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Executive Editor, Journals Dept. University of Hawai‘i Press
by | 3 May 2004 · 6:25 pm

Thailand: Dangers of Jihadi Reprisal

The South Asia Analysis Group has just posted an analysis of the recent clash between Muslim youth and Thai police in the Pattani area of southern Thailand.

3. The tactics adopted by the poorly-armed Muslim youth bring to mind more that of the LTTE in the early years of its struggle against the Sri Lankan Armed Forces or of the Maoists of Nepal or of the tribal insurgents of India’s North-East than that of the jihadi terrorists active in the South-East Asian and South Asian region. The LTTE, the Maoists and the Indian tribal insurgents used to adopt such tactics to replenish their stocks of arms and ammunition.

4. What these young Muslims have exhibited in common with their co-religionists in Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere is their fierce motivation and not the modus operandi adopted by them. They do not appear to be bandits or narcotics smugglers as projected by Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra of Thailand and his officials. They are politically and religiously motivated fighters, with no evidence so far of any external influence–either from the Jemaah Islamiyah of the South-East Asian region or the jihadi organisations of Pakistan and/or Bangladesh–on their mind.

5. Attacking in large numbers with machetes is not the known modus operandi of any of the identified jihadi organisations of the International Islamic Front (IIF). They do slit the throat of their victims with a knife just as they slit the throat of a sacrificial goat with one, but they do not indulge in massive attacks on posts of the security forces and the police carrying only machetes.

At the same time, Nirmal Ghosh in the Straits Times reports:

PATTANI – A top security adviser to the [Thai] government said yesterday that an underground shadowy movement that has been building its ranks for almost a decade was behind the recent spate of violence in the country’s restive south.

And the Weekend Australian reports:

SUSPECTED Islamic militants killed by security forces at a south Thailand mosque may have been trained abroad by the al-Qaeda linked South-east Asian terror network Jemaah Islamiah (JI), a news report said today.

Pattani is just across the piracy-plagued Straits of Malacca from Aceh.

Hat tip: Winds of Change

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by | 3 May 2004 · 5:48 pm

Indonesian Legislative Elections, 2004: Round-up and Analysis

The South Asia Analysis Group has the most comprehensive round-up of data and analysis on the April 5 legislative elections in Indonesia that I’ve seen so far.

The voting pattern has indicated that majority still prefers the old school of politics as seen from the strong showing of Golkar, PDI-P and the PPP. On the other hand there are voters (presumably in the urban areas and the younger generation) who are looking for a political change as is reflected in the emergence of parties such as the Democratic Party and the PKS.

There is widespread political disillusionment over the last 5 years (2 years under the deposed president Abdurrahman Wahid and 3 years under Megawati Sukarnoputri). News reports elicited from the people from various walks of life indicated that the general public would be happy to go back to the New Order days when there was more political stability.

One of the main reasons for the disillusionment of Megawati regime has been the slow progress of the economic reforms. Besides some of the reforms such as cuts in power subsidies were unpopular. The high percentage of unemployment has not been attended to. Corruption at all levels is also affecting the economy. Incidentally a survey of foreign businessmen carried out by Hong Kong based Political and Economic Risk Consultancy Limited indicates that Indonesia is the most corrupt country in Asia for the third year running.

Unfortunately, the analysis was posted on 20 April, just before the final vote tally and just before Golkar nominated General Wiranto as its presidential candidate. Here’s what the SAAG had to say about the upcoming presidential elections on 5 July.

It may be remembered that in 1999, a loose grouping of Islamic parties succeeded in preventing Megawati from becoming the president even though her party (PDI-P) was the leading party with 34 per cent of the votes. Amien Rais of the National Mandate party, who is also speaker of the People’s Consultative Assembly (MPR), is trying a similar strategic move this time by forming a coalition called “Save the Nation Axis” with the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS). This only confirms his ambitions for the post of the president.

The leading contenders to the post of the President are:

Akbar Tandjung of Golkar (party ranking first in this election)

Megawati Sukarnoputri of PDI-P

Susilo Bambang Yudhyono of Democratic Party

Amien Rais of the National Mandate Party

The position may become clear once the Golkar convention scheduled for 20 April decides about its presidential candidate. Akbar Tandjung, a seasoned politician since 1977 and a former minister under Suharto, has recently been accused of corruption in a major case though he has been cleared by the Supreme Court. The fight in Golkar is primarily between him and General Wiranto, a former armed forces chief who has been indicted for atrocities in East Timor.

