Academia

Writing Wednesday: Writing as Habit

Last week, Josh Nudell (whose blog “Noodlings” I read quite frequently), commented on my distinction between writing as habit and writing deliberately. He suggested that for him, getting into the habit of writing helps him create a space (and time) where he can write more intentionally. I understand this.

For me, the challenge isn’t making time to write. Since the very end of my graduate school career, I’ve always managed to make time to write. In fact, it is so baked into my daily and weekly routine, that when I don’t write, I get anxious and distracted and feel off. Most of my daily writing appears on my blog or, increasingly, in my little notebook. Even as I take time to handwrite in my little notebook, the output is mostly low level writing and reflects what I consider to be low level thinking. This means it’s thinking without the benefit of research, revision, or careful consideration. In many cases my writing here represents “warm takes” conjured on walks, preliminary drafts of more serious work, or “speculatin’ on a hypothesis.” While writing in my notebook involves a more deliberate choice, when I re-read my entries, they strike me as even more casual (and careless). It turns out that even when I try to write deliberately and push myself to handwrite in a notebook, my habits of writing to write remains strong.

I reflects my tendency to write to scratch the itch to write. The problem is that over the course of a year, writing in my notebook and blog can absorb a tremendous about of time (and words!); I often write around 130k words per year here and another 30k or so in my notebook. 

Recognizing the amount that I write (which represents around 2 million words over the lifetime of my blog) has given me pause. Every day, I spend an hour or so diligently pecking away on my keyboard or scratching in my notebook. Over the course of a week, a month, or a year, this adds up. It’s time when I’m not reading, not preparing my classes, not writing for a professional audience (or really much of any audience to be honest), and not “being present.” It is sobering to realize that a significant percentage of this work is habitual writing and not driven by any greater goal than this is what I do first thing every morning.

What really brings it home is comparing my blog and notebook to my academic output (which is my job and, among other things, the basis for my salary). Over the last 20 years or so, I’ve probably managed 400k words of professional, published writing. That’s about 20% of my total writing work over this time if I allow for a generous overlap between my blog and my scholarly output. When I exclude, say, 20% of my academic writing as template driven and habitual “blah, blah, blah,” the numbers become even more bleak. The amount of my writing that represents deliberate, purposeful, and meaningful prose is even lower still.

Of course, I understand runners train many more miles than you race. We read many more books than we love. We practice more than we perform. Our habits prepare us to do things well when the circumstance demands it.

That said, humans are also prone to excess (as we are reminded daily in the media) and sometimes doing things just to do things isn’t really justifiable. When I think about my writing, I fret that my habit doesn’t justify its cost.

Three Things Thursday: I’m tired

On my walk yesterday, I forced myself to come to terms with how tired I’m feeling. I know by admitting this, I risk turning this blog into one of those early aughts Live Journal confessionals. And I really don’t want to do that, but I’m tired.

People who follow this blog have a pretty good sense for why I’m tired. The last month of the semester was brutal: my dad’s passing, my book manuscript being due, and the usual end of the semester (and end of the academic year) push to get things done while looking ahead and ramping up for travel during my summer research leave.

The texture of this fatigue is interesting though. For this week’s three thing Thursday, I want to try to disentangle it a bit.

Thing the First

Travel is always tiring and I’m not a great traveler. I get myself all stressed out about things that I can’t control in the week before I travel and fail to enjoy the miracle of air travel, the amenities of airports, or the careful vigilance of our safety and border control officers. As a result, I’m physically tired when I embark and even more tired when I arrive at my destination. It typically takes me the better part of a week to recover from international travel and that does something crazy with my body. Before I left for the Mediterranean, I was “running” (more of a bouncy walk, but whatever) 20-25 mile per week without much problem. Here in Cyprus, I’ve slowly labored my way through 12-15 miles weeks. My body protests every step with new twinges and aches, my legs are heavy, and my breathing and heart rate vacillate from being inadequate to power my movement or out of control.

On top of that, I sleep poorly, my blood pressure is high, and my resting heart rate — which shows little variation during the week — bounces up and down. I don’t feel refreshed in the morning and I’m usually exhausted my early evening. 

These feels are unpleasant but interesting in that they are so … somatic? So real? So physically textured and measurable. I don’t want to say that I enjoy them, but every day becomes a new adventure in how my body might hurt, refuse to respond, or behave unpredictably. I also smashed my smallest toe into a piece of furniture and almost certainly broke it. It hurts.

Thing the Second

The great heavyweight boxing champion Oleksandr Usyk is known to distinguish between motivation and discipline. He says motivation relies on emotion. When you feel motivated to work out, you work out, but if you don’t feel motivated, maybe you don’t work out. (This is best imagined with a very heavy Ukrainian accent). When you’re disciplined, you work out no matter how you feel. 

