“The Power of Disillusionment: Reflections on History, Adulthood, and Access to Knowledge”: Scott Richard St. Louis on Peter Baldwin’s *Athena Unbound: Why and How Scholarly Knowledge Should Be Free for All*

A few months ago, I experienced the joy of celebrating my thirtieth birthday with several friends and loved ones. It was an occasion that brought forth tremendous gratitude from deep inside my heart: for my parents, for my sister, for all the lessons learned with plain luck or hard work or blunt failure. Soon enough, I realized, I will have lived more of my life away from my hometown than I have in it.

As I progressed through high school during those final years at home, my grandmother fell into irreversible cognitive and physical decline. On occasion, my mother enlisted my help managing the avalanche of work that accompanied loss of independence for her aging parent. In the basement of my grandmother’s house, I found a few history books that once belonged to my grandfather, who had already passed away. For me, those books were the start of a greater journey.

When college began, I hauled my grandfather’s musty old books across the state of Michigan, declared a history major as early as possible, and never changed it. My attention increasingly focused on the possibility of launching a career as a history professor, through which I might offer the minds of the willing a chance to explore the bygone worlds that could fire their imaginations and confront their values and shatter their assumptions. It did not take long for me to learn that some considerable obstacles stood in the way. My undergraduate alma mater offered a wonderful education, but there was a risk of it being too obscure a place from which to scrap my way first into an elite doctoral program, then into a career as a leading historian in academia. Such a career path often struck me as narrowly fixated on pedigree and prestige and rank at its loftiest levels, while being rife with instability elsewhere. Cities home to the wealthiest research universities very often featured a high cost of living that juxtaposed unpleasantly with even the largest doctoral stipends that history students could expect. Such a daunting combination – large bills and modest pay, stretched out for years – would likely demand acceptance of steep opportunity costs relative to other career paths. Further, I bristled at the sclerotic norms of publication in the discipline: at paywalls to publicly funded scholarship, at monographs so expensive that even academic libraries often understandably hesitate to purchase them, at the complacency and fear I perceived as keeping these norms in place, even as other disciplines and lines of work evolved to harness the benefits of our digital world more rapidly. It all felt like a system that defined success more by shutting people out than by bringing them in. Academic historians today tend to find these observations unsurprising, at least in my experience. At the time, though, I needed to talk about them, ideally with someone unafraid of helping a young adult consider – with unflinching honesty – the personal implications of such challenging realities.

My chance would come soon enough. After a three-hour evening class filled with his quintessential energy, one of my favorite professors pulled me aside and gave me the opportunity to express these thoughts. A formative discussion unfolded one-on-one, during which he confirmed my suspicions about academic careers in history, while nudging me toward information science as a more suitable gateway to the life and legacy I was trying to build, given my interests in digital technology, workplace collaboration, and broad access. A dream began to die as an actual plan started to take its place. I was relieved to have found a mentor whose candid treatment of important subjects reflected a real belief in me as a nimble and capable strategizer. I resolved to pursue my youthful passion for history with all the time I could give to it, right up until the bitter end, but not for a minute longer than that. Soon enough, it would be time to put the pieces together to make a professional master’s degree possible.

Graduation came quite a while after developing this plan. To pay the bills and save for two years of graduate study in information science, I started working full-time at my undergraduate institution. Something strange happened. Upon the serendipitous run-in somewhere on campus, a handful of faculty members began asking questions that confused me. What was I still doing there? Why was I not working on my doctorate already? Was I scared to leave? Sharing my sense of bewilderment, a trustworthy friend employed at the university even told me that these and similar questions were sometimes being asked without me in the room.