With the strong mandate for Golkar, Akbar Tandjung has all the advantages and the political acumen for becoming the next president. However the opinion polls show that Susilo Bambang Yudhyono, the former security minister under Megawati and a former general is ahead of all the other presidential candidates including Akbar Tandjung. He has also scored over Golkar and the PDI-P by selecting Jusuf Kalia, the Chief Social Welfare Minister as his running mate for the presidential election. Both Golkar and the PDI-P were eyeing him as their vice presidential candidate. The chances of Megawati returning as president by a successful manipulation of a viable coalition are not very bright. As Abdurrahman Wahid made it to the presidency in 1999 from nowhere, the presidential poll this time also can bring a surprise winner, though it may not be in the best interests of the country.

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by | 2 May 2004 · 4:39 pm

The Oldest Malay Manuscript Ever Discovered

Uli Kozok, assistant professor of Indonesian language at the University of Hawai‘i, is studying the oldest Malay manuscript ever discovered. It appears to date from before the advent of Islam.

In 2001 I received a Research Relation grant to study the Kerinci script of central Sumatran as part of my work on the palaeography of Southeast Asia. The grant was used for the mapping of existent variants of the central Sumatran scripts that provided us with new insights into the internal relationship between the two closely related scripts. [See map.]

In 2002 I received a second Research Relation grant that resulted in the spectacular discovery of what I believed was the oldest extant Malay manuscripts. This manuscript, a legal code of 34 pages that I found in the village of Tanjung Tanah, contains two texts, one in the old Malayu script, and one in an ancient form of the Kerinci script, which is very likely the missing link in the development of the Kerinci and other South Sumatran scripts from an earlier version of the Sumatran version of the kawi script [Indic-derived and used to write Old Javanese].

The research was continued in 2003, again supported by a Research Relation grant. In the meanwhile my assertion that the Tanjung Tanah manuscript is the oldest extant Malay manuscript came under attack by scholars of Javanese palaeography who argued that, on palaeographic grounds, the manuscript is not older than 200 years. As an expert in Sumatran script I immediately knew that such a late age was impossible, and also the textual evidence (e.g. the absence of any Arabic loanwords) ruled out a date as recent as the 18th century. Since I was unable to challenge their conclusion (I am not in expert of the Javanese script to which the Sumatran Malayu script is closely related), I decided to support my claim with scientific evidence and asked the owner to provide me with a small sample of the manuscript that I sent to the Rafter laboratory in Wellington, New Zealand. The result corroborated my hypothesis which was based on philological and historical evidence unanimously.

This manuscript is now beyond any doubt the oldest Malay manuscript in the world (most likely 2nd half of the 14th century) predating the hitherto oldest manuscript by nearly 200 years! …

My research on the Tanjung Tanah manuscript (which is the only Malay manuscript in a pre-Islamic script) is significant in that it makes a number of theories on early Malay literacy obsolete, and forces us to entirely rethink the intellectual history of the pre-Islamic Malay world.

If it can be established that the Tanjung Tanah manuscript is palaeographically related to the 13th century Adityawarman inscriptions, we will not [only] have convincing proof that the manuscript dates to the 14th century, but it is also very likely that the manuscript will force us to entirely rethink Sumatran palaeography that hitherto had been closely linked to Java with its abundance of stone inscriptions and (from the 14th century onwards) manuscripts [in Arabic-derived Jawi script].

The translation of the manuscript, and the analysis of the language it is written in will give us new insights into the early Malay legal system, the political relationship between the coastal Malay maritime kingdoms with the upriver communities in the Bukit Barisan mountain range, but also into the development of the Malay language since this is the oldest existing substantial body of text in the Malay language.

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by | 2 May 2004 · 9:59 am

Impearls on May Day, the Haymarket Riots, and Capital Punishment

Impearls has a timely look back at the origins of May Day in the 1886 Haymarket Riots in Chicago, which serve as an object lesson in a polemic about the dangers of capital punishment.

Today is May Day, May 1st. People in America are often vaguely aware that other regions of the world, especially Europe and leftist-impressed parts, celebrate May Day as the occasion for a pro-labor holiday, the equivalent of the U.S.’s Labor Day held in the fall. Few Americans, however, recall that this day actually commemorates events which occurred in the United States, in Chicago, on and after May 1, 118 years before this day.

Fifteen years ago, three years after the centenary, I posted a progenitor of this polemic on the Usenet (aka Newsgroups), which rather than emphasizing the labor aspect of the day in history, treated it as an abject example of the dangers of application of the death penalty by society, and the certainty that innocents will be executed in error if capital punishment is employed to any significant extent. I believe the subject is even more pertinent today than it was back then.

Read the rest.

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by | 1 May 2004 · 1:48 pm

New Caledonia and the Origin of Kanak

Head Heeb recently posted a nice backgrounder and update on New Caledonia.