I aspire to being disciplined and I know that my time on research leave is fleeting. That means when I’m here in the Mediterranean, I do work. The days when I could work 12+ hours days are long past (and were probably less efficient than I imagine them to be) but I still do my best to push myself to get work done even when I’m unmotivated.

This summer, I’m spectacularly unmotivated (more on this in a minute) and my discipline is wavering. Writing has become a chore, project management is unfocused, and things feel cattywampus (and that is never a good thing when dealing with archaeology). I’m recognizing that for the first time in over 20 years, I can’t just switch gears and change my scenery to discover some new reserve of energy. 

That said, I’m going to keep slogging away and making slow progress. It is an interesting challenge. The resistance to even simply analytical tasks feel like wading through molasses. 

Thing the Third

The most bizarre part of my fatigue is that it has made even things that I enjoy — like photography — seem oddly dull and uninspired. I am taking photos on my daily walks, but they’re pretty uninteresting. Some are hackneyed. Some are cliche. And many are poorly executed and technically flawed (but not in an interesting way).

It’s disappointing because I’ve enjoyed taking photographs so much lately, but I’m feeling oddly detached from my practice. My discipline is still there (I’m taking photos), but the emotional resources that I draw upon to shape my own creativity, discern something positive, or even enjoy myself are simply empty. These feelings have made clear to me how much a sense of emotional awareness drives my photography (and “creative process” whatever that means in my case).  

Image

However interesting the texture of my current state is, I’m eager for it to pass. 

Ray Pospisil Day

It’s the end of a long, hectic semester, and it is time for a University of North Dakota story. Stories like these, that are passed down from generation to generation, are part of what makes our campus a special place:

Many years ago — some say the 1950s others the 1920s or 1930s or even the 1970s or 1980s (or even 1880s!) — there was a man called Ray Pospisil. He worked in the registrar’s office. Toward the end of every semester, he would make the announcement at that final grades could now be submitted and were due at a particular date.

This was usually with some fanfare: the ringing of the campus bells, a “huzzah” from the students and faculty as the news of the announcement would course across campus; some would raise a celebratory glass at the moment. Almost instantly, pre-printed flyers would appear around campus naming the location of student parties and dances. Throughout the day, people would wish one another a “happy Ray Pospisil day!” and the campus would embrace a celebratory mood that belied the stress and anxiety of the finals to come.

When the internet age arrived the administration saw fit to make a gesture to the original Ray Pospisil and the celebrations associated with his end-of-the-semester announcement. Today, the email that makes known that final grade rosters are ready comes from an account named “Ray Pospisil.” And, thus, the administration has preserved the shadow of a campus tradition into the 21st century. Today there are fewer “huzzahs” and the bells are silent, students no long plan parties for the day or wish each other well. But in a few campus buildings where some older faculty work and teach, there is the quiet ripple of applause (and maybe a draught of coffee, water, or whatever one keeps in one’s bottom drawer) to mark this moment.

Campuses are full of little traditions. These don’t get inscribed in glossy alumni magazines or touted on recruitment websites. They trace lines that course through both the public life of campus and extend deep into the undercommons. Ray Pospisil Day is a minor tradition — one that an updated email system or a new provost or some flashy new marketing priority could wipe away — but faculty and staff maintain it quietly without fanfare to show that they remember people who did meaningful work and embed these memories into the annual rhythm of the academic year.

Academic Rituals: When to Haggle

Universities are ritual places. The academic year is punctuated by ritualized gatherings: convocations and commencements. We have ritualized titles such as “professor” and forms of address. At times we were funny, impractical outfits and arrange ourselves in largely arbitrary hierarchies meant to invoke historical order that communicates the mystery and traditions of learning.

Universities also like to create new rituals from time to time and are replete with invented traditions. These both lean into already existing ideas that academic traditions are ancient (if not almost timeless), but also that each generation finds meaning in them in new ways. In this way, universities use rituals not only to provide the sense of enduring significance, but also as a discourse through which to articulate certain values.

Many of the rituals at universities are outward facing and seek to represent the university as a community. There are, however, some that are inward facing: “reading and review day” for example is the last Friday of the semester and historically was a day for students to prepare for finals. The rhythm of the semester has changed in the last 15 years and this day is probably more about blowing off steam or working an extra shift than reading and reviewing.

This last month, faculty engaged in a ritual that had developed over the course of the last ten or so years: the contract negotiation. UND is not a union school and as a result, each faculty member has a separate contract. When I started at UND these contracts were standardized: 40% teaching, 40% research, and 20% service. At some point over the last decade, the percentage of teaching changed. In my department we continued to teach 5 classes, but the value of the class shifted from 8% per class to 10% per class. Many contracts were then 50%, 40%, 10%. The work we did as faculty didn’t change, but how the contract represented it did.

In 2016, the university went through a series of dramatic budget cuts and saw the installation of a new budget model. These events were traumatic to the university community not only because we witnessed the termination of programs, cutting amenities, and most significantly people let go, but also because it contributed to the transformation the relationship between faculty and the administration. The change in the relationship between faculty and the administration also created new rituals.

