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To Save, Or Not to Save
Posted 1/24/2005
Warren Goldstein, associate professor and chairman of the history department in the College of Arts and Sciences, reflects on the dilemma of what we should save, and what we should not , in a column in the current issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Following is the text of Goldstein’s column, as it appears in the Jan. 21 issue of The Chronicle.
For Keep’s Sake: a Chairman’s Files
By Warren Goldstein
I’d been putting it off for months. But we needed the space. We’d done our homework: His widow had taken the books she wanted; she didn't want his papers.
So one morning a colleague and I steeled ourselves and slid open the top drawer of the first file cabinet belonging to our late chairman, retired three years before, dead from cancer within months, the man who had pulled my cold inquiry letter from a pile nearly five years earlier.
Because of his instincts back then, I now had tenure and his job, and here I was, uninvited, opening his meticulous files, prepared to pronounce judgment on his career. What should we keep, and what should we discard?
It felt like sacrilege. For centuries we historians have made our livings hunting for treasure in the thankfully preserved files of the famous and (more recently) the less so. Thanks to the wisdom of our ancestors in not throwing away diaries, letters, snapshots, journals, grocery lists, newspaper clippings, postcards, memoranda, ledgers, receipts, handbills, visiting cards (the list is endless, really), and that of archives in storing and cataloging those records of past lives, we can ply our peculiar trade -- the only respectable job, a friend once observed, where you get paid for reading other people’s mail.
Down to business. A folder from History Day 1980 yielded a brochure, a list of involved students, a program, a button. Sure, I said confidently, a keeper. But what about History Day 1981, and 1982, and 1983? My colleague raised an eyebrow.
Oh boy, I thought. Two historians consigning History Day to the round file.
But we were just getting started, and the trash can was already full. So we wheeled in one of the oversize recycling bins and plunged into folders for each course our late colleague had taught for decades: syllabi, class lists, grades, assignments, handouts, stray papers never picked up by long-ago-graduated students, photocopies of material put on reserve in the fall of 1987.
We still teach some of those courses, but we had recently revised others out of the curriculum. Could the folders be valuable for a study of how history teaching changed in the late 20th century? At first I held onto principle, only tossing the early stuff. But like a crumbling battlefield line, soon I cut and ran. There went the 80s, then the 90s, then all the course materials.
My partner in archival crime went off to teach, and I burrowed further down. Faculty Senate minutes—gone; dean's task force on (you fill in the blank)—gone. Library committee—gone. Department meetings—hmmm. Maybe those would be kind of fun, so I began to put them aside. Soon I came to my senses. I leafed through the folders. Agendas, circulars, notes: no real window onto controversies, debates, or hiring priorities. Personnel files? They had been sanitized to meet privacy rules. By the time my co-conspirator returned, the file drawers lay empty, only a stray paper clip or curled-up label hinting at what had been.
In the days that followed I circled back mentally to those files. Inevitably I wondered why my late colleague had held on to all that stuff. The answer came soon enough. My wife and I were getting ready to move, and I thought I'd do a little pruning in my own files.
I casually opened a drawer—and froze. Horrified, I found myself staring at folders holding syllabi from 1991, job letters I'd written from 1991 to 1993, and student evaluations from 1988. And more: form-letter rejections, copies of student projects finished in 1996, the text of my very first class lecture; photocopies of primary sources from my dissertation research 25 years ago; letters from editors in 1981 turning down an essay I didn't even remember writing.
Had I stumbled onto the tip of an iceberg of obsessive-compulsive pack-ratism, even though I presented myself to the world as a rational academic? No, I protested silently, I had good reasons to keep that stuff. I had never used all my dissertation research. My kids might some day want to follow their father's struggle to get published. Plus eventually I'd be going up for promotion, reason enough to file every scrap of writing since I'd come to the university, not to mention the student evaluations.
Perhaps, I fantasized dreamily, I belong to some trend that will turn out to be important to the historians of 2075. How would they find out about me if I left my files for my colleagues (or my wife) to dump into the recycling bin after my retirement or death? I should start talking to archives about donating this potential treasure. From neurotic pack rat to immortality (not to mention the tax deduction!) in just a few minutes: I was reaching, and I knew it.
Of course academics—and especially historians—save things. We’re only separated by one degree from the librarians and archivists and museum curators on whom we depend for our research. Living and working against the grain of a society that worships the new, we academics belong to the tiny minority who do hold onto records of the past. We write and teach about long-dead thinkers, artists, scientists, poets, and regular folks.
It is hardly surprising, then, that in my extended family (where I'm the only academic), I have also become the understood caretaker for our old photographs, letters, books, awards—even china. I don't always like getting those things, or being responsible for them, but someone has to be, and why not the historian? As family roles go, it's not so bad, and pretty harmless.
