The post On Being’s Krista Tippett appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

From years of obsessively watching Law & Order, I had assumed my questioning would focus on the titillations mass media devours—which was how my name was associated with the crime in the first place. My involvement with the case did not begin January 31, 2015 when the 42-year-old Croatian historian William Klinger was shot twice in an Astoria park in broad daylight and left to die. After he was declared dead in a New York City emergency room, no one had informed me because I was irrelevant to his life. Three weeks later, however, I got emails and calls because the murderer claimed I was part of why Klinger had died.

Police determined that Klinger had been in the park alone with a friend, 49-year-old Alexander Bonich. They also discovered that Klinger had wired $85,000 to Bonich in order to purchase an apartment in Astoria. Anyone who knows anything about New York real estate can smell a rat in this story. An apartment in Astoria costs about $700,000, if you’re very lucky. In New York City, real estate fraud is a believable motive for killing. Bonich was arrested posthaste.

To counter the murder charge, Bonich insisted he shot Klinger out of self-defense. As Bonich told police and then a New York Times journalist, on the day of his death Klinger behaved strangely. He seemed unhinged, filled with emotional rage triggered by the fact that he had deserted his family in Europe “to meet a woman named Dominique.” With Klinger coming at him, Bonich insisted he had shot Klinger to forestall Klinger doing the same to him.

There are very few people connected with Croatian academia who share my first name. Within minutes of the New York Times article giving Bonich’s side of the story going live, a friend wrote me an email to alert me. Within an hour, my inbox was filled with queries from journalists and police. The idea that Klinger’s grieving wife and children would have to suffer the killer’s lies cut me to the quick and I responded by contacting anyone I could to set the record straight.

The New York Times immediately erased my name from the article they had published online. I gave journalists, police, and lawyers full access to all my communications with Klinger. At some point, the murderer had also asserted that Klinger and I had had a rendezvous in New York in the days prior to the shooting. To disprove this, it took just a few minutes to supply travel itineraries and credit card statements showing how I was nowhere near New York City at the time.

At Bonich’s trial three years later, I assumed I was being called to the stand to disprove assertions about Klinger’s relationship to me. Imagine my surprise, then, when two minutes into my deposition the prosecutor asked me, “What are the archives?”

In my professional life as a history professor at an elite research university, “what are the archives?” is a question that gets posed regularly, often by professors encouraging students to think about how history “gets made.” When the prosecutor asked me this question, it was in response to my explanation of how I had first met Klinger. I had said “I met him in the archives in Rijeka [Croatia],” assuming this was straightforward. When asked to elaborate, I still assumed that the question was not about the things I usually talk about when discussing archives, but about the nature of my relationship to the deceased.

Was it possible that the prosecutor feared the jury imagined we had met at some nightclub called “The Archives”? Maybe those Queens residents were picturing us drinking cocktails at a bar pretentiously decorated with old-school card catalogs, green banker’s lamps, and anachronistic maps? So, instead of answering what archives were in a professional sense, I focused on how unsexy—how all work, 8 a.m.-to-2 p.m. no fun—they are.

Here is where it became clear that all my assumptions about why I was in that courtroom were wrong. As I was explaining how archivists regularly introduce scholars to each other in the reading room, the defense attorney called out: “Judge, I’m going to object to the witness being nonresponsive.” Though the judge overruled the objection, the effect of the defense attorney’s intervention was significant.

From then on, my job in the almost 80 questions that followed was not to disabuse the court of ideas of adulterous encounters but instead to explain what this strange profession of “historian” was, and what role it played in bringing Klinger into that Astoria park on the day he died.

I told the jury how Klinger had attended some of the most prestigious institutions in Europe, how he had published widely in several languages, and how he was generally considered the expert in his field, even though he could not find permanent, full-time employment anywhere. A long-time motto repeated ad nauseam in academia is “Publish or perish.” In essence, I was there to explain how this historian perished in our profession even though he had published, and how his professional disappointment set him up for associating with someone who would kill him for real.