Ouch. It was as if the vital pursuit of long-term financial wellness need not factor into my planning, as if challenging myself with a change of direction now – in service of greater security and real peace of mind later – was somehow an unworthy choice. Laughing it all off with another friend one night after work, I recalled a downright bizarre office-hours conversation in an earlier year. A professor had blissfully invoked stale talking points associated with the now-infamous “Bowen Report,” earnestly explaining to me that I thus need not worry at all about successfully landing on the tenure track after doctoral studies in history. Memorably, my friend and I did not take long at all to confirm – beyond any shadow of doubt – that this was hilariously bad career advice. We laughed some more.

Certainly nothing but positive motivations were at play. These were scholars eager to welcome a rising generation to their craft, and – quite laudably – they were eager to see a former student onward to continued growth. Still, some statements I struggled to shake off: “There will always be good jobs for good historians,” another professor once warmly assured me, almost verbatim. The problem was that such statements did not line up with readily available data. Basic consultation of professional literature, and a splash of external networking, strongly demonstrated that these perspectives were simply misinformed. It wasn’t hard at all to find out.

In hindsight, it took a while to wrestle with the irony: my undergraduate education had sharpened the research and critical thinking skills that now alerted me to the considerable shortcomings of that very same education. It was time to chart a new course. I remain thankful to the professor who encouraged me to branch out into information science. Beyond that conversation, turning to the history department for useful career advice increasingly came to feel like searching for leaves to rake on the moon. There was no reason for me to ignore the writing on the wall, plowing ahead on a path inconsistent with the emerging priorities that would define a new phase of my journey. Even so, at the weaker moments of my early twenties, I felt a bit stung by what seemed like disapproval from people whose validation I had sought not long previously. To become stronger in those moments, I picked myself back up with a reminder of what my history education was truly all about: becoming more adaptable, more resilient, and more prepared all around for the rocky and foggy road of career and adult life.

Over time, I realized these awkward experiences with erstwhile supporters offered me another useful lesson: the word “disillusionment” often has negative connotations, but it is better to understand the term differently. To cast away illusions is to see the truth more clearly, always an important thing to try, even when the truth hurts. Not all aspirations and relationships will go the distance in life, and it is okay for good things to come to an end – as all things eventually must – even if the end is somewhat painful. Some ideals, however, deserve to live on a while longer. For me, such is a belief in the power of sharing knowledge as a way of spreading the capacity to make positive change in the world. Such sharing can extend, does extend, and ought to extend to contexts far beyond the academy: to industry, to public service, to civil society, and to so many other places, often with help from digital technology’s agility and scale. This belief carried me through an engaging two years of graduate study in an information science program, amid a world buffeted by the hardships of the COVID-19 pandemic.

All of these personal experiences came to mind while reading Peter Baldwin’s excellent book, Athena Unbound: Why and How Scholarly Knowledge Should Be Free for All. It is a testament to the author’s considerable gifts that a book about research communication, of all things, could be so evocative and such a pleasure to read. He and his colleagues at the innovative MIT Press have made this work available to all of us; at the time of my writing, you need only click here. For those readers who learn better with their hands – and highlighters – on a traditionally bound copy, there’s an option to purchase one. Professor of History at UCLA, and Global Distinguished Professor at NYU, Baldwin swiftly and stylishly dispenses with nonsense. Consider, for example, his righteously tough-minded fifth chapter, “The Professoriate and Open Access.” Baldwin finds an obtuseness at play that mirrors the breezy portrayals I once received of doctoral study in history as a straightforward road to a prosperous career. Indeed, even historians serving on the faculty of such esteemed institutions as Harvard and Cambridge can fall prey to notable misunderstanding about the circulation of scholarship in our time. On the Ivy League side, we learn – to my great surprise – that the majority of academic output “can be found, by anyone who wants to find it, by searching Google.” This observation seems mistakenly to assume that connections to expensive subscriptions and databases are ubiquitous, when in reality such connections often are not consistently in place beyond the orbit of large research universities. Across the pond, we learn that the choice of publication venue serves as an efficient “signal” for those to whom a given work will be understandable. Even in a world of exponential content proliferation, all that is necessary from there is for readers “to pay for access to my thoughts.” Against this conclusion, Baldwin offers a response: “Any biographer, author of popular science, nonfiction freelancer, and writer of historical fiction or other imaginative literature requiring research – unless they happen to be university faculty – will have to make do with the web, their local public library, or the pirate sites. The same holds for citizen scientists, such as data collectors in ecological studies. And for journalists, civil servants, and social activists.”^[1] For serious students of history, it’s not hard to imagine that some older monograph with a small print run – to this day, downright essential reading for its occasional seeker – might be lost or long overdue, buried underneath a pile of papers on someone’s desk, and thus unavailable to another person looking for it through interlibrary loan. Similarly, the author of a compelling but obscure journal article – an approachable scholar who gladly shared copies with anyone who asked – might now be dead, perhaps leaving in place no readily discernible, lawful way to avoid a costly paywall of some kind or another.

