How I Became a Scholar - Pt. 2

Susan Rosowski working in the Cather Archive. From The Mowers’ Tree.

Today’s essay is part of a new series including me,

Latham Turner

,

Bowen Dwelle

,

Michael Mohr

,

Dee Rambeau

, and

Lyle McKeany

. In the past we’ve written about trust, fatherhood, recovery, work, and home. This week, all of us explore the roots of our personal philosophies.

How I Became a Scholar — Pt. 2

September, 1997. I’m reading Willa Cather’s first novel, Alexander’s Bridge, about an engineer named Bartley Alexander, when a passage leaps out from the third chapter.

There was only one thing that had an absolute value for each individual, and it was just that original impulse, that internal heat, that feeling of one's self in one's own breast. When Alexander walked back to his hotel, the red and green lights were blinking along the docks on the farther shore, and the soft white stars were shining in the wide sky above the river.

The character’s humble beginnings and maniacal ambitions, driven by what seem like fantasies, have been giving me déjà vu. He’s also obsessed with a girl. I just know I’ve read all this before. The passages keep piling up, and suddenly I have it: Cather must have been imitating Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby!

I check the dates and grow even more excited. Alexander’s Bridge first appeared in 1912 and Gatsby wasn’t released until 1925. This is even more exciting: How can it be that portions of the greatest American novel seem to have been lifted, nearly verbatim, from a little-known work that Cather didn’t even claim as her first “real” novel?¹

The evidence doesn’t lie. I write it up for my Tuesday seminar with Susan Rosowski, the preeminent Cather scholar at that time. I can’t wait to see what Sue thinks.

Sue is delighted. She knows Cather’s oeuvre inside and out and has never once heard of this. She sends me to the library to investigate. We both think this could be my first big break, and I’m just a first-year M.A. student.

My excitement immediately deflates. It turns out that someone published my essay in 1982. Tom Quirk’s “Fitzgerald and Cather: The Great Gatsby” appeared in American Literature, the top journal in the field. Quirk even shows correspondence between the two: Cather congratulating Fitzgerald on his achievement, and Fitzgerald fanboying back.

There it is, right in the intro: Cather had “exerted a greater influence upon him than even he seems to have realized, in matters of incident and story as well as style and technique.” Damn you, Tom Quirk!

From JSTOR

This is disappointing, but it’s part of my apprenticeship as a scholar. It’s hard to create new knowledge. Sometimes your epiphany isn’t new, no matter how fresh it feels to you. Sue helps me understand that this isn’t a failure on my part, it actually validates my instincts. I’ve been closely attuned to the text, keen to its echoes in another, and by arriving at the conclusions I have, I’ve done something very much like a scientist replicating another’s research. So instead of mourning the nut that Quirk found, I need to go find my own.

This is what scholarship is. And it is more than a method. It is a worldview or ethos. If you like, a personal philosophy.

—

I’m not sure I’d have finished my PhD if it had not been for Sue. She was like me in many ways, a girl from flyover country who fought her way through the arbitrary barriers of class and the old boys’ club to an endowed chair at the University of Nebraska. I loved her origin story, how she stole time from her “real” dissertation on Tristram Shandy to do a little side research on Cather. How the work she did for herself turned out to be the real thing: a book on Cather’s Romanticism.

Turns out that scholars can be driven as much by love as by cold potatoes reasoning. I needed to hear that.

Sue also spoke about presenting at conferences where she felt like an outsider, where male scholars laughed raucously after hours at the hotel bar. She once hosted another senior scholar who had just finished pages of explanatory notes for a scholarly edition of Death Comes for the Archbishop. We gathered in a circle to hear him talk, and he held up the thick sheaf of notes. Sue was sitting next to him, and she held out her hands, expecting to pass it around the ring. But he ignored her, and I watched her face redden as he stuffed the manuscript under his chair.

Sue had a method for overcoming that kind of slight: she made her prose sing. It was more than tight reasoning, it was a care for craft that reached far beyond the footnotes. You marshaled your evidence, but you also searched for your voice. The secret sauce was the marriage of the two. If you had it, there were no special favors required: the work would advance on its own merit through blind review. It was the perfect opposite of personal branding. Every scholar had their own niche, but for their work to be credibly endorsed by anyone else they had to first remove their own name.

Sue taught me that research begins with a hunch, what feels like a spontaneous revelation, like mine about Fitzgerald and Cather. But the point is to test it, to read what others have said on the subject, even to cede portions of an argument to opposing views in good faith, and then to draw the most reasonable conclusions from the material at hand.

A scholar learns to guard against confirmation bias and straw opponents, to read with curiosity rather than a priori judgments. You show all your cards — you never hide the inconvenient footnotes up your sleeve. If you are a scientist, you show your steps so transparently that others can reproduce them, and you take care to make your claims falsifiable.