When reading over the court transcripts, it is hard to remember that we were all sitting together in that room because a man had died. The questions were not about Klinger or his murderer. Instead, they focused on the intricacies of how difficult it is for a historian to make a living.

I explained how historians can’t get academic jobs through individual merits in the U.S. or Europe. You need networks. I talked about “markets,” the expectations of what CVs (the academic term for resumes) should look like, and how getting noticed by universities is dependent not just on productivity but also on references from people of great esteem. With every explanation I gave, another question came up. What is a postdoc? What is an editor? What is a letter of recommendation? How does anyone get paid?

The questions kept coming because the answers I was giving made no sense to how people imagined someone survived as a professional historian. Weren’t historians like artists or writers? Wasn’t their worth and position dependent on the quality of what they produced? Or maybe they were like journalists, paid per column or through working on producing publications? Or maybe historians were like teachers, their employment opportunities dependent on the degrees they had obtained?

I’m sure it was confusing when I told the lawyers, judge, and jury about how the writing and publishing process works. I said: “People don’t make money working for journals; you do it as a volunteer for the state of the field. There are no paying jobs.” Both the defense attorney and the prosecutor had been under the impression that Klinger’s arrival in the United States would solve his miserable professional status in Europe. My testimony underscored that it was far from the truth—but that Klinger didn’t know it, and that’s what made him vulnerable.

Though he had published much and the solidity of his research was undeniable, Klinger had not proven himself as a man who worked within structures. He had never taught in an American classroom. He had no portfolio of teaching evaluations. He had not participated in a research facility where interdisciplinary collaboration was emphasized. He had almost no links within the wider profession, meaning there were few who could vouch for him to those outside his relatively obscure specialty. This also meant he could not help future students procure positions.

Klinger did history like a starving artist might: he worked alone, he published in the easiest and quickest (rather than the most prestigious) journals, and he struggled to broaden his profile. His lack of networks was partly a result of the fact that no one in Italy or Croatia would give him a permanent position. But it was also partly because he was so passionate about the researching and writing that he didn’t prioritize the other stuff.

I had explained to Klinger “at the archives” and in emails what I had said in court: procuring permanent employment in the United States is a slow, networked, highly professionalized process that proves unsuccessful for most. I had told him explicitly that there is no way to just publish, come, and get a job. But Klinger ignored me and decided instead to believe a man who told him what he wanted to hear.

Apparently, Bonich promised Klinger all: not just an apartment but also a job at Hunter College in New York City based on his qualifications, with no application, interview, or letters of recommendation required. That is as inconceivable as the $85,000 price tag for an Astoria apartment. Nonetheless, Klinger wanted to believe. The murderer also told the court Klinger had deserted his family in part because I had arranged a position for him as a journal editor in Maryland, one which would pay enough for him to build a new life for himself.

This, too, was not just a lie; it was impossible.

It didn’t matter that Klinger and I barely knew each other. It didn’t matter that the journal the killer named did not exist. It also didn’t matter that history journals do not pay book review editors. The killer told those lies because he thought they were believable, because that’s how he thought the historical profession worked. Just like Klinger, Bonich did not realize that there are almost no historians in the world who can survive on their writing, their editorships, or their qualifications. Historians in the United States are paid for how they work within institutions. And getting into the institutions is a herculean feat only the most obstinate should try to undertake.

We’ll never know how many lies Bonich told Klinger before killing him. It pains me to imagine what must have been going through Klinger’s mind right before he was shot. According to statements from Klinger’s wife published later, he was supremely happy when he arrived in the United States and believed he had a professional future waiting for him, filled with open horizons. Did he find out before the shots were fired that this was not true?

