During COVID, a friend who worked in a large corporation asked me about institutional memory during times of upheaval, how and why to record an organization’s response to major social disruptions. My experience in academia and museums probably inspired the question. Here’s the first part of my answer; the other two parts will follow in subsequent posts:
Here are my first thoughts on preservation of institutional history during times of rapid change, including crisis. From hanging around artists and reading historians, my sense is that there are two things to remember: First, if you take a piece of acid-free paper and draw a picture on it with a #2 pencil, that paper and image will last a thousand years if kept in a typical museum collections facility. So media count. Second, historians try to discover the circumstances under which actions, including decisions, are made (evolutionary biologists call these circumstances “boundary conditions”), the rationale for those decisions, and how that rationale played out over time. Because they are historians, these scholars also tend to tie people to rationale. So the historical record to be preserved is the evidence for boundary conditions, evidence for decisions about what to do given those boundary conditions, and evidence that will provide some sense of all the possible decisions that could have been made. Thus ideally, as a result of studying history, “How did we do our business?” evolves into “How should we do our business?”
History books (there are millions!) can be lessons on how to deal with current events in an historical way, and a couple of my favorites are Barbara Tuchman’s Stillwell and the American Experience in China and Neil Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam. Tuchman won the Pulitzer, I believe, for The Guns of August; her Distant Mirror was a best-seller; but in my opinion, March to Folly was a great one. However, she also wrote about the plagues, and those might be really helpful in this case; Distant Mirror deals explicitly with the 14th Century, and the parallels to 2020 are frightening. Also try her Lessons from the Black Death. These titles, or at least some of them, are available as e-books. The lessons one gets from reading these books are focused on those boundary conditions and rationales for actions.
My own experience as an historian involves not only directorship of a natural history museum, with its massive research collections and associated data, but also writing a history chapter for an upcoming e-text in parasitology, being the lead writer and evidence retrieval person for Charles E. Bessey’s nomination to the Nebraska Hall of Fame (he was selected), being the senior editor of an academic history (A Century of Parasitology: Discoveries, Ideas and Lessons Learned by Scientists who Published in The Journal of Parasitology, 1914-2014), being constantly involved, especially through the Foundation, with the history of UNL’s Cedar Point Biological Station (CPBS), writing post-war Oklahoma history through the lives of my parents (Bernice and John: Finally Meeting your Parents who Died a Long Time Ago), and constructing a five-books fictitious history that doesn’t cover many years but does cover a lot of territory (the Gideon Marshall Mystery Series, see www.johnjanovy.com/marshall.html). I’ll deal with these items separately.
The University of Nebraska State Museum has, in addition to its exhibits building (Morrill Hall, with Archidiskodon imperator mainbeni), a massive research collection that includes millions of specimens of invertebrates, invertebrate fossils, insects, vertebrates and vertebrate fossils, anthropological specimens, and, of course, parasites. It doesn’t take very long in those collections to realize just how incredibly valuable are not only the specimens, but also, especially, the paper records. And just as quickly, you figure out how vulnerable that material is to fire and upper administration decisions, especially decisions driven by a business mindset. If that museum were a real business, with a relatively narrow range of products and a cost associated with inventory, that mindset would make sense. But the boundary conditions for museums are not the same as for Firestone Tire and Rubber Company or Ford Motor Company. So my sense is that the first question a person should ask, if embedded in a recognizable historical moment, but thinking a hundred years ahead, is: What are the boundary conditions that constrain this situation? Application of Ford Motor Company’s boundary conditions to the Manter Laboratory of Parasitology would quickly result in trashing of a massive supply of intellectual history and artifacts, all in addition to a million specimens (tangible evidence for what the world was like at a particular time and place). The contribution of that tangible evidence to a realm of intellectual endeavor would be destroyed.
The Manter Laboratory of Parasitology has also received millions of dollars of grant support to catalog its specimens, for example the two or three thousand slides from my Field Parasitology course, update and secure the collection records, and provide loan service to scientists around the world. Technology for accomplishing these goals is part of the deal. Does it matter if one tapeworm specimen from a Beckius Pond black bass, or the paper record telling when the fish was caught and who caught it, get lost? No. Does it matter if the overall collection disappears? Yes; that collection, taken as a whole, provides a picture of how parasitic organisms are distributed in nature over time and space, and that picture is what we use to write testable hypotheses about the mechanisms by which infectious agents in general, including stupid ideas, are spread and maintained.
