On Saving LSU Press

Bertram Wyatt-Brown is an acclaimed historian of 19th-century America, professor of history emeritus, University of Florida, and visiting scholar, Johns Hopkins University. He writes below on the value of LSU Press, now facing the possibility of major cuts, and describes the press's historic significance and its vitality up to the present.


On Saving LSU Press
Bertram Wyatt-Brown

With many other academicians in this country, particularly those in the South, I am most distressed that the LSU community is encountering fiscal difficulties that may lead to a diminution or even an abolition of the great publishing institution on LSU’s campus. I am particularly indebted to the splendid capabilities of the LSU Press under the leadership of the late director Les Phillabaum and more recently Mary Katherine Calloway and her editor, John Easterly. For over a decade and a half I was editor of the Southern Biography Series (which was launched in the 1930s), having retired from the position in November 2008. In the course of that period, we produced over 35 volumes, none of which received unfavorable reviews, some of which won literary prizes, and all of which received acclaim in the marketplace.

Authors with subjects in a variety of fields were attracted to our series because of the high quality of the press's operations. The lives of Chief Justice John Marshall and Daniel Boone, for instance, have won widespread praise and high sales. We covered distinguished figures, both male and female, white and black, and a variety of fields-journalists, Civil War and Confederate military and political leaders, attorneys, judges, reformers, physicians, governors, and clergymen—from colonial times to the recent past. The field of southern history would have been sorely diminished if these works had not been published in our series. We have just published Thomas Settles’s John Bankhead Magruder: A Military Reappraisal. I might also mention that the Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures, which the University sponsors, has produced a valuable set of works. They have included such notable authors as C. Vann Woodward, David Donald, John Hope Franklin, T. Harry Williams, James M. McPherson, William E. Leuchtenburg, Drew Faust, now President of Harvard University, and many others, including myself. Some of the Fleming lecturers have won Pulitzer Prizes in history.

The Southern Biography series is only one of several highly successful aspects of the LSU Press's contribution to scholarship and sound learning. Literature and poetry are also well represented. In the areas of literature and history, fields I know best, the press holds an enviable position in the realm of academic publishing. It published Confederacy of Dunces in 1980. It won the Pulitzer for literature in 1981. The press’s reputation extends far beyond the confines of the South and has an international standing. It is not a regional or local enterprise by any means. At the same time, it should be noted that the press does offer considerable notice of the Gulf region as well as the history and literary achievements of Louisianans. Only the University of North Carolina Press and the University of Georgia Press, in my opinion, matches it in quality and significance in the field of southern studies. As it is, the press manages its funds with great care; there are no frills in its operations, and many on the staff work very hard for relatively modest financial reward. The press team is thoroughly dedicated to top-notch publishing. In addition, we in history and other parts of the humanities, have to have strong academic presses to support the publications of young, first-book authors in our faculties as they seek to rise in the profession. The LSU Press is particularly adept at attracting such promising scholars to publish under the guidance of the professional staff in Baton Rouge.

For the state of Louisiana to amputate or even obliterate the LSU Press would be most tragic and most shortsighted. Better times will come in due course, but to revive a dormant or vanished operation of this kind would be disastrous. It would take many years to regain what would be lost.

Richardson's Rules of Order, Part IV: How to Read for a College History Course

In an essay on "Success" Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: "'Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear." Careful reading is difficult to master. Undergrads in history find it tough to get that kernel of truth buried deep in a document. Others search long and hard for the thesis in a haystack with little luck.

In this installment of Richardson's Rules of Order, Heather Cox Richardson gives advice to college students on close reading. She poses some crucial questions students should consider when they make their way through that microfilmed newspaper article, court record, diary entry, novel, census record, television program, or monograph.


How to Read for a College History Course
Heather Cox Richardson

There are two types of sources in history: primary sources and secondary sources. They should be approached very differently.

Primary sources are things produced at the time. Letters, photographs, census records, songs, movies, advertisements, newspapers, TV shows, paintings, emails, and books are all examples of primary sources. Primary sources tell historians about the world at a certain time, and how people who lived then saw their world.