For his sake, I hope he never found out. But I cannot say the same thing for the world surrounding me. All the imaginary ideas that the media and the public have about all the humanities professions need a reality check. People whose employment is based on their expertise in history, literature, art, languages, music, philosophy, religion, theater, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality do not live “outside” professional worlds. They are not narcissistic navel-gazers, or spoiled and leftist tweed-wearers who spout off elitist ideas and pursue whatever whims their interests take. They are also not hired based solely on their educational qualifications or their publications.

What historians and other humanists are expected to do within their places of employment are a mixture of several different specializations. They are supposed to research like forensic accountants, publish like writers, instruct like teachers, institution-build like well-connected editors, promote others like agents, and administer institutional bodies like practiced CEOs.

Even those who can do all these jobs simultaneously often can’t secure employment. According to 2019 surveys, only 19 percent of recent Ph.Ds. in history programs within the United States received the kind of job Klinger believed he would get in New York City. And a large number of the 80 percent who did not gain a permanent research-geared university position had a more balanced employment portfolio than Klinger could boast.

It’s been six years since Klinger died and three years since I testified about the historical profession at his murder trial. Since then, the world this 42-year-old Croatian historian tried to enter has become even tougher to crack. Now there are even fewer jobs while the breadth of the work required for this profession has only increased. Technological know-how is increasingly required for any applicant in this increasingly digital world. Sociological and psychological know-how are now musts in environments where students are exhibiting ever more the traumatic effects of our political and economic realities. Administrative skills are ever more sought after as educational institutions’ budgets get tighter. I imagine soon deans will require proof of the ability to fundraise for new hires.

At the termination of the murder trial, Bonich was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison. In her closing arguments, the prosecutor emphasized how Bonich’s crime was premeditated, one which weaponized an “abuse of the American dream” to catch, corner, and eliminate Klinger, his prey. The judge finished his sentencing saying “[I]t was as though you were writing a play. You set about and engaged in an elaborate scheme to convince Mr. Klinger that the yellow brick road from Croatia to America goes right through you.”

Both the prosecutor and the judge were right, but Bonich was not alone in abusing a dream or writing that play. We have, too. It’s time to give up the fantasies we have about what the profession of history is, so we can better appreciate what its practitioners do and better streamline how humanists might engage with society at large.

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Things often sound true when they rhyme. Growing up in Canada, I would have agreed with Carnevale. I would have even agreed with politicians like the governor of North Carolina, Patrick McCrory, who sees university primarily as job training. I had a Romanian immigrant’s relentless pragmatism, having been raised to think that medicine and law were the only acceptable career options in life. Although I was a bookish teenager, I never thought I could study literature or history or philosophy. At some level I felt these topics were pleasant but useless fluff, nice as hobbies but not worth thousands of dollars in tuition and four years of my life.

At the University of Toronto I fell in love, against my better judgment, with English literature, and switched majors. I felt like a rebel reading Paradise Lost and learning Old English grammar instead of doing something that would earn me a job after graduation. But although I made the switch to the liberal arts, I couldn’t help but feel that the humanities were still somewhat superfluous. This opinion began to change the summer when I was 20 years old. In search of my roots, I went to Bucharest and worked at the Canadian embassy there. That job was the beginning of a practical education in the importance of the humanities.

I learned, for example, how much depends on a word. One of my tasks was to translate interviews with Romanians who wanted to marry Canadians. The immigration agent needed to know if the couple was in love or if the relationship was faked. It was essential that I be scrupulous, adding nothing and taking nothing away. Liars, I learned, often make up romantic stories about their betrothed but cannot bring themselves to say “love.” One woman was allowed to emigrate because, pressed to explain why she wanted to marry her middle-aged, average-looking fiancé, she said merely that he was a good man and she loved him.

During another interview with a prospective fiancée, the Canadian agent pushed a pile of letters and cards towards me and said, “Look over these and see if they seem romantic to you.” My critiques of Romantic poetry in university had made no difference to those long-gone poets, but now the woman whose future I would help to decide watched me as I read over her correspondence with her boyfriend. “It isn’t particularly romantic,” I declared, with all my 20 years of life experience behind me, “but they seem to know each other well.” Her visa was approved.

