James Morton

@HistorianZhang Weirdly, I was once on a summer course at Dumbarton Oaks where they made us wear white cotton gloves to handle a facsimile of a manuscript in the library, but then let us handle genuine manuscripts with our bare hands in the manuscript department. I never understood that!

@HistorianZhang When I was a grad student on a palaeography course at the Vatican Library, they specifically told us *not* to wear gloves. The mantra was clean, dry, bare hands.

And meanwhile plenty of archives in Asia still insist on using those nasty surgical gloves. Every time I use them I feel like I'm doing damage to the documents

@MerriamWebster That’s because the tithe was set at 10%! Which is what ‘decimate’ means!

Another problem with insisting that 'decimate' should have a single meaning is that very few words in English retain a single meaning. ALSO, the word 'decimation', meaning “a tithing,” had been in use for about 60 years before ‘decimate’ began to be used in any fashion.

Yes, 'decimate' originally did mean “to kill every tenth man.” Our earliest record of this specific meaning comes from the late 1500s. However, by the 1600s, it acquired the broader meaning of “to severely damage or destroy."

What are they preempting?

@HistorianZhang I’ll never forget the look on one of the student’s faces when I replied that yes, they were supposed to read the readings marked as ‘this week’s reading’. His response: ‘But… they’re so long.’

@HistorianZhang This was right before they had to take a quiz about the readings (which I had told them about in the syllabus and in Week 1), which had apparently caught them off guard. Naturally.

These are moments when I want to throw them in the fiery pits of hell

So true. Though I can’t really say that I ever used to be with ‘it’, myself.

@romanhelmetguy You want to have one professor to lecture on the entirety of history, teaching eight hours a day, every day? That’s more than a school teacher does. This means: 1. Your professor won’t do any research. 2. The lectures will be poor quality. 3. The burnout rate will be very high.

Ok here’s my proposal: If someone gave me the money to start a university there, every undergrad would learn the exact same thing: History & Math. One track for everyone. No electives. Why? Because if you know enough history and you know enough math, understanding anything else becomes trivial. And by teaching just a single track, this could be done for dirt cheap. For history, the first year should just be reading 50k pages written during the Ancient period, second year 50k pages from the Medieval period, third year 50k pages from the Early Modern period, and fourth year 50k pages from the Modern period. Professors would give daily lectures to structure and synthesize the day’s readings. In the course of this history instruction, students would ofc read the theological, philosophical, and ideological works that drove much of history. And they would debate these ideas to learn rhetoric and become skillful writers and speakers. For math, the standard math major is already somewhat decent, but there would be just one rigorous track for everyone: an intense course load that covers both theoretical and applied, and with enough probability and information theory etc to understand AI. In the course of instruction, practical applications to engineering, physics, coding etc would be taught alongside. Anybody who went through that curriculum would be perfectly positioned to understand anything. All hard sciences are downstream of math, and all social sciences are downstream of history. With all the advances in the past 500 years, consider this my proposal for a modern trivium: a base layer of knowledge that any truly learned person must be expected to master, before going on to specialize in a specific field. And the benefit of running a university this way is that it’s very cheap. Theoretically you could do it with just 2 professors: one for history, one for math. They could each teach 4 courses: each year’s course in a 2 hour block every day. History Year 1-4, and Math Year 1-4. Also, every upper year student is qualified to TA every lower year class. And of course, if we had the money, we could hire more professors to teach these 8 courses to reduce the workload. 4 professors teaching 2 courses each would be a nice balance. A typical student’s day could be for example: a 2 hour block for History instruction, a 2 hour block for Math instruction, and the rest of the day for studying. If you enrolled just 100 students a year and they each paid just $25k for tuition and board, that’s $2.5M a year to pay just 2-4 professors and maintain the handful of buildings needed. And if we taught 100 smart students a year this way, I’m convinced they’d conquer the world. There are approximately zero people alive today who have the comprehensive knowledge of history needed to master the humanities AND the comprehensive knowledge of math needed to master STEM. They would be in a league of their own.

@AntigoneJournal @MariaGXanthou I read more than this when I was a university student (yes, in the original language). I’m pretty sure that top Classics programmes still require students to read a good number of texts.

The syllabus of what was read at a small secondary school in their final two years by teenagers who focused on Classics in 1910. It is now more than is read in any three- or four-year university degree in the world.

This is the wrong generation, isn’t it? I thought the 67 kids were Gen Alpha - not old enough to vote yet. So it’s not only cringe, it’s also pointless!

Merry Christmas! God bless us, every one!

@HistorianZhang The upkeep costs on that chateau will make you wish you’d bought the 600 sq ft HK apartment

That's a 600 sq ft apartment in Hong Kong.......

It shouldn’t be controversial to say that universities should hire the best-qualified person for the job regardless of that person’s intrinsic identity, but it has been a massive taboo over the last few years. Hopefully that can change.

There are several other stories like this. We also saw it in the huge glut of hires in African American Studies after 2020. I remember at one point seeing about 150 jobs on H-Net relating to African Studies. Did they really need that many professors? Or was there another reason?

This article is being shared around a lot right now. I would say it was an open secret in U.S. academia, but to be honest it wasn’t much of a secret. This is precisely the reason why so many white academics impersonated people of colour. compactmag.com/article/the-lo…

@HistorianZhang I think I got this email once! Just straight-up, unashamed corruption.

I've gotten some pretty dodgy offers to "teach" students online in some private arrangements, basically selling my credentials to help someone polish their CV and maybe write a rec letter. This is worse

@ProudBavaria Underrated

Post the first word that comes to mind when seeing this image.

@HistorianZhang Wasn’t he basically being held hostage by Stalin?

Meanwhile his natural born son was hanging out in Moscow until 1937