When you read a primary source, you need to read every word very carefully. You want to figure out who produced the source, and for whom it was written. A letter from a Confederate prisoner of war to his elderly father describing the black Union soldiers who had captured him would be very different than the memo from the black soldiers’ captain commending their actions, and neither would exactly reflect what had happened. (Think about it—a letter to your grandmother describing a day of college life would be a very different thing than a letter to your best friend describing the exact same day and, again, neither would be one hundred percent accurate).

Why was the document—or film, or canvas—produced? When James McLaughlin wrote his book My Friend the Indian (1910) was he trying to excuse his role in the murder of Sitting Bull? When Frank Triplett wrote The Life, Times, and Treacherous Death of Jesse James (1882) was he attacking the Republican government that controlled Missouri and the rest of the nation in the 1880s? The answer to both of these questions is yes, and as a result both authors strongly slanted their telling of events. No one produces anything without a bias, so you need to know the author’s agenda when s/he produced the source, to give you some sense of what can and can’t be learned from the document. McLaughlin is fairly reliable about mid-nineteenth-century Lakota treaties, while Triplett is reliable only for giving us an excellent picture of how ex-Confederates perceived the postwar Republican government.

When and where was the primary source written? A Southern version of Reconstruction written in 1868 would be dramatically different than one written in 1890, just as a letter to a friend about an exciting new job would be very different after five years of overwork, underpay, and an eventual sacking during a downsizing, even though both letters were about the same job and were written only five years apart.

Finally, a question most students have trouble answering: What does the source say? What can we learn from it about the time in which it was written? This will be much easier to decipher once you know the “who, when, where, and why.” Think, for example, of Jimi Hendrix’s famous version of the Star Spangled Banner performed at Woodstock in 1969.

Without any context except a knowledge of rock and roll history, his version has meaning for guitar fans, but someone who had never heard of Hendrix, or the song, or the era would probably dismiss the piece altogether as “a bunch of utter garbage,” as a student once called it when we listened to it in class. With a knowledge of the history of the song as the nation’s anthem, Hendrix’s position as America’s premier guitarist at a time when African Americans and Native Americans were demanding rights in the nation, the context of the Vietnam War, and both domestic and international challenges to America’s stratified society, and the story of Woodstock, it becomes a vital piece of America’s history.

Secondary sources are things written after the period, which analyze primary sources to make an argument about how we should interpret the events of the past. In history courses, secondary sources will usually be books or articles, but they can also be documentaries or websites.

You read a secondary source very differently than you do a primary source. Your goal in reading a secondary source is to discover the author’s argument, and to see what evidence s/he marshals to support that thesis. Once you have a handle on the argument and its evidence, you need to analyze whether or not you buy the argument, and why you’ve taken your position.

To read a secondary source, begin with the introduction, even if the professor has not assigned it and has asked you to read only a chapter or two of the book. Historians tend to say what they’re going to say, then to say it, then to say what they’ve said. Introductions almost always lay out the argument of the book. Once you’ve read the introduction, skip to the conclusion, looking again for the argument of the book. In the conclusion, an author usually summarizes the book’s thesis. Stay in the introduction and conclusion until you are certain of the book’s argument.

Once you know what an author is up to, read the body of the book. The most efficient way to do that is to read the introduction and conclusion of each chapter, to see how the argument progresses, and then to go back to the beginning of the book and move through it, reading the topic sentence of each paragraph. By now you should have a very clear idea of how the book works and how the argument develops. You can now go back and read the book to see how the author uses evidence to support his or her points. Check footnotes sometimes, especially if something seems forced. Is the source a solid one, or does it seem insufficient to support the point it makes?

This is a different way of reading than you are accustomed to, and it will seem awkward at first. It’s worth developing the skill to do it this way, though. This is by far the most efficient way to read secondary sources in history (and many other subjects), and will give you the best command of the material in the shortest time. Remember, what matters is not how many hours you spend reading, but whether or not you actually understand what you read. A student once told me proudly that he had taken all day Saturday and Sunday to read every single word of a book I had assigned although he didn’t understand any of it. Personally, I can’t think of a more thorough waste of a weekend. Please recognize—as he didn’t—that simply passing your eyes over the letters on a page is not a good use of your time.

