Med-School Professor Seeks Grad Assistant for Course on Ben Franklin. Historians Are Not Happy.

Craig Gallagher noticed the job listing in an email digest. It was for a position in his area of study — early American history — but that wasn’t what caught his eye.

What stunned him was that the listing, on the interdisciplinary network H-Net, sought a part-time “teaching fellow” to help the oncologist and bioethicist Ezekiel J. Emanuel plan and teach an undergraduate course on Benjamin Franklin at the University of Pennsylvania.

Emanuel, the ad read, “seeks a graduate student or postdoctoral fellow to help design the course and reading list, select outside speakers, and organize field trips in Philadelphia.” The fellow would also help with grading and would be paid “generously.”

Gallagher, an adjunct instructor of history at New England College, in New Hampshire, calls himself a “chronically underemployed academic” and says he’s no stranger to reviewing posts like the one on H-Net.

“I made a habit over the last couple of years, partly because of how unequal and exploitative I find the academic job market to be, of highlighting ads that I think are ridiculous in terms of what they expect of the people applying,” he said. “So it felt worth saying how irresponsible and insulting I thought the ad actually was.”

Gallagher shared the H-Net listing on Twitter, writing that Emanuel (whose brother Rahm is a former mayor of Chicago) was asking applicants to “do literally all the work of the class he is going to teach on Benjamin Franklin, despite having no historical training himself.”

Historians on Twitter quickly echoed Gallagher’s sentiments, questioning why Emanuel — a frequent health-policy commentator who last week appeared on MSNBC to criticize President Trump’s response to the coronavirus outbreak — was teaching a course on Franklin. They complained that the position would follow a troubling tradition of undervaluing or exploiting the labor of early-career scholars, or of the humanities as a discipline.

Karin Wulf, a professor of history at the College of William & Mary and executive director of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture, was among those voicing concern on Twitter.

“I don’t think anybody is telling Dr. Emanuel that he’s going to be out of a job because I can look up ‘oncology’ on Google,” Wulf told The Chronicle, “or I could teach a class in oncology by getting a med student to tell me a little about it. This is a symptom of an erosion of respect for expertise that sometimes hits particularly hard in subjects that people think are more intuitive, rather than intellectual and requiring deep study and disciplinary expertise.”

Wulf even questioned the veracity of the listing. “I cannot imagine a historian writing that ad. There is a kind of naïveté about how that exploitation of historical expertise would read in the ad that made me think, ‘Who wrote this ad? Is this a joke?’”

The listing, as it turned out, was not a joke. In response to one scholar’s query, H-Net tweeted that it had confirmed the post’s authenticity with Penn.

‘Taken Aback’

Emanuel told The Chronicle he was “a little taken aback” when a historian colleague told him that the ad was attracting controversy on Twitter. He’d already spread word of the opportunity among his colleagues and interviewed several candidates, all to positive receptions.

“[I] probably should’ve spent more time trying to make my ad conform with the other ads on H-Net, but this is neither deceptive nor a fake ad,” Emanuel said. “I am not being exploitative or going to have a grad student do all the work and put my name to it. Anyone who knows the least bit about me would recognize that that just isn’t what I do.”

In fact, Emanuel said, he’d never intended to teach that course. He hadn’t known much about Benjamin Franklin until arriving in 2011 at Penn, which Franklin founded. But after reading a few Franklin biographies, Emanuel wanted to learn more. He asked an assistant to find out whether the university offered a course on Franklin, so that he could enroll.

Word came back that not only did Penn have no such course, but neither did any other Ivy League institution. Emanuel found that ludicrous, and began to advocate for the creation of a Franklin course at Penn.

At the same time, Emanuel said, Penn was planning a set of civic-engagement courses to offer undergraduates as part of its Stavros Niarchos Foundation Paideia Program.

“When people heard my interest in doing this and my outrage that we didn’t have a class, they suggested, ‘Why don’t you teach one of these Paideia courses in the inaugural class?’” Emanuel said. He said he had hesitated, noting he wasn’t “terribly qualified.” But he does hold a Ph.D. in political philosophy from Harvard University, he said, and has “taught lots of political ideas over my time.”

Emanuel said he explained his vision for the course to Paideia officials, who agreed to the idea. While he plans to spend July preparing for the class, which will be offered in the spring of 2021, he mentioned several potential topics — including Franklin’s views on colonization, slavery, and patriotism — in an interview, and said he was working with Philadelphia institutions such as the Benjamin Franklin Museum to identify course resources.

Daniel K. Richter, a professor of history and director of Penn’s McNeil Center for Early American Studies, said he had no comment other than to say that neither he nor Penn’s history department had been consulted about the course’s creation. He wrote in an email to The Chronicle that he had a conversation with Emanuel last summer about Emanuel’s “general idea for the course,” but had not spoken with him since.

A Second Try

The job posting was removed from H-Net on Friday afternoon and replaced hours later with a more-detailed version:

“As part of an initiative on civic engagement, the university is offering a new course on Benjamin Franklin for the Spring 2021 semester. By critically engaging with Ben Franklin’s life and writings, this interdisciplinary course combines political theory, ethics, and history to explore questions about how to live a life of meaning, how to confront or overcome our own limitations, faults, and errors, and how to be civically engaged,” the new post reads. “Course Professor Ezekiel Emanuel seeks applicants who will complement his background in political theory and medical ethics by bringing expertise in 18th-century American history to course development and instruction.”

The new listing, which includes a pay range — $15,000 to $20,000 — and details on preferred qualifications, was more satisfactory to some scholars. But on the basis of the job description, Gallagher, Wulf, and others remained skeptical.

An interdisciplinary, co-taught course that relied on Emanuel’s public-health expertise, Wulf said, would be welcome. “But this,” she wrote in an email to The Chronicle, “is not that.”

“Penn has simply reworded the ad to make it seem like the opportunity to have your labor wildly exploited by an Ivy League professor is actually a better opportunity than it first seemed!” Gallagher tweeted. “Now they will pay you less than minimum wage!”