NHS -- 2010 New Hampshire State Football Champions! (With A Hint of Melancholy)

I never got to play for a state championship when I played football for Newport High School. My sophomore year we lost in the first round of the playoffs to a team we had beaten just a few weeks earlier. My junior year Newport began an ill-fated experiment in playing in a league of Vermont and New Hampshire teams, the Connecticut Valley League, that made total sense geographically (I don't think we had a road trip of any more than an hour in two seasons). But the New Hampshire Interscholastic Athletic Association was not a fan of our trans-state machinations, and so for two years we were ineligible to play for any sort of postseason berth. Both years we had winning records against teams from schools that were at least twice as big as we were and in some cases four times as big -- each of the New Hampshire schools in the conference would later play in conferences two or more divisions above Newport.

The next year, when I was a freshman in college, Newport went back to the NHIAA with its tail between its legs, entered the normal divisional system (which has changed at least five times in the last three decades) and won a state championship in a tiny division of the state's tiniest football playing schools, and between then and 1995 won at least two other championships. After something of a dry spell (brought about at least in part because Newport continues to be one of the smallest, if the the smallest, football-playing high school in New Hampshire) Newport again emerged as state champions last weekend after crushing a team from Gilford that had defeated my Tigers by twenty points two weeks earlier. The final score was 35-0, all the more impressive because it took place on Gilford's home field. And in typical Newport fashion, residents of the Sunshine Town traveled well -- we likely outnumbered the home crowd by a substantial margin. My junior year we played a pivotal conference game against Lebanon, 45 minutes up the road, and Newport, a town of 6,000 people then as now, had fans numbering in the thousands on the sidelines. (For posterity's sake I should note that I made the first tackle in that game against Labanon's All State kick returner and running back. Yeay me!).

My uncles won a couple of state championships back in the 1970s and Newport won another a few years before I got to the varsity. But because of the CVL experiment I never got particularly close to a state championship in football despite playing for teams that had a record of something like 18-7 in my three years. And while I am proud of my individual track state championships, it's just not the same thing inasmuch as no one actually gives a shit.

I certainly have not long lamented not winning a state championship in high school. I was always better at track than football, and while I was recruited by a few small colleges to play football, once I got into Williams I banished any of those ideas, though I have long regretted not even trying to "walk on" for the Ephs. But Newport winning brought back a bit of melancholy.

Newport is a small high school in a small town. The connection that one has to a school such as NHS is deeply personal, made all the more so by the intimacy of a community such as NHS. I would guess that there have been fewer graduates of Newport High School since I left for Williams than walk the halls of Permian High School this morning. I know the head coach (who was one of my high school teachers, who was then the baseball coach who had been passed over for the head coaching job, who some of the town idiots -- including the AD -- tried to remove a few years ago after his only losing season in nearly two decades, and who is by just about any measure the most successful football coach in Newport's pretty solid football history) and talked to him on Sunday. Most of the players have names I recognize -- I played with their fathers or uncles or brothers. And now they are New Hampshire Division VI State Champions.

Glory To Newport . . .

Students, Writing, and E-mail

It seems that I am constantly having to explain to my students why writing matters. There is nothing more annoying than reading teaching evaluations at the end of a semester and seeing "This is not an English class -- why did he grade only based on how good we wrote?" (QED)

It is idiocy to believe that only English professors should be encouraging writing skills, so in order to pre-empt this blood-boiling criticism I address it headlong (I relish pointing out that our history department has published more books than our English department). And one of the ways I do this is to argue that in nearly every career that they choose they will have to write and that a huge percentage of that writing will come in the form of emails.

It might seem odd to equate writing a college essay with constructing an email. But the two really are not all that different. In both you are trying to make a point and eventually accomplish some goal. To be effective both must be clear, well organized, and well thought out. And in both cases the audience matters.

At his fine blog that is otherwise devoted to "research, international development, foreign policy, and violent conflict," Chris Blattman has a nice post that I hope gets as much attention as possible: "Students: How to Email to your Professor, employer, and professional peers." Students, and all of us, really, should commit his twelve rules to memory.

Goodnight Consensus

In today's Boston Globe Joan Wickersham uses Amazon reader responses to the venerable children's classic Goodnight Moon as something of a metaphor for our times.

