The Office of Historical Corrections(39)
He wasn’t alone. Before I’d left GW for the institute, I had been on an upward trajectory, had been lucky. I could recite the academia warning speech I had been given and was supposed to give promising students in return: you had to be willing to go anywhere, to leave anyone, to work for any paltry amount if you wanted to work in your field, and even then, there was probably no job, or no chance that out of a hundred PhDs who applied, you’d be the one to get it. But I had done just one year of a four-four visiting gig in the Midwest before landing a well-regarded tenure track job, a two-two job not just in a major city but in the city I was from. The DC of my childhood was gone, of course, whole swaths the city felt familiar now only because I remembered less of what they used to be, but it was still the only place I’d ever felt at home. Landing a good academic job here was serendipity bordering on magic in a market where “professor” increasingly meant teaching seven classes on four different campuses for no health insurance and below minimum wage.
I missed my students and colleagues after leaving, missed working on the manuscript that no one asked me about anymore—my years of research on Odetta Holmes still in file drawers. I missed the particular playacted pretension and permanent adolescence that characterized academic parties, and, I admit, I missed the ways that being near the top of a crumbling enterprise had still felt like the top. But, when the chance to work at IPH came, I’d left all of that to do what felt more immediately meaningful.
My parents had relished introducing me as Dr. Jacobs, the history professor, and now didn’t quite know what to say I was. I had tried to explain to them that professor, even in its best incarnation, now meant answering every year to the tyranny of metrics and enrollments, meant spinning what you loved because you loved it and valued because it was valuable into a language of corporate speak to convince administrators your students were employable. It meant being told you were the problem if you coddled students too much, you, the last chance to prepare them for the sink-or-swim world, but also you were the problem if the students were in crisis, if you didn’t warn someone in time that a student was a danger to themselves, if you didn’t have a plan for how to keep your classroom in the fifty-year-old building with doors that didn’t lock anymore safe if a student with a gun showed up. It meant being told each year in a celebratory fashion that the faculty was now more diverse than ever, and then, at some more somber meeting a few months later, being given a list of all the acts of self-governance faculty would no longer be trusted to do and all the evaluative metrics that would now be considered more strictly. It meant being given well-intentioned useless advice from senior colleagues who floated in denial that the institutions they’d devoted their lives to were over as they had known them, but reminded by your more precarious colleagues that you had it too good to complain.
It had been hard for me to convince people—even the people at IPH itself, who had been mostly recruiting from the surplus of PhDs without full-time jobs—that I had really wanted to leave. The best I could explain it was that I loved my work and hated watching it disappear.
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The institute was not without its detractors. The proposal alone had incited a chorus of libertarian panic. In our first year, there were seventeen different social media accounts devoted just to monitoring our corrections; the accounts called us, depending on their angle of critique, The Big Brother Institute, or The Department of Political Correctness, or The Bureau of Whitewashing, or, once in a major paper’s op-ed, The Office of Historical Corrections, which was intended to be dismissive but felt enough like our actual mission that it had become a running office joke, the imaginary shadow entity on which we blamed all missteps and bad publicity. The Office of Historical Corrections strikes again!
The attention economy was our nemesis and our cheapest tool. About half of the historians worked primarily online. Originally, each had a friendly profile with their name and picture and credentials, meant to make them accessible and unintimidating, but all three of the women of color complained that every time they made a correction their replies flooded with personal vitriol. They tried randomizing log-ins, so that each day’s corrections were not necessarily linked to the agent who’d issued them, which pleased no one: white men did not like being called ugly cunts any better than anyone else, it turned out, and the women of color who had complained in the first place did not like feeling uncredited for their labor, or appreciate the erasure of the professional voices they had cultivated. Everyone with a desk job now worked from a shared faceless account, which did, admittedly, look somewhat ominous and bureaucratic, but was generally cheerful in tone.
We did the best we could. There was an agent primarily devoted to sending strongly worded letters to the publishers of inaccurate textbooks, but we did not go to schools and classrooms (guideline 4). Our purpose was limited to correction of the historical record, which our mission defined as events at least one year old (guideline 2, part b). We were to make every effort to avoid or back away from the kind of confrontation likely to escalate to force or police intervention (guideline 1). We were supposed to avoid meaningless and pedantic corrections (guideline 8), but the work attracted the pedantic. We had done a month of damage control after one of my more zealous colleagues publicly embarrassed a popular influencer over her pronunciation of “Ulysses” in a fashion vlog she’d posted from Grant’s Tomb. The influencer dubbed us The Office of Mansplaining, which was picked up by at least a thousand of her million followers. I was one of three women of color who were field historians with the project at the time; in the wake of the controversy, I had been sent by the director to be profiled in The Post, to show we were inclusive and nonthreatening.