Once you have command of the book, think about it. Do you agree with it? Did the author make his or her point by using factual evidence that supported the conclusion? If not, what seemed wrong? Did s/he make a sweeping argument about nineteenth-century American society and use evidence only from a few decades? Did s/he put into footnotes critical information that contradicted the argument in the text? Does the argument seem radically different than prevailing thought? Does it appear forced, without adequate and believable sources? Does it seem to make assumptions about the past in order to fit a specific theory? Or does the book seem to make a solid argument about the past that illuminates the way society works? Do you agree with the argument? Does it change the way you think about things?

Thinking about a book doesn’t have to take place at a desk. It’s a good way to take up time when you’re walking somewhere, or doing repetitive exercise, or even going on long drives. Make thinking about your studies part of your life. This, too, will be a habit that takes some effort to acquire, but will stand you in very good stead in the future, when you’ll have work issues that require more thought than you can give them during work hours.

See previous posts for more Richardson's Rules of Order.

The New History of Toleration

Chris Beneke

The latest issue of the William and Mary Quarterly includes a forum on Stuart Schwartz’s groundbreaking All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (2008), which argues that a surprisingly large proportion of ordinary people within the early modern Spanish and Portuguese empires maintained that salvation was available to a wide range of believers. Drawing on his extensive archival work on both sides of the Atlantic, Schwartz contends that these two Catholic regimes, famous for their religious exclusivity, actually harbored a substantial number of religious relativists. Schwartz’s book is distinctive in another way: its subject, he notes, “is not the history of religious toleration, by which is usually meant state or community policy, but rather of tolerance, by which I mean attitudes or sentiments.” (6)

The WMQ comments are generally positive. Lu Ann Homza does find fault with Schwartz’s heavy reliance on statements drawn from inquisitorial tribunals and suggests that when “Schwartz found over and over again the phrase that ‘each could be saved in his own law,’ we must ask whether Inquisition notaries were fitting defense testimony into rhetorical formulas.” David D. Hall sets Schwarz’s book within the new, non-linear and anti-triumphalist historiography of toleration in early modern Europe, specifically Alexandra Walsham’s Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500-1700 and Benjamin J. Kaplan’s Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe. Hall suggests that Schwartz’s universalist-minded subjects might be evidence of “the persistence of tensions within any strong cultural system.” Marcy Norton expresses her wish that Schwartz had given more weight to the impact of religious and ethnic diversity in prompting tolerant attitudes. And Andrew R. Murphy argues that we need to devote more attention to the “borderland between attitudes and political practices” than Schwartz does in All Can Be Saved.

As engaging as it is for specialists, this WMQ forum might seem a bit esoteric to the un-initiated. Fortunately, Murphy summarizes recent historiographical developments in his conclusion. The new literature on toleration in the early modern (Anglo-American) world, he writes, is characterized by four “corollaries”:

* Intolerance was—theoretically, conceptually, and theologically speaking—as robust as tolerance.

* Elites often had “good,” or at least comprehensible, reasons for persecuting religious dissenters.

* Toleration often resulted from the intentional plans of tolerationist elites but as an unintended consequence of actions growing out of complex motivations (economic, political, strategic).

* Toleration, when it happened, was due as much to exclusionary impulses and intolerance (separatism, anti-Catholicism) as to humanistic and skeptical ideals.

The WMQ forum on All Be Saved falls on the heels of a fascinating September 2008 conference organized by Evan Haefeli, Brendan McConville, and Owen Stanwood on “Anti-popery” in the Protestant Atlantic world from 1530 to 1850, which also offered a generally non-triumphalist and socially grounded take on the extent of early modern toleration across the Atlantic world.

Beneke's essay, "America’s Whiggish Religious Revolution: An Instance in the Progress of History," will appear in the June 2009 issue of Historically Speaking.

