang in the balance. It is unsurprising that during these times of the crisis that the bureaucracy itself becomes the object of vitriol as faculty and students from across the ideological spectrum attacked the lack of transparency, “administrative bloat,” and levels of compensation as the cause rather than the symptom of the changing financial environment facing 21st-century universities.  

Two Things Tuesday: Writing, Sausage, and Teaching a Campus Crisis

It’s a funky mid-April Tuesday where I’m starting to feel both excited about my summer research time and harried by the end of a hectic semester. These two, sometimes contradictory emotions, create quite a tumult in my rather simple world. I’m both eager to get on with the program and hoping to have more time to tend to matters at hand!

In any event, complicating this further is the topic for todays “Two Thing Tuesday”:

Thing the First

A few weeks ago, I complained that I was struggling to find time to write and this was causing me a certain amount of frustration. What I really should have said, in hindsight, was that I couldn’t quite find an excuse to write. 

Fortunately, just such an excuse materialized this past week. I was very excited to have received word that the editors of a book on campus crises have accepted my proposed contribution: “Teaching as Activism during a Campus Crisis.” Our chapters are due August 1 and since I will be up to my neck in workshops, Roman pottery, and Slavic ware for May and June, it feels like this means that I need to start writing this chapter now.

And so I have (see below).

Thing the Second 

When I started this blog, part of my goal was the expose how we make academic sausage. This means sharing book notes, outlines, drafts, crappy ideas, pre-prints, and whenever possible published work.

Over the next couple of weeks, I’m going to turn my attention to this chapter and that means subjecting anyone who is interested in reading to drafts of my work. Keen eyed readers will note that it is cribbing a good bit from the proposal.

Enjoy (or don’t read it!):

Teaching as Activism during a Campus Crisis

Introduction

This chapter considers the potential of classroom based activism as a response to a campus crisis at the University of North Dakota, a mid-sized, public university. In 2018, the University of North Dakota labored under a painful series of budget cuts triggered by state financial shortfalls. These cuts extended across campus and made national headlines with the termination of the university’s prominent women’s hockey program and successful music therapy degree. These cuts and the largely negative publicity that they generated bewildered and angered students and faculty alike. It stoked a sense of outrage on campus which had been smoldering since the naming of an awkward and unpopular figure, Mark Kennedy, as university president. A failed effort at program prioritization, the implementation of a seemingly complex new MIRA-type budgeting process (Model for Incentive-based Resource Allocation), and the growing reach of an increasingly bureaucratized administration further exacerbated a sense of confusion surrounding university processes and decision-making. 

In response to the growing sense of crisis, I decided to offer a class on the University of North Dakota Budget. The class was offered as an honors section of our department’s venerable History of North Dakota class and taught at the intermediate level. It was open to both honors and non-honors students and quickly enrolled close to its 20-student cap. The class situated the contemporary budget crisis on the UND campus in both local and national contexts and took advantage of the timely appearance of a series of incisive books that sought to frame the national sense of crisis in higher education in historical, administrative, and ideological terms. Christopher Newfield’s The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them (2016) and David Labaree’s A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendency of American Higher Education (2017) served as our textbooks. 

This chapter attempts to contextualize this class in a way that was authentic to my decision to offer the course. This means recognizing that I am not an educational theorist versed in the latest articulations of activist teaching, nor am I an historian of higher education. I do not have any training as an activist or community organizer. Instead, I was trained as a historian and archaeologist and largely teach survey and “service” classes for my department. In other words, my experiences come from the ragged edges of the professionalization paradigm that this chapter seeks to critique and, in some limited way, subvert. 

This will account, in part, for my awkward efforts to weave together three threads. First, I will situate my efforts to use teaching as a form of activism within the 20th-century conversations surrounding “teach-ins” and student empowerment. Then, this paper will offer a concise narrative of the specific budget cuts and institutional changes at UND. The third thread will be a description and discussion of two classes that these 20th-century conversations and sense of contemporary crisis inspired at my institution. 