The upcoming election in New Caledonia is shaping up to be significant for the future of the country. As usual, the election will pit the ruling settler-dominated, anti-independence Rally for Caledonia in the Republic against the indigenous, pro-independence opposition, but this time the leader of the ruling party wants to pull out of a 1998 power-sharing accord.

New Caledonia is one of the Pacific’s few settler colonies. Like Australia, it began as a penal colony with many of the convicts choosing to stay after the completion of their terms; nickel and copper booms later in the 19th century led to further settlement. Unlike other regional settler colonies such as New Zealand and Hawaii, however, the indigenous Kanaks were never reduced to a small minority. Instead, the Kanaks and the descendants of settlers are at rough parity. The Kanaks are the largest group but are only a 42.5-percent plurality of the population, with Caldoches (whites) at about 37 percent and Asian and Pacific labor migrants making up the remainder. The higher birth rate of the Kanaks gives them a long-term demographic edge, but the relatively even numbers have led to sharp conflict.

The history of how the Hawaiian word for ‘human, person’, kanaka, eventually came to be appropriated by Melanesian nationalists in a French colony named after Scotland is a tangled one.

The word kanaka comes from the original Polynesian tangata as it was pronounced in the eastern end of the Hawaiian archipelago (the island named Hawai‘i), where earlier t had come to be pronounced [k]. The western dialects, in particular those of Kaua‘i and Ni‘ihau, preserved the older pronunciation as [t]. (The island of Taua‘i shows up on early Western maps as “Atooi.”) In 1778, the English explorer, Captain James Cook, on his way north to seek the Northwest Passage, sighted the biggest, highest, southernmost island in the archipelago before any of the other islands he named after the Earl of Sandwich. The local chief, Kamehameha, thus acquired the means to conquer the other islands before his neighbor-island rivals did. His kingdom was named after his home island, and his dialect eventually set the standard for the huge volume of written Hawaiian language materials during the 1800s, a rich legacy which is now being translated and standardized.

The same Captain Cook was responsible for naming New Caledonia (after the old Roman name for Scotland) when he first sighted it on an earlier voyage in 1774.

By the 1840s, at the peak of the whaling and sandalwood trade, Hawaiians could be found on ships and in ports all over the Pacific. At Fort Vancouver, for instance, 40% of the Hudson’s Bay Company laborers were Hawaiian.

As the English vessels stopped in the Sandwich Islands, now the Hawaiian Islands, to take on stores of food, water, and goods like rum and coral, Natives were offered (or sometimes forced into) short-term, renewable contracts with the Company; they boarded ship (in fact, they gained a reputation as skillful aboard because, unlike most sailors of the day, they could swim) and joined the workforce at Fort Vancouver. The employee village, just southwest of the stockaded fort proper, came to be known as Kanaka Village because of the large population of Hawaiians residing there, though it was home to all the diverse employees of the Company.

The common languages were either Canadian French or Chinook Jargon, a trade language based on Chinook but incorporating elements from English, French, and Hawaiian. In the early years of the fort, English was used infrequently, with visiting missionaries or the remnants of unsuccessful American fur trading ventures.

Among the gathering places in the South Pacific for whalers and traders in sandalwood and bêche-de-mer (sea cucumber, trepang) were Tanna in the southern New Hebrides and the Loyalty Islands off New Caledonia. The equivalent of Chinook Jargon here was Bislama, which also incorporated elements from English, Hawaiian, and later more and more French, as France began claiming territory in the area during the 1850s and 1860s.

By this time, kanaka seems to have been used on ships all over the Pacific to mean ‘native’, with the same derogatory implications that its English gloss has. In both Bislama and Tok Pisin (New Guinea Pidgin), it suggests someone who is not just a native, but an uncivilized hillbilly. The word and its meaning were borrowed into French as canaque. However, Melanesian nationalists reversed its derogatory implications and defrenchified the spelling to Kanak, which has the advantage of denoting all New Caledonians of Melanesian ancestry, no matter which of three dozen different Melanesian languages they might speak.

If you’ve read this far, you really should go read the rest of Head Heeb’s post.

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by | 30 April 2004 · 8:48 pm

Two Backgrounders on the Separatist Movement in Aceh

The East-West Center has just published two useful backgrounders on the separatist movement in Aceh in northern Sumatra in Indonesia.

The Free Aceh Movement (GAM): Anatomy of a Separatist Organization, by Kirsten E. Schulze. Policy Studies 2. Washington, DC: East-West Center Washington, 2004. ix, 76 pp. Paper, $5.00.

