The Rhythm of the Academic Life
I have been in the academy now, as a student or an instructor, some forty-four years. I have witnessed all sorts of changes – most strikingly, a vast expansion in the scope, reach, and cost of the administration (which now dwarfs the faculty in most institutions). One thing has not changed, however – the peculiar rhythm that punctuates the academic year.
The first part of every term is for students and for those who teach them light-hearted. We start out well rested. The material is new and exciting for the most interested students and familiar and welcome to those not teaching it for the first time. Most important of all, there are no exams, no papers to write, and nothing to grade.
When I was a student, I found that I had the time to read books and articles of significance that I was not required to read, and I freely and joyfully indulged myself. When I became an instructor, if I was not teaching a new course, I found that I could continue for a time nibbling away at the research and writing that I had been doing in the summer.
Soon enough, however, four, five, or six weeks into the term, the deluge begins. There are preliminary exams to take or administer and papers to write or grade, and one must bear down to catch up or get the grading done. At this point, self-indulgence comes to an end. Or, at least, it should. Those students who wish to succeed set aside their outside reading, and their instructors set aside their research projects. The latter may still find some time to read things that they need to read, but very little writing gets done – except under the pressure of a deadline. For once the deluge begins, it does not stop. After the first preliminary exam comes the second, and there are additional papers as well.
By the end of term, exhaustion sets in. After Thanksgiving, on virtually every campus, there is a flu epidemic. The main function of the vacation is to put a substantial proportion of the student body on planes so that they can contract diseases from their fellow travelers, bring them back, and infect those who remained on campus or traveled only a short distance for the holiday. In the Spring, disease is less of a problem, and, at least in northern climes, the change in weather ordinarily brings relief. But there is exhaustion nonetheless. At my 9 a.m. classes, young people who are ordinarily energetic and attractive (as the young tend to be) with some frequency look like something the cat dragged in.
This year, my teaching was especially demanding. In the morning on the days I taught, I lectured on the origins of war, using case studies – the Peloponnesian War, World War I, the Second Punic War, World War II, and the Cuban Missile Crisis – intended to illustrate the dangers associated with entangling alliances, the difficulties of crafting a lasting peace, and the folly to which fecklessness can give rise. This course is hard on the students. Comparative history requires jumping from example to example, and one must learn the details from scratch over and over again. Structurally, there may be similarities between some of the cases. Noticing the similarities and the differences is the point of the course. But the devil really is in the details. Circumstances which are similar are never quite the same, and one must attend to the particularities of each case. This course is less hard on me than on my students. I have taught it frequently in the past. But I do have to remind myself of much that may in the interim have slipped my mind.
In the afternoons came the genuine challenge. I am working on a book on early Sparta – before and during the Persian Wars – and I wanted to teach a course that would require me to present what I had learned to an audience of relatively well-informed, diligent, and interested undergraduates. If I could explain myself to them, I could explain myself to that part of the reading public apt to purchase such a book. It is, I have always known, amazing what one learns in the process of trying to explain something of this sort to others unfamiliar with it.
Even more to the point, I taught the course with an eye to forcing myself to master material pertinent to the book that I was not fully in control of. This meant that I had to work like a dog all term, reading and re-reading the primary sources and coming to grips with the secondary literature. Above all, it meant that I had to tackle Achaemenid Persia – Sparta’s great foe in the Persian Wars.
You might think that this is all old hat. After all, scholars have had Herodotus, Xenophon, and the Jewish Bible to rely on for centuries, and there is not all that much to be learned from the biographies written by Cornelius Nepos and Plutarch, from the Moralia of the latter, from Diodorus of Sicily, and from the geographers Strabo and Pausanias. And you would be – partly – right. The subject on which I am working is well-trod ground.