The more important lesson, though, I learned secondhand. One day, as I was running background checks and doing paperwork, my co-worker told me the story of her in-laws’ marriage. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the communist government of Romania carried out a massive program of re-education and extermination of the country’s cultural elites. Artists, intellectuals, lawyers, politicians, and priests were put in political prisons and work camps. In a notorious experiment at the Pitești prison, prisoners—many of them university students in the humanities—were “re-educated” using physical as well as psychological torture. Guards beat and subjected them to extreme cold and hunger. They were made to eat their own excrement, and, worst of all, to torture each other. My colleague’s father-in-law, then a student of literature, was one such prisoner.

In order to maintain his sanity, the young man turned to his education. He knew French, his cellmate knew English, so they spent their captivity teaching one another their foreign languages. After his release, the student was forced to work in a factory, where he met a woman who had also studied literature and been imprisoned as a result. Neither could marry people with clean records for fear of ruining their “files” with the government, so they married each other. Their apartment in Bucharest became a kind of salon, with artists and writers always coming and going. This man, who had learned English in a jail cell, ultimately became a literary translator of English poetry.

When I heard this story, I understood that the stereotype of the fluffy, useless liberal arts was a lie. If the study of literature or history were really that pointless, a government trying to control the minds of its subjects would not go to the trouble of putting humanities students and professors in jail. For educated prisoners, the love of language, art, and scholarship was no mere hobby. It was a lifeline, sometimes the only thread tying them to their identities, their dignity, their shredded sense of humanity. Nothing could be more practical.

Years later, when a new wave of cutbacks in higher education led to reports of another humanities “crisis,” I decided to find out how much of the oral history I heard at the embassy had been written down. I read a dozen Romanian prison memoirs, all of them published after the 1989 revolution. Each one testified to the power of the liberal arts—especially literature and foreign languages—to help individuals maintain sanity and a sense of self in conditions designed to destroy them.

The memoirs taught me how common it was for prisoners to teach each other languages. Constantin Giurescu, a historian, learned Hungarian from one prisoner and taught it to another; meanwhile, he practiced his English, German, and French. The mathematician and Holocaust survivor Egon Balas held language sessions during captivity to practice English, Russian, French, and German. In prison, Arnold Schwefelberg recalled the Hebrew he had previously learned to the point where he could think in it fluently. Dan Brătianu and his fellow prisoners were tormented by lice, for which they received DDT in glass bottles, so they covered the bottles in spit, rubbed them with soap, and sprinkled the DDT on top. They could scratch up to four hundred words on this makeshift writing surface, which they used to teach each other foreign vocabulary. Later, some of the prisoners who had learned English from Brătianu became professional translators.

Many prisoners survived by recalling poetry they had learned in school or by writing their own. The artist Lena Constante learned French prosody by remembering lines of poetry, scanning and analyzing them, and then composing her own verse in French. Schwefelberg “wrote” 50 to 60 poems and a play, some of which he committed to paper after release. Inmates used Morse or other tapping codes to compose poems, often finishing each other’s lines. They also communicated essential information by quoting poetry, guessing that the guards would miss the point. Prisoners formed study groups, recalling the plots of novels and teaching each other history from memory. Forced into a program of “re-education,” they created their own university instead.

Being an immigrant once made it difficult for me to imagine studying the humanities. Going home to Romania—both physically and through books—helped me understand the value of the liberal arts, one that goes far beyond job prospects and starting salaries after graduation. We have been taught to think of the liberal arts as unnecessary and wasteful, or in Ronald Reagan’s words, “intellectual luxuries that perhaps we could do without.” Memoirs of the Romanian gulag showed me what a dangerous lie this is. Educated political prisoners drew on rich inner resources to preserve their sanity and their spirits. They used their knowledge to help their fellow inmates survive as well. Their experiences reveal what the attack on the humanities really is. It is an attack on the ability to think, criticize, and endure in crisis, and its virulence betrays how vital the liberal arts are. The political rhetoric against the humanities exposes what is most important in our education, even as it attempts to destroy it.