When I first arrived at UND there was a faculty member who would negotiate his own contract each year. He would hold out, refuse to sign, and in the late summer, meet with the dean and ask for more money. Since he did this fairly regularly, my sense is that he this tactic was successful.

I have to admit participating in similar (although not identical) strategies. In my early days on campus, if I need support for my research, I could have a meeting with our Vice President of Research (or his assistant) and ask for resources directly. It sometimes worked and other times, it did not, but it was not a reach to do this. Indeed, it was possible for me to meet with the dean on a few days notice and colleagues had meetings with the provost and president regularly with a minimum of fanfare.

When faced with the horrors of laying off people who had worked at UND for generations and budget cuts that materially and personally impacted the university community, it is only natural that administrators wanted to put some distance between themselves, faculty, staff, and students. In the place of face-to-face meeting new more structured forms of ritual emerged to mediate between administrators and faculty. The contract negational counts among these.

Contract negotiations today are not about how much we get paid. That’s a separate process that is cloaked in its own mystery. Instead, we negotiate the percentages of the contract assigned to various part of our job. The stakes in these negotiations are so low that they can only be ritual. These negotiations are even lower than, say, the kinds of negotiations that take place when buy a car (where a dealer’s position serves mostly to affirm (and praise) the customer’s willingness “to playing hard ball” by performed an exaggerated “reluctance” to give in to the haggling) or when a new employee negotiate their salaries with both sides knowing the likely outcome of the performance. In both these cases the performance of ritual bargaining serves to give the customer or the new employee as sense of empowerment at a time of vulnerability.

The rituals surrounding contract negotiations at my institution serve slightly different functions. While buying a new car or negotiating a starting salary are situations with clear material significance, contract negotiations at my institution do not. These are effectively symbolic numbers that have no predictable correlation to substantive material gain. This ritual, then, has different goals:

First, they serve to reinforce a relatively new position in the administrative hierarchy: the associate dean. By encouraging faculty to negotiate with the Associate Dean — most often via the chair — the college (and the university) makes visible the presence of this position. This parallels court rituals which serve the mark out levels in the hierarchy, but make the hierarchy visible even, or, perhaps, especially, in relatively low stakes situation. 

The risk, here, as one of my colleagues pointed out, is that the ritual negotiation obligates both the faculty member and the associate dean to positions in the contract. Unlike, say, a procession where ritual presents hierarchy to a passive audience, contract negotiations creates mutual bonds. This means that the “winner” (the associate dean) must try to win and the “loser” must, eventually, accept their position of lower power and prestige. There is no moment where the loser is empowered —  for “driving a hard bargain” — but the winner must still assert their position effectively within the rules of the ritual. In other words, even a symbolic contract negotiation must justify the power difference rather than merely assert it as this important documentary shows.  

Finally, while most faculty view this ritual from the inside, there is a real possibility that the ritual also serves a broader audience outside the college. Some colleges on our campus have struggled more than others with the increasingly bureaucratization of university leadership. In many cases these are smaller colleges with fewer faculty and fewer intermediaries between dean and faculty members. As a result, the development of associate dean and the ritual contract negotiation becomes increasingly fraught as faculty seek to push back against the creep of bureaucratic control. In other words, the salary negotiation emerges a key symbolic battlefield. 

As the bureaucratization of the university is largely a top down process — faculty have little interest or need for the growing army of associate deans, associate provosts, vice presidents and so on — the need to demonstrate that bureaucratization is occurring across campus. These low-stakes rituals make this processes visible both to the upper tiers of the administration and across the various colleges. Indeed, there is reason to encourage a bit of drama in these negotiations to ensure that the upper administration sees faculty brought into line with the new hierarchy, but not so much drama that the ritual becomes an opportunity for resistance. Assessing the value of the harvest at the threshing floor is a practical and symbolical ritual provided that it doesn’t drive producers to thresh at night.

These kinds of analysis of university rituals are important for two reasons. First, it recognizes the role of ritual and mutual complicity in creating hierarchy on campus. In other words, if faculty participate in this ritual dance, they are participating in the creation of new administrative distinctions whether that’s their goal or not.

Of course, there are ways to opt out. For example, if faculty do not do the dance and haggle, this increases the chances that the ritual will fail. That said, it also breaks any form of mutual obligation that the ritual itself enacts. By refusing to participate, may cause the associate dean to resort to a display of “raw” authority (that is simply declaring what the contract percentages are) and this would undermine the mutuality that the ritual itself present. On the other hand, this risks ceding the expectation of mutuality however illusory.  

Whatever one’s strategy, it is nevertheless worth recognizing ritual moments at the university when they occur and trying to understand what the goals of seemingly pointless ritual exchanges might be. Because the ritual relies on both parties to work, this means that there are always opportunities to manipulate these ritual interactions in ways that benefit either side even if these manipulations will never completely bridge the real differential in power and authority on either side. 