But there is one thing that has changed. For something like twenty-five years, a group of scholars, mainly in Europe, have met annually for what they call the Achaemenid History Workshop to compare notes on the empire founded by Cyrus, expanded by Cambyses and Darius, and sustained by Xerxes. One could, of course, read about it two hundred years ago (and well before that) in Herodotus, Xenophon, and Plutarch and in the Book of Esther and the Book of Nehemiah. But there is also evidence (and lots of it) on papyrus, clay tablet, and stone in Aramaic, in Egyptian hieroglyphic, and in some of the languages that used cuneiform script – Old Persian, Elamite, and Akkadian – and there is archaeological evidence from localities stretching from Pakistan to Libya and from the Persian Gulf to Romania. There is no one in the world who can read all of the pertinent languages. And until the members of the Achaemenid History Workshop began gathering and reading papers to one another, there was no one in the world fully aware (much less in control) of all of the available evidence. To get a sense of what is now known, you can now work your way through Amélie Kuhrt, The Persian Empire: A Corpus of Sources from the Achaemenid Period (Routledge) and read Pierre Bryant, From Cyrus to Alexander (Eisenbrauns). And if you do, you will find Xenophon, The Education of Cyrus, tr. Wayne Ambler (Cornell) fascinating, The Landmark Herodotus, ed. Robert Strassler more exciting than ever before, and you will read the Book of Esther and the Book of Nehemiah with new interest and respect.
Thanks to the Achaemenid History Workshop, we now know a great deal that we did not know before. We can compare taxation practices in Babylon and Egypt. We can trace the workings of the Persian courier system. We can compare the practice of making land grants in Mesopotamia in return for military service with the practices in Anatolia and along the Nile. In its day, Achaemenid Persia was the greatest empire ever known to man, and we now have a pretty good idea how it was sustained.
For me the most interesting aspect of what has been learned is the light it casts on the pictures drawn by Herodotus and Xenophon and by the authors of the Book of Esther and the Book of Nehemiah. Put simply, although the evidence from the Near East suggests that these observers were wrong in certain particulars, it tends overall to confirm their expertise, to suggest that their judgment was penetrating, and to make one think that – on matters where we cannot test what they say by comparing it with documents from Persia, Babylon, or Egypt – their reports deserve respect and careful consideration.
For what I have gained by all of this labor I have nonetheless paid a price – something very much like the price paid by my students. Since mid-March, when we had our Spring vacation, they have been exhausted, and so have I. If I had my way, I would be writing manically right now about the battles of Salamis and Plataea. But I am simply too tired. The words scholarship and school come from the Greek word schole, which means leisure. I need some leisure from my leisure. Something of the sort happens every May.
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May '10
Re: The Rhythm of the Academic Life
After being out 20 years, I still kinda miss Summer being Summer. Right now, the only magic to be had is when my young ones get out of school. Otherwise it is just that time where the humidity and temp is 90+.
May '10
Re: The Rhythm of the Academic Life
Any chance we could get a peek at your case studies? I'd be particularly interested in the one on WWI. No matter how many times I read about its origins, an hour later I find myself thinking "How did that thing get started?" Are you familiar with "A World Undone" by G J Meyer? Any thoughts? I can't help thinking we're living in an era a lot like early July, 1914, with no clue of the apocalypse about to break over us.
May '10
Re: The Rhythm of the Academic Life
Boy, did this ring true, Professor. While I have no demands of the level of intensity that you describe (publication, etc.) the timing description really made me nod my head in agreement!
Nick, I'm with you. WWI has been on my mind for over a year. I took a group of our students to the museum in Kansas City. Here's a link to our school online publication about our trip...and I took the photo. :)
Aug '10
Re: The Rhythm of the Academic Life
Get a job with a federal politician. They follow a similar calendar. If you're in the district it's a holiday when the boss is in Washington. If you're in Washington it's a holiday when the boss is in the district.
;-)
Dec '10
Re: The Rhythm of the Academic Life
Misthiocracy
Get a job with a federal politician. They follow a similar calendar. If you're in the district it's a holiday when the boss is in Washington. If you're in Washington it's a holiday when the boss is in the district.
;-) · 2 minutes ago
I think you have it wrong. What you want to be is a politician. When a non-politician wants to campaign for office he needs to quit his day job. Politicians have no problem spending all day campaigning while still discharging their responsibilities of office. How time-consuming could those responsibilities be?
Aug '10
Re: The Rhythm of the Academic Life
Foxman
Misthiocracy
Get a job with a federal politician. They follow a similar calendar. If you're in the district it's a holiday when the boss is in Washington. If you're in Washington it's a holiday when the boss is in the district.
;-) · 2 minutes ago
I think you have it wrong. What you want to be is a politician. When a non-politician wants to campaign for office he needs to quit his day job. Politicians have no problem spending all day campaigning while still discharging their responsibilities of office. How time-consuming could those responsibilities be?