But as I discovered on my journey through my late chairman’s files, as well as my own, we rarely go back and assess what we've filed away for safekeeping. If we did, say once a year, we would make some discoveries.
While most of us can use course materials, proposals, and reports from the last few years, maybe even the last five years, I have never, ever (in any position) had a genuine need for a syllabus, reading list, budget, letter of recommendation, memorandum, or job letter more than five years old. That’s not to say I haven’t excavated in that material; it is to say that it turned out to be useless. In fact, the overwhelming majority of many of those items should be useless five years hence, except as curiosities.
Look, if a letter of recommendation hasn't changed much in five years, which is to say its subject hasn't changed much, we might want to ask ourselves why we're writing it at all. And a six-year-old promise from a dean (who has likely moved on) to fill a vacant line, well ... if you think you're going to get that position, I'm not going to be able to convince you otherwise.
Before you object, I understand that the development folks need donors' giving records, and that our institutions need documented memories that stretch back longer than five years. But institutional needs do not justify my seven-year-old syllabi and 12-year-old job-application letters. And as for future historians, I think they will be about as interested in my files as in my family photo albums.
Still, maybe that's the way to think about keeping the really old stuff. Even though it has no rational use at all, it can still give pleasure, like photographs of our catastrophic family camping vacation when it rained for three weeks straight and the raccoons ate our food and the kids got throwing-up sick.
We don't need to think we're fit subjects for biography to hold onto some, even a lot, of the documentary record of our academic careers. In my dotage I might enjoy chewing on the wonderful report my adviser gave my dissertation, and thumbing my nose at the well-known editors who turned down the manuscript of a book that remains in print. And every now and then I do look at drafts of old essays, or rejection letters, or old correspondence, to see who I was back then, and to think about how, if at all, I've changed. You don't have to be a historian to enjoy musing over the development of your life and career. Reflection can be its own reward.
I learned something important from the twin traumatic exercises, first, of tossing my late colleague's files, and second, of confronting and heaving my own. Four years have now passed, and you know something? I haven't once wanted something that I discarded back then.
I even assembled a promotion file last summer, and guess what happened to those 15-year-old student evaluations from my previous teaching position that I had been saving? The committee chairman told me they were too old. “Too old?" I objected (to myself). “Not relevant?” My last rationale for keeping them had vanished. So I’ve decided to throw them out—tomorrow.
Following is the text of Goldstein’s column, as it appears in the Jan. 21 issue of The Chronicle.
For Keep’s Sake: a Chairman’s Files
By Warren Goldstein
I’d been putting it off for months. But we needed the space. We’d done our homework: His widow had taken the books she wanted; she didn't want his papers.
So one morning a colleague and I steeled ourselves and slid open the top drawer of the first file cabinet belonging to our late chairman, retired three years before, dead from cancer within months, the man who had pulled my cold inquiry letter from a pile nearly five years earlier.
Because of his instincts back then, I now had tenure and his job, and here I was, uninvited, opening his meticulous files, prepared to pronounce judgment on his career. What should we keep, and what should we discard?
It felt like sacrilege. For centuries we historians have made our livings hunting for treasure in the thankfully preserved files of the famous and (more recently) the less so. Thanks to the wisdom of our ancestors in not throwing away diaries, letters, snapshots, journals, grocery lists, newspaper clippings, postcards, memoranda, ledgers, receipts, handbills, visiting cards (the list is endless, really), and that of archives in storing and cataloging those records of past lives, we can ply our peculiar trade -- the only respectable job, a friend once observed, where you get paid for reading other people’s mail.
Down to business. A folder from History Day 1980 yielded a brochure, a list of involved students, a program, a button. Sure, I said confidently, a keeper. But what about History Day 1981, and 1982, and 1983? My colleague raised an eyebrow.
Oh boy, I thought. Two historians consigning History Day to the round file.
But we were just getting started, and the trash can was already full. So we wheeled in one of the oversize recycling bins and plunged into folders for each course our late colleague had taught for decades: syllabi, class lists, grades, assignments, handouts, stray papers never picked up by long-ago-graduated students, photocopies of material put on reserve in the fall of 1987.
We still teach some of those courses, but we had recently revised others out of the curriculum. Could the folders be valuable for a study of how history teaching changed in the late 20th century? At first I held onto principle, only tossing the early stuff. But like a crumbling battlefield line, soon I cut and ran. There went the 80s, then the 90s, then all the course materials.