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But are students really fleeing the humanities? Brooks cites a fall-off in humanities majors at Harvard. But Harvard and other elite schools do not represent the larger national picture. Seen in absolute numbers, humanities majors have actually risen slightly over the last 50 years. What’s changed is the proportion of undergraduate students majoring in humanities. Students haven’t simply switched from English to, say, physics. Instead, the number of students, and of majors offered, have greatly increased. The humanities have gone from being a main course within a relatively narrow menu of options to just one plate among many at a bounteous buffet.

This frames the real challenge for the humanists: to demonstrate the relevance of the humanities within this broader landscape.

“The Heart of the Matter,” a recent report from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences, stands apart from the elegies of the humanities now being issued with dreary regularity. Rather than defending the humanities by setting them against the other disciplines—as nearly every other defense of them tends to do—“The Heart of the Matter” insists that the humanities are integral to the larger whole of education for democracy, if only they can recognize and claim their part.

Commentaries tend to frame the curriculum as a zero-sum game: the more math and science, the fewer humanities. When numbers win, arts and letters lose. But “The Heart of the Matter” imagines the university curriculum not as an arms race but as a balancing act. This perspective may depart from the way that we faculty perceive the situation (we see ourselves as in competition with one another for resources), but it comes much closer to the experiences of our students, who must negotiate a mash-up of general education requirements, courses in their major, electives, and, increasingly, credits transferred from other institutions.

What students need from us, the report insists, is coherence. In place of “an ever-more fragmented curriculum,” it calls on the disciplines to cooperate in identifying and fostering the “qualities of mind” needed by all students “for leadership in an interconnected world.” In place of a battle for institutional turf, it imagines the disciplines joining together in “a mutually energizing balance.”

The primary site of this integration is general education, which the report calls “our distinctly American form of education: broad, comprehensive, and balanced, recognizing the interdependence of all areas of knowledge.” Unlike the canons and cores “of some idealized past,” this general education is dynamic and interconnected. Rather than viewing the disciplines as disconnected silos (or “pillars of excellence,” as a colleague wryly calls them), it asks them to come together to pursue “grand challenges” of shared concern.

The integrative ideal in “The Heart of the Matter” describes a vision of education that is connected not only within but also across institutions. The report recommends “a nationwide effort to reconnect our K-12 schools and teachers to the broader scholarly community” and urges “college and university faculty” to “reach out to their teaching colleagues at K-12 schools” to create “a true teaching network—from kindergarten through higher education [that] will collect and share new methodologies, new discoveries, and new student needs.” In this network, higher education is one piece of a long continuum spanning educational sectors that have long been held apart.

To this, New York Times commentator Stanley Fish, a master of snark, retorts, “Sure, let’s have a joint bake sale or a dance.” The very improbability that faculty would “reach out” to high school teachers, or vice versa, leads Fish to conclude that the report is “laden with bland commonplaces and recommendations that could bear fruit only in a Utopia.”

The charge is unfair, but it also points to an all-too-common shortcoming in the report itself. Despite insisting that “the humanities and social sciences are not merely elective, nor are they elite or elitist,” the commission’s members are themselves overwhelmingly from elite institutions. So are the educational initiatives they cite as exemplary. Had the report broadened its focus to the comprehensive and state institutions that produce most of the nation’s humanities majors, it could have found inspiring examples of integrated institutions and student-focused curricula already in action.