The province of Aceh is located on the northern tip of the island of Sumatra in the Indonesian archipelago. Since 1976 it has been wracked by conflict between the Free Aceh Movement (Gerakan Aceh Merdeka; GAM), which is seeking to establish an independent state, and the Indonesian security forces seeking to crush this bid. At the heart of the conflict are center/periphery relations and profound Acehnese alienation from Jakarta. This paper aims to provide a detailed ideological and organizational “map” of GAM in order to increase the understanding of its history, motivations, and organizational dynamics. Consequently this paper analyses GAM’s ideology, aims, internal structure, recruitment, financing, weapons procurement, and its military capacity. The focus of this study is on the recent past as the fall of Suharto not only allowed the Indonesian government to explore avenues other than force to resolve the Aceh conflict, but also provided GAM with the opportunity to make some changes to its strategy and to transform itself into a genuinely popular movement. It will be argued here that the key to understanding GAM in the post-Suharto era and the movement’s decisions, maneuvers and statements during the three years of intermittent dialogue can be found in the exiled leadership’s strategy of internationalization. This strategy shows that for GAM the negotiations, above all, were not a way to find common ground with Jakarta but a means to compel the international community to pressure the Indonesian government into ceding independence.

Security Operations in Aceh: Goals, Consequences, and Lessons, by Rizal Sukma. Policy Studies 3. Washington, DC: East-West Center Washington, 2004. ix, 58 pp. Paper, $5.00.

Since Indonesia’s independence in August 1945, the province of Aceh on the northern tip of Sumatra island has often been described as a center of resistance against the central government in Jakarta. The first uprising-the Darul Islam rebellion-began in 1953 and ended only in 1961 after the central government promised to grant special autonomy status to Aceh. When this promise was not fulfilled, another rebellion erupted in the mid-1970s. Unlike the Darul Islam rebellion which sought to change Indonesia into an Islamic state, the rebellion in 1970s took the form of a secessionist movement led by the Free Aceh Movement (Gerakan Aceh Merdeka; GAM). Despite its defeat in 1977 after the Indonesian military launched a security operation, another GAM-led rebellion broke out again in 1989–and again the Indonesian government responded swiftly with another military crackdown.

This paper examines the purpose, consequences, and lessons to be drawn from the security operations conducted by Indonesian forces in Aceh since 1990. As the vested interests of the TNI and its emphasis on a military solution have contributed to an escalation of the conflict, it argues that the military requires an exit strategy to be followed by socio-economic reconstruction. The paper is divided into four sections. The first outlines the root causes of the conflict and discusses military operations during the period 1990-98 when Aceh was designated a Military Operations Area (Daerah Operasi Militer; DOM). Security operations in Aceh between the downfall of Suharto’s New Order regime in May 1998 and May 2003, when the government finally decided to impose martial law and launch a full-scale military crackdown in the province are explored in the second section. The third explores the conduct of the counterinsurgency operation during the first six months of martial law in the province. The final section looks at how the government’s failure to consider the wider context of the conflict undermines the relative gains achieved on the military front. While security operations during the 1990s contributed to the aggravation of the problem–due primarily to the failure of Indonesia’s litary to protect human rights–the military operation since May 2003 will not end the conflict in Aceh if the government fails to undertake non-military measures to address the root causes of the problem in the province.

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by | 30 April 2004 · 8:03 am

The New Economics of Academia: Wanted: Really Smart Suckers

Reporter Anya Kamenetz has a must-read feature in The Village Voice (27 April) for anybody who has ever spent time working in academia–or who ever hopes to. It’s entitled Generation Debt – the New Economics of Being Young, subtitled “Wanted: Really Smart Suckers: Grad school provides exciting new road to poverty.”

Here’s an exciting career opportunity you won’t see in the classified ads. For the first six to 10 years, it pays less than $20,000 and demands superhuman levels of commitment in a Dickensian environment. Forget about marriage, a mortgage, or even Thanksgiving dinners, as the focus of your entire life narrows to the production, to exacting specifications, of a 300-page document less than a dozen people will read. Then it’s time for advancement: Apply to 50 far-flung, undesirable locations, with a 30 to 40 percent chance of being offered any position at all. You may end up living 100 miles from your spouse and commuting to three different work locations a week. You may end up $50,000 in debt, with no health insurance, feeding your kids with food stamps. If you are the luckiest out of every five entrants, you may win the profession’s ultimate prize: A comfortable middle-class job, for the rest of your life, with summers off….

