Week 1: Meet the Department, Meet the Students!

For all my American colleagues - this is what an office window that opens looks like.

My delightful office in Niels Treschows hus, amid my faculty colleagues here at the Department of Archaeology, Conservation, and History at the University of Oslo, is fully modern. It resembles a very nice office in any US university - except that the window pushes open! In case you are wondering, the building seems to date from the 1960s, so it is not as if it antedates the concept of climate control. Buildings of similar vintage in the States, in my experience, and definitely those built more recently, have sealed windows. I am on the fourth floor, and the breeze is wonderfully pleasant, as the weather has been spectacular this July and August in Oslo. Just a small cultural difference, I suppose - there is little anxiety about exposure to the elements here.

I do, however, need to get some books for these lovely wooden shelves. That way, students will believe I am an Historian at Work.

This first week of the fall semester, beginning early by US standards, was busy. As the system of education, all the way through from grammar school to university, is organized here on a national basis, the whole country starts to school the same time. All pre-college students started on Monday, 19 August - one massive back-to-school day for all parents and children, including me and mine - and duties at the university began the same day. In my case, this meant an approximately four-hour department meeting to kick off the semester, which was attended by about forty people, including department staff as well as faculty, with the Head of Department, Professor Tor Egil Førland, presiding. This meeting featured a five-minute presentation by me, introducing myself and my planned activities for the semester to my new colleagues.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKpX-5jQjQ0

(The video clip attached to the URL above was part of my planned presentation, but alas the Internet connection was not working. You can't win them all.)

The rest of the meeting was conducted entirely in Norwegian.

As I said to Tor Egil afterward, this made for a rather interesting anthropological experience - I could focus on the forms of personal interaction, since I had no idea of the content of people's remarks.

I did understand a bit of the content of one substantial and very important presentation, which was by Professor Olav Njølstad of the history faculty, who explained in some detail the findings of a commission appointed by the government to analyze the horrible events of 22 July 2011 in Norway, when Hans Behring Breivik murdered 77 people in a series of terrorist acts. Professor Njølstad and other historians have been prominently cited in the news media here in Norway, amid the media coverage of the second anniversary of this mayhem. The esteem in which historians are held here, reflected in the serious attention paid to their views on such issues of urgent civic concern, is quite notable to an American historian.

Despite my inability to understand almost anything of the formal presentations made by my colleagues here, I was greatly enlightened by the conversations that my table-mates at this meeting made with me, entirely in English. At first I thought this was mere consideration toward me, which it certainly was. But I also discovered that one of the three colleagues sitting at my small table was a Dane, Professor Julie Lund, and that she - I hope she will not mind my sharing this - does not speak Norwegian. English is generally accepted as an international lingua franca here, the default alternative to Norwegian when dealing with international audiences. So the conversation would have been in English even if I had not been present. The three colleagues at my table, it turned out, were all from the archaeology wing of the department, which is clearly quite strong. The department is generally very strong in medieval studies, and the archaeologists do a lot of work on the Viking period, as well as much earlier periods, e.g., the Iron and Stone Ages. Quite fascinating!

Two days later my class, "America and the World since 1898," met for the first time, with some thirty students in attendance. The room barely held the group, but everyone dealt with that in good cheer.I followed my usual American customs as much as local culture seemed to allow - which is to say completely, since Norwegians are far too polite to suggest a visitor from the US is doing anything culturally awry. This meant going through the class list I had obtained, calling on each student, pleading with her or him to correct my mispronunciation of her or his name, and asking each to say something about about why she or she was interested in taking this class and what her or his educational goals are. I really have no idea if students are used to this or not - they weren't telling - but they played along. The group is somewhat international - two students from France, one from Iceland, one from the Netherlands, two from the US (from Minnesota!), and one who identified himself as half-American. They were younger by a few years, on average, than my students back home at Metropolitan State. But they really were not very different from my usual students, once we got to discussing course policies and content.

Particularly since students had done no reading yet, this was a day for introducing and previewing major themes of the course. (This is to say, I followed my usual practice of keeping students for the full scheduled class period at the first meeting. What can I say - I'm just mean.) These included the rise of US to preeminent global power in the 20th century, the crisis and decline of Europe (I did apologize about this), decolonization, and the rising force of nationalism in regions around the world. The most basic theme of the course will be the interactions, in the more-than-a-century since 1898, between two key rising forces: US power and Third World nationalism.

I didn't actually get to all my prepared material for this meeting, since the students proved stimulated and quite willing to talk about the issues that I did put on the table. Chief among these was the notion of US empire. I asked for an opening show of hands:

 Who thinks the United States is or has been an imperial power in the period since 1898? About half the hands went up.

Then: Who thinks the United States has not been an empire?

No hands.

Well, now that's interesting. Were the nonvoters simply undecided, I asked? Uncertain responses.

This should be interesting.

Next week: On to the Philippines!