The History of Memorial Day and the National World War One Museum, Kansas City

Randall Stephens

As Americans cram their faces with hot dogs and swill cheap beer, many will also reflect on the heroic efforts of countless men and women who have served their country over the years. Parades, concerts, and ceremonies across Boston will turn our attention to those who fought and died for their country. The National memorial Day Concert in Washington, D.C., will draw a massive crowd of observers in the capitol and TV viewers.

According to the Library of Congress it all began in 1868 when:

Commander in Chief John A. Logan of the Grand Army of the Republic issued General Order Number 11 designating May 30 as a memorial day "for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet churchyard in the land."

The first national celebration of the holiday took place May 30, 1868, at Arlington National Cemetery, where both Confederate and Union soldiers were buried. Originally known as Decoration Day, at the turn of the century it was designated as Memorial Day. In many American towns, the day is celebrated with a parade.

One of my favorite history museums in the country, the National World War One Museum in Kansas City, will be open on Monday. A visit to it would make a perfect outing for the holiday. Open since 2006,

and designated by Congress as the nation’s official World War I Museum, the new state-of-the-art complex uses an incredible collection and highly-interactive technology to bring this global history to life, and to foster timely discussions of ethics, values, decision making and conflict resolution.

See also, Jeffrey S. Reznick, "Memorial Day, the Great War, and America’s Last Surviving World War I Veteran," History News Network, May 26, 2008; and Adam Cohen, "What the History of Memorial Day Teaches About Honoring the War Dead," New York Times, May 28, 2007.

Summer Travels in Roman Western Europe

Randall Stephens

In time for the summer travel season Elaine Sciolino writes an interesting piece on "Roman France" in the NYT travel section.

Over the years, I have discovered traces of Roman civilization throughout the country, from Arras in the north to Dijon in the center and Fréjus in the south. My hunt for Roman Gaul has turned up treasures in the oddest places, including the middle of wheat fields, the foundations of churches and the basements of dusty provincial museums. . . .

If French history books tend to underplay ancient Roman rule, local politicians and entrepreneurs in the south do not. In the summer, area restaurants offer “Roman” menus with 2,000-year-old recipes: dishes prepared with cumin, coriander, mint and honey.

The article features a map with key sites marked out and a slide show. Related pieces include: "Traces from When Paris Was Roman" (May 17, 2009); and "Amid the Glory of France, the Grandeur that Was Rome" (May 17, 2009).

There's plenty to see across the channel, too. About a year ago Kevin Rushby wrote about a short trip he and his four-year-old daughter made to Hadrian's Wall and the Housteads fort, "England's Great Wall" Guardian, March 29, 2008. The serpentine wall is UN World Heritage site and a fascinating window into the distant past.

Built around AD124 in a commanding position on a swathe of the dramatic Whin Sill escarpment, Housesteads is one of the most important sites of Roman remains in Britain, in its day the last decent bath house before the great unwashed of Caledonia. . . .

Many interesting finds have come from the fort, even more from the settlement of hangers-on clustered below its walls. Two counterfeiting coin moulds from the 3rd century AD were discovered next to the remains of a house, the forger's den. Under his floor were two skeletons, one with a knife still stuck in the ribs.

The Book Business, Down and Out

Randall Stephens

Toby Barnard's essay in the May 8th TLS, "Textual Healing—Ireland: Land of Scholars and Publisher Saints," is well worth reading. (Though the on-line version isn't up on the TLS site just yet.) Barnard considers the fortunes of Irish publishing over the last few decades and laments the 2009 demise of Four Courts Press.

In 1925 W. B. Yeats intoned: "We . . . are no petty people. We are one of the great stocks of Europe. We are the people of Burke; we are the people of Swift, the people of Emmet, the people of Parnell. We have created most of the modern literature of this country." Even with that illustrious past, Barnard notes: "only one Irish University, Cork, maintained its own press." Why? "[A]lmost from the invention of printing," writes Barnard, "ambitious Irish authors, uncertain how far their words would be spread, preferred to be published outside of Ireland. As well as authorial pride, there were financial incentives.” Turning to the present, Barnard looks at the dire impact of the economic downturn on the industry.

