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Old October 21st, 2014 #1
Karl Radl
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Default The Chutzpah of Candice Falk and the Emma Goldman Papers

The Chutzpah of Candice Falk and the Emma Goldman Papers

When I got a 'Google Alert' about the Emma Goldman Papers project I was slightly surprised: it is one of those academic archival projects (of which there are a great many) you will hear the 'latest' developments about once a year or so (if you are lucky). However as Goldman has more than a passing intellectual interest for me: I thought I'd take a look.

What the article (from the San Francisco-based 'Jewish Weekly') (1) turned out to be was a bunch of accusatory self-congratulatory rubbish written by one Rachel Spence, but which could have almost have been ghost-written by its protagonist: Candice Falk.

Falk, who seems to be jewish herself (although that is more an inference I have drawn from her singular focus on jews involved in anarchism and where she tends to air her dirty laundry), was having a whinge because the notorious radical hothouse (which should have been shut down, cleansed of leftists and re-opened decades ago) of UC Berkeley has decided to pull the final (financial) plug on the Emma Goldman Papers project after thirty years of helping underwrite it by having Falk on the payroll.

Falk uses every classic excuse in the book to claim that she has been undermined by UC Berkeley:

1) She has had extended periods of illness (two bouts of cancer).
2) She has had to spend a longtime compiling, indexing and studying documents.
3) She is just about to finish the 'great work'.
4) She has had high staff turnover because nobody was giving her enough money.

Thus according to Falk she just needs more money and is quick to fling out the fact that she has forty thousand documents to deal with.

Alright: that is a lot of material to sift through, but sorry but it really doesn't take thirty plus years to do it.

Biographers go through huge amounts of material all the time as well as discover new documents/papers (for example Mary Lovell's and Jon Godsall's two minutely detailed research projects into the life and times of a life-long serial writer [like Goldman] Sir Richard Francis Burton): so the amount of material isn't actually a reason.

It just sounds impressive to someone who hasn't done archival work before.

It sounds less impressive however when you realize (as is indicated by a careful reading of the article) that many of the 'documents' that Falk is allegedly indexing, cataloging and reading are not originals, but rather copies (be they PDFs or photocopies) of original documents in established archives such as the famous (to students of leftist history anyway) International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam.

You don't have to pull them together in one place per se and the internet has actually eliminated the need for photocopies anyway due to the wonderful innovation called email (which has saved scholars much in the way of research expenses, but caused angry reactions from those who became an academic for the gravy train aspect to the work).

That means that these documents have had most of the hard work done on them done already (i.e. checking providence, contexts for indexing etc), which Falk merely has to copy over to her archive. What little there is in terms of original documentation should be relatively simple to sort out (as with the numerous letters of Rosa Luxembourg for example) and require a few years of concentrated effort to index, catalog and analyze (as with most archival research projects of this type).

So Falk really has no excuse there either.

You also cannot claim that the periods of illness are relevant either since being treated for cancer doesn't mean you are unable to work: it means you'll feel rather bad for quite sometime, but it doesn't make you a physical or intellectual cripple.

That's just a matter of self-discipline to be brutally honest.

The fact that she 'was about to publish volume four' of her work on Goldman's years in America is irrelevant: if you can only produce four books in thirty years on a topic you have ostensibly dedicated your life to studying (and which you are paid to do). Then it is only surprising that you have been employed as long as you have: considering part of the workplace brief in being an academic is that you to contribute substantially to the academic literature.

Has Falk been doing that?

Not really as far as I can see: she's hardly prolific.

I am reminded of the controversy that surrounded by the publication schedule (or lack of it) of the Dead Sea Scrolls texts (which were far more of a challenge than standardized documentation, correspondence and manuscripts of a twentieth century intellectual figure) when it was under the leadership of Fr. Roland de Vaux: it is simple incompetence (administratively, intellectually or both) to repeatedly fail to meet your publishing commitments (which the article tells us Falk has failed to do and has done so on a frequent basis).

People usually get fired for failing to do their job properly: it is about time that applied to academics as well.

Falk is, to my mind, a more deserving case than most to be dropped off into the big bad world to go and get a real job rather than sit there demanding money for doing practically nothing.

She complains of her high staff turnover and blames on it lack of financing: might she sought a reason closer to home before blaming it on money?

Sure: some people will move on quickly for a better salaried job, but there are plenty of people out there who will do something as a part-time hobby or out of an ideological commitment.

The suggestion that she can't find medium to long term staff/assistants is suggestive that the problem lies less with pay and conditions and much more in relation to Falk herself. After all when we consider Falk's behaviour in relation to spending thirty plus years collecting, indexing and cataloging an already extent body of material, while only publishing three works on the basis of it.

Then it strongly suggests she is personally irresponsible (why else would she take so long compared to other projects of similar or greater intellectual scope) and this would in turn allow us to suggest the possibility that she is personally disagreeable and difficult to get along with as well. This is also suggested by the fact that as soon as she is called on her inadequate publishing record and (effectively) asked to account for what she is spending: she immediately runs to the (jewish) papers.

Yet she has the chutzpah to claim she needs $250,000 (plus medical insurance etc paid by the university) to keep the project running: that's a huge amount of money for what, as an academic project, appears to be an abject failure.

Quite frankly I can barely believe anyone has the chutzpah to do what Falk has, but then we can draw a positive sign for her inability to get private (or further university) funding: the jewish left isn't as popular as it used to be!


References


(1) http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/...-plug-on-anar/

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This was originally published at the following address: http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot...-and-emma.html
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Old August 8th, 2015 #2
littlefieldjohn
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" I am an anarchist. I am a disciple of Emma Goldman. Her words set me free. "

Leon Czolgosz , assassin of President William McKinley
 
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