Le Minh Khai's SEAsian History Blog (+ More)

I recently wrote a blog post on how in the 2020s, what we can call activist/progressive scholarship has largely come to dominate in certainly the North American variety of Asian Studies/History as well as in various Humanities and Social Sciences fields.

One big question then is why has this happened?

While one can answer that question from many perspectives, ultimately, I would argue that at the core of this issue is a declining sense of self-worth.

The world of academia has traditionally been centered on three activities: publishing, teaching, and service. It is from these activities that scholars have traditionally gained a sense of self-worth.

What I would argue is that in the Internet age, and now in the AI age, it has become increasingly difficult to gain a sense of self-worth from those activities. And I would add to this a related issue, which is working in an office.

In what follows, I am going to provide some auto-ethnographic reflections on how I lost a sense of self-worth in these areas, and where I have found it (at least temporarily) as well. It all relates to the Internet age, and now the AI age.

Publishing

Publishing monographs has historically been one of the main ways that scholars have gained a sense of self-worth. However, the importance of monographs clearly declined in the Internet age.

To get tenure and promotion at an American university in the field of History, there are different requirements depending on the university. At the University of Hawaii, the main requirement when I went up for tenure and promotion in the early 2000s was a monograph. If you had a published article as well, which I did, that was considered “icing on the cake,” but the monograph was essential.

In certain other places, I was aware that the requirement was a monograph and “substantial evidence of progress towards a second monograph.” Even though that wasn’t a requirement for me, I essentially did that. I got my dissertation published quickly and then I started working on a new topic, spirit writing in Vietnam, and by the time I went up for tenure and promotion, I had like 70 pages written on that topic.

Twenty years later, that second monograph still has not appeared. Why not? To a large extent, it’s because of self-worth.

My monograph was published in January 2005. By like January 2007, I started to get reports from the publisher, University of Hawaii Press, of how many volumes had been sold. It was like. . . 49, and mostly purchased by university libraries.

Oh, I suddenly realized, nobody reads this stuff. . . And indeed, at that time you could really feel the Internet taking over and that whatever reading human beings were doing was largely online, not in printed books.

So, I couldn’t justify to myself spending a large amount of time to produce a monograph on an obscure topic which very few people would ever read. That would have provided me with very little sense of self-worth.

That said, I hadn’t totally given up on publishing monographs at that point. Instead, I considered writing a monograph on a slightly less obscure topic, “the modern search for the origins of Vietnam.”

I published some articles that contribute to this larger project, but in the end, that sense of futility of publishing in monograph form, a form that I saw less and less evidence of people engaging with, took over and I decided not to bother, and to focus instead on publishing articles and book chapters, both of which are 1) easier to read and 2) can be shared on personal or archive sites.

That said, if a clear path emerges between published books and LLMs, such that I can be certain that a book I write will definitely be incorporated into the “knowledge” of an LLM, then I might still consider doing it. However, so far that pathway hasn’t been clearly established (as far as I know).

Teaching

While tenure and promotion are based heavily on publications, professors probably spend more time on teaching. That’s certainly the case in the early years, and teaching is definitely a domain where one can gain or lose a sense of self-worth.

I remember back when I was in high school, I was talking to a cook in our cafeteria and he said, “You guys have it easy. You just get tested once and a while. But I’m tested every single day by the kids who eat my food. All it takes is for one snot-nosed kid to say, ‘What?! Chicken again?!!’ and I feel like I failed.”

Teaching is the same. You get an immediate review of your performance through the body language of the students every time you teach, and your sense of self-worth is affected by that.

Clearly there are people who develop mechanisms to block out or somehow not be affected by negative reactions to their teaching. However, I am unable to do that. If something isn’t working, I either change to something that does work, or just stop doing it.

Teaching dense upper-division courses is something that stopped working for me around 2010. I used to teach a course on modern Vietnamese history and one on the modern history of “the world of the Mekong,” which included histories of what is now Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos, with also some coverage of southern Vietnam and Myanmar when that intersected with the histories of the other places.

However, as smart phones took hold and started to decrease student attention, I found myself increasingly looking at kids with their eyes rolled back into their heads. Not knowing any other way to do what I was doing, I just stopped teaching those courses and focused on lower-division survey courses, courses that were more fast-paced and dynamic.

However, as we entered the AI age, those types of courses also became meaningless to me, as students started to turn to LLMs to do the work, creating a gap between what was covered in the classes (the part I contributed to), and what they produced with LLMs.

Again, I faced the choice of either A) trying to figure out how to teach and structure the courses differently or B) just stopping, and I chose option B. I have yet to conceive of a way to teach undergraduate history in the AI age and maintain a sense of self-worth.

For those who can succeed at that, you have my utmost respect!!

Office Work

Working in an office at regular times is very important for gaining a sense of purpose, and by extension, a sense of self-worth, and that is something that the Internet age has greatly reduced.

When I was working in Hawaii, there was no demand that one work from one’s office. However, when I first started in the early 2000s, people in my department generally did, at least to some extent, if for no other reason than that the university had a better Internet connection than the dial-up access that we had in our homes.

As a result, I would see many of my colleagues every day, and if I left my door open, someone would invariably stop by and start up a conversation. Students stopped by too.

That then changed at some point later in the 2000s when we all got high-speed Internet in our homes, and by the 2010s, I would often be the only person in my entire hallway who was in his/her office.

Needless to say, the collegial conversations (and gossip) largely disappeared, and it was only at departmental meetings that I would see certain people (I would often forget that certain colleagues even existed, I saw them so little). Students stopped coming as well. Not surprisingly, it is also around this time that you could really sense morale start to decline.