Reading Barnard’s bleak assessment—and his eulogy for Four Courts—I was reminded of a controversial article that appeared about a year ago in Times Higher Education: “Publish and Be Ignored.” Matthew Reisz gauged the shortcomings of British academic publishing that had led a number of “authors to sign up with U.S. and mainstream imprints.” For scholars who churn out specialist monographs, “the only realistic choice is between a British or US academic press. American books tend to be cheaper. British editors, often responsible for far more titles, may adopt a less ‘hands-on’ (or interventionist) approach. But what are the differences in terms of author experience?” The differences were great, said Reisz.

And now, stateside, dark clouds are once again appearing on the horizon. Louisiana, reeling from the financial crisis, may make big cuts to LSU Press, reports the Chronicle: “The Louisiana Legislature wants to slash funds for higher education, and that includes a proposed $40-million cut for the press’s home institution, LSU at Baton Rouge, said Bob Mann, a professor of mass communication there. He also edits a series for the press.” The University of Missouri Press cut half of its staff in the spring. Other state university presses are running behind budget and rethinking financial strategies.

I’ll still keep buying books in some vain hope that my purchases will lend a little help.

See also Ted Genoways’ post at the Virginia Quarterly Review site: “The Future of University Presses and Journals (A Manifesto)”; and Robert B. Townsend, “History and the Future of Scholarly Publishing,” Perspectives (October 2003).

History on TV

Randall Stephens

Worth noting are a couple of history documentaries and dramatic features that are airing, or will soon air, on TV. Since John Adams premiered last year on HBO the bar has been set quite high. Corny CGI and bad acting no longer suffice. (I've finally ditched showing the rather primitive Mary Silliman's War in an American history course.) The current crop of history-related TV offerings does not disappoint.

Episodes of the PBS American Experience series on Indian history, We Shall Remain, have been beautifully presented and look well suited for the history classroom. PBS describes the series as a "multi-media project that establishes Native history as an essential part of American history. Five 90-minute documentaries spanning three hundred years tell the story of pivotal moments in U.S. history from the Native American perspective." My favorite episode so far has been Wounded Knee. Questions that this installment raises are particularly interesting and don't lend themselves to easy answers. As a bonus, full episodes can be watched here on the PBS site.

Also currently playing on PBS is WWII: Behind Closed Doors, a three-part docudrama directed by Laurence Rees. According to the PBS site, the "award-winning historian and filmmaker Laurence Rees (Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State, Nazis – A Warning from History) uses documents to tell the story of the backroom deals that cost many lives but were seen as necessary evils to keep the Soviet Union in the war." "At six hours, playing out over three nights," comments a reviewer in the LA Times "'Behind Closed Doors' requires a commitment from viewers, but for anyone interested in the complexities of WWII and, indeed, the moral impossibilities of war itself, it is a commitment worth making." Attention to detail will draw in viewers. The actors are spot on. A portly, jut-jawed Paul Humpoletz plays Churchill to great effect.

There's more Churchill over at HBO. Into the Storm will premier on that channel on May 31, 9pm. The production site indicates that the movie will pick up the "story of Churchill told in HBO's award-winning film, The Gathering Storm." Into the Storm "is set against the backdrop of World War II, and offers an intimate look at the making of a nation's hero, whose prowess as a great wartime leader ultimately undermined his political career and threatened his marriage to his lifelong supporter, Clemmie."

Free Articles from the Journal of the Historical Society

Randall Stephens

The Wiley-Blackwell website has offered five articles from The Journal of the Historical Society free of charge. Under the able direction of George Huppert (editor) and Scott Hovey (managing editor), the journal ranges broadly over time and thematic focus. The JHS is one of the only publications that is accessible to the non-specialist educated reader who is interested in "worldwide trends in historical research." For this reason the TLS wrote that the journal published "essays that represent history as it should be." It also praised the JHS for paying "serious attention to . . . serious subjects." Take, for instance, Herman Ooms’ 2005 essay, "Early Modern Japanese Intellectual History: USA, France, and Germany." Like a number of other articles in the JHS, it is a readable, fascinating account of a field that few non-specialists know anything about:

