Three Things Thursday: Mumbo Jumbo, Assessocracy, and Public History

It’s been a hectic, but interesting week. This means that my mind is cluttered with half-baked thoughts and competing priorities. This seems like a good excuse for a three things Thursday.

Thing the First

I continue to be fascinated with Ishmael Reed’s 1972 novel, Mumbo Jumbo. Not only is an entertaining book, but it also represents a kind of pseudoarchaeological novel. I’ve blogged on it before. Of course, even the casual reader will recognize that the book isn’t straightforward and the climax of the novel, when Papa LaBas gives a breathless lecture on the history of Jes Grew, the book slips perilously close to a parody of Zora Neal Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain (see this article by Gillian Johns; read my blog post on this novel here). This is deliberate, of course, as Reed makes clear, the power of Jes Grew doesn’t come from replacing one text with another, but from our encounters with the Black experience. These encounters serve to undermine claims to textual authority whether vested in the Text that LeBas so desperately seeks or any of the other sacred traditions associated with reading right-to-left.

As I was reading around about Mumbo Jumbo, I stumbled across a number of citations to Mark Shadle’s “A Bird’s Eye View: Ishmael Reed Unsettling the Score by Munching and Mooching on the Mumbo Jumbo Work of History.” As the link shows, it appeared in NDQ 54.1 (1986).

Thing the Second

Over the last five years or so, I’ve stepped back from my interest in university affairs. For a few years, I was deeply interested in how the university worked on both the local level and the historical one. With the COVID pandemic, with my own writing and research projects, and the changing nature of the administration, understanding the university became less of a priority. Every now and then, though, the university drags me back in.

This past week, I’ve been navigating an administrative quandary. Without going into great detail, it appears that certain administrative and technological limitations are exerting a significant influence over the academic aspects of university life. In this case, the processes used to admit students into a complex, historical program have started to encroach on the autonomy of this program and its ability to serve students (although I’m sure that the administrative perspective is that what they’re doing serves students best).

The point of this isn’t to vaguely accuse the staff at disagreeing with faculty, but instead to ponder at which point policies and procedures shifted from facilitating faculty visions of education to constraining them. This seems to be the core function of the assessocracy, for example, which is no longer directed toward assessing faculty directed outcomes of courses, but, instead, assessing whether faculty are doing what they’re saying that they’re doing. The tail has come to wag the dog.  

In my little book, I think about campuses as spaces of control. It is clearer to me now that it was when I wrote that chapter that campuses were not designed just to control students, but to control faculty as well.

Thing the Third

I was flattered to read this piece in the campus newsletter on my work with Nikki Berg Burin to produce a small book consisting of 150, 150-word essays on the history of Grand Forks. You can check it out the little piece on our (and our students!) work here and here is a link to down load the little volume.

We have 100 more little essays to go and it would be amazing to collect another gaggle of these before the end of the year!