principle

I carpooled down to work as usual this Monday. We spent the first half of the ride talking about the driver’s history course. She’s working on getting students to think about how history is presented in different contexts. She’s working with museums right now. She has a reading—I forget the name of the author—about how museums present information. The main case study was the uproar about the Enola Gay exhibit that the Smithsonian wanted to do a number of years ago. The curators wanted to show the consequences of dropping the bombs on foreign policy and the civilian population. On one side, you’ve got the historians who used primary sources from the time period that suggest that maybe, maybe, we didn’t have to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end the war. On the other side, there are veterans' organizations and miscellaneous folks who believe that the bombs ended the war months earlier than it would have and that we shouldn’t ever feel anything resembling remorse for killing all those non-combatant folks. I’m exaggerating, but still. . . .


So the lines are pretty clear on this one, right? Historical evidence versus popular sentiment, evidence wins. But then she tells me about some other exhibit that got closed down. It was called “Back of the Big House” and it was about slavery in the USA. In this case, it was the largely African American staff that worked in the Library of Congress who objected. As far as I can tell from the ride down, (now backed up by some judicious Googling) the employees did not like the exhibit, though it had been shown without comment at five different locations before it got to the LoC. The link suggests that the complaint may have originated in a labor dispute, but I couldn’t find any more detail online. At any rate, this show was also cancelled and eventually moved to a different venue.

Now you’d think that the same rules would apply here. Historical evidence and expertise trump popular sentiment, yes? No. In this case, my colleague thought that the feelings of working people should be taken into account.

Once she said this, I lost all interest in the conversation. This is something about talking about race with some people that makes me just nuts. It doesn't matter how friggin' crazy an African American's idea is, it gets cut slack by some well-meaning white liberal, who would be all too ready to jump down the throat of some old white dude. Now why are the feelings of African American workers more important than that of WWII vets? Got me, but my suspicions are that the feelings of black folks are considered more legitimate than those (presumably) old white soldiers). Legitimate? Why legitimate? Legitimate because we are no threat, because we have no perceived power, whereas the old white dude is emblematic of patriarchy, of the government, of their father for all I know. At any rate, he's someone to be struggled with and we are a people to coddle and condescend to. We are treated like children.


More about my soon to be ex-employer. As I was looking for information about the LoC exhibit problem, I came across this on an academic history blog:

Please. It is just plain pitiful that a graduate of XXXXX will never have had an opportunity to take a course in European history or much of any other history for that matter. God knows what other opportunities they will have missed while being filled with "Global Studies" mindsuck.

Oh dear. You know my colleagues have been telling me that our model is admired in other institutions, but maybe that's just not true. It turns out that the professor that wrote this is a political conservative. Nevertheless, he's not completly wrong about the role of ideology in instruction here.