Some Off-the-Cuff Graduate School Reflections

As promised, a brief post-mortem of Semester 1 (and some horn tooting)

Graduate school has begun in earnest again and, as I write these words, I am about to leave on my 1-2 hour commute to attend my first class of the week, this one being a research seminar on U.S. imperialism. That topic is fascinating enough on its own, both because I’ve always been interested in the concept of empire from a broader perspective, but also because it seems like many (if not most) in my class have a relatively dated view of how “empire” is discussed in left and right wing circles in 2024. In short, there seems to be a bit of 2004-inflected bias going on where everyone believes that the right wing position on empire is simply “yes, and that’s a good thing.” Clearly, no one has spent any time looking into how the right wing rhetoric of the past eight years has been developing—in my experience, I have seen far more hee-ing and haw-ing about American empire from my right wing friends and acquaintances than my left wing ones. This isn’t to say either is correct; I have surprisingly ambivalent feelings on the notion of American empire, at least qualitatively compared to other empires of the past and the havoc they wrought. I’m certainly more inclined to feel sympathy with an anti-imperialist perspective, thanks largely to what I know from history, but again, I think American empire is something new and distinct from, say, the Belgians in the Congo, the British in India, or the Japanese in China.

But anyway, my off-the-cuff musings on empire aside—especially since that should be its own essay for another day—I have been reflecting on what this graduate school experience has been like. Many other events shaped my life far more deeply in the last year (which I promise I will discuss in more detail at a future date), but graduate school was a significant shift, especially after receiving my first grades, which, shockingly, were far better than I initially expected. My pessimism at my academic prospects had more to do with insecurity at my life circumstances—here I was, the only person in my cohort that hadn’t gotten a bachelor’s degree in history and only had a handful of classes under my belt, from all the way back in the salad days of pre-Great Recession 2000s (a period of time in which a good proportion of my classmates were literally still children). I didn’t know the first thing about historiography (beyond subconscious context clues that I’ve developed over the years working on History Impossible—basically, understanding the continuity of scholarship on particular topics from one decade to the next. I also had to learn how to create Chicago-style citation. I had to relearn how to turn a phrase with an academic tone instead of a conversational one. Perhaps most difficult for me, I had to learn how to keep the expression of my ideas constrained to hard word and page-limits; shocker, I know. I needed to learn how to discuss history with people who also knew about history—often times about things I had never heard of. I had to learn how to swallow my tongue when I heard the usual dumb academia-inflected progressive bromides being stated by people who clearly were just saying what they thought they needed to say in order to feel like they were in good company. It was a profound life adjustment in the context of learning and doing history.

And yet…it all clicked into place. My lack of a degree in history had earned me respect, from both my more open-minded classmates and from my professors (who both peppered me with questions I didn’t expect to be answering, mostly about what kind of psychology I studied); just as they all had a pool of experience and knowledge I didn’t possess, I apparently had a pool of experience and knowledge that they didn’t possess. I not only learned how to formally explain and detail a historiography, I learned that I really hated it and much-preferred original research (which apparently makes me the odd man out among my classmates with only a few exceptions). Chicago-style citation quickly replaced the ingrained APA-style citation I had gotten used to, and it turned out to be something the more autistic parts of my brain actually enjoyed doing. I did indeed learn how to confine my ideas within certain word and page limits; much as I love to go as long as possible on something to make sure listeners/readers understand where I’m coming from, I had relatively little trouble embracing the notion that brevity is the soul of wit and staying with the constraints I was given. The disordered conversation that comes from excitement was very quickly able to give way to a historically-minded shorthand that stayed relatively lively throughout the semester. And those academia-inflected progressive bromides? Annoying as they were, I found that not all of my classmates resonated with them and those with whom they did are perfectly nice people who have never chafed (at least outwardly) with anything I might have said (though let me assure you, it’s not impossible to drop redpills here and there as long as you know how to use the language of the “woke”).

The only real incident or issue was, of course, tangentially related to this last point of sociopolitical clash, which was to be expected after the events of October 7th. You see, academia does indeed have a long-held tradition of skewing politically left, no matter what the chroniclers I’ve been made to read will say (since their idea of “conservative” clearly means “to the right of Bernie Sanders”). It does not skew right, not in any meaningful sense. Part of skewing left is to hold a pretty long-standing position regarding Israel, which, as long as it falls within the spectrum of “it’s a colonial project that should not exist and anyone who fights against it is noble” and “it’s a colonial project and therefore super problematic.” Because this has been a tradition since the salad days of the PLO and the radical chic of the early 1970s, rather than something aggressively studied and discussed, the tradition has replaced the messiness of the reality. The depth and breadth of knowledge regarding Israel, the conflict between Jews and Arabs, British colonial history in the region, Ottoman imperial history in the region, Russian history vis-a-vis anti-Semitism, and the role of both World Wars, is about as wide as a pencil and as deep as a paper plate. And this was made perfectly clear to me when a classmate of mine started aggressively ripping down Hamas hostage posters in the history department hallway, sneering that it was “Zionist propaganda.”

If I have any regret from this past semester, it’s that I didn’t try to interrogate what this person actually knew about any of this. Under normal circumstances, I might have. Under the circumstances of the time—it being almost 9pm and I had a one hour commute home ahead of me, it being the literal last day of the semester, it being during a particularly scary time for my family necessitating me to be home as soon as possible—I didn’t. I also recognized in witnessing such casual and performative cruelty that my own rage would create a non-zero chance a bridge would be burned and I might negatively affect my trajectory as a graduate student after only one semester with four more (at least) to go. It was a moment of self-censorship, but in the end, I think I made the right call.

This is partly because I resolved to play the game of graduate school but with the aesthetic and in the voice of a graduate student. In other words, I remembered the importance of knowing my audience. I felt like an outsider when I began graduate school, but then I realized, through my efforts and skills, that I wasn’t. My own views—let’s try not to diagnose them; I’m too tired—don’t really comport with most of my classmates’, but that doesn’t make me an outsider. Acting like a dick to someone who was being a dick probably will. I’ve realized that I can speak these people’s language and I actually enjoy doing so because I have not sacrificed an ounce of my personality in doing so; it’s like the imposed word count. It’s an imposed handicap. And this is why I plan to make one of my research papers this semester focus on the role Arab nationalists played in sowing their own destruction. Will my classmate whose own sensibilities offended my own ever read this paper or hear my presentation of it? I doubt it. But I know that to burst a bubble of possible groupthink (or , the best way to do it is to speak the language of the group so they have a harder time rejecting counternarratives out of hand. Maybe this is the wrong approach, maybe I’m naïve (let me know if you think so!); we will see.

If there really is any takeaway from these musings (that increasingly look like me tooting my own horn, so forgive me that self-indulgence), it’s that I’m starting to feel more confidence as a graduate student and as someone who is learning how to “do history.” I could feel completely different by the end of this semester. Or hell, I could feel completely different by the end of class tonight. I really have no idea. But things no longer feel as, I guess the word would be “untethered.” And that’s something I want to hang onto.

Anyway, stay tuned. I may have more updates as the semester goes on. There is more History Impossible content to come very soon, but in the meantime, in case you missed it, enjoy the most recent special episode I did with Richard Lim of the This American Presidents podcast where we discussed the contentious (to say the least) election of 1876.