The field of intellectual history of Japan’s Early Modern or Tokugawa period (1600–1868) as practiced in the United States has a unique characteristic. It has produced what one could call, with only a slight exaggeration, an actual subfield of state-of-the-art reflective writing. An unusual number of scholars are keeping themselves busy, at one point or another, surveying the field or, putting it less technically, sizing up their colleagues. An outsider might wonder whether there are actually not more reflecting scholars than practicing historians. And indeed, one could conclude that the United States is running out of scholars that are available for this peculiar subfield because the last one to engage in it (in 2002), James McMullen, is British. Between 1996 and 2002 over half a dozen publications, averaging one a year, addressed in one form or another the “state of the field.” >>> read the complete article here

See this Wiley-Blackwell page for other free articles.

The Journal of the Historical Society
Table of contents, March 2009

"Was Hitler a Riddle?"
Abraham Ascher

"Government, Press, and Subversion in Russia, 1906–19171"
Jonathan W. Daly

"Santa Anna Never Had an iPhone: Some Thoughts on the Price of Peace and the Financial Misfortunes of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848"
Richard J. Salvucci

"The Great Migration and the Literary Imagination"
Steven A. Reich

"Antebellum South Carolina Reconsidered: The Libertarian World of Robert J. Turnbull"
Raymond James Krohn

C.P. Snow's "Two Cultures" at 50

Randall Stephens

Robert P. Crease reflects on the 50th anniversary of C.P. Snow's “The Two Cultures” lecture at physicsworld.com. Snow's subsequent "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution," Encounter, XII (June, 1959), famously turned readers' attention to the yawning chasm between the sciences and the humanities. Crease's comments are particularly relevant to a recent biology vs. history conversation on our blog. (See David Meskill's post, "What Can Historians Learn from Biologists." Snow's observations have also come up in Historically Speaking essays and forums on science and history.)

Crease acknowledges Snow's many faults, but writes that Snow helps "us to recognize the two-culture gap half a century later in a different world. . . ." Crease sees the "two-culture gap in the attitude of historians, novelists and philosophers who deride the idea that they need to incorporate science when thinking through humanity’s 'important questions'; a condition that I named — with less flair than Snow — 'anosognosia'."

He concludes: "The pertinence of the phrase 'two cultures' continues; the science kids and the humanities kids, as it were, still sit at different tables in the lunchroom."

For more on the relevance/irrelevance of Snow's thesis, see also, Robert Whelan, "Fifty years on, CP Snow's 'Two Cultures' are united in desperation," Telegraph, May 4, 2009; Peter Dizikes, "Our Two Cultures," New York Times, 19 March 2009; and "May 7, 1959: Can't We All Just Get Along?" Wired, 7 May 2009.

Google Books & Footnotes

Jeffrey Vanke

In revising some work under deadline, I needed to emphasize a certain quotation more than originally planned. The problem was, I didn't have the original. All I had was my own paraphrase and partial translation from the German. I don't live in a town with a major research library. I didn't want to buy the book online (out of print but available used), and I didn't want to wait 10 days+ and pay extra for a public library inter-library loan.

So I looked to Google Books. The next problem was, this book is copyright-protected on Google Books. I have no problem with that. But I didn't give up, because Google Books does let you see those briefest of excerpts.

Here's how I found my quotation, with many minutes of experimentation and then several minutes of labor. I write to spare you the former, next time you're in this kind of pinch.

Step 1. The page number was of no use. I had some proper nouns and a date, though, and of course the title and author. These got me to my page, at the head of the journal entry I needed. So I clicked through to view the snippet on Google Books.

2. Your next step is to look at the last two words on that snippet, then to swap them, in quotation marks, for the proper nouns from Step 1.

3. Compare the results from your Google search results first, prior to click-through, with the scanned text snippet second. In both cases, the two words you searched for are probably at or near the beginning of a quotation. But almost always, either the Google Books index results OR the snippet image goes deeper into the text from your two search words than does the other. To save yourself some time, find which one goes farthest, and identify the last two consecutive words.