More importantly, perhaps, is that by recognizing these exchanges as ritualized, we can see them for what they are. These rituals mark and create new layers of bureaucracy. Our contracts do not directly impact faculty labor or material benefits any more than being knighted in the 21st century grants one substantive political, military, or material privileges. It remains up to us as faculty to decide how best to use these ritual moments.

Teaching Thursday: I Learned it By Watching You

This year I’ve been enjoying the handwringing about the use of generative AI by students. It’s been exciting to see how people hardened into camps and how fierce the “debates” have become. I’ve even come to enjoy the sometimes cloying moralizing that characterizes the “Never AI” camp and the techno-utopian imaginings of the pro-AI camp. 

Of course, part of the reason why generative AI is marketed to students looking to avoid having to write papers, literature reviews, or other kinds of assignments is because these assignments are both highly formulaic and very common, it is easy for generative AI to mimic the structure, tone, and even content of these essays. This reflects the formulaic character both of academic writing and also of academic thinking. There are exceptions of course; scholars who can turn a literature review into a nuanced intellectual history. But we should be honest that most literature reviews, for example, are not the most valuable parts of the articles that we read. More than that, as scholars we often lean on things like critical book reviews and historiographic essays to help us unpack the relationships between works of scholarship and streamline our understanding of disciplinary practice. We can argue that book reviews and historiographic essays are still human generated, but their tendency toward formulaic expression and standardized organization make them a very constrained and, as a result, banal form of writing (in most cases). The line between this kind of writing and that gloop produced by generative AI tends to be fairly thin. As a result, when our students read our work and the work generated by large-language models, they often fail to discern the distinction between human-made and machine-made interventions. This is as much our fault as writers and thinkers and our students’ fault as readers and learners.

As pressure to publish or perish becomes ever more pointed, the tendency toward formulaic work becomes more pronounced and even necessary to keep the scholarship machine (and the scholarly publishing machine) humming. In short, we’ve created the perfect storm for generative AI, and the increase in articles written by robots demonstrates that scholars are not immune from the temptation to take shortcuts. This, in turn, feeds the proliferation of journals, ranking system, and impact factors. 

When we think about how our students engage with AI, it perhaps would behoove us to start with our own behaviors as scholars. Students pick up on our priorities. If we treat writing as a transactional activity designed to satisfy the requirements of funding organization, to fortify our impact factor, or to maintain our contraction obligations, our writing (research and thinking) habits will show this not only in what we write, but how we write (and teach writing).

This semester, I’m facilitating a faculty reading group on Tricia Bertram Gallant and David A. Rettinger, The Opposite of Cheating: Teaching for Integrity in the Age of AI. (2025).  I’ve blogged on the book here. 

So far, attendance at the reading group has been highly uneven (to be polite). Moreover, most in attendance haven’t completed the rather short reading. To be clear, these reading groups are voluntary. Presumably faculty and staff signed up for these groups because they anticipated some benefit. They had the option of several different meeting times and the meetings were scheduled weeks in advance. Still, faculty struggled to turn up, struggled to complete the readings, and struggled to participate.

Just as pressures on faculty to publish or perish have contributed to student use of AI by reducing the complexity and creativity of academic writing, faculty and students share innumerable competing pressures when it comes to attending class, doing the reading, and participating in discussion. I’ve written about the challenges of attendance on this blog a number of times (here, here, here, and here) and how it isn’t a sign that students (or for that matter, my colleagues) don’t care, but rather a sign that our expectations are increasingly incompatible with current realities. At a minimum, our own struggles with attendance should make us more able to empathize with our students.

At best, it should offer a kind of insight into why things like generative AI offer such an appealing short cut. When faculty struggle to find time to do all that they want to do, this creates conditions where the shortcuts promised by AI can thrive. Instead of meeting at a set time to discuss a book, we discuss its contents with an AI bot. Instead of doing the entire reading, we ask AI to summarize the text.  These conditions extend to our students as well (and to our administrators, our friends, and to our lives outside the university).

Teaching Thursday: Chasing AI

As readers of this blog know, I’m intrigued by how AI has become the latest raw material for the outrage factory (on social media). To be clear, I’m not an AI apologist nor some kind of fanboy. I have found some of its capacities useful — especially for analyzing very large bodies of unstructured text — but I am acutely aware of its limitations and the ethical problems associated with its use. 

That said, I’ve can also appreciate how AI has become a scapegoat for certain broader trends in social and in academia. There are lots of reasons to dislike and distrust the behavior of large tech companies recognizing the potential for abuse encourages us to remain vigilant. As goes society, so goes academia. The rise in the use of generative AI in scholarship and in the classroom has caused a good bit of alarm, led to a rash of new policies, and more than a little pious moralizing.