Yabbut, it's way easier to get a job with an incumbent than it is to become an incumbent.
Re: The Rhythm of the Academic Life
On World War I, I assign the relevant chapter in Donald Kagan, On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace (Doubleday) as well as Laurence Lafore, The Long Fuse (Waveland Press) and Immanuel Geiss, July 1914 (W. W. Norton). The last of these is a source book.
There is also lots of optional reading. See my next comment.
Re: The Rhythm of the Academic Life
Here is some of the optional reading:
Fourth Week
Volker Berghahn, Germany and the Approach of War I-III.
Fifth Week
Wolfgang Mommsen, “Domestic Factors in German Foreign Policy Before 1914,” Central European History 6 (1973) 3-43.
Geoff Eley, “Sammlungspolitik, Social Imperialism, and the Navy Law of 1898,” Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen (1 (1974) 29-63 (reprinted in his From Unification to Nazism: Reinterpreting the German Past [Boston 1986] 110-67).
Joachim Remak, “1914—The Third Balkan War: Origins Reconsidered,” Journal of Modern History 43 (1971) 353-66.
Paul W. Schroeder, “World War I as Galloping Gertie: A Reply to Joachim Remak,” Journal of Modern History 44 (1972) 319-45.
Ulrich Trumpener, “War Premeditated? German Intelligence Operations in July 1914,” Central European History 9 (1976) 58-85.
Dec '10
Re: The Rhythm of the Academic Life
Dr. Rahe - I will be awaiting your tome on Sparta with bated breath. I was enthralled with VDH's "A War Like No Other" and have always been fascinated by ancient Greece and the Persian wars. The movie 300 was entertaining, but there is so much more to the entire story than Thermopylae.
My college experience is about 30 years past, but I am watching (from a distance of about 175 miles) my son finishing up his Bachelor degree from Seattle Pacific Univ. We have the following schedule - June 7 at 4 pm we'll attend the Commissioning Ceremony from SPU's School of Theology. At 7 pm June 8 we'll attend my daughter's graduation from Wilsonville (Oregon) High School. At 12:30 pm on June 9 SPU's Commencement. Seattle is a 3.5 to 4 hour drive from here. I think by the end of that weekend we'll know a little of the exhaustion you speak of.
Re: The Rhythm of the Academic Life
Highly recommended:
F. R. Bridge, “Izvolsky, Aerenthaal, and the End of the Austro-Russian Entente, 1906-8,” Mitteilungen des Österreichischen Staatsarchivs 29 (1976) ??-???.
Michael R. Gordon, “Domestic Conflict and the Origins of the First World War,” Journal of Modern History 46 (1974) 191-225.
Konrad Jarausch, “The Illusion of Limited War: Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg’s Calculated Risk, July 1914,” Central European History 2 (1969) 48-76.
Fritz Stern, “Bethmann Hollweg and the War: The Limits of Responsibility,” in Krieger & Stern, ed., The Responsibility of Power 252-85.
L. C. F. Turner, “The Significance of the Schlieffen Plan,” in The War Plans of the Great Powers, 1880-1914, ed. Paul M. Kennedy (Boston 1979) 199-221.
I. V. Bestuzhev, “Russian Foreign Policy, February-June 1914,” Laqueur & Mosse, ed., 1914 = Journal of Contemporary History 1:3 (1966) 88-107.
L. C. F. Turner, “The Russian Mobilisation in 1914,” in The War Plans of the Great Powers, 1880-1914, ed. Paul M. Kennedy (Boston 1979) 252-68.
Marc Trachtenberg, “The Meaning of Mobilization in 1914,” in Military Strategy and the Origins of the First World War, ed. Steven E. Miller et al. (Princeton 1991) 195-225.
Re: The Rhythm of the Academic Life
Also highly recommended:
Jack S. Levy, “Preferences, Constraints, and Choices in July 1914,” in Military Strategy and the Origins of the First World War, ed. Steven E. Miller et al. (Princeton 1991) 226-61.
Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War: Explaining World War I (New York: Basic Books, 1999).
Annika Mombauer, Helmuth von Moltke and the Origins of theFirst World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
The Origins of World War I, ed. Richard F. Hamilton and Holger H. Herwig (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Sean McKeekin, The Russian Origins of the First World War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).
Aug '10
Re: The Rhythm of the Academic Life
My Amazon wish list grows exponentially with every visit to Ricochet ...
