An open letter to my students

Dear students,

In this, my last term of teaching, I've decided that it's time to comment on one of your favorite words, a word for which I don't really share your enthusiasm.

That word is "biased."

First (for reference's sake), "bias" is a noun and "biased" is an adjective. A historical author or source might be biased, but cannot be bias. Just so you know.

Second, do you know where the term "bias" really comes from?

Cloth.

Every piece of cloth has a direction in which it likes to move. If you pull cloth in the direction of its bias, it stretches nicely. If you pull it against the bias, it resists. It wants to go in one direction and not to go in another. (It's kind of like the grain in wood - cutting with the grain is easier than cutting against the grain. Meat has a grain, too, and if you cut against the grain, you get short pieces that melt nicely in your mouth; if you cut with the grain, you get longer, rubberier pieces.)

When you say that a historical author has a "bias," you're saying they incline a certain way. They lean in a certain direction. And that's fine, as far as it goes.

The thing is, you inevitably declare that the author is "biased" as if this is all you have to say on the subject - as if discovering "bias" is some form of analysis.

I hate to tell you this, but it's really not. Because if we go back to our cloth analogy: can cloth not have a bias? Not really. The characteristic of inclining in a particular direction is just something that's built into fabric.

It's the same with people. ALL authors are biased in some way. To declare a historical author "biased" is like declaring that a writer uses words. It's kind of a DUH! statement.

Instead, what you need to do is tell me HOW the author EXPRESSES that bias - and specifically, in detail. I don't want you just to tell me that an author is biased in favor of (Christians, the king, their children, Republicans, who/whatever); I want to hear how the author shows that favoritism. What does that actually mean, to be "biased," say, in favor of Christianity? Does that mean the author is willing to lie about/omit matters that make Christianity look bad? Or does it mean the author exaggerates matters that make Christianity look good? Show me what's going on in the text. Something more that just "making Christians look good"; there are LOTS of different ways to make something look good. How does this specific author in this specific text do it?  "Good" is an awfully big category - portraying someone as a "good Christian" because they take up arms to defend the weak and helpless, say, is different from portraying someone as a "good Christian" because they pray, fast, and embrace pacifism. Authors make choices about how to portray their subjects (I think Flavia would agree), and if they portray their subject as a veritable Terminator of Christianity, they do so on purpose. That tells us something important about what "Christianity" meant to this society. Which may not be - in fact, probably isn't - the same thing it means to us. Which is the whole point of studying history in the first place.

Finally, because every author is "biased" - because "bias" is inherent to the human condition - being "biased" doesn't mean the same thing as "unreliable" or "inaccurate." In the same way that declaring an author biased is not analysis, dismissing the author as unreliable doesn't work, either. If bias = unreliability, there is no possibility of a reliable author. Of course, if you define "reliable" as "mirror image of the truth," wie es eigentlich gewesen ist, then no, there probably is no possibility of a reliable author. But since then historians would have to sit around twiddling their thumbs lamenting the impossibility of knowing anything, I have to reject that approach. There are some incredibly unreliable authors, from whom we can nonetheless learn a lot. And there some authors who are incredibly reliable. Again, you have to explain how this author is "biased," and demonstrate how that specific expression of bias gets in the way of a reliable account of whatever it is you're reading about. A person who's convinced that they've been abducted by aliens may not be the most reliable commentator on astral phenomenon, but they may be lucidly crystal-clear about the best way to cook beef stroganoff.

So please, my lovely industrious scholars, please stop telling me that a source is "biased." (Although that's preferable to being told that a source is "bias.") Tell me something I don't know already.

Affection and analysis*,
your instructor

*apologies to profgrrrrl

Comments

[Professor de Breeze]

Wow! My students must commute a long way each day in order to be your students as well. Who knew? :)

[Janice]

This year I'm getting less claims of "bias" or "biased" and more "impact" and "impacted". When they write that country A or individual B was "impacted" by or "biased" for a cultural movement C, they think they're being profound. And, hey, they've made an analytic statement, haven't they? So thesis analysis and insight? All covered there!

In reality? They're contributing to the balding of the professoriate, male and female, as we all start pulling out our hair.