What has intrigued me the most lately is the close relationship between what AI can do in the classroom and in academia and the standards we often hold as instructors and researchers. This makes sense, of course, not only is AI trained on texts produced under certain standards, but we often reinforce those standards by providing rubrics and guidelines that serve as guardrails (or form the basis for Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback [RLHF]) for AI responses. Recently, a colleague was decrying an AI application that promised to produce accurate citations for academic work. He noted that such an application would hinder students ability to do proper research; in fact, he offers a “pro-tip”: “the only honest and acceptable way to generate citations is to do research, write from your research, and cite the sources you use.”) There is much to agree with in his perspective.

What struck me however is that using Ai to generate citations is a solution only because academia has fetishized citations as an indication of academic rigor. I have to admit that I sometimes fall into this trap. When students ask me how many citations they need in, say, a research proposal, I usually tell them that citations are a way to show me that you’ve done the work. In other words, citations authorize one to make statements on a given topic. While this is pedagogically useful — especially for students who struggle to understand the value of the research process — it feeds into a culture where citations are less about giving credit, showing the genealogy of ideas, or engaging in a conversation and more about “showing receipts.”

This culture is nowhere more manifest than in the peer review process where (and I speak here as someone who has done just this) it is only too common to be told to cite this or that work. Sometimes this is a welcome suggestion, but as often, it is a nudge to include a vaguely related article that seems “not inappropriate to cite.” A cynic can sometimes see the nudge as a political gesture to cite a colleague’s (or a reviewer’s) publication or a kind of desultory comment designed to show a vague attentiveness to the manuscript at hand. In few cases does the reviewer make the case for why a particular citation is valuable. As a result, the citation becomes performative in an intellectually empty way.

This, of course, coincides with the rising use of citations to measure scholarly productivity and “impact.” I10-index and H-index are perhaps the most common examples. Both of these serve mainly to track the number of times publications cite a particular work and this serves as a surrogate for “impact” in the field. The main promoters of these kinds of measurements are tech services company that overlap nicely with firms promoting and developing generative AI. Indeed, the kind of structured data present in citations is easy to extract and quantify. More to the point, for publishers having an oft-cited article or journal improves their rating, attracts subscriptions (and submissions), and pads their bottom line. It creates a metric that is easy for administrators to understand as well especially in an era where vaguely benevolent efforts to support and reward “scholarly productivity” has given way to the more coercive demand for “research products” and “high impact practices.”

The rise of generative AI that provides citation (accurate and otherwise), then, is not an entirely unwelcome arrival of a disruptive force in academic culture, but as a natural extension of diverse commitments to an ecosystem that both supports citational politics and that seeks to quantify citations as evidence for impact and productivity. In other words, we brought this shit on ourselves.   

New Year’s Goals

I don’t really do New Year’s resolutions, but I do think that the end of a calendar year is a good time to reflect on what I can do better, more, or differently. Even if these musings only inspire a moment of reflection, then I think they’ve more or less served their purpose.   

My goals last year were things like play more chess (which I think that I managed to do: I played just under 800 games of chess on chess.com and Lichess in various formats (5 minute blitz games, 10+5 games, 3 Day games, and even some “bullet” games, just for fun). I started writing more in my notebook. I exercised consistently. And I finished my Bakken book. I tried to do more for others, which in hindsight is probably not something that I should designate a resolution.

In 2026, I have two routine goals.

1. Write 100 Notebook Entries.  Last year, I managed about 65 and felt like there were times when I wanted to write and had things to write, but for some reason just didn’t do it. I think that 100 is within easy reach. After all, it’s just two per week right? 

Beyond the nice round number, I feel like 100 entries will be enough for me to figure out whether writing regularly in a notebook will help me become a better writer and thinker. My biggest concern is whether short, thoughtful writing exercises, like a notebook promotes will help me refine my writing in ways that longer, more relaxed, and digitally mediated exercises don’t.

2. Take Photos. I don’t really keep track of how many photos I take, but I know that I sometimes grow lazy and don’t carry my camera with me when I’m out on walks, I’ve struggled to make time to work on some interior photographs (which I have planned for a little photo essay), and I don’t necessarily take photographs with any sense of discipline. As a result, I accumulate random snapshots, poorly composed pictures, and sometimes go days without using a camera. This, of course, isn’t the recipe for becoming a better (or more satisfying) photographer.

There are two specific goals:

3. Finish PKAP II. This manuscript is killing me. This is the second volume documenting my work with David Pettegrew and Scott Moore at the sites of Pyla-Koutsopetria and Pyla-Vigla on Cyprus. At some point around 2014, we had 75% of the volume complete … and then it stalled. It stalled for a many reasons: I started working at Polis and in the Western Argolid; some of our authors enjoy fieldwork more than writing; David and I started editing the Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Archaeology; Scott became a Distinguished Professor; David and I worked together to publish EKAS, and so on. Over the last two years, we’ve managed to close the gap to about 95%. We’re waiting on ONE contributor who has promised us her chapter “by the end of the month” (which month was not entirely clear, but a promise is a promise). We have the rest of the bits and bobs in place. We have to finish this now.

