#3, September 15, 2003

Gatekeeping

A Guide for our Profession’s Newly Appointed Officials

While staying at the convention hotel at a recent historians’ conference, a young waiter came up to me and handed me a document that he said had been left in the conference room at one of the previous evening’s sessions. I am not sure why he thought I might be interested; perhaps he thought everyone at the convention was supposed to have a copy; perhaps he was a provocateur or some kind and thought that I looked disgruntled and disaffected in some way; maybe it was just serendipity. But whatever it was, I found the document fascinating and thought that I should share its contents with as many of my fellow historians as possible. It is printed below.

Congratulations on rising to the highest levels of your profession. This is a position of considerable responsibility so we hope that you will take a moment to study the following brief guide to help you fulfill your duties most effectively.

Acting as one of the profession’s gatekeepers requires tact and diplomacy. Remember that appeals to civility and respect (the tense but tender ties of your profession) will contain and channel those who would advance alternative methodologies (advocates of revolutionary methods and subversive ideas, engagers in polemical critique, evil doers). Remember also that your position of authority can be used even to fashion historiographical debates, helping to determine the answer to the question "What is history?" itself. You now have considerable power and authority; use these wisely.

Here are some rules to follow as you minister to the needs of this profession (note that you may be able to learn from the practices of colonial officials in the past, as well as other wielders of power and holders of privilege, so deploy your own grasp of History to supplement this brief guide). The main principle underlying these rules is:

Do not engage the opposition in direct debate but use various forms of subterfuge to achieve your objective.

Here are some examples to help you understand this general rule:

– You can use a position of authority within the Organization of American Historians or the American Historical Association, on committees perhaps, to shape aspects of the profession (and a presidency of the AHA or the OAH is in the future for one who serves the profession with great honor and distinction).

– As an editor of the profession’s leading journals you can push for the publication of particular kinds of articles meeting “appropriate” standards – E.P. Thompson's father once described these as “solid highways” and, while we perhaps should be moving on to imagery of a more environmentally appropriate kind, we feel that this is a helpful metaphor nonetheless.

– You can use the anonymity of the tenure or manuscript review to declare that only certain kinds of people and certain kinds of works reflect the proper standards of the profession.

– You can also set demands for your own students to meet, molding them in your own image, securing positions for them at universities where they can mold others in that same image.

and

– You can then support candidates in the job market who come from graduate stables that you trust, and who have not, as far as you are aware, in any way rocked the boat.

If all these things are carried through effectively, would-be scholars who fail to conform to the profession’s civil code will be isolated, their own pronouncements will be discredited as products of the prominent chip they bear on their shoulders. “They don’t have graduate students,” may perhaps be the word put out about them. Or perhaps they will be discredited because their excessive attention to theory makes them difficult to work with and results in what we would consider poor students with yet poorer dissertations. Or we may collectively dismiss them as upstarts, easily discredited because they have lost touch with “real people” (the “masses”), and so on, and so forth.

These methods are, it must be noted, far more effective than the direct assault in writing and open engagement with an adversary’s ideas, which only brings the person more attention than can possibly be helpful. Let us provide some examples of where this has been shown to be true.

Officials who have been following attempts to stamp out subversive work by the method of direct assault will remember the essays by two of our British Associates criticizing the work of a South Asian interloper from a subversive Subaltern Studies cell (though it calls itself a collective). They may also know of a lecture made by yet another such associate in England that endeavored to accomplish the same thing, largely through ridicule. All these efforts were noticeably unsuccessful. They brought sympathy to this man (we feel uncomfortable using the word scholar) as the potential victim of his senior colleagues’ assaults. They contributed to making his ideas more widespread, especially since his rejoinders turned out to be more persuasive than the original assaults. [It was a rather messy business, really. There was some effort made to show that the interloper was endeavoring to ride two horses simultaneously, but this was very much turned back on the officials, who, much to our chagrin, found that it was their horsemanship that was being brought into question.] Not so long after these interventions, the same man was invited to contribute the first article on Subaltern Studies ever to be published in one of our flagship journals. We must consider this a failure of intelligence of the highest magnitude.