Teaching as Activism

It has become cliche to regard crises in higher education as both slow moving and immediate. The immediacy of the crises often produce great flurries of activity designed to forestall the imminent calamity. Slower moving crises, whether rooted in the glacial pace of institutional change, the constant crises of contemporary capitalism, or the geological (albeit accelerating) rate of the global climate, often create opportunities for campus activism that operate on different trajectories than those informed by the urgency of the moment. The scholarship related to teaching as activism is as broad and complex as the social problems that it seeks to resolve (Ozaki and Parson 2020, 2021). Rather than offering a rather necessarily desiccated review of this dynamic body of literature, this chapter will take as points of reference the “teach-in” movement of the 1960s and 1970s which emerged in response to the Vietnam war and as an important component of the first Earth Day and Ira Shor’s work on empowerment in the college classroom. While these landmarks are more than a bit dated, they still offer an important lens through which to appreciate the potential of teaching (and learning) as the foundation for social and institutional changes.

The oft-recited origins of the “teach-in” movement as a response to the US bombing of North Vietnam. Jack Rothman and Marshall Sahlins offer accounts of the origin of the “teach-in” movement at the University of Michigan in 1965 (Rothman 1972; Sahlins 2009). The term sought to invoke mid-century sit-in protests or in Sahlins’s mind the Hegelian concept of the “teach out” and forged a compromise between calls for a teaching strike and calls for a form of protest that would be more in keeping with the educational mission, resources, and ”special competency” available at the university. The first teach-in at Michigan, started at the end of the class day and then ran all night. Over 3000 students and dozens of faculty gathered in university lecture halls and classrooms. This offered a way for faculty and students to engage with “a clear factual and moral protest against the Vietnam War” (Rothman 1972). While the language of Rothman’s description of the first teach-in reflected prevailing pedagogical practices of the day, it recognized the key role of universities as places to educate as well as to organize and encourage students (and the university community more broadly) in response to crises. The subsequent adoption of the teach-in as a response both to short-term and to slower moving crises — from episodes of racist hate-crimes on campus to growing concerns about the environment — reveals the persistent potential of the teach-in as a tool to produce better educated activists and larger social change.  

Of course, the special competence of faculty as teachers framed an approach to rallying social change that was anything but open ended. The original teach-in organizers had the kind of moral and political clarity that is often, but not always, absent in the complexity of contemporary college crises.

Ira Shor begins his now classic work Empowering Education (1992) with an anecdote about the first day of a new semester teaching “English One” at a New York public college. The students were surly and unresponsive until Shor asked them bluntly what was going on. At that point, the class became surly and responsive and explained that they were angry about the English writing test required for all first-year students. The class went on to explain to Shor that they felt the test to be unfair. Shor leveraged their frustration both to build an empathetic relationship with the students and to encourage them to channel their anger into the goals of the course. He admitted that despite the students’ ability to articulate their views, they stopped short of wanting to become activists themselves. 

What Shor recognized, however, is that giving students space and time to voice their anger and frustration started a process where they worked together to articulate their concerns. He was also giving students the critical tools to express their ideas in more compelling ways. As scholars have long argued, perhaps nowhere more compellingly as in Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970 in English), teaching critical engagement with crises provides a basis for empowerment. While it goes without saying that largely middle-class honors students at a regional state university are a far cry from Freire’s Chilean peasants, the systems and structures that these students encountered on a daily basis, however, nevertheless relies upon the kind of hegemonic discourse that reproduces asymmetries of power across the institution.     

Three Things Thursday: Reading, Writing, and Teaching

It’s the Thursday of Holy Week and for archaic (and not entirely acceptable) reasons we have a long weekend at Easter. If it weren’t such a welcome break from what can be a long winter-to-spring semester, I’d be filled with the kind of luke-warm outrage that comes from a slight (and deliberate) misunderstanding of the relationship between church and state.

In any event, Holy Week feels like as good a time as any to produce another three-things Thursday.  

Thing the First

When I don’t have time or bandwidth to write, I get a bit unpleasant. At some point in my life my identity shifted from being a scholar (and mostly a field guy at that) to being a writer. That said, I never have (and never would) identify as a writer and I certainly don’t share the commitment to craft (per se) as some of my more writerly friends, but writing is so deeply engrained in how I think about myself that when I’m not writing, it’s hard to feel like I’m “working on something.”

It may be, of course, that the tail has come to wag the dog. Maybe having time each semester to allow myself to become preoccupied with teaching, service work, and even reading (see below) breaks the tendency for my desire to write (and perhaps disingenuously to feel like I’m creating or at very least making) something to impinge on my need to actually be experiencing and engaging with my field (including the field), colleagues and students.  

