When you become a doctor, my mother told me, be a generalist, not a specialist. She was convinced that specializations come and go and, once cancer was cured, oncologists would be greeting customers at Walmart. Eventually I did become a doctor. But not the sort of doctor my mom had in mind: I have a Ph.D. in history. After many years as a specialist, though, I became a generalist. Not only does it turn out that my mom was right — specializations do come and go — but that, at least when it comes to effective teaching and writing, it is best when they are going and gone.
Let me explain. What I began to learn in graduate school, continued to learn as a postdoc, and learned yet more of as an assistant professor in modern French history has been invaluable. I learned how to make my way through local and national archives, make sense of public and private documents, and make the case for tweaking my particular field’s understanding of a small part of France’s past. During the years I spent heaving my notes into a dissertation, and my dissertation into a monograph, I also learned how to write for my few and mostly anonymous readers.
After writing a dusty sequel to the first monograph, along with teaching undergraduate and graduate classes devoted to the same historical region and period, I learned something else: I’d had enough of this subject. I also had the good fortune to be tenured, which allowed me to act on this knowledge. While I idolized the great names in my field, I realized that it was time to move on.
The thrill of discovery, I have discovered, is contagious.
I have moved on, but I cannot tell you exactly where. While I still teach one course from those early years, I have inflicted many new classes on several generations of undergraduates. The subjects have ranged from Enlightenment and existentialist thinkers to terrorism and nihilism, the Trojan War and ancient Greek tragedy to World War I and postmodern fiction.
What are my credentials? Strictly speaking, I haven’t any. Given my professional training, I am no more accredited to teach these classes than Trump University was to teach the real-estate business. At times, quite honestly, I feel less like a generalist and more like an impostor. A bit like Ferdinand Waldo Demara, the man who inspired the 1961 film The Great Impostor and, though he never graduated from high school, worked as a dentist, psychologist, prison warden, Trappist monk, and, yes, college professor, cancer researcher, and doctor. (No doubt his mother was more satisfied than mine.)
I am not urging people to find this particular Waldo in their own careers. After all, when asked why he pretended to be what he wasn’t, Demara replied, “Rascality, pure rascality.” While he did not kill anyone while pretending to be a doctor — in fact, he saved a man’s life by amputating his leg (after speed-reading a surgery manual) — a rascal is not someone I would trust to give my child a tetanus shot, much less a tonsillectomy.
But I believe that somewhere between imposture and inertia, between goring patients with a scalpel they’ve never before used and boring students with a script they’ve used too often, professors can find a place — it might be labeled “Start” — where they need to spend more time.
First, I try to design a syllabus that leads me to this place. It lists the required readings for my students, of course. But I am also required to reread these books. Or read them for, yes, the first time. (Am I truly alone to refer in lectures — repeatedly — to books that I have never cracked open?) Yet once I do open each book — whether Céline’s Voyage to the End of Night or Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, José Saramago’s Blindness or Karan Mahajan’s The Association of Small Bombs — it is, almost unfailingly, a revelation.
Second, revelations tend to ripple. The thrill of discovery, I have discovered, is contagious. With books I have taught for 20 years or more, the dots not only connect but congealed a long time ago. Pedagogically, that is not a problem; I am not required as a teacher to be in a state of wonder. But it does help. With books I am teaching for the first time, the dots fill the air like lightning bugs on a warm summer evening, and I am running after them along with my students. There are no losers, only winners in this catch-as-catch-can pursuit of meaning.
Third, this approach is an antidote to what my colleagues in sociology call “the curse of knowledge.” Specialists are particularly prone to this condition. I should know — as a recovering specialist in the subject of Vichy France, I still carry the curse. The longer I researched this historical period, the dimmer grew my ability to relate it to students. Surrounded by trees, I could not convey the character of the forest to others — or, honestly, to myself.
I came to take jargon for vernacular and complicated contexts for common knowledge. And the more I took for granted the inherent importance and interest of this period, the harder it was to explain why to others. The more I honed my specialist credentials, the duller grew my reasons — once urgent and immediate — to study Vichy in the first place. From a passion, it had withered into a profession.
Besides, the curse of knowledge is, as Steven Pinker notes, “the chief contributor to opaque writing.” This happens when writers “don’t seem to know the intermediate steps that seem to them to be too obvious to mention, and can’t visualize a scene currently in the writer’s mind’s eye.” As a result, academics fail “to spell out the logic, or supply the concrete details” to their readers.
When you combine logic and details, you create a story — which is perhaps why academic historians have a difficult time at narration. Why bother to show, after all, when you have been taught to tell? And when you have spent years telling this or that, and not showing, then your captive audiences find this or that as tempting as a slice of last week’s pizza.
Ferdinand Waldo Demara spent his life one step ahead his patients and prisoners, superiors, and students. While his rascally character is hardly a virtue for teachers — or almost anyone else — his intellectual restlessness may well be. Keeping one step ahead of our students may help keep our profession from taking yet one more step toward its grave.