4. Get North Dakota Quarterly on more sound financial footing. As readers of this blog know, the University of Nebraska Press pulled the carpet out from under NDQ at the end of the summer forcing us to scramble to raise money for a subvention to keep our relationship with that press. This wasn’t a great situation, but things like this happen. Publishing is a proverbial “frog eat frog” business. I’ll post a longer note on this later in the year.

Things are still in flux for the Quarterly, although I feel confident that we have at least two more years of issues ahead of us. My goal is to get NDQ funded through volume 100 and then some time between volume 95 and 98 step aside as editor so that someone else can shape the Quarterly knowing that they have a stable funding situation.   

There are two larger “big picture” goals:

5. More Discipline, Less Habit. Over the last year, I’ve found myself becoming pretty habitual with things. I write my blog, I exercise, I play chess, I read stuff, keep on top of my classes, and try to be a good departmental citizen. My abiding concern is that some of this has become just habit. In other words, I’m doing stuff because it’s the stuff I do.

Most days, routine involves playing a listless game of chess or moving my legs on my indoor bike just to do exercise (rather than with a plan on improvement or even enjoying the moment). It’s here that any sense of discipline lapses and instead routine takes over. I want more days where I do things intentionally and fewer where I just shuffle through my routine. 

6. Community. Our department has been going through a rough spot lately. I think it was prompted by a combination of new blood and the disappointment that comes when expectations elevate ever so slightly. To be clear, new blood and elevated expectations aren’t bad in and of themselves, but sometimes our eagerness for change outpaces the capacity of institutions and colleagues to change. As a result, things get tense and community breaks down.

This year, I’m going to think more about community and how we can create a department, institution, classroom, and society that feels more committed to each other than to some kind of ideal, goal, or outcome. I’m not entirely sure what this will involve in practice, but I am very certain that it will involve listening more than I speak (never an easy thing for a middle-aged dude), not looking for problems to solve (and indulging my savior complex), but for opportunities to celebrate, and keeping my fucking head down. 

Happy New Year, everyone!

Dark Academia

Every now and then (and often despite myself), I pick up one of those books that look to diagnose the problems with contemporary universities. To be clear, I am aware that these books are the academic equivalent to motivational books that populate airport bookstore shelves. Most of them — aside from some absolute classics that tend to mark watersheds rather than evince particularly compelling analyses — represent meaningful, if predictable and overly generalized diagnoses of problems that are so deeply rooted in social, economic, and political conditions as to resist any kind of practical inventions. 

Peter Fleming’s Dark Academia: How Universities Die (2021) is a proud expression of this genre. It’s about 170 pages of text and filled with familiar observations and conclusions. Rather than providing a fulsome review of a book that you could read in an afternoon, I’ll offer some superficial observations.

1. Authoritarianism. The greatest strength of Fleming’s book is that he offers a plausible explanation of how authoritarianism emerges in academia. As someone who has witnessed this on my own campus (and to some, limited extent, in my department), I was drawn to his analysis. He argues that neoliberal (his term) economic rationalization at universities has created a preoccupation with “pragmatic utility.” On most campuses this manifests as the growing spread of metrics, data, and quantitative assessment. Following cues from Taylorist practices in the private sector, administrators have deployed these methods with a kind of ruthless ubiquity. It matters very little that these numbers do not really represent the actual work of most academic life: teaching, research, writing or reading, and so on. They represent a method of control anchored in the economic authority of efficiency.

Of course, the failure of the pragmatic utility of metrics to reflect the actual work of academics leads to what Fleming calls “a para-structure of social informality” that seeks to close the gap between the methods of control and the needs for the university to teach students, support faculty, and conduct research in the real world. In my experience, this para-structure of social informality is another space where another kind of authoritarianism can emerge dictated largely by the uneven access to the informal (and social capital) knowledge necessary to accomplish goals. Fleming argues that access to this para-structure requires navigating “a shadow within a shadow” that exists within the unofficial informal culture in academia. This involves negotiating gossip, making awkward (and sometimes regrettable) compromises to gain sufficient capital to affect results, and operating at a significant remove from the transparent, if flawed structures of authority.

In short, Fleming demonstrates that most academics are caught between the rock of metrics that misrepresent (at best) our work and the hard place of the para-structure, informal networks, and gatekeeping politics necessary to accomplish our goals. This sounds familiar to me.

2. Individualism. One of the key points that Fleming makes is that the emphasis on individual work — both among students and among faculty — is a feature designed to facilitate mechanistic sorting and ranking processes (using metrics, of course) and stifling discontent by fragmenting both faculty and students. This is a technique, of course, common to authoritarian practice, but Fleming’s argument here does run counter to his claim that there are para-structures that organize shadow networks. Similarly, Moten contends that universities have the capacity to support undercommons that thrive in institutional blindspots and can subvert their explicit missions. 