It’s not very difficult to extend this line of reasoning to other areas of intellectual endeavor. For example, Bob Kaul, now deceased, got into the botanical records and specimens then used the information to construct a pre-development native vegetation map of Nebraska. So we can ask: How are humans affecting the environment in which they live? To answer that question, we can pull out Bob Kaul’s map and compare native vegetation types and distributions to the present ones. Do we care what kind of an impact we’re having on the environment that supports us? Or maybe we could ask: Why should we care about what kind of an impact we’re having on the environment that supports us, including the intellectual and social environment? Maybe go ask five-year old kids in Flint, Michigan, that question.
Do I have a personal memory that is permanent and powerful? Yes; while putting together the documents to support Charles Bessey’s nomination (see web sites at the end), I went to the UNL Library archives and pulled out documents ranging from his scientific papers to his grade books for undergrad classes. Time and time again I came across copies of letters written by high school students and others just curious about some plant they’d seen growing somewhere. One of the most well-known turn-of-the-Century American scientists, adviser to presidents, and president himself of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, took the time to answer all of these letters, at least the ones in the files, in a gentle, patient, and teacherly way. Bessey was not only encouraging, but also endorsing, scientific literacy. What might be the value of those letters? Handling them, reading them, knowing who wrote them, and who he wrote them to, provides an unforgettable lesson in, and a role model for, the responsibility of a professional scientist to interact with the broader public. So it seems to me that when we start asking ourselves what to save and why to save it, the “what” and “why” become inextricably linked, with the “why” part being the take-home lesson in what it really means to be a member of the human species.
Sometime shortly after I was elected Vice President of the American Society of Parasitologists (ASP), Jerry Esch, my long-time close friend gave me a phone call. We had been in graduate school together in the 60s. Jerry had just completed his 20-year service as editor of The Journal of Parasitology, an international peer-reviewed science journal, and had an idea for an edited volume. Also, ASP was getting ready to celebrate its centennial, during which I would be President. He laid out this plan to recruit well-known parasitologists to contribute chapters to this book that would go with the organization’s centennial. Jerry negotiated the contract with Wiley, but because I was on Council and he was not, I ended up signing the contract and being senior editor of the resulting academic history: A Century of Parasitology: Discoveries, Ideas and Lessons Learned by Scientists who Published in The Journal of Parasitology, 1914-2014. The job was helped along because Jerry had already strong-armed a group of contributors. Once the contract was signed, the pressure was on and the manuscripts started coming in. Luckily I had just hired a student helper, Talia Everding.
What did this experience reveal, at least to me, about history? The answer is that even if you are working with a group of scientists, some of whom are highly specialized, the continual pressure, sometimes exerted with a red pen, to focus on ideas and discoveries that drive research, interpreting past in terms of present, and on the lessons learned from experience, produces some informative history. Among the most instructive chapters in A Century of Parasitology is the one written by William Campbell, who spent his career working on anti-parasitic drug development at Merk Animal Health. At the time we were working on this book, it seemed like drug development, possibly because of the clean, and sometimes not so clean, experiments, in which the rationale and execution were clear, was a particularly instructive area of parasitological history. I remember when Bill Campbell’s first manuscript came in. I gave it a quick look then printed it out for Talia, who did the first read on all these contributions; e-mail exchanges with authors always included copies to Talia and Jerry Esch. Later, when the ASP meetings were held in Omaha, Talia attended some of the sessions and met Bill Campbell, who remembered her well from the correspondence. They had a nice visit; undergrad student and retired scientist. That was after Bill had won a Nobel Prize for his part in the development of ivermectin.
So what is the take-home from A Century of Parasitology? My impression is that instructions to authors matter, especially if those instructions force some conceptual thinking. Ideas, discoveries, and lessons—those were the keys in this case. If I were a history prof assigning papers, I’d give every student a different subject then ask for a narrative that revealed and linked ideas, discoveries, and lessons. If I were one of those students, I’d probably wonder how in the hell I was supposed to accomplish this task when what I really expected from a history class was a string of dates and wars to remember. That post-No Child Left Behind child wants a correct answer to give; the teacher doesn’t care about a correct answer, but instead wants an individual to construct an answer to the questions: What is an idea? What is a discovery? What is a Lesson? What can we learn from the present crisis that will help humanity deal with the next one? The perceptive students will go to a library, or a truly massive database, and use those questions to guide a search for material: How do I recognize an idea that drives action? What do people discover when they perform certain actions? Did they modify their behavior based on what they discovered? Did others modify their behaviors based on what was discovered as a result of performing certain actions? Reading Barbara Tuchman, I can assure you that Vinegar Joe Stillwell saw plenty of ideas driving actions in China in the 1940s, and made plenty of discoveries, but the politicians back home could not seem to learn their lessons.
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Here are the Bessey references:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Edwin_Bessey
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Charles-E-Bessey
https://www.unl.edu/chancellor/charles-edwin-bessey