4. Repeat Steps 2-3 until you advance through the text to the precise quotation you need. In some cases, of course, the two-word sequence appears multiple times in the same book. But your results give you all instances, and you just find the one with your page number.

Presto! Citation revised and completed.

Richardson's Rules of Order, Part IIId: Appropriate Behavior in College Classrooms

Heather Cox Richardson

Heather Cox Richardson offers up more wisdom for history undergrads. See previous posts for more Richardson's Rules of Order.

Grading:

Never tell a teacher that you “need” a certain grade on an assignment. You earn grades; they are not “given” to you. If you need a certain grade to maintain your athletic eligibility or to graduate, it is your job to work all semester to maintain a healthy average. You cannot simply “get” a passing grade because you “need” one.

If you are disappointed in an exam grade, talk first with your TA about what went wrong on the exam, and how to write a better exam the next time. If you feel you still don’t understand how to write a good exam, make an appointment with the professor to talk about it. Do not go to a professor to argue about the points awarded on an exam unless there is a clear error. An example of a clear error would be a case in which a grader did not see one of the answers.

If you are disappointed in an essay grade, follow the same procedure you would for an exam. Ask your TA and your professor for strategies to enable you to learn how to write a better essay. If your teacher has written comments, study them. Learn from them. Never write a rebuttal to your professor’s comments, or otherwise argue with them. If you want to dismiss them, fine, but don’t expect that arguing about the professor’s assessment of your work will get you a better grade. If, after talking with the professor about your work, you think s/he is truly out to lunch, contact the ombuds office for help negotiating your way through—or out of—the course. In twenty years of teaching, I have seen this situation only once, and other professors stood by the student from the beginning. If you’re the only one complaining about the grading, be honest with yourself about the quality of your work.

Few college professors will permit “extra credit” assignments. Do not try to bargain for a passing grade if you have failed the course. Do the course work and you will not need to try to save yourself at the end.

If you are going to make an excuse for your performance in a course, or ask for an exception to the course assignments laid out on the syllabus, recognize that the teacher’s job is to keep the playing field level for every student. S/he cannot simply change the rules for you. If you do need adjustments to the course, take an honest look at your reasons. Are they excuses the rest of the students in the class would accept if they heard them? Death and illness (either physical or mental) are almost always good reasons; “I’ve been busy,” usually isn’t. Actually imagine yourself explaining your circumstances before your classmates. Would they buy your reasoning? If so, take it to your professor. If not, though, don’t hope you can arrange something with the teacher that the other students won’t know about. It’s the professor’s job to be the advocate for the whole class and, even if s/he would like to cut you a break, s/he cannot give you a better deal than the rest of the students got.

Letters of Recommendation:

Do ask teachers for letters of recommendation when you have established a good rapport with the instructor. You do not necessarily need to have an “A” average; you need to have demonstrated an interest in the subject and shown some effort to do well in the class. Ask for a letter immediately after the semester ends, DO NOT wait for several years, by which time the teacher will not remember you nearly as well as s/he does right after the course ends. You can—and should—set up a dossier at the career services department, where letters of recommendation are kept on file for whenever you need them.

You must ask for a letter, not demand one. Always give the instructor the option of declining. Perhaps s/he was less impressed with you than you thought; or perhaps s/he simply thinks someone else can write a stronger letter than s/he can. You do not want a weak letter in your file. Give the instructor room to say no.

Always give the instructor plenty of time to write a letter, provide addressed, stamped envelope(s), and drop the instructor an email reminding him or her about a week before the letter is due. Instructors often have dozens of letters to write at approximately the same time, and it’s easy to get mixed up about what’s due, when.

If you are going to use the professor as a reference again several years after you graduate, drop him or her an email to let him or her know and to remind him or her who you are. Put in the class you took, your interests, anything that will help jog his or her memory. When we deal with hundreds of students a year, it’s confusing suddenly to get a phone call asking us to identify and recommend a student from several years before. It doesn’t help your case to have the employer trying to jog our memories so we can recall exactly why we recommended you in the first place. Give us some warning, and we can be ready when they call.