That said, Fleming is at his most persuasive when he develops the point that individualism is a core feature of the assumption that faculty are economic creatures who seek to advance their own careers and earnings at the expense of others and at the lowest possible cost. This not only justifies the development of controls to ensure that faculty do their job and also the culture that assumes faculty will want to compete with one another to gain a greater share of the resources. More than that, if they don’t accomplish their goals whether by dint of competition or the informal shadow networks operating below the level of the administrative oversight, then it is a personal failing. 

3. Human Costs. A system based on authoritarian metrics complemented by a shadowy informal para-structure is a good recipe for misery. The decline in faculty morale, the persistent sense of crisis, and the sometimes crippling anxiety experienced by many faculty derive from a system that in fundamentally inhumane. Students, who often encounter some of the same challenges as well as taking on crippling level of individual debt, likewise suffer.  

There is a deeply painful irony that a system that often has among its explicit goals the desire to develop our capacity for empathy can, in turn operate in such a deeply inhumane way. For me as a scholar, this is the greatest disappointment in my time in the academy. I’m a cynical as the next person and can be a kind of a jerk at times, but over my two decades in higher education, I’ve been simply stunned by the number of instances where not only administrators, but also colleagues have shown profound levels of ambivalence in the face of policies or decisions that would compromise the morale, mental health, and even livelihood of colleagues.

This seems possible within a system where the misfortunes of others can only represent their inadequacies and limitations. As a result, these situations aren’t personal (somehow), but professional (while at the same time, reinforcing that success or failure are the result of personal traits, character, grit, work ethic, or whatever). Needless to say, this constitutes a deeply unhealthy environment.    

4. Institutional Viability. Finally, as the title of the book suggests, Fleming sees the university as dying institution that not only has abandoned its fundamental mission to improve society, but has also is built on an unsustainable (and deeply flawed) economic model.

~

Reading these books makes me feel like a physician trying to diagnose my own illness. I never fail to see shades of my own experiences in them whether it involves being tempted by tidy precision of metrics and data or feeling awkward when I encounter the expected power of informal para-structures in our institution. Maybe that’s their persistent popularity. They help us understand our situation better, affirm our anxieties, and present an irresistible structural problem that is beyond our individual capacity to resolve. 

Botxo CHAT in Bilbao

Those of you following my blog probably know that I spent most of last week at the annual CHAT conference in Bilbao, Spain. It was great and like the best conferences, I learned a good bit and it filled my head with ideas.  

Here are some quick thoughts on the conference as go through my notes (and my reading list!).

1. Multiple methods, ontologies, and epistemologies. I am always thrilled by the diversity of papers and approaches present at CHAT. While I tend to be conservative in my approach to archaeology (methodologically at least), I very much want to encounter and engage with more provocative forms of archaeological work.

In other words, I appreciated, say, the use of traditional archaeological methods to document the discarded material after a weekend flea market in Poland, the intensely detailed and careful documentation of migrant landing sites on Gavdos, or the use of aerial photography, view shed analysis, and GIS to locate anti-aircraft batteries in the occupied Czech Republic during World War II. I also enjoyed the use of experimental archaeology to explore the archaeology of dance for example. The construction of a clay dance floor, the casting of part of a removed sprung dance floor in bronze, and ethnographic parallels such as the dancing areas of festival grounds and the preparation of Sumo floors offers ways to understand the materiality of dance.

More provocative still were the use of film and audio not only to form a vivid backdrop for archaeological narrative, but also to create knew forms of experience and embodied knowledge.

2. The City. So many archaeological conferences take place in a hotel rather than in a city. For example, next week, I anticipate shuffling obediently from conference room to conference room for meetings and panels. The city of Bilbao not only formed a backdrop for the conference, but also was a participant in our discussions of contemporary archaeology, heritage, and urbanism. The transformation of Bilbao from an industrial city to a showcase for gentrified contemporary urbanism created a narrative that suffused our conversations in the conference. This inspired us to think about how our work to recognize contemporary heritage can transform not only the past of the city, but also the future.

I thought a good bit about my work in Grand Forks at CHAT and while Bilbao and Grand Forks are fundamentally different historically and in terms of scale, the challenges facing contemporary heritage are similar. Being in Bilbao pushed me to think about how both to memorialize and preserve the traces of past flows and accumulation of capital even as contemporary pressures push us to transform the present. 

3. Leadership. One of the most intriguing and productive panels at the conference was a roundtable on leadership in archaeology featuringSara Perry, Tiffany Fryer, Emma Dwyer, Carmen A. Granell, Francisco Orlandi, and Guillermo Díaz de Liaño. The topics ranged from institutional considerations (e.g. how do we facilitate the kind of discipline that we want within the limits of our current institutions) to more personal reflections on what makes a good leader.