But the Internet means no isolated community has to stay that way. A new group of tortured, funny, largely anonymous websites are providing an outlet for academics who feel like they’re getting spanked by their alma mater. They have names like Invisible Adjunct, (a)musings of a grad student, Beyond Academe, and Barely Tenured, and they address the emotional just as much as the practical consequences of competing in, and losing, the academic job-market lottery.

Founded in February 2003, Invisible Adjunct quickly became one of the most popular such blogs. Dozens of regular posters followed discussion threads like “The Old Boy Network” and “Is Tenure a Cartel?” Invisible Adjunct’s author—call her IA—is a New Yorker in her late thirties with a Ph.D. in British history, an adjunct for the past two years. “I’ve spent all these years and I’ve failed,” says IA, who entered graduate school in 1993 and received her Ph.D. in 1999. “You agree to do this five-to-seven-year low-paid apprenticeship because you’re joining this guild. And if you end up as an adjunct you think, wow, I’m really getting screwed over.”

The also pseudonymous Thomas H. Benton was a frequent contributor to Invisible Adjunct’s blog and has penned a series of cautionary columns for the Chronicle of Higher Education. He is even more blunt than IA. “The premise of graduate education in the humanities is a lie: Students are not apprentices preparing for a life of scholarship and teaching,” he says. “They are a cheap source of labor and status for institutions and faculty and, after they earn their degrees, most join the reserve army of the academic underemployed.” Benton, a professor at a small liberal arts college, warns his students about trying to follow in his footsteps. “My experience as a working-class kid who finally earned an Ivy League Ph.D. is that higher education is not about social mobility or personal enrichment; it is one trap among many for people who are uninitiated into the way power and influence operate in this culture.”

Grad school applications are up slightly over the last decade, as unemployed college grads seek a haven from the job market. Every winter, a new crop of bright, bookish, maybe slightly fuzzy-headed kids, the kind who cover the sidewalks of the Lower East Side and Williamsburg, decide they’re sick enough of the 9-to-5 grind to borrow some money and go back to school.

Unlike trade schools, most graduate programs do not offer prospective students detailed data on job placement, which varies widely from program to program. Tri-State Semi Driver Training School in Middletown, Ohio, for example, guarantees a job before you even start driving, while the American Language Institute in San Diego promises lifetime placement assistance to its teachers of English as a foreign language. Your local Ivy League English department can’t offer the same deal: Last year, the Modern Language Association expected some 965 Ph.D.’s to be granted, while only 422 assistant professorships were advertised, a drop of 20 percent from the year before. In the foreign languages, there were only 263 positions advertised (for the 620 Ph.D.’s projected), a drop of one-third from the previous year. The MLA estimates that students who entered English programs in 2003 had a 20 percent chance of coming out with a tenure-track position. The situation is better in history, where the number of new Ph.D.’s in 2003 almost equalled the number of new jobs, after a decade of “overproduction,” with growth coming in trendy specializations like the Middle East.

But numbers like these do little to deter the best students. “Top undergraduates are arrogant; they lack perspective,” says Benton. “They’ve been fawned over all their lives, and they think grad school is there to help them realize their potential, not to use them up and toss them out.”

The Chronicle (30 April) profiles the Invisible Adjunct at some length. Almost like an obituary.

Now, she senses that the Ph.D. in her pocket has grown stale.

“I have to confront the fact that my shelf life has expired,” she says, “and I’m not going to get a job in the academy.”

My sentiments match those in the comment posted by Anita Henderson on History News Network, where Ralph Luker noted the Village Voice article.

The reason grad students and adjuncts are taken advantage of is because they can be. And that’s because there are too many of them. More than the market needs.

What’s amazing is the sense of outrage in academic circles about the system, as if being a college instructor were different from other jobs. I’ve been through downsizing efforts in industries. Many, if not most, Americans have. People watching their earning potential fall through the floor. What they’ve worked to achieve for years become devalued in the marketplace.

Ivory tower academics must be oblivious to this, thinking that the old system of establishing yourself and then sitting back and letting the money roll in is in place. Rather than feeling sorry for themselves and their colleagues, they should try getting on with life the way most people do.

Lots of people want to be rock musicians. A few make it big, a few more earn comfortable livings. Most do it as a hobby along with their day job or barely squeak by. Lots of people want to be professional athletes. A few make it big, most don’t.

There’s nothing unique about academia. Social activists always say we need to tune inner city kids to reality, make them understand that they probably won’t become sports stars, the odds against that are too high, so they should have some other plan to fall back on. Maybe we need to let these professor wannabes [learn] the same thing.

Here’s my advice, from one who has made the transition out of academia, and back in, several times: Start early. Stay in practice. Avoid irrational optimism.