Public library support is a wonderful thing, but it’s not necessarily perfect or complete. Does anyone really expect Baldwin’s rich sampling of contributors to culture and scholarship – who lack university affiliations – to pay for every last journal article or monograph to which they otherwise might not be able to secure access? I hope not, but I might be wrong, at least to the extent that academic career-advancement incentives align more with prestige than with broad access. To be fair, if it is indeed prestige that keeps an elusive kind of history career moving in certain echelons of academia, I can’t blame anyone for doing what they need to do to look after themselves and their families in a competitive and uncertain world. In the aggregate, though, a problem emerges: “Striving for prestige,” Baldwin writes, “humanities and social science scholars are blinded to how they effectively extinguish their books by sticking with traditional publishers. To issue an academic monograph with a conventional university press or one of the commercial scholarly houses often means dropping your work into a black hole. The only readers who will see it are those who can afford the three-figure price of a Routledge or Oxford University Press book or who enjoy lending privileges at major research libraries.” In such a publishing system, the monograph “is effectively privatization.”^[2] Does Baldwin exaggerate here? Perhaps. After all, there are plenty of scholarly monographs that don’t come close to three figures in price. Even so, costs can add up quickly, especially in humanities disciplines where funding is scarce. In any case, Baldwin’s problem is not with traditional longform scholarship, to which he is no stranger. Instead, he finds fault with the inefficiency and unfairness of a scholarly publication system that, on the whole, does not center broad access quite as decisively as it could, even for publicly funded work. Citizens lacking stable access to university resources are, on some level, locked out. This is trouble for the humanities, history included.

Lest such language come across as tall on emotion and short on substance, consider a difficult reality. Citing work in College & Research Libraries and Learned Publishing, Baldwin explains that research libraries in the United States increased their spending by more than 200 percent on periodicals over less than three decades beginning in the 1980s, while monograph spending decreased by 21 percent over a similar stretch of time.^[3] “For most serious academic work … substitutability is not an option. Journals multiply and cannot be interchanged … Thanks to burgeoning content combined with ever-higher overall costs, acquisitions budgets continue to be drained.”^[4] The upshot? A serious challenge for academic historians: “In 1980, 2,000 copies of a history monograph might sell, by 2005, only 200.” That number continues to drop: “The average scholarly monograph these days sells 60 copies.”^[5] Scientific journals came “to devour the bulk of library budgets, undercutting humanities publications.”^[6] The necessity of change is plainly apparent. Baldwin observes that for an author, “the point is not to be published but to be read.” A reader, in turn, aims “not to buy a book but to be put in useful contact with new ideas.” Thus, a key question: “Can this be achieved otherwise?”^[7] For Baldwin – and for myself – the answer is yes; after all, not every book “must be a printed volume, or every printed volume a leather-bound artifact.”^[8] For those excited by the prospect of using digital technology to improve long-term access to gold-standard forms of historical scholarship, Baldwin’s work – strengthened by superb source compilation – will be an excellent place to start learning more. From financial challenges and intellectual property considerations, to diverse national contexts, to careful respect for the rich variety of goals that motivate scholarly and creative endeavor, Baldwin considers many difficult questions that have emerged in debates surrounding open access over the years. He distills thorny complexity into just a few hundred compelling pages. Ultimately, for practitioners of a discipline like history, an important question lingers. As immediately relevant opportunities for stable, remunerative academic work wither away, could some form of open access become increasingly useful for a growing body of contingent or independent scholars who might wish to stay involved in the conversations for which they are trained?

