Patty Limerick, Faculty Director and Chair of the Board of the Center of the American West and Professor of History at the University of Colorado, will deliver the third installment in the "New Visions of the American Scholar" lecture series on Thursday, November 1st, at 6pm at The Laboratory of Art and Ideas at Belmar.
Her talk is entitled: "Dale Carnegie for the Academic: How to Win Friends and Influence People in the Wider World, while Still Retaining a Degree of Scholarly Good Standing"
About Patty Limerick
Limerick was born and raised in Banning, California, and graduated from the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1972. She received her Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University in 1980, and from 1980 to 1984 she was an Assistant Professor of History at Harvard. In 1984, she joined the History Department of the University of Colorado. In 1985 she published Desert Passages, followed in 1987 by her best-know work, The Legacy of Conquest, an overview and reinterpretation of Western American history that has stirred up a great deal of both academic and public debate. Limerick is also a prolific essayist, and many of her most notable articles, including “Dancing with Professors: The Trouble with Academic Prose,” were collected in 2000 under the title Something in the Soil.
Limerick has received a number of awards and honors recognizing the impact of her scholarship and her commitment to teaching, including the MacArthur Fellowship (1995 to 2000) and the Hazel Barnes Prize, the University of Colorado’s highest award for teaching and research (2001). She has served as president of several professional organizations, advised documentary and film projects, and done two tours as a Pulitzer Non-Fiction jurist. She regularly engages the public on the op-ed pages of local and national newspapers, and in the summer of 2005 she served as a guest columnist for the New York Times. Limerick is also known as an energetic, funny, and engaging public speaker, sought after by a wide range of Western constituencies that include private industry groups, state and federal agencies, and grassroots organizations.
In 1986, Limerick and CU Law Professor Charles Wilkinson founded the Center of the American West. During her tenure, the Center has published a number of books, including the influential Atlas of the New West (1997), and a series of lively, balanced, and to-the-point reports on compelling Western issues, including What Every Westerner Should Know About Energy (2003) and Cleaning Up Abandoned Mines (2006). Limerick and Center staff are currently working on several projects, including a book about the role of the Department of Interior in the West, based on the “Inside Interior” series of interviews hosted by the Center between 2004 and 2006; the long-awaited Handbook for New Westerners; a new report on What Every Westerner Should Know About Energy Conservation and Efficiency; and an illustrated history of the Denver Water Board.
About Dale Carnegie for the Academic: How to Win Friends and Influence People in the Wider World, while Still Retaining a Degree of Scholarly Good Standing," Limerick writes:
Lamentation over the inward turn of academic communication is itself a well-established literary genre, and a genre that sets the standard for futility. At the turn of the last century, the remarkably undiplomatic sociologist Thorstein Veblen joyfully burned every bridge in sight, between him and his academic colleagues, characterizing them as pompous "priestly" figures, wielding their knowledge to hold others at a distance. Professors were "great sticklers for form, gradations of rank, ritual, ceremonial vestments, and learned paraphernalia generally," Veblen wrote in 1899, in a sentence that needs little updating for 2007. Six decades later, John Kenneth Galbraith, a man who seemed to have been inoculated against humility and modesty early in his career, used academics as a prime case study of the enshrining of the "conventional wisdom," a phrase he coined. In 1993, in the New York Times Book Review, I presumed to take up the baton of this failed cause, writing a much-photocopied-and-handed-around essay called, "Dancing with Professors: The Trouble with Academic Prose."
Neither Veblen, nor Galbraith, nor Limerick, nor any other campaigner in this cause seems to have made any measurable impact at all.
My own fortune took a better turn when I gave up pleading with my fellow professors to change their practices and shifted, instead, to the much more manageable cause of simply changing my own customs and habits. In the last twenty years, hundreds of experiences in exchanging ideas with members of the "general public" (a term that could profit from-and will-receive clarification and definition!) have taught me a great deal, deepened my sense of mission, and given me a sense of professional and personal satisfaction that, if it could be made available as a prescription or over-the-counter medication, would exceed the sales of every other pharmaceutical. The influences and inspirations that led me to these new practices are varied and multiple, but surely one fork in the road came from an several occasion, thirty years ago, when my students and I read Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People in an American Studies junior seminar.
In this talk, we will briefly review the well-tested ineffectuality of condemning and lamenting conventional scholarly practice, and move rapidly into a celebration of the very fun and gratifying activities available to public scholars today, with just a little defiance of the powerful force of academic conformity and insularity.