I first started after finishing high school in Japan (Canadian curriculum, not Japanese). I decided I didn’t want to go to college. (I wasn’t that eager to immigrate back to the U.S., either.) After working the summer in my uncle’s service station–not just pumping gas and checking oil, but changing tires on farm tractors and logging trucks, I acquired a new appreciation for schoolwork. So I applied late to my father’s alma mater, the University of Richmond, Va., where I was one of two “foreign” students–both American missionary kids, in fact. The Richmond Collegian interviewed us both, concluding thus.

Joel had visited the U.S. at several intervals before coming to UR. Joel said that his opinion of the U.S. changed each time he came. He said that he likes the U.S. better now than he did. However, he added, “When I read Mad Magazine in Japan, I thought the magazine exaggerated situations, but now that I’m here, I do not think the magazine does!”

I don’t think I phrased it quite so awkwardly, but that’s pretty much what I intended to convey. My U.S. college experience was not what the Asian edition of Newsweek had suggested it might be. Ferment, no. Boredom, yes. I dropped out in my sophomore year. The draft beckoned. The best I could do was opt for the Army language school. They gave me the 7th language on my list of 8: Romanian. So I spent my Vietnam-era Army days assigned to a stateside Civil Affairs unit that had more officers than enlisted men. I took a couple of extension courses on base, and spent a lot of time in the library and volunteering at the language lab on base: teaching an English class to Korean officers (always careful never to be seen in my enlisted uniform), and to a lovely class of Thai and Vietnamese army wives.

I took advantage of an early out to resume college, and managed to stretch my G.I. Bill benefits out well into my Ph.D. program, thanks to work-study, graduate assistantships, and other temporary or part-time jobs. I swore I wouldn’t get married until finishing my dissertation, then did anyway. I swore I wouldn’t accept full-time employment before finishing, then did anyway. I did finally manage to finish, mostly writing on weekends. And I finished only $2,000 in debt, which I paid off early! After spending most of the 1970s in grad school, I spent most of the 1980s doing computer support work in the business world (even taking a couple night classes in accounting), then migrated back into academic publishing during the 1990s.

In many ways, I’m a natural-born academic. But my wife teaches. Other friends and family teach. Heck, I’ve taught. And I know it’s not for me. Nor is the long stretch of pre-tenure paranoia and post-tenure burnout. I suppose this blog is now my classroom. Whimsy is my syllabus. Attendance is optional. And there are no papers to mark. My day job pays the mortgage. But I do worry about how to encourage my daughter to pursue her interests–even more academic than mine–while steering her away from a career in academia.

UPDATE: Via an update to History News Network, I see that Erin O’Conner of Critical Mass adds further thoughts and outlines her own answer to “The terrible, horrible, no good, very bad grad school question“:

Between the Chronicle of Higher Ed’s farewell paean to the Invisible Adjunct, the current Crooked Timber thread attempting to theorize the unconcern and even contempt tenured academics display toward the adjunct labor that sustains their comfortable lifestyles, and yesterday’s Village Voice piece on how you’ve got to be a hell of a sucker to go to grad school in the humanities or social sciences nowadays, I’ve been thinking a great deal not only about the politics of the academy, but about the politics of lamentation about the state of the academy.

There is something a bit, ummm, noisome in the spectacle of established, tenured academics clucking their virtual tongues and beating their virtual breasts about the terrible lot that has befallen the Invisible Adjunct and all those other adjuncts for whom she has so invisibly stood. What besides clucking are these folks doing to reform the abusive system that chewed IA up and spat her out? …

You can say that this is a fine case of the pot calling the kettle black. After all, what have I been doing on Critical Mass since March 2002 besides lamenting the state of academe, and devoting considerable space to the corruption of the academic humanities? I’ve clucked about the exploitation of adjunct labor more than once on this blog, and I’ve done it from a tenured position whose shape is structurally dependent on all the non-tenure-track lecturers, adjuncts, and grad students that my department regularly employs to round out its course offerings. So where do I get off?

I’ll know the exact answer to that question next week, when I decide which of several job offers teaching high school English to accept. In the meantime, I’ll simply note that what gives me license to point fingers in this moment is that I am leaving academe–in no small part because I cannot see a way to resolve the many interlinked crises facing the academic humanities, and I cannot reconcile my beliefs in institutional fairness, personal and professional integrity, and, much more basically, education, with a life lived from within a university English department. I’m not sure the problems can be resolved at this point. And, frankly, I’m not sure they should be. The self-discrediting behavior of the humanist “haves” during the past several decades of progressive deprofessionalization, combined with their confirmed collective refusal to take their own disciplinarity seriously (whether as scholars or as teachers), doesn’t suggest there is a whole lot worth saving….