Certain situations on my campus has made me particularly intrigued about how to create situations where positive forms of leadership are possible. For me, this means balancing the need to create institutional guardrails to prevent abuses, while also ensuring sufficient freedom for transformative leadership.  

4. Publishing. I was able to contribute to a roundtable on the challenges of publishing archaeology today with Catherine Frieman (formerly EJA and now Current Anthropology), Jaime Almansa-Sanchez, and Lara Band. As the publishing ecosystem developed to support archaeology remains diverse, so did opinions on publishing.

My position on archaeological publishing is well-known. As appealing as it is to imagine a radically different system of publishing, it is not particularly realistic. As a result, we need to encourage authors, readers, and publishers to work thoughtfully within the system that we have where large non-profit publishers, for profit publishers, open access publishers, and various other forms of publishing operate side by side creating a wide range of spaces and audiences. This means avoiding stereotypes (for profit publishing is “bad” or open access publishers are lower quality) and embracing the dynamism present in contemporary academic “outputs” and audiences.  

5. Conviviality. One of the greatest things about CHAT is that is the conviviality. The informality of the conference, the breaks, the long evening with food and beverages, created a space where ideas flowed freely. I was particularly happy to engage with students ranging from MA to PhD level who were willing to work outside the traditions of archaeological practice. Their presence contributed immensely to the conference and their willingness to present their work and engage in conversation made the conference more welcoming for everyone.

The music in the final session was amazing:  

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Talking about Public Humanities

I have been invited to participate in a panel today on the public humanities and that always gives me pause. I don’t always consider myself a particularly good humanist and I sometimes wonder whether what we do in the humanities has only the most tenuous connections to things outside of academia. In other words, are the public humanities really a thing or is it merely a marketing ploy designed to imply a broad audience for an otherwise limited-use tool. 

That said, when invited to participate in conversations, I tend to show up.

As I’ve mulled over the invitation, I think that I can contribute three things that I’ve tried to do as someone committed to public humanities.

1. Listen. One of the main things that I’ve learned from my interest in the public humanities is to listen more carefully to people when they talk about what they love, value, read, write, and do. When I first started thinking about public humanities, I focused too much on telling people what I do and what I think and trying to write in such a way that other people will read it. Of course, there is a time and a place for this, but over the years, I’ve found there are far more opportunities to listen than to speak. 

This helped me understand that public humanities isn’t so much about bringing what we do in the academic humanities to a public audience, but a matter of recognizing how the wider community “does the humanities” beyond the walls of academia. It is true that I don’t always love the humanities that the public “does,” but that’s fair enough, I don’t always appreciate the work of my fellow academic humanists either. The point of listening is that by recognizing how other people think about issues central to the humanities — values, art, literature, and so on — we broaden the conversation rather than just growing the audience.

2. Media is the Message. There was a time when I would argue (or perhaps only assert) that the humanities primarily deal with texts. I might begrudgingly admit that films qualified as “texts” of a sort. Then, maybe, TV shows (but only quality TV shows). Over time, I accepted that video games have a place within the big tent of the humanities. Lately, I’ve been intrigued by music. Podcasts are so textual that you almost need to turn a page while listening to them. TikTok, The Insta, Facebook, Twitter, Bluesky, Los Elefantes, and other places seem also to qualify.

Part of what’s exciting about the public humanities is that proliferates across media. It is a transmedia phenomenon. I’ll be quick to admit that my commitment to the public humanities is limited. I don’t enjoy podcasts (other than the one boxing podcast that I listen to from time to time), I don’t watch many movies (unless on a long flight), and it is apparently illegal to access the TikToks in North Dakota. I do what I can, however, to help people develop certain kinds of media skills. For example, in my Practicum in Writing, Editing, and Publishing I work with students to understand the editing and production process. While many of them aspire to careers in publishing, I try to remind them that they could be publishers without working in the “industry.” In fact, being students at a university give them access to all of the tools necessary to be a publisher and to explore print as a medium for their vision. Of course, their phones, laptops, and tablets provide most of the tools necessary to explore video, podcasts, and social media as ways to talking to and with a wider audience.

3. Creating a Platform. Finally, I like to think that my best work in the public humanities involves creating a platform for various voices. I try to do this with my press with varying levels of success. Some of the books we publish are intended for a broad audience, although most of the authors we feature are academic authors. North Dakota Quarterly, on the other hand, does more to platform public humanists who are not academic, who are academic, and who move between the categories.

Of course, as readers of this blog know, NDQ has struggled a bit to remain solvent and relevant within a very unstable, crowded, and difficult (perhaps even unsustainable) segment of the media world. That said, we (myself and my collaborators) continue to work to create space where academic and public humanities can intermingle in meaningful ways. It seems to me that the key to cultivating the public humanities is not just making what we do in the academic humanities available to a wider audience, but acknowledging that the public humanities exist, and we as academic humanists can do more to promote this work.