The Long Beach Promise,” for example, joins Long Beach Unified School District, Long Beach City College, and Cal State Long Beach in an exemplary cross-institutional collaboration meant to ease students’ passage from kindergarten to college graduation. Cal State Northridge and neighboring Pierce College have aligned their curricula to ease transfers between them, in the process creating integrative general education designed around “grand challenges” like community health, social justice, and sustainability. Alverno College, a tiny school serving working-class women in Milwaukee, has designed its entire curriculum around eight “core abilities” that exemplify education for the “qualities of mind” that “The Heart of the Matter” suggests are needed by all graduates. Examples like these might convince doubtful readers like Fish that the report’s integrative vision is already making progress in forward-looking institutions that can serve as examples to others.

Elite institutions stand to gain much by broadening their focus, not least because of their role in preparing the future academic workforce. Where “The Heart of the Matter” calls for “a vision of education that meets students’ needs …, not one that simply mirrors the map of current faculty specialization,” it will fall on Ph.D.-granting institutions to develop new ways to train graduate students to be the future professoriate. Tomorrow’s professors must do more than excel in specialized research; they must be able to perceive their role within a broader educational world that is undergoing fast and unpredictable change. That world demands that their training as future educators be no less rigorous than their research preparation. It also demands that future academic employers encourage and reward innovation in the classroom—including the general education classroom—if our institutions are to repair the fragmentation of the curriculum and deliver an education of balance and relevance.

This challenge can only be met through a true integration of institutions, faculties, and administrators. If “The Heart of the Matter” brings us closer to meeting it, the report will have made a powerful contribution indeed.

The post The Humanities Aren’t As Dead As You Think appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

To teach arts is to advocate for the arts. For more than 40 years, I’ve been doing just that—by talking to school boards, speaking to public groups, attending rallies, sending letters to politicians, meeting with legislators, organizing parents, and serving on the board of the California Alliance for Arts Education. I’ve heard every possible excuse for why our schools have reduced or eliminated arts programs—budget cuts, limited instructional time, the cost of materials, the difficulty of finding instructors, greater emphasis on math and language arts and, like a lot of people in the arts, I’ve spent a ton of time thinking of creative ways to make the point that the arts are vital and that they shouldn’t be eliminated from school curricula.

But then, a year ago, I came to a simple realization. I’d been spending my time on advocacy when, legally speaking, it wasn’t necessary at all. While browsing through the state Education Code online, I learned (embarrassingly late in my career) that the law couldn’t be clearer. Since 1995, the teaching of the arts has been mandatory in California for grades one to 12.

Section 51210(e) mandates the Visual and Performing Arts (VAPA), which includes music, dance, visual art, and theater, be included in the school curriculum for all students in grades one to six. Section 51220(g) mandates that the VAPA be offered to all students in grades seven through 12. Arts is a “course of study,” and Section 51050 states “The governing board of every school district shall enforce in its schools the courses of study.”

In short, if a school district is not teaching the arts right now, it is breaking the law.

Despite all of these mandates, however, there has been no effort by any authority in California to require compliance. For the last year, I’ve been trying to figure out why.

My investigation has been enlightening—and frustrating. In July 2012, I made a presentation to the State Board of Education and was told that the board does not have the authority to enforce the Education Code. Last December, at a meeting with members of the California Department of Education, I was told that neither the State Superintendent of Instruction nor the department has the authority to enforce the Education Code. In the legislature, I met with staff of the 12 members of the California Legislature Joint Committee on the Arts, which has produced various arts-education-related recommendations, but none related to enforcement.

I’m trying everything I can think of. New legislation directs the State Superintendent of Instruction to revise the criteria for high school review (the Academic Performance Index), so I’ve asked that the arts be included in the criteria. I’ve asked the California Arts Council to provide leadership in getting enforcement too. I shall see what happens. If none of this works, I will pursue litigation.

If the code were to be enforced, school boards could apply for waivers from the State Board of Education on arts. I do not object to that, as long as the waiver process provides for parent, student, teacher, and public input. But to simply allow non-compliance with the California Education Code is unacceptable. We should teach our children that the arts matter. And so does the law.

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