Forty-five: Shame, Shame, Shame

It must be time to give out our less-frequent-than-annual Annual Award for historians who have transgressed the bounds of common decency.

Just imagine that you are presenting a paper at the convention of one of your discipline’s organization. You are presenting a chapter from your dissertation. You have presented this work at a special conference previously, but you are pleased to have this opportunity to present it to a wider audience. You have been slaving away on this dissertation trying to rework it into a publishable manuscript after having just earned your degree.

You get through the paper and you feel relieved as the audience claps while you return to your chair. The respondent gets up to speak. He is a fairly prominent member of your field, someone who has published several books, and someone who has taken up a chair at a fairly prestigious university. You are hoping that he liked your paper. You are to be disappointed.

This man rises and in a very gruff manner begins to launch into a diatribe against you. There were two other papers that were presented but he doesn’t spend much time on them; his main ire is directed at you for some reason. But it doesn’t seem to be so much what you have said, or what you have argued, it seems to be just you.

He says that he has googled you and found that you have presented this paper somewhere else. He notes that it has taken you about ten years to finish your dissertation, and he wonders why it has taken so long for you. It didn’t take him so long. He went straight from his final exams to his thesis, and it only took him three years. Moreover his thesis was published only a few years after that.

For some reason, he doesn’t mention the level of funding he received from his prestigious university graduate program; he doesn’t mention that, while he did have kids, he was married and most of the reproduction of the household was undertaken by his partner or spouse. He doesn’t recognize that it is conceivable that you might have taken a different route form his own; that you may have needed to bring up your kids largely on your own; that you may have needed to teach at a community college because you didn’t get the same kind of support that he received.

And you wonder whether he would be willing to recognize that your struggle to complete your thesis was akin to the struggle of those people whose history you were describing, those facing discrimination and impoverishment. His endeavors to describe the same thing from the lap of grant-funded luxury – were they marked in any way by empathy of any kind? Does it matter? you imagine him responding. He got to the Truth of the matter, and he did so more quickly than you, because you seem to have been lazy, or you have some other character flaw.

And you say to yourself, wasn't it ever so? And you say no wonder this fellow has won the Annual Award for lack of decency.