Thing the Second

My reading this year has been sporadic and unsatisfactory. On the one hand, much of my reading has focused on unpublished (or not-yet-published) manuscripts and there’s something deeply gratifying in this work. On the other hand, there’s so much that I want to read and that I should read if I’m going to continue to try to pursue an active research agenda. In fact, I need to balance reading and writing if I want to continue to be a useful and informed reader of manuscripts both for my press and in my capacity as a peer reviewer.

My hope is that I can somehow get back on track this spring and return to my habit of penciling in six or eight hours on the weekend for professional reading. Maybe the holiday weekend will help.

Thing the Third

Then there’s teaching. I am very proud of the fact (in a vaguely random way) that my lecture today is on Byzantine Spirituality. This feels perfect for Holy Week! I wish I had planned my class like this and it wasn’t just luck.

One of the really interesting trends that I have noticed over the course of this semester is that my classes have changed from being centered on lectures to being centered on discussions. I guess when I reorganized my classes to focus on in depth, week-long, discussion of a handful of primary source texts, I hadn’t considered how this would impact the lectures that provided context for these primary sources. The unanticipated result is that lectures now have gone from being central to the learning experience to not-quite optional for most students. The come to class, but rather than frantic note taking or nearly obsessive fixating on details, they now push me to explain more, they want to chat about the past more during lectures, and finally, they are actually more engaged in the classroom. Who knew this would be a knock on?

Three Things Thursday: On AI and LLM

At first, I was all aboard on the panic about large language models (LLM) and “artificial intelligence” in the academy. In fact, I participated in an on-campus conversation a few months ago that centered on the impact of ChatGPT in the classroom. Since then, I’ve largely grown bored of the hype and the endlessly repeated tropes that AI will change everything, we need to adapt or die, or that AI is poised to open new horizons.

Since I appreciate folks like Joshua Nundell’s efforts to respond to and critique some of the recent conversations, I thought I might add my two cents in the spirit of solidarity among bloggers, if nothing else. 

Thing the First

It seems to me that some of the anxiety surrounding the impact of LLM driven AI in the classroom centers is a bit misplaced. After all, there is a massive catalogue of approaches to writing that easily sidestep the problematic temptation to use, say, ChatGPT to produce an assignment. In my department alone, I know colleagues who do low-stakes, in-class writing, some who develop richly scaffolded writing assignments that require outlines, multiple drafts, proper citations, and other elements that LLM can’t replicate, and finally, some who encourage students to work in groups where peer pressure mitigates the risk of using ChatGPT.

Each of these approaches have pedagogical merits and are well-tested tools in a teaching tool kit. In other words, creating scenarios where LLM assisted writing is discouraged doesn’t involve re-thinking how we teach. It simply involves adopting what many have argued are “good practices” for teaching writing anyway. Of course, I understand that incorporating these practices into a class involve a bit of a redesign, but it’s hardly a revolution.

Thing the Second

Recent handwriting over the role that LLM driven AI plays in scholarship is mostly ridiculous. The examples used are, of course, egregious—especially those that preserve the telltale word, “Certainly” before listing a bunch of references in a literature review—and, presumably, embarrassing to the journals where such text appears. But let’s be honest here: these are not good journals. The examples bandied about the internet are simply not good articles as even a cursory survey of their content (and despite their being far outside my field) reveals.

In other words, this does little to convince me that a wave of AI generated content is welling up in the depths of the more unscrupulous scholarly world. Of course, most academics know that a tremendous amount of poor and mediocre scholarship exists. This is not driven by ready access to LLM derived AI composition, but by the irresistible pressures to publish frequently, to develop important quantitative markers for scholarly performance, and to constantly justify a position within the academy. Of course, publishers are only too happy to take advance of the need for content. Ironically, the pressures produced by unrealistic research expectations and unscrupulous publishers rely partly over-extended and over-worked faculty who can’t (or, more tactically, won’t) fulfill their professional obligations as reviewers.  

It seems to me that this ecosystem is as much to blame for the rise in articles that carelessly make use of LLM’s capacity to generate plausible sounding text. This isn’t to absolve the “authors” of such articles of dishonest practices, but to suggest that blaming it on ChatGPT is mistaking the symptom for the disease.