Re: The Rhythm of the Academic Life
Worth perusing:
Klaus Hildebrand, “Opportunities and Limits of German Foreign Policy in the Bismarckian Era, 1871-1890: ‘A System of Stopgaps?” in Escape into War? The Foreign Policy of Imperial Germany (New York 1990).
George Kennan, The Fateful Alliance: France, Russian, and the Coming of the First World War (New York 1984).
Paul M. Kennedy, “Tirpitz, England and the Second Naval Law of 1900: A Strategical Critique,” Militärgischichtliche Mitteilungen 2 (1970): 34-54.
Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860-1914 (London 1980).
J. McDermott, “The Revolution in British Military Thinking from the Boer War to the Morroccan Crisis,” in The War Plans of the Great Powers, 1880-1914, ed. Paul M. Kennedy (Boston 1979) 99-117.
Sean M. Lynn-Jones, “Détente and Deterrence: Anglo-German Relations, 1911-1914,” in Military Strategy and the Origins of the First World War, ed. Steven E. Miller et al. (Princeton 1991) 165-94.
Robert K. Massie, Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War (New York 1991)
Jonathan Steinberg, “The Copenhagen Complex,” Laqueur & Mosse, ed., 1914 = Journal of Contemporary History 1:3 (1966) 21-44.
Re: The Rhythm of the Academic Life
Also worth perusing:
Norman Stone, “Hungary and the Crisis of July 1914,” Laqueur & Mosse, ed., 1914 = Journal of Contemporary History 1:3 (1966) 147-64.
Norman Stone, “Moltke and Conrad: Relations Between the Austro-Hungarian and German General Staffs, 1909-1914,” in The War Plans of the Great Powers, 1880-1914, ed. Paul M. Kennedy (Boston 1979) 222-51.
Holger H. Herwig, “Clio Deceived: Patriotic Self-Censorship in Germany after the Great War,” in Military Strategy and the Origins of the First World War, ed. Steven E. Miller et al. (Princeton 1991) 262-301.
Re: The Rhythm of the Academic Life
The Great Adventure!: Dr. Rahe - I will be awaiting your tome on Sparta with bated breath. I was enthralled with VDH's "A War Like No Other" and have always been fascinated by ancient Greece and the Persian wars. The movie 300 was entertaining, but there is so much more to the entire story than Thermopylae.
My college experience is about 30 years past, but I am watching (from a distance of about 175 miles) my son finishing up his Bachelor degree from Seattle Pacific Univ. We have the following schedule - June 7 at 4 pm we'll attend the Commissioning Ceremony from SPU's School of Theology. At 7 pm June 8 we'll attend my daughter's graduation from Wilsonville (Oregon) High School. At 12:30 pm on June 9 SPU's Commencement. Seattle is a 3.5 to 4 hour drive from here. I think by the end of that weekend we'll know a little of the exhaustion you speak of. · 5 minutes ago
You will indeed.
Dec '10
Re: The Rhythm of the Academic Life
I've said it before and I'll say it again: I wish I knew about Hillsdale when I was applying to colleges.
Of course, I also wish that I had the same drive and discipline I do now, back when I was 18--(10 years ago!)
I will put your book on my "must read" list as soon as it's out. Good luck!
Re: The Rhythm of the Academic Life
Prof. Rahe, have you been on the semester system all 44+ years? In my experience with the quarter system, I never had any time to read unrelated readings for fun because the courses went by so quickly. We had our first papers and midterms due three weeks in, and we were done and onto the next set of courses after a short 10 weeks.
Jun '10
Re: The Rhythm of the Academic Life
Ditto. I did undergrad on the quarter system and law school on the semester system and I noticed the same phenomenon.
Aug '10
Re: The Rhythm of the Academic Life
Michael Horn: I've said it before and I'll say it again: I wish I knew about Hillsdale when I was applying to colleges.
Of course, I also wish that I had the same drive and discipline I do now, back when I was 18--(10 years ago!)
No kidding. When I find myself thinking about how I wish I'd made different choices, I stop myself by reminding myself that the choices are way less important than the general lack of effort. ;-)
Mar '11
Re: The Rhythm of the Academic Life
Ditto but 20 years ago.
When the prof said "Optional Reading" I heard "Things Not To Read". And when the prof said "Required Reading" I heard "Optional Reading".
I got A's though so that tells you something.