Exactly. And the other aspect of those finances is: where are the jobs? It seems unusually obtuse for the president of the AHA--much less a man who works at a fine public institution that undoubtedly has as much difficulty placing its graduate students as anyone else (even Harvard places about 50% a year) to not know that training people for academic jobs in a field where opportunities are even narrower than in other fields would not see this as a practical decision. On the one hand we ask grad students to think through the consequences of their decision to go to grad school at all; on the other hand, we castigate as superficial if they don't choose a field that meets the standards Sweet sets.
I would also say that the column is a perhaps unintentional slap at folks like you and me for tryin gto reach a broader public.
In general, it is not surprising to find well-established scholars in any discipline who had prior facility with its specific high-end skills requirements and who faced no enormous material hardships in getting into their situation finding it difficult to appreciate what their field must look like to a person beginning graduate work, interested in their discipline, but who doesn't have those advantages. It is a kind of other-worldliness that would baffle many people in the private sector, where if they want to staff up in an area that has very demanding skills requirements, they would know that they'd have to pay through the nose to get those specialists. But honestly, if you're doing the AHA leadership gig, this should not be an issue that's not on your radar. I know the professional staff in the organization are somewhat alert to it. You want your premodernists, you gotta pay more to get them, from Day 1 of their doctoral training all the way through to hiring them.
100% it does. Like, I think a lot of us agree there are many interesting things to study that properly ought to be studied with multi-site ethnography, but if you put that expectation in there alongside every other anthropological doctorate, you can expect the people are at least slightly savvy about the time and expense that's going to involve to avoid that kind of work.
It feels like some of these issues are connected. For example, it's cheaper to study early modern Europe, or the ancient Mediterranean world, than to study early modern West Africa (as you describe) or ancient South Asia, for many of the reasons you mention. But academia has, for good reasons, decided that history departments with the kinds of focus areas that prevailed 50 years ago are no longer acceptable, but without a concomitant increase in resources to make that possible without shifting more towards the present.
Even early modern Europe or the ancient Mediterranean are more difficult now precisely because the other thing that hasn't changed in academia, including history, is the desire to support research work that in some sense seems original. So, for example, a lot of people working on classical Mediterranean history are being pushed in some sense (including by contemporary politics!) to stretch beyond Greece, Rome and the Hebrew-speaking Levant in various ways, but no matter which way you move in that respect, the linguistic and evidentiary challenges multiply quite quickly (as do some of the challenges of working in the specific locations you might need to go to). Or with early modern Europe, historians are (rightly) reconsidering how to write about a "Europe" that is in a great many ways also elsewhere at that point. And again the same thing happens: to do that well, both in the sense of "with diligence" and "with originality", you're instantly having to look at more archives in more places in more languages, right from the get-go.
I agree with all of that. My point is basically that as the standards for what doing good research changes, it almost always changes in ways that make the work more difficult (needing to consider more perspectives, or new methods, or bring in more connections, etc). This is true in basically every field. Sometimes that's mitigated by greater productivity (online journals! word processing! better training!) and sometimes its mitigated by greater funding (certainly the case in my field) but if neither of those happen its going to be mitigated by not investigating the topics that require huge resources (see also the changes in machine learning research or drug discovery).
Yes. And that's the thing: at least for historians, "good research" always has some need to demonstrate originality (in choice of topic, in method, in argument). And for premodern fields, the cost of doing that on researchers is many times what it is for someone working on 20th Century US history. So you're exactly right. Sweet is naming the wrong suspects here.
Exactly. And the other aspect of those finances is: where are the jobs? It seems unusually obtuse for the president of the AHA--much less a man who works at a fine public institution that undoubtedly has as much difficulty placing its graduate students as anyone else (even Harvard places about 50% a year) to not know that training people for academic jobs in a field where opportunities are even narrower than in other fields would not see this as a practical decision. On the one hand we ask grad students to think through the consequences of their decision to go to grad school at all; on the other hand, we castigate as superficial if they don't choose a field that meets the standards Sweet sets.
I would also say that the column is a perhaps unintentional slap at folks like you and me for tryin gto reach a broader public.
In general, it is not surprising to find well-established scholars in any discipline who had prior facility with its specific high-end skills requirements and who faced no enormous material hardships in getting into their situation finding it difficult to appreciate what their field must look like to a person beginning graduate work, interested in their discipline, but who doesn't have those advantages. It is a kind of other-worldliness that would baffle many people in the private sector, where if they want to staff up in an area that has very demanding skills requirements, they would know that they'd have to pay through the nose to get those specialists. But honestly, if you're doing the AHA leadership gig, this should not be an issue that's not on your radar. I know the professional staff in the organization are somewhat alert to it. You want your premodernists, you gotta pay more to get them, from Day 1 of their doctoral training all the way through to hiring them.
All of which makes me think that they need a more assertive person editing the newsletter.
Preach. I’m pretty sure this applies to extended ethnographic work as well.
100% it does. Like, I think a lot of us agree there are many interesting things to study that properly ought to be studied with multi-site ethnography, but if you put that expectation in there alongside every other anthropological doctorate, you can expect the people are at least slightly savvy about the time and expense that's going to involve to avoid that kind of work.
It feels like some of these issues are connected. For example, it's cheaper to study early modern Europe, or the ancient Mediterranean world, than to study early modern West Africa (as you describe) or ancient South Asia, for many of the reasons you mention. But academia has, for good reasons, decided that history departments with the kinds of focus areas that prevailed 50 years ago are no longer acceptable, but without a concomitant increase in resources to make that possible without shifting more towards the present.
Even early modern Europe or the ancient Mediterranean are more difficult now precisely because the other thing that hasn't changed in academia, including history, is the desire to support research work that in some sense seems original. So, for example, a lot of people working on classical Mediterranean history are being pushed in some sense (including by contemporary politics!) to stretch beyond Greece, Rome and the Hebrew-speaking Levant in various ways, but no matter which way you move in that respect, the linguistic and evidentiary challenges multiply quite quickly (as do some of the challenges of working in the specific locations you might need to go to). Or with early modern Europe, historians are (rightly) reconsidering how to write about a "Europe" that is in a great many ways also elsewhere at that point. And again the same thing happens: to do that well, both in the sense of "with diligence" and "with originality", you're instantly having to look at more archives in more places in more languages, right from the get-go.
I agree with all of that. My point is basically that as the standards for what doing good research changes, it almost always changes in ways that make the work more difficult (needing to consider more perspectives, or new methods, or bring in more connections, etc). This is true in basically every field. Sometimes that's mitigated by greater productivity (online journals! word processing! better training!) and sometimes its mitigated by greater funding (certainly the case in my field) but if neither of those happen its going to be mitigated by not investigating the topics that require huge resources (see also the changes in machine learning research or drug discovery).
Yes. And that's the thing: at least for historians, "good research" always has some need to demonstrate originality (in choice of topic, in method, in argument). And for premodern fields, the cost of doing that on researchers is many times what it is for someone working on 20th Century US history. So you're exactly right. Sweet is naming the wrong suspects here.