Thing the Third

Over the last dozen years, I’ve shifted from being an enthusiastic advocate for open access academic publishing to more of an agnostic skeptic. This isn’t because I think OA publishing is bad or wrong—after all I run an open access press—but that I think OA publishing as part of a more complex scholarly ecosystem that isn’t necessarily an unqualified good for all participants in this system.

It has been interesting to me to see how scholars have pivoted from championing the power of OA publications as democratizing knowledge to hesitating just a bit now as it becomes clear that OA publications may form an important component of future LLMs. Without disparaging the entire OA movement, it seems apparent that the emergence of LLM and recent challenges by copyright holders whose works constitute these LLMs creates opportunities for OA texts to create a foundation for new forms of automated and algorithmically derived knowledge making. 

Of course, for this to work, the larger ecosystem has to continue to produce high quality OA texts for our new LLM to consume. If we imagine that publishers will ultimately seek to monetize LLMs and their algorithms, then the loop is effectively closing. The growing body of OA publications, which some scholars and institutions pay to produce, will invariably populating the next generation of LLMs which will, in turn, power the next batch of AI text generators. 

This isn’t some kind of radically new observations, but does, I think, help me understand the how the larger ecosystem surrounding AI text generators and LLMs works with both teaching and publishing in the academy. 

PKAP2: The Introduction

It’s been a long time in the works, but the second Pyla-Koutsopetria volume is almost done and should get submitted this spring. I realize, of course, that this project had been pushed so far to the back burner that some of you may have lost track of it entirely.

To rectify this and to maintain a tradition of using this blog as a window into my research, reading, and writing process, I will start to post the various chapters of the volume as I finalize them. 

At present, they’re are lacking figures as we’re still compiling and producing them, but they are in substance complete.

Here’s the introduction and stay tuned for more.

Beginnings and Endings

It’s starting to feel a bit like spring around here and that means both that I’m starting to plan for my summer research season and that I’m feeling some pressure to wrap up projects before everything goes on pause while I’m “doing the archaeology.” 

Over the last few days, I’ve started to work in earnest in wrapping up the second volume in the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project series. The first volume, as readers of this blog know, dealt with our intensive survey of the coastal zone of Pyla village in southeastern Cyprus and the second volume will focus on three seasons of excavation in 2008, 2009, and 2012. This volume has taken us much longer to finish than we expected. In fact, as I was fussing with citations and figures yesterday, I found myself editing some texts that I had written for this volume in 2013. 

I have to admit that I’m terrible at end games. In chess, when I feel like a situation is hopeless or, in happier cases, resolved, I tend to resign or get so bored that I make silly mistakes (often complicating the course of winning!). In working on my own projects, I tend to get frustrated as the pace of a project slows and more and more energy is needed to complete the fussy parts of book preparation such as illustrations, checking citations, and reviewing final manuscript pages. While I find such work immensely gratifying when the book belongs to someone else, I find it beyond tedious when it is my own work. 

But it needs to be done and so it goes.

At the same time, I find the beginnings of projects fraught with anxiety. On the one hand, I get excited when I set upon a new (to me) ideas and feel the rush of encountering new bodies of scholarship and evidence. On the other hand, I’ve come to learn that a lack of discipline early in a research process can often lead to inefficiencies later. Indeed, some of the tedious work that I’m doing now with the PKAP2 volume is the direct result of my lack of discipline when I started the project.

I’ve been keeping up with some of Tom Isern, a colleague at NDSU’s history department, musings on research process. In a recent post on his blog, he has reaffirmed his commitment to hand writing notes in a notebook. I’m somewhat embarrassed to say that my note taking practice is a bit of a “warm mess” which combines proper (albeit digital) notes, with annotations on the book itself (and sometimes on digital versions of the book!), and casual writing (which I often post to my blog). The result is a complicated jumble of information that leaves me constantly scrambling to find a passage or to recall whether this or that book said what about whatever. 

Tom’s commitment (as well as my colleagues Eric Burin, Kostis Kourelis, and Richard Rothaus!) to note taking on paper has made me contemplate a shift in discipline for my new project on pseudoarchaeology. As a rule, I’m preoccupied with process (or as we call it in publishing “workflow”) and maybe shaking up my workflow at this stage of my research will energize my practice a bit and perhaps pay dividends when I have to turn the jumble of words into a proper manuscript!