There is one market, though, that is WIDE OPEN for humanities M.A.’s and Ph.D.’s, and that is the independent school market. “Independent” is mostly a contemporary code word for “private,” though it can also mean “charter.” Your Ph.D.–or, if you are ABD, your M.A.–is a very attractive qualification in this market….

Locating and applying for such jobs could not be easier. There are agencies whose entire mission is to match you with schools that are looking for candidates like you. The agencies are entirely free to the candidates. They are not gimmicks. They work.

Why do you hear absolutely nothing about this career option from within academe? Why do academic departments pretend this entirely dignified and deeply meaningful career path does not exist–even though it could be just what many of their otherwise unemployable Ph.D.’s, not to mention their dissatisfied faculty, are looking for? Why do they treat as beneath their notice a type of work that they ought to be embracing as a seriously significant alternative to the dead-end academic career of the adjunct? Do I really have to ask?

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by | 27 April 2004 · 10:41 pm

Clarence Greathouse, Kentucky’s Legal Advisor to King Kojong in Korea

GREATHOUSE, CLARENCE RIDGEBY (c. 1845-Oct. 21, 1899), journalist, lawyer, diplomat, was born in Kentucky, the son of Dr. Ridgeby Greathouse, an early emigrant to Ca1ifornia. In 1870 he went to San Francisco. He practised law with Louis T. Haggin, then, upon the latter’s retirement, in the firm of Greathouse & Blanding–finally Wallace, Greathouse & Blanding. He was also active in local politics as a Democrat and in 1883 he became the general manager of the San Francisco Examiner, a Democratic daily. He continued in this position until 1886, when he was appointed consul-general at Kanagawa (Yokohama), Japan. Upon the confirmation of his appointment he left Washington May 31, 1886, and served successfully at his post for four years. At this time events and conditions in Korea were largely an enigma and a challenge to discovery to most foreigners in the Far East. Korea was also the one Asiatic country in which American influence and American participation in governmental affairs was at least the equal of that of any other Occidental nation. The successive American representatives in the Korean capital succeeded in so impressing the Korean King with the friendly and disinterested nature of the policy of their government that he was led to secure a comparatively large number of American advisors and on Sept. 12, 1890, Greathouse was engaged to serve as legal advisor to the Korean government. At that time there were eight Americans serving in Seul in various advisory capacities. The extent of American influence in Korea displeased the Chinese, but despite positive suggestions by the Chinese Resident against the employment of further foreign advisors, on Jan. 3, 1891, the Korean government gazetted Greathouse as a vice president of the home office and gave him charge of matters pertaining to foreign legal affairs. Gen. Charles Le Gendre [q.v.] at this time was a vice-president of the same office as foreign advisor to the King.

It is difficult to evaluate the work accomplished by Greathouse during his eight years in Korea. It is certain, however, that he secured the confidence of the King, and that for a time he was given complete charge of the trial of important political cases. He is also said to have acted as head of the Korean post-office department, but since during most of his service this department was weak and struggling he cannot be said to have accomplished much in this direction. His legal knowledge was often called upon in the drafting of conventions, in the constant negotiations with foreign representatives in Seul, and in the revising of Korean law and the reorganizing, at least on paper, of the Korean judicial system. His best-known work was in connection with the trial of the Koreans implicated in the murder of the Queen of Korea by Japanese and Korean conspirators on Oct. 8, 1895. After the King had escaped from his Japanese and Korean captors to the safety of the Russian legation, he asked Greathouse to supervise the investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death of the Queen. Greathouse attended all sessions of the court, examined the witnesses, and had the trials conducted in a thoroughly modern manner. It was owing to his influence that the trials were free from the gross faults which customarily disfigured the proceedings of all Korean courts, and that for general approximation to Western notions of justice and integrity they were in every way remarkable. During the last few years of his life Greathouse acted as confidential advisor to the King on foreign affairs. As far as the records show, he was never married; his mother remained with him until his death. While he was in Japan he secured the services of a young Goanese, H. A. Dos Remedios, as his secretary. When he went to Korea he took his assistant with him and Dos Remedios came practically to occupy the position of son as well as secretary, although he was never officially adopted. Greathouse died in Seul while still in the service of the government of Korea.

[The only trustworthy sources on the life of Greathouse are in the archives of the Department of State, and in the former American legation in Seul, Korea. Unfortunately, these are very meager. For printed sources see the Korea Repository, Mar. 1896, aud the Examiner (San Francisco), Nov. 18, 1899.] H.J.N.

