Gundolf Graml's List: Undergraduate Research

• But, as Grafton’s discussion also makes clear, there are serious concerns about the quality of this experience.  In particular, the university curriculum leaves students disengaged from the material they are supposed to be learning.  They see most of their courses as intrinsically “boring,” of value only if they provide training relevant to future employment or if the teacher has a pleasing (amusing, exciting, “relevant”) way of presenting the material. As a result, students spend only as much time as they need to get what they see as acceptable grades (on average, about 12 to 14 hour a week for all courses combined).  Professors have ceased to expect genuine engagement from students and often give good grades (B or better) to work that is at best minimally adequate.
• This lack of academic engagement is real, even among schools with the best students and the best teachers, and it increases dramatically as the quality of the school decreases.  But it results from a basic misunderstanding — by both students and teachers — of what colleges are for.

• Thanks for posting, this looks like an interesting read (once I'm done grading). - Gundolf Graml on 2011-12-13

• I have come to think of such half-baked work as "fast-food scholarship." It's characterized by several factors:
• Minimal, selective citation.
• Reliance on minimal or anecdotal evidence
• A related practice is making big claims supported by little evidence. It's a problem of scope. Not long ago, I reviewed (for a university press) a book manuscript by a senior scholar. One chapter made large claims but was based entirely on what had happened during the author's own class meetings during one semester. In careful and rigorous scholarship, the scope of your evidence must match the scope of your claims, but that author took the easy way out and simply asserted her claims but supported them with insufficient evidence.
• Distorted arguments. I'm referring here to manuscripts that wrench a given argument out of context in order to force it to do service to the author's own position. That is an alarmingly common trend, and it represents a type of intellectual dishonesty that is antithetical to the scholarly enterprise.
• Woefully undeveloped manuscripts. Too many academics submit articles with half-developed arguments as if they were ready for publication. While length is not a direct indication of how well an argument has been developed, it is, at least, a partial indication of how much space an author has devoted to a subject. Frequently, journals will be flooded with submissions directly after the discipline's annual convention.
• What I fear is that in a society in which everyone has an opinion and apparently everyone's opinion is equal, we have lost our passion to truly master a subject before weighing in on it. We have replaced that with a desire to pump out publications. In my mind, true intellectual work requires deep dedication and a willingness to labor long after the amateur would have quit. Too many of our colleagues, I fear, have forgotten that and are focused on the pressure to produce a quantity of works to satisfy hiring or tenure committees.

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• This abysmal situation looks even worse when we compare the United States with other developed countries. Canada, of course, pursues language learning in English and in French as part of its national self-understanding. In Europe, some 50 percent of the population over the age of fifteen report being able to carry on a conversation in a second language, and the European Union has set a goal of equipping all citizens with proficiency in two non-native languages. This level of language ability will obviously represent an enormous human resource in the global economy, which is to say that the American model of education for monolingualism deprives our students of the skills they will need in tomorrow’s economy. The endemic hostility to language learning is a war against our next generation.
• Yet the argument for language learning is not only about specific skills for economic competitiveness. More important, it is about the enhanced intellectual and cognitive capacities that come with language learning. Studying another language strengthens the ability to understand cultural difference. Moreover, studying another language simultaneously contributes to one’s understanding of one’s own language by amplifying metacognitive awareness of linguistic issues. Studying a second language does not undermine one’s native language; on the contrary, second-language study allows students to use their first language with greater intentionality.

• Members of a new generation of digitally savvy humanists argue it is time to stop looking for inspiration in the next political or philosophical “ism” and start exploring how technology is changing our understanding of the liberal arts. This latest frontier is about method, they say, using powerful technologies and vast stores of digitized materials that previous humanities scholars did not have.
• “The digital humanities do fantastic things,” said the eminent Princeton historian Anthony Grafton. “I’m a believer in quantification. But I don’t believe quantification can do everything. So much of humanistic scholarship is about interpretation.”
• In Mr. Scheinfeldt’s view academia has moved into “a post-theoretical age.” This “methodological moment,” he said, is similar to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when scholars were preoccupied with collating and cataloging the flood of information brought about by revolutions in communication, transportation and science. The practical issues of discipline building, of assembling an annotated bibliography, of defining the research agenda and what it means to be a historian “were the main work of a great number of scholars,” he said.

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• Many teachers and administrators are only beginning to figure out the contours of this emerging field of digital humanities, and how it should be taught. In the classroom, however, digitally savvy undergraduates are not just ready to adapt to the tools but also to explore how new media may alter the very process of reading, interpretation and analysis.