My partner in archival crime went off to teach, and I burrowed further down. Faculty Senate minutes—gone; dean's task force on (you fill in the blank)—gone. Library committee—gone. Department meetings—hmmm. Maybe those would be kind of fun, so I began to put them aside. Soon I came to my senses. I leafed through the folders. Agendas, circulars, notes: no real window onto controversies, debates, or hiring priorities. Personnel files? They had been sanitized to meet privacy rules. By the time my co-conspirator returned, the file drawers lay empty, only a stray paper clip or curled-up label hinting at what had been.
In the days that followed I circled back mentally to those files. Inevitably I wondered why my late colleague had held on to all that stuff. The answer came soon enough. My wife and I were getting ready to move, and I thought I'd do a little pruning in my own files.
I casually opened a drawer—and froze. Horrified, I found myself staring at folders holding syllabi from 1991, job letters I'd written from 1991 to 1993, and student evaluations from 1988. And more: form-letter rejections, copies of student projects finished in 1996, the text of my very first class lecture; photocopies of primary sources from my dissertation research 25 years ago; letters from editors in 1981 turning down an essay I didn't even remember writing.
Had I stumbled onto the tip of an iceberg of obsessive-compulsive pack-ratism, even though I presented myself to the world as a rational academic? No, I protested silently, I had good reasons to keep that stuff. I had never used all my dissertation research. My kids might some day want to follow their father's struggle to get published. Plus eventually I'd be going up for promotion, reason enough to file every scrap of writing since I'd come to the university, not to mention the student evaluations.
Perhaps, I fantasized dreamily, I belong to some trend that will turn out to be important to the historians of 2075. How would they find out about me if I left my files for my colleagues (or my wife) to dump into the recycling bin after my retirement or death? I should start talking to archives about donating this potential treasure. From neurotic pack rat to immortality (not to mention the tax deduction!) in just a few minutes: I was reaching, and I knew it.
Of course academics—and especially historians—save things. We’re only separated by one degree from the librarians and archivists and museum curators on whom we depend for our research. Living and working against the grain of a society that worships the new, we academics belong to the tiny minority who do hold onto records of the past. We write and teach about long-dead thinkers, artists, scientists, poets, and regular folks.
It is hardly surprising, then, that in my extended family (where I'm the only academic), I have also become the understood caretaker for our old photographs, letters, books, awards—even china. I don't always like getting those things, or being responsible for them, but someone has to be, and why not the historian? As family roles go, it's not so bad, and pretty harmless.
But as I discovered on my journey through my late chairman’s files, as well as my own, we rarely go back and assess what we've filed away for safekeeping. If we did, say once a year, we would make some discoveries.
While most of us can use course materials, proposals, and reports from the last few years, maybe even the last five years, I have never, ever (in any position) had a genuine need for a syllabus, reading list, budget, letter of recommendation, memorandum, or job letter more than five years old. That’s not to say I haven’t excavated in that material; it is to say that it turned out to be useless. In fact, the overwhelming majority of many of those items should be useless five years hence, except as curiosities.
Look, if a letter of recommendation hasn't changed much in five years, which is to say its subject hasn't changed much, we might want to ask ourselves why we're writing it at all. And a six-year-old promise from a dean (who has likely moved on) to fill a vacant line, well ... if you think you're going to get that position, I'm not going to be able to convince you otherwise.
Before you object, I understand that the development folks need donors' giving records, and that our institutions need documented memories that stretch back longer than five years. But institutional needs do not justify my seven-year-old syllabi and 12-year-old job-application letters. And as for future historians, I think they will be about as interested in my files as in my family photo albums.
Still, maybe that's the way to think about keeping the really old stuff. Even though it has no rational use at all, it can still give pleasure, like photographs of our catastrophic family camping vacation when it rained for three weeks straight and the raccoons ate our food and the kids got throwing-up sick.
We don't need to think we're fit subjects for biography to hold onto some, even a lot, of the documentary record of our academic careers. In my dotage I might enjoy chewing on the wonderful report my adviser gave my dissertation, and thumbing my nose at the well-known editors who turned down the manuscript of a book that remains in print. And every now and then I do look at drafts of old essays, or rejection letters, or old correspondence, to see who I was back then, and to think about how, if at all, I've changed. You don't have to be a historian to enjoy musing over the development of your life and career. Reflection can be its own reward.
I learned something important from the twin traumatic exercises, first, of tossing my late colleague's files, and second, of confronting and heaving my own. Four years have now passed, and you know something? I haven't once wanted something that I discarded back then.
I even assembled a promotion file last summer, and guess what happened to those 15-year-old student evaluations from my previous teaching position that I had been saving? The committee chairman told me they were too old. “Too old?" I objected (to myself). “Not relevant?” My last rationale for keeping them had vanished. So I’ve decided to throw them out—tomorrow.