(By the way, put me in the column of those who loathe the so-called "democracy" of anonymous, unfiltered Amazon reviews. Yeah, yeah, I'm an elitist. Since when is "elite" a bad thing?)

Herf at a Celebratory TNR

Over at TNR's The Book, friend of dcat Jeffrey Herf has a review of Gilbert Achkar's book The Arabs and the Holocaust. The closing paragraph:

The Arabs and the Holocaust has elements of candor and courage. It is a salutary development that someone with Achcar’s political views acknowledges the realities of the Nazi-Islamist wartime collaboration. It is important to be reminded of the history of a secular Arab leftism and liberalism that opposed fascism, Nazism, as well as Zionism. Yet Achcar undermines these virtues of his book with superficial, unfair, and unreliable readings of those with whom he disagrees, above all those who fought fascism and Nazism on the basis of secular, liberal, and even leftist values yet still support Zionism. His attack on these scholars is neither a contribution to scholarship nor a contribution to moderation.

Speaking of TNR, the venerable bastion of center liberalism is celebrating its 96th birthday.

Impumelelo on the World Cup (Self Indulgence Alert x2)

The latest issue of Impumelelo: The Interdisciplinary Electronic Journal of African Sports is now available. It includes a group of brief articles on "FIFA World Cup 2010 Reflections," including my contribution, "Ayoba!: Reflections From South Africa's World Cup. " (As long as I'm engaging in self indulgence anyway, the last issue of Impumelelo included my much lengthier "Stopped at the Try Line?: Rugby, Race, and Nationalism in Post-Apartheid South Africa.")

[Crossposted at the FPA Africa Blog.]

Pardon Our Interruption . . .

My US Sports History and Society class had a project whereby they put together an episide of Pardon the Interruption. Their YouTube trailer is brilliant and is destined to go viral.

ISN Insights: The ANC (Self Indulgence Alert)

I am pleased to announce that I have begun a new regular gig writing about African affairs for the Zurich-based International Relations and Security Network (ISN). I will be contributing to their ISN Insights. My first piece for them, which is on the state of the African National Congress, has been posted.

[Crossposted at the FPA Africa Blog.]

And Now To Charlotte

I am heading to one of my old stomping grounds, Charlotte, for this year's Southern Historical Association annual meeting. If you're going to be there we'll inevitably cross paths in the book exhibit.

Back From Israel/Death Cab For Cutie: Oddest dcat Juxtaposition Ever?

I'm back from Israel and am trying to pull my life back to some semblance of normalcy. There is always something strange about going abroad during the semester. You return and jump right back into the routine and it's as if the travel never happened. The conference was great, I was pleased with my paper, and naturally returning to Israel was great but raised myriad questions and thoughts. I'll be writing about the political situation in the next few days and will keep you posted when I do.

In the meantime, rejoice that the spring will see the release of a new Death Cab for Cutie album. They promise a wholly new departure. Because bands always promise wholly new departures and are conflicted about their last album. It's the oldest rock star trick in the book. Well, after banging groupies by the handful, doing lots and lots of drugs, and drinking Jack Daniels straight from the bottle. Usually at the same time.

Off to Israel

I am off to Israel for eight days and posting may be even lighter than usual. I am giving a paper, "From Apartheid to Liberation: Race, History and South African Historiography," at a conference, "Concepts of 'Race' in the History of the Humanities," at the University of Haifa.

I have not been to Israel in several years and am looking forward to returning and seeing how things there have changed (or, perhaps, how my perceptions have changed). The Israel-Palestine conflict is in the midst of another potential turning point moment that is likely to result in disappointment even as so many of us ardently hope for the alternative.

Hump Day Humor

Just a reminder that no particular faction or ideology monopolizes the crazy:

Hat Tip.

Friday Nitpicking

Ok, so this criticism is pretty picayune, but in his recent review of Tony Blair's new memoir, A Journey: My Political Life, Fareed Zakaria writes the following sentence: "The fact is that Bill Clinton and Tony Blair were the two most successful political figures in the post-cold-war world because they understood the essential truth of economic policy in our times, which is centrist pragmatism."

Here is a one-question exam:

In fifty years, which of the following political figures will loom largest in the history of the post-Cold War era:

A) Tony Blair

B)Bill Clinton

C) Nelson Mandela

Even using Zakaria's own standard of centrist economic pragmatism, and even ignoring the decades before 1990, the answer is C.