I’ve always loved that about science, that nothing is believable unless it is expressed in such a way that it must be discarded if better evidence comes to light. The same is true of literary criticism. Hedging your bets, qualifying your terms, admitting to indeterminacy isn’t a sign of weakness, it’s an expression of humility. In fact, a mark of trustworthiness.

—

When I taught literature, I tried to recreate my experience in Sue’s class. There was the Romantic stage of it, where we invited a text into our inner lives and communed with it there. This was the space where we might believe, with Emerson, that a poem or essay could open us to the sublime, that every author was an emancipator of sorts, lifting the scales from our eyes or kindling feeling from our ashes. Like Whitman, we might see ourselves as everyone, not just inhabiting the lives of fictional characters imaginatively, but truly becoming them, like a Catholic receiving the Eucharist. This was the fundamental “why” of literature: the intuitive, mystical, core.

Sue asked us to write informal reflections each week. She’d collect them, add comments before we met, then hand them back in hard copy at the beginning of class. We’d begin each seminar in silence, reading our private exchanges with Sue. In response to my case for Cather’s influence on Fitzgerald, Sue had written Ahhh, Josh!!! It was the mark all of us aimed at during the discovery stage of our research. If we could make Sue sigh with ecstasy, we must be on to something.²

But then came the discussion, when we had to defend those hunches, when feelings mattered less than context and evidence. This was the Enlightenment phase, when we channeled Locke, Hobbes, and Descartes, playing Socrates to Glaucon. As an undergraduate, I’d been allowed to begin and end paragraphs with long quotations, thinking the proof could speak for itself. But Sue was insistent that I subordinate my evidence to my argument, sandwiching every quote with context and driving it home with conclusions. You’re relying too much on this source, she would say. Assert yourself more. In this, she was more uncompromising than any male mentor I had, perhaps because it was how she had mastered blind peer review. There was no scholarship without feeling, without a firmly held hunch. But none of this amounted to a puff of dust if it didn’t stand up to scrutiny.

So I knew two Sues: the Believer and the Doubter. And the Doubter was as hard-boiled a rationalist as I ever knew. This was also an essential part of the courses I taught, where we subjected our guesses to the clear light of day, where one Brainy Quote was not enough to carry an argument, where the most affirming thing a teacher or classmate could say was, “OK, but what about ___?”

—

These are still the standards by which I measure knowledge today. They are not the standards of business, where there is no truth but revenue, which can be produced just as easily by raw power or chicanery as by reputable means. They are not the standards of our influencer age, where bold claims matter more than footnotes. I read an essay some months ago that assuredly made the author some coin. It received thousands of likes, even from some of my highly educated friends, with the claim that the real reason (singular) that men are foregoing college is that it has become feminized. The evidence? A single study from veterinary science. And not even the study itself, but a summary of it, if you clicked through the link. It wouldn’t have passed one of Sue’s sniff tests. Nothing wrong with the premise, but it must hold up to scrutiny.

Except that it doesn’t. What has been true of mainstream media for years is now true of many independent writers. It’s the traffic, not the content, that earns money, power, and respect (those three keys to life). Sheer reach and the power to say anything, to scorn straw villains, even to willfully misstate facts in a way that delights the base while drawing trolls, is authority. By contrast, a scholar dunks on no one, because tone is indelibly bound to the truth. The evidence can bite, the voice can be forceful, but scorn spoils the whole enterprise.

This was already happening in higher ed near the end of Sue’s career in the early 2000s. She sometimes spoke of it to me, her concern that activism was overtaking peer review. It didn’t make as much sense to me then, but I now see how confusing that must have been to someone who had helped restructure a system compromised by gender and identity (the old boys’ club) into a more meritocratic one, only to watch new identity camps reclaim it again.

The level of rigor in reviewer comments had waned considerably by the time I left academe in 2021. When I started out, I could expect a detailed rationale from each blind reader, and even if I chafed plenty at Reviewer #2, the one with all the annoying hang-ups and revision suggestions, there was an integrity to the process. In one case, an editor overruled a dissenting reviewer, concluding that they had thoroughly misunderstood my case. Even then, two experts agreed. When my research ran that gauntlet and saw print, I felt it would last.³

But then I landed an essay with what I thought was a reputable journal without a single reader comment in return. Months had gone by after submitting it, so I emailed the editor about the status. In reply, I did not receive a personal note or even a message from him, but a disembodied invitation to create an account in the journal’s dashboard, so I could begin preparing the manuscript for publication. I still stand by that essay — I wouldn’t have sent it out if I didn’t. But the process made me wonder if I ought to withdraw for ethical reasons. I felt like I’d stumbled upon a hundred dollar bill on the sidewalk with no owner in sight. And if that is how many other essays are now being published, the 2018 Grievance Studies Affair makes perfect sense.⁴

But the height of absurdity is that an essay I submitted in 2019 will finally see print in Spring 2025. This is a piece on the neuroscience of epiphany, citing what was at the time current brain science research. I can appreciate the irony of an essay appearing nearly four years after I left academe, and I still think the argument holds as a close reading of Lucy Gayheart. But is it new knowledge? Is it even scholarship anymore? Without a reasonable chance to update the lit review, I’m not so sure.