Looking back, my youthful explorations of scholarship in the humanities – not to mention the wider world of research communication – taught me a great deal. For example, the contrasts between what a faculty career in history demands, and how I do my best work, forced me to articulate a few thoughts that came to be useful as I prepared for my postbaccalaureate professional journey:

• Strive not for adherence to a predetermined path; instead, aspire to perennial adaptability. Relentless change is itself a constant. Too many variables are at play to carve out your ideal path to the retirement party right this moment. Rather than laying it all out immediately, focus instead on the project of making just one well-informed upcoming choice for your education or career. When you’ve followed through on that choice, consider a new set of options informed by the feedback that reality will offer. Iterate for probably four decades. Enjoy the journey. Who wants to be limited only to those possibilities imaginable to their younger minds?
• Throw off the metaphorical tweed jacket. Learn about “vocational awe” and challenge any elements of it you can detect in your own thinking. From what I can tell, romantic or sacred attitudes surrounding many career paths – history professorships, for example – rarely survive contact with reality. That isn’t to say you can’t be enthusiastic about what you want to do. It’s just that one-dimensional attitudes can yield blindness to other opportunities when they come into your life. My own experience shows that disillusionment doesn’t have to be a bad thing. After all, it’s better to be a little disappointed now than regretful and disoriented later.
• Know that money is not a dirty word. Virtually everyone needs to think about how, and when, to start preparing consistently for the phase of life in which they are no longer able to work. You deserve to hear that there is nothing wrong with simply walking away from an option that doesn’t meet financial needs or aspirations, whether in an immediate or a long-term sense. Playing around with a compound interest calculator for just ten minutes can be eye-opening. Math is powerful.
• Interrogate sources like a good historian. The best choices I have made for my own professional growth have emerged from a mindful effort to balance dispassionate analysis of information, on the one hand, with unapologetic recognition of my needs and core values, on the other. The former helps me identify the best paths available for prioritizing the latter. In other words, I ask myself the question: what aspects of my life make me happy, and how can I enjoy those things while existing in the imperfect world of today and tomorrow? This is all easier said than done, but you must try. It starts exactly where good historical research does: with thorough, critical evaluation of wide-ranging sources, rather than just fishing for whatever you want to hear in order to hold onto an idea in which you might be invested emotionally.

There you have it. Knowing what I know now, I no longer “love” history as a discipline like I once did: the risky prospects of the traditional pathways, the all-too-often ugly interpersonal conduct shaped by these difficult material conditions, and of course the stubborn old prestige hierarchies, well-suited as they are to unhealthy distortions of self-worth and perceptions of others alike. All of this is not even to mention the destructive lack of sufficiently widespread and urgent attention both to research access issues and to the opportunities held forth by technological advancement. Your mileage may vary.

These concerns aside, I respect history as a rewarding line of inquiry in life, and as a training ground for an important (if incomplete) set of skills with which to practice good citizenship and earn a living. Even when I criticize its contemporary practice, I try not to rid myself of stubborn hope for the future of history. For me, that creative tension is even more rewarding than youthful passion.

^[1] Peter Baldwin, Athena Unbound: Why and How Scholarly Knowledge Should Be Free for All (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2023), 142-143.

^[2] Ibid.,  161.

^[3] Ibid., 79.

^[4] Ibid., 78-81.

^[5] Ibid., 216.

^[6] Ibid., 123.

^[7] Ibid., page 238.

^[8] Ibid., page 246.