[Crossposted]

Bill James and the Simpsons

Over at SI.com Joe Posnanski analyzes Sunday night's Simpsons baseball episode, which cleverly took on the supposed sabermetrics-traditionalist divide.

Even in making fun of statistical analysis, the episode (inadvertently?) got at a larger truth: stealing bases is actually pretty dumb much of the time (not always, just much and possibly most of the time).

Hump Day Humor

This is on my coffee cup, which I got from the famous Blackwell's Bookshop in Oxford, and it makes me laugh every time I read it:

Insight Into a Failing Business Model

If you want some sense of the absurdity of the current pricing model of scholarly journals you need look no further than a recent email I received from Taylor and Francis after I inquired about buying an issue of one of their journals:

The single issue price for 'Soccer and Society,' Issue Numbers 1-2 is:

Institutional Rate: $200

Personal Rate:$60

Yes, you read that correctly. For one issue (and yes, it appears to be a "double issue," but seriously now) of a journal of which you have probably never heard (and that I was only vaguely aware existed) they want to charge an individual $60. I can live with higher institutional rates, though journals have skyrocketed those costs as well, passing the expense on to rich institutions, yes, but also pricing less rich institutions -- which is to say, the vast majority of institutions -- out of the market.

And I guess this pricing model is an ingenious idea because Routledge has actually turned the double issue into a book. And is selling it for $125. Because apparently they want no one reading their journals and books. Cunning.

Interesting Take on Something We Discuss

Wilson and TR

Paperback Row (Self Indulgence Alert)

I got some good news recently. Yep -- paperback.

A Friday Question

So why is it that the very same people who claim the staunchest fealty to the Constitution -- and are most inclined as an ideological bloc to claim authority as its interpreters -- are also most inclined to call for amending it, usually to get rid of the inconvenient stuff they don't like?

University Life Roundup

Lots of stuff on higher education has been clogging up my tabs on my computer, so consider this a purge:

Here is a pretty good defense of tenure, aimed at parents of future and present college students, which may not be perfect but is still pretty important. One issue the author does not address is the fact that not only does tenure protect certain types of potentially controversial work, it also protects the ability to do long-range research. It is not uncommon for a historian to take a decade or more to write a book, especially a big, ambitious one. We should embrace that sort of commitment to quality. And if that holds true in the humanities, it is even moreso in some of the sciences -- imagine telling a cancer researcher that they must work on the timetable of a three year contract.

Inside Higher Ed recently published two defenses of something that ought to need no defending (here and here) -- the liberal arts education. The goal of any college or university ought to be to teach students how to think, how to reason, and how to engage with ideas. If students can do that, they will be able to succeed in any range of jobs and careers (which they will change multiple times anyway) where there will be training in any case.

Here is a decent, if too tepid, defense of the professoriate from the onslaught from the outside. Academics are an easy target, but most of the criticisms barely withstand even the minutest scrutiny.

I oftentimes toy with declaring my classes to be a no-laptop zone. The vast majority of students do not use them to take notes, or even to look things up relevant to the class. And yes, sometimes classes can be "boring," I suppose, as dealing with unfamiliar or challenging material often is. But while I hope my classes are entertaining, my job is not first and foremost to entertain them. And if they are on Facebook or ESPN or sending emails, it is a distraction for people around them and it is a waste of time for them and for me. I have also toyed with the equivalent of pop quizzes: "Show me your laptop now." But I'd prefer that my classroom not be a place for "gotcha" moments even if some students deserve to get got. In any case, two recent articles agree with me, here and here. I'm not certain if I'll enact such a policy. But I'd be wholly justified in doing so.

The New Republic's Book has recently published a couple of justly tough reviews of new books on higher education, including Richard Kehlenberg's critical look at Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus' Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids -- And What We Can Do About It and David A. Bell's completely warranted hammering of (former Williams professor) Mark Taylor's Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming our Colleges and Universities.

Finally, can technology help reform (or overhaul) peer review? It will help. But technology is not a panacea. And while a wiki approach to scholarly publishing certainly might have some merit, as a historian, I still believe the craft of writing matters. We are not mere compilers of fact and dossiers for interpretation. History is as much art as science (moreso, I'd argue) and there is pleasure as well as knowledge to be gained from a well crafted book or article in my discipline and in many others.

Liberalism is Right

Obama is fundamentally right. Just keep that in mind.