[Jeannette]

This post made me smile.

[khora]

With little modification, this would make a lovely handout. Or, in honor of Earth Day/Week, you could save paper and post it on your Blackboard course site. If you have one of those.

[Matt Gabriele]

Genius. Can I borrow this?

[Dr. Rural]

Beautiful. May I hand it out in class?

I just finished grading a bunch of book/article reviews, too many of which read like this: "This article was published in the Journal of African American History, so you can see the author is bias towards black people. . . ." In the wake of such comments, I gave my students much the same speech. But you said it oh so much better.

[Sleepycat]

Brava!

[Jane Dark]

Awesome. Thank you for this!

[The History Enthusiast]

Awesome post!

My students have a related problem. They think that anytime a scholar has a perspective that that automatically means the author is biased against other perspectives. They had to read a work by Very Famous Professor, who writes on American environmental history, and they all said: "well, VFP is biased because he focuses on the environmental impacts of human decisions, instead of studying society more broadly." I kept having to remind them that just because he is an environmental historians doesn't mean that he thinks all other perspectives are crap.

They also tend to claim that any author who is revisionist is biased, simply because they are contradicting a commonly accepted belief.

Grrr...can you tell I've been grading this week???

[mimi]

Amen. Great, great post. Phew. Well done.

[luckybuzz]

Awesome. I immediately thought that I might need to borrow this, too. :)

[Susan]

This is terrific, and I suspect will show up on syllabi, in handouts, etc. next fall! Can I just add to this absolutely terrific post that narrative does not mean objective? That how you tell a story -- what you leave out, what you put in -- reflects your bias, in the true sense of the word. In other words, narrative is also an argument.

[yankeetransferred]

Just stopping by to say hello. It's been ages.

[Dr. Virago]

You rock my world, New Kid! I'm clipping this and saving it for later. I'm also showing it to Bullock because I'm sure he could use it in his PoliSci classes.

And why aren't you a rhet/comp person? You'd be great at it!

[The_Myth]

Fantastic post! Agreed with others, this should be remade into an open-source handout for posterity!

But you forgot all the various "approved" spellings:

biast

baised

and my personal favorite: buy-assed

[EmmaNadine]

I also want to share this with my classes. Nothing like teaching political science 101 to make you sick of "bias" :D

[New Kid on the Hallway]

Heh, who knew I'd strike such a chord?? This is something I've been wanting to tell one of my classes this quarter, but I haven't because I don't trust myself not to deliver it as an utterly hectoring, harassing harangue (I'm a short-timer now, it's not my finest hour).

Anyone who wants to is more than welcome to use this in class or wherever - feel free to modify in any way you see fit!

(And The_Myth, I am dying over buy-assed! I've never seen that one, and all I can think is Pat, I'd like to buy an ass.)

[susie]

Ahhhhh. Thank you for writing this! It warmed the cockles of my shriveled little grading heart.

[Dame Eleanor Hull]

Maybe I have the siblings or friends of the students you and Prof. De Breeze share?

[Cheeky prof]

I'm fairly certain this isn't the first time I've said this, but you're my hero.

[ADM]

I'm so sending this to my students right before the final!

[Liz]

Truly, you must know (meaning you must LEARN from all of your readers) how utterly amazing you are - not only can you predict what will be in all of our students final papers, but you've given us the perfect response. I have been reading your blog since I was working on my dissertation, then during my first job (didn't work out), then during my visiting gig, now in my second job - goodness it has been at least 4 years and always you have relevant, well written posts. I really wish you the best in law school and I will continue to read.

[af]

This is so, so true. In a paper I got last week, a student was critical of the Quran because it portrayed Allah as "the greatest person ever." I kid you not. The Quran: biased in favor of God.

[Tommy]

A minor point: references I checked about the word "bias" and its etymology (e.g., here and here) say it's about an angle oblique to a fabric's grain, rather than referring to the grain itself.

[New Kid on the Hallway]

Damn, I knew I should have looked up "bias" before posting this! ;-) Well, it was a nice idea.

And af, I LOVE that the Quran is biased in favor of God. Wow.