After you pass that biblical milestone of three-score and ten, if you’re determined to remain active, then you have to take stock, make sure you’re on course and on pace. By which I don’t mean, chasing after every shiny new thing.
Old guys in the academy, people wonder whether they are still current in their field. I don't think I have any question marks in that regard, being a voracious reader, a productive writer, and thoroughly plugged into professional developments.
Oh, but how about the technological transformations going on? It’s not my first rodeo, I’ve always been ahead of the game in matters digital, remain so. Still, there is that statement that appears on the first page of all my syllabi. It says,
The pledge: nothing in this syllabus, or in the course it describes, is, or ever will be, generated by artificial intelligence. Real teaching, real learning. Real intelligence, real History.
Old School, I guess. But in ways that employ the most recent insights in cognition and learning. Close reading, deep engagement with text, using methods of my own devisement that I teach the next generation of prairie scholars. Hand writing in order to master material. All this supercharged by the technological capacity to gill-net oceans of data for the material we need.
Most of all — and now I’m coming to the point of this essay — living a secret life, invisible to a public that knows me for sermonizing on the radio, networking with organizations across the state, and cheering on the Bison. I think, or hope, I have a reputation for persistent investigation and dogged discussion of history and folklife on the Great Plains of North America. (If not, then I’ve wasted a couple million words and a lot of miles on my F150 over the years.)
What remains hidden, mostly, is the engine under the hood, and here’s where I get really Old School, as in right back to the wonky origins of academic history. I’m talking about that venerable institution known as the seminar, the essential institution for the advancement of knowledge and renewal of the field in History.
The study of the Great Plains and the institution of the seminar are inextricably entwined in the person of Walter Prescott Webb, author both of the foundational text in the field, The Great Plains (1931) and of the evangelical how-to essay on the seminar in History: “The Historical Seminar: Its Outer Shell and Its Inner Spirit.”
The seminar in History is what the laboratory is in the sciences. Webb says it is “a group of mature students or scholars” — meaning graduate students — “studying and practicing the art of investigation and research under the direction of an experienced supervisor who sets the goal and sees to it that the best procedures are utilized by the group journeying toward it.” The leader brings the idea to the seminar — and that word, idea, is freighted with meaning.
Webb begins by likening his seminar to an expedition of adventurers entering an unknown country. By the end of his essay, he likens it to a pirate crew. Right now I am the leader of such an enterprise. I haven’t decided whether the fellow travelers in my rural and regional seminar are explorers or pirates. I’ll check back with you later to assess that, and to share the booty.