SOURCE: Dictionary of American Biography. Greathouse was survived by his mother, who donated her diaries and documents to the U. of Kentucky Library in Lexington. I attended first grade at Greathouse Elementary in Louisville, KY, after kindergarten in Kokura, Japan. All I remember about school that year was nuclear attack drills and warnings about not allowing strangers to pick you up in their cars. (I guess nowadays kids are more scared of their classmates.) I never knew until decades later that Clarence Greathouse was a Kentucky notable who provided legal advice to the Meiji government, then to the Korean court. His whiskey-swilling mother was said to be one of the distinctive characters in the diplomatic community in Seoul. I spent some time exploring her diary and other documents in the Greathouse archives at UKy at few years back. Most of her diaries are concerned with diplomatic gatherings, especially this or that “tiffin” (high tea), with increasing worry about her son’s stomach ailments. I got the impression he drank himself to death.

A series of letters from other members of the diplomatic community in Seoul during the 1890s is online here.

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by | 26 April 2004 · 10:05 pm

Mining Muninn: Shanghai in August 1945

While perusing the archives of the Muninn blog I recently discovered, I came across another interesting bit of historical detail posted on 26 March, which describes the content of the newspaper Shenbao in Shanghai in August 1945:

You pick up the most circulated newspaper in Shanghai on August 15th, 1945, the day of Japan’s surrender. What do you see? Well, the news of the surrender hasn’t made it for the day’s issue. Instead, in the days leading up to the end of the war the newspaper focuses on the Russian advances in Manchuria, or the arrival of B29 bombers attacking Japanese targets in China. Of course, you still see the usual advertisements for CPC Coffee, and various brands of penicillin. But how will the newspaper change in the next few days as Japan’s control over Shanghai comes to an end? While this wasn’t a question related to my research, it was at the back of my mind as I skimmed through an important Shanghai newspaper called 申報 from the second half of the year 1945….

CPC Coffee, which had long had very recognizable, if somewhat boring, advertisements depicting a can a coffee, finally join the victory bandwagon on the 21st by getting rid of the can image and replacing it with three victory slogans for the Allies, China, and Chiang Kai-shek. They scrap this on the 26th and add an image of a caucasian drinking coffee. Prices still look kind of inflated on the 26th. Meimei Si is selling coffee for 18,000 yuan and ‘Victory’ sundaes for 40,000. Also on the 26th we see the sudden appearance of radio channel advertisements, promising the latest news from San Francisco or India. Not far from Meimei Si’s victory sundaes is a very short article noting the mass suicide of a group of Japanese soldiers in front of the imperial palace. The editorial of the day emphasizes the need to preserve social order and reminds everyone that Chiang Kai-shek has ordered that no-one is to show hostility towards the surrendered Japanese soldiers. Thousands of them are still wandering around with their weapons, some have yet to officially hand over control of the cities they control. Most of them are not disarmed until weeks or months later and some of them end up helping one side or the other in the conflict to come. In these early postwar days, the KMT and the Communists are in a mad nation-wide rush to get their troops into each Japanese controlled area to accept the hand-over of power first. While the two sides were nominally allied during the war against the Japan, the country is on the verge of a new civil war between the two. In the first few weeks, however, we see Mao and Chiang inviting each other to tea parties and banquets.

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by | 26 April 2004 · 9:50 pm

Mining Muninn: 102 Former Soldiers in Nanjing, 1937

Mining some of the historical posts on the Muninn blog I recently discovered, I came across an interesting entry on 19 March, 102 Former Soldiers in Nanjing, 1937:

I went on a used book buying spree last week, finally blocking off some time to roam the stores near Waseda’s campus one afternoon. One book I snapped up was a cheap copy of the normally $60 oral history book … edited by … (Matsuoka Tamaki). The book is part of a series of new Japanese books coming out which is methodically publishing vast amounts of primary materials on the Nanjing Massacre. Don’t read this posting if you are squeamish. I believe the books are associated with a group of historians who are disgusted by the revisionist nationalist scholars who once completely denied that anything horrible happened at the fall of Nanjing and now still claim that there was nothing out of the ordinary by the standard of modern warfare. While mainstream Japanese historians, along with the rest of the world, recognize that the fall of Nanjing was followed by an unusually horrible amount of slaughter and rape, I think most of them are tired of playing games with the revisionists and thereby sustaining the idea that there is some controversy worth debating. Rather than engaging them in futile debates, this particular group of historians seems focused on getting as much raw data as possible into print. The two newest books that I have seen are a collection of statements by Chinese witnesses of the massacre (which of course, the revisionists dismiss as liars or government stooges) and the volume I purchased collecting the statements of the soldiers themselves.

The rest is not pleasant, but really should be read.

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