Related to this, I remember how in the mid-2010s, I used to drive my kids to school in the morning. I could get there pretty quickly, but the return journey required that I join a mass of cars heading towards Honolulu from outlying areas, and that could mean total gridlock for like 45 minutes to an hour.

So, sometimes to avoid that, I would veer off the highway and head to a beach below Diamond Head where I would chill for half an hour or more, and then I would either go back home or go to work in a fraction of the time that it would have taken if I had tried to make that journey 45 minutes earlier.

Sometimes as I was sitting there, looking out at the waves, I would think to myself, “Man, this is absolutely crazy! I could just sit here all day, and no one would ever know or care.”

While some people might claim to like that. I didn’t. I like the feeling of working, accomplishing things, and having structure in life. It gives me a sense of meaning and self-worth. And I would try to do that, but when you are the only person in a building for hours, and even for days on end, it gets difficult to maintain that sense of meaning.

Then in 2018, I moved to Universiti Brunei Darussalam, where my unit, the Institute of Asian Studies, definitely had structure. You were expected to work from your office. You were expected to attend the weekly seminar that the Institute organized, etc.

At the same time, you also had freedom within that structure. The lunch break was like an hour and a half long and you didn’t have to literally be in your office at all times, so you could meet up with colleagues at the library café to talk, etc.

I loved that because it gave one a sense of purpose, meaning, and “community” as well. And I can even remember how days would go by when we would all be busy and wouldn’t really even see each other or say more than “selamat pagi,” but you always knew that people were there.

You’d hear people’s voices. You’d hear people going into the staff room to make tea or coffee. You’d hear people going to the office to ask the staff about something. You’d hear the staff in the office talking to each other. People would pass by your door on the way to the bathroom, etc. Even just hearing that felt so much healthier than being the only person in a hallway of empty offices day after day after day.

That said, I think most universities in the world follow the Hawaii model, and most scholars will probably say that they prefer it, but I would argue that giving people the freedom to not work from an office is actually detrimental to their own sense of purpose and self-worth.

It is certainly detrimental to any sense of community and a sense of morale at a work unit.

Service

Service is traditionally the one area of work that professors devote the least amount of time and effort to. So, when they have to report what they have done, the record for their activities in this area are generally the most limited. “I gave a talk at ABC event.” “One sentence of something I said was quoted in Newspaper EFG,” etc.

I started out that way, but as meaning started to drain out of publishing and teaching, both due to the rise of the Internet/smart phones/social media, I started to put more and more energy into service in the form of this blog, and then videos, etc.

Writing blog posts and creating videos for people who actually responded proved to bring a much stronger sense of self-worth than anything I was doing in the area of publishing, where I was getting little to no response.

However, that also changed with time. In the early years, there were intense interactions, but then as people spent more time using cell phones (harder to type on), and Facebook eliminated Notes, the interactions sharply decreased.

And, certainly, there have been times over the years when I have seen no purpose in it and just wanted to shut it down and walk away.

However, recently I have started to see value in it again. There is this enormous body of messed up scholarship on early Southeast Asia that I have some ability to address, and now I see that LLMs are starting to do what Wikipedia doesn’t do, and what my colleagues would never do, which is to recognize what I am doing.

So, yea, to spend life on planet earth acquiring skills and knowledge that enable me to rewrite a thousand years of human history in a region of the world (Southeast Asia) and to have that become a part of the world of knowledge in the AI age. . . I can live with that. I can get a sense of self-worth from that.

However, I think this makes me extremely fortunate.

The Sense of Self-Worth

Most professors/scholars are not in this position. Instead, they’re teaching courses that feel increasingly meaningless because they can’t figure out how to teach in the AI age (as I couldn’t) but they either have no alternative but to keep going (mortgage, kids in school, etc.), or simply don’t know what else they could do.

They publish behind paywalls and get no reaction/response to their work.

Their service still consists of “I gave a talk at ABC event” because they continue to follow the traditional way of doing things.

And they work largely from home, thinking it’s great, but in reality, they spend their days doomscrolling and feeling miserable.

Then as for the freshly-minted PhDs who are trying to get into this system, where tenure-track jobs are few and far between and where it’s a struggle to even get a post-doc, they have another set of miseries as well on top of all of this.

It is extremely difficult to have a sense of self-worth in such a world, and this is ultimately where I think activist/progressive scholarship, etc. all come from. People are grasping onto such approaches in an effort to feel like they have some self-worth in a world that no longer provides it through the mechanisms that were designed to deliver it: publishing, teaching, service, and working in an office at a university.

In certain systems in Asia where publishing is monetized, I’m not sure if people get a sense of self-worth from publishing, but they certainly get more money, so perhaps that translates into some sense of self-worth.

However, I think the focus on citation numbers rarely if ever succeeds in bringing a sense of self-worth. If anything, it has the opposite effect. It creates a sense of despair among people who, try as they may, cannot get others to notice and cite their writings.

Activist/Progressive scholarship, I’m arguing, gives some people a sense of self-worth in this system which no longer delivers it through the traditional means.

Further, that sense of self-worth that activist/progressive scholars receive does not come from those traditional means. Their publications are just as un-read as everyone else’s, and they face the same challenges in teaching.

Instead, it comes from a feeling that one is on the right side of certain issues.

Therefore, when one publishes something, one can declare it to be a “critical intervention,” regardless of whether or not anyone ever reads it. When one teaches, negative reactions can be interpreted as a sign of a lack of enlightenment on the part of the students, rather than as a sign of the inadequacy of one’s pedagogy.

I think it is potentially a lot easier to exist in academia now if this is how one thinks. It, therefore, does not surprise me at all that activist/progressive scholarship has risen to a position of dominance.