The Read: University Whodunits (Becky Cooper, We Keep the Dead Close; Richard White, Who Killed Jane Stanford?)
Friday's Child Is Loving and Giving
Why did I get these books?
They’re both pretty irresistable to a historian with an interest in higher education.
Are they what I thought they were?
White’s book is absolutely what I thought it was, but I had some advance warning about it from reading Lulu Miller’s Why Fish Don’t Exist.
Cooper’s book surprised me a bit. It’s as much about becoming obsessed with finding out a long-sought truth and the perils of identifying too much with a past person—in some ways it’s a verification of Jill Lepore’s criticism of microhistory as anything else—and in the end complicatedly deflating, both for Cooper and the reader.
What continuing uses might I have for them?
Either of them would teach really well, though Cooper’s book is long and might not provide as much useful background into the university in its time period as White’s does. I also think Cooper doesn’t quite do as much engagement with Harvard’s history backwards and forwards of the murder at the heart of her account as she might.
White’s book is deliciously rewarding for anyone who dislikes Stanford, which at this point would be a fair amount of American academia.
Cooper would also be interesting reading for history graduate students as case study about what to do with a research project where your initial suspicions or theories simply don’t pan out, and where the truth turns out to be something you hadn’t really prepared for during your research.
Quotes
“They had made a cartoon version of my generation in the same way I had made one out of theirs. It took an ambassador in the form of a dead girl to get me in that room, to get me to understand that their feminism wasn’t all bra burning, that the merger of Radcliffe into Harvard was as much a submersion of a vital institution as it was a landmark of women’s equality.” (Cooper, p. 129)
“I was starting to believe that there were two kinds of archaeologists: the scholars like Jim Humphries and Richard Meadow, who were meticulous and bound by data, and, as I’d seen sitting in his class, the storytellers like Karl. I was also starting to believe that the storytellers always won.” (Cooper, p. 147)
“If Iva was right and Jane’s story functioned as a kind of cautionary tale, then perhaps it was less about the literal truth of what happened to Jane than it was an allegory about the dangers that faced women in academia.” (Cooper, p. 199)
“This dusty old story that had lived privately with me for years and years was about to be blown back open on the national stage.” (Cooper, p. 211)
“What would a culture look like, I wondered, that, recognizing the limitations of memory and rejecting the half-truths of reconstruction, discouraged nostalgia? What would be the consequences of a collective shedding of history?” (Cooper, p. 320)
“Others took a dimmer view of Carnegie, Stanford and philanthropy. Doing great harm seemed to be the prerequisite for gestures of amelioration. They regarded Carnegie and Stanford as the kinds of men who having cut off your leg, offered you a crutch.” (White, pp.52-53)
“Jordan spent his career at Stanford trying to distance himself and the university from the Stanfords’ spiritualism, but Jane Stanford did not prove to be easy to escape.” (White, p. 56)
“Faculty who departed from Jane Stanford’s wishes endangered their jobs.” (White, p. 67)
“David Starr Jordan emerged from the Ross Affair a diminished, vulnerable, and vindictive man.” (White, pp. 115)
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
Most universities don’t look terribly glorious if you poke around in the circumstances of their founding or of much of their later history, particularly not if you follow the money. But Stanford at its beginnings was marked by corruption, greed, arrogance and misconduct in a pretty distinctive way. The university seems to have kept in touch with its roots.
Harvard doesn’t come off particularly well in Cooper’s book, but it’s pretty much ordinary par-for-the-course arrogance and self-protection rather than any notable malfeasance. (The response to several egregious cases of sexual misconduct that Cooper eventually pays attention to in more recent years is much worse than anything that happened in the life and death of her main focus.)
I like Cooper’s shift about 2/3 of the way through her book to seeing the murder of a Radcliffe undergraduate in January 1969 as a kind of tabula rasa that women in academia who knew of the case used as a cautionary tale about men. Cooper finds that she’s part of a community of women who’ve taken an interest in the case over the years, many of them with some indirect relationship to the murdered woman, but some just with a relationship to the relevant disciplines (archaeology and anthropology) or to Radcliffe and Harvard. All three of the male academics who Cooper investigates as suspects turn out to be watchfully observed by colleagues, both men and women, in terms of their observed and imagined behaviors.
I also kept going back in my own mind to the murder of a graduate student in my own program during her first year of doctoral study. It unnerved many of us tremendously, and the case remains unsolved. (The Baltimore Sun has covered the murder as a cold case several times in the intervening years, each time noting that there has been no movement towards any resolution.) The police at the time suggested, just as they did in the case at the heart of Cooper’s book, that it was likely someone she knew, which spurred a lot of intense discussions within the program. Cooper’s late-book revelations about the truly confusing, messy details of the police investigation of the Radcliffe murder made me wonder a lot about whether the police in the Baltimore case had any real reason for making that suggestion.
In Cooper’s book, I found myself a bit surprised at how incredibly thin the amount of genetic evidence that provided a confirmed suspect ended up being. There are times where I really wonder whether we’re doing that work as carefully as necessary, especially in older cases where you have to wonder at the standard of evidence preservation.
White’s book is in some ways less subtle or wide-ranging than his previous work, almost to a fault. It reads a bit like an adaptation of a Columbo script, with White playing the lead detective. He has his suspicions from the beginning, but the case offers in almost classically novelistic form a series of red herrings, false clues and credible suspects with means, motives and opportunities. I don’t know if I should reveal how it turns out in the end, but by the first third of the book, I think most readers will see where White is pointing. It is not a surprise when he unveils his accusation near the end. White’s open sympathy for the person he eventually accuses is also interesting—in a group of people that he plainly views as odious, Jane Stanford is one of the worst, to the point that White can appreciate why the suspect might have wanted her dead. (David Starr Jordan also comes off very badly, but perhaps not quite as much as in Lulu Miller’s Why Fish Don’t Exist, where Jordan’s intense devotion to eugenics ends up devastating Miller as she comes to see the scope of it.)
The Read: University Whodunits (Becky Cooper, We Keep the Dead Close; Richard White, Who Killed Jane Stanford?)
The gossip in the Cooper is kind of the main attraction, if you're tuned into the channel. It's not just interesting in its own right, but also as a kind of snapshot of one whole channel of disciplinary/guild conversation.
I read both of these and ended up liking the Cooper better, but hating Stanford lots more than ever. White does write in a fairly engaging style. Maybe I was just more interested in the Harvard archaeology intrigue and gossip, though.