The integrity of peer review assuredly varies by publication and, to some extent, by discipline. But the system has been fatally weakened since the pandemic, as fewer professionals have been willing to do that work pro bono, as it must be done. The result is often long delays, which hurt young faculty with a tenure clock ticking and create the same problems with currency that I detail above. New (or old) forms of gender bias seem to be creeping back in. But one can only surmise that the quality of reviewer is also on the wane if the overall pool of readers and securely employed scholars is dwindling. So how much can you trust what sees print? How do you teach young people what makes a credible source?

As academic libraries go, so goes scholarship, but that picture also looks grim. Two years ago I wrote about a huge restructuring at Texas A&M. Just a few days ago The Chronicle reported that Western Illinois University had axed all of its library faculty, replacing them with a dean and “paraprofessional staff members.” The library increasingly is a place to check out books or to process scans of articles from someone else’s stacks, not a place that actively supports the production of new books or that curates a reliable ecosystem of scholarly databases.

Scholars care about this, of course. But the model for libraries is increasingly becoming the model for the classroom: the teacher as cashier or convenience store clerk rather than mentor or expert.

Who can we trust if our houses of knowledge have no hosts?⁵

—

You can see why I so often feel that my personal philosophy is out of step with the times. Characteristically, I turn to Cather for hope. She felt misaligned with modernity and consistently tried to write through that puzzle.

Here is her opening to “Double Birthday,” a short story about a household of old-fashioned misfits.

Even in American cities, which seem so much alike, where people seem all to be living the same lives, striving for the same things, thinking the same thoughts, there are still individuals a little out of tune with the times—there are still survivals of a past more loosely woven, there are disconcerting beginnings of a future yet unforeseen.

The peer review system that gave structure and coherence to Sue Rosowski’s career, the system that she helped shape as the visionary behind the Scholarly Editions of Cather’s works, still exists in some quarters. But at many universities the scholarly process has already fallen into the sand.

Believing and Doubting. Context and Evidence. Testing your hunches so they stand up to scrutiny. New knowledge and integrity must walk hand in hand.

I lost Sue in 2004, a year before I finished my Ph.D. She was a cancer survivor, but that rare strain, melanoma of the eye, came creeping back. The last time I saw her, she whispered, “It’s too soon, Josh. It’s too soon.” It’s always that way when you lose someone you love. It’s how I felt when I walked out of my office on the last day. It’s how I feel now, at age 49, knowing that many of the skills I honed best fit the structures I’m watching crumble all around me. It’s too soon to feel as obsolete as I often do.

But I wonder if I might learn something by transporting myself back to that first graduate seminar, when Sue showed me that it wasn’t my method or ethic that needed fixing so much as its subject. So that Gatsby essay has already been done? Stop cursing Tom Quirk and go find a new one. I did that more than a dozen times over the years with research, and dozens more beyond that with essays and poems.

I’m at the beginning of a new apprenticeship as a writer and coach. But I don’t think I have to start all over from scratch. The beginnings of a future yet unforeseen don’t have to be disconcerting if they have a strong anchor in the past. Sometimes we can look forward with fortitude by first looking back.

What I try to do every week is what Sue did all her life, which she learned in turn from Cather herself. The world might have broken in two. The old boys might be laughing it up at the hotel bar. But you still have to make your prose sing.

Read the rest of the personal philosophy series ⬇️

A letter to my son

Drapa's Shirt

My Personal Philosophy

Arise Each Day

It's Always Now

1. In “My First Novels [There Were Two],” Cather explains that she saw Alexander’s Bridge as an imitation of Henry James and O Pioneers! as the book where she discovered her true voice.

2. If I seem overly idealistic about what higher ed could be, can you blame me? And I don’t think I’m alone. Everyone who grieves what academe has become is mourning a lost love, not rubrics or learning outcomes.

3. That essay tried to explain why so many American modernists omitted the 1918 influenza entirely from their fiction. Turns out this was a relevant question for 2020, as well.

4. You can follow two of the architects of that hoax here —

Peter Boghossian

and

Helen Pluckrose

. I thought it was a stunt when I first read about it, but I’ve come to understand that they were whistleblowers. They didn’t indict peer review itself, but they exposed how compromised it has become.

5. There is a troubling syllogism emerging from these trends. If the academic libraries with sufficient funding and expertise increasingly exist in privileged environments and the professoriate itself is gentrifying, then not only do the resources necessary for constructing new knowledge disproportionately serve a certain kind of scholar, the questions asked and hypotheses posed do, too.