Fortunately, however, the discipline was rescued by the handling of an agent working out of one of our mid-western offices. S/he published an essay in our journal which did more to immunize historians against “French flu”, poststructuralist excess, and “post-foundationalism”, than all the British protestations and tirades combined. Instead of the special issue bringing into widespread usage ideas employed by the members of this South Asian cell, this agent managed to show how they ought to be appropriated and used by proper, mainstream, historians.

So that you may quickly develop the ability to pull off this maneuver for yourselves, let me elaborate on how this agent accomplished this for us. On the surface her/his contribution appeared to be a friendly and complimentary appraisal of the output of this truant cell. [The agent, rather deftly we feel, alluded to the earlier assaults by saying that both sides made some very compelling points. S/he thereby reestablished the value of the critique in a situation where it really wasn’t possible for both sides to be right – this was inserted almost unnoticed into a footnote. Ah, the beauty of footnotes!] Indeed, a quick read of this article would leave anyone with the impression that it was a fair and judicious essay, attempting to “rethink” history by incorporating into the study of the agent’s area of expertise the work of a previously neglected group of historians. There was a small problem owing to the fact that many who read the work also felt that the agent went a bit far in suggesting that s/he was in a position to make these pronouncements, but we feel (and think most others agree) that this was justified by her/his years in the profession and her/his “mastery” of an incredibly large body of literature. Meanwhile, working almost at the level of subliminal messages (most especially in the footnotes, which our officials have found to be an exceedingly helpful tool over the years) and other subtle code, the agent finally revealed to the more diligent reader (those who needed convincing, rather than those who were merely happy that this cell had received the recognition it needed and now it was possible to return to more normal pursuits) that s/he had come, not to praise Caesar, but to bury him.

Another couple of examples can be given to you budding officials of the profession. Let us take a hypothetical situation. You are invited to a conference as a distinguished guest. You find, however, that you are being unduly (and, given your present stature, we can be certain that this is the case) criticized in one of the papers being presented. There are two approaches you may take to dealing with this unfortunate occurrence (though we should note that these are infrequent, as we do take pride in the quality of our officials). If you feel that you are on pretty safe ground, and that most of the audience finds this paper unfair in its presentation of your ideas, or they just don’t really want to be associated with the attack on your scholarship (essentially your tutelage over the historiography), then you can take the direct approach. In this case, use all your years of training to greatest effect and do not take prisoners. The danger here is that if your assault is not a surgical one, or if it should be misdirected so as to hit another panelist, or even an unsuspecting member of the audience who had not appreciated their connection to your target, then you will possibly do more harm than good. There is no room for collateral damage in this profession.

On many occasions this will not be possible, and if you have reached the top of your profession you should be able to read the situation properly. If you cannot take the direct assault, you need to develop a “Plan B”, as the lawyers might call it. This is a kind of diversion play. Let us say that you are faced with three people on the panel, only one of whom you find offensive. Your best bet is to ignore entirely the person who is making comments relevant to your own work, and focus on the work of another of the panelists. Since you are a person of considerable influence it should be quite within your powers to turn the questions in the direction of another issue that may be totally unrelated. The additional benefit of this ploy is that by ignoring the real concern you effectively reassure everyone that you don’t consider it really worthy of your attention. In so doing you convince members of the audience that it is not worthy of their notice either.

This is obviously not the end of the process. Damage control needs to occur at other levels of the conference. You need to lobby other officials to round up their disciples; you may even ask other scholars to make facetious and disparaging comments in their own presentations, ridiculing the offensive critique or the person who makes it in some way. You possibly should bring pressure to bear also on the organizers of this conference. They have invited you for a reason, perhaps to attract other people to the conference; they are in your debt. You need to make sure that they are aware of this debt. Let us say that there is to be a volume of essays that will come out of this conference, you must make it clear to the organizers that your paper and the one that you have only just skillfully and publicly ignored cannot be published under the same cover. If any other prominent official can back up your demand, then you are in a strong position to effectively silence the upstart. Should this person persist towards independent publication, perhaps you may be able to intervene as a reader of the article or book, and failing that maybe take up the review (again not to engage the ideas but to sit on it so that the book does not receive timely attention in your professional organ).

Remember, the subaltern will only speak if we let him (though let us remember that the subaltern may also be a woman). Of course, the subaltern will always be able to speak (this is a free country and a liberal profession, after all), but has he (remember, she as well) really spoken if no one is there to listen?

Strength lies in numbers. Go forth and multiply.