October 2, 2026
Currently I am enjoying Book and Dagger, Elyse Graham's fascinating and witty book about scholars and librarians recruited as spies in World War II by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which eventually became the CIA. To learn about nerds of academia helping the allies win the war is pretty comforting to an academic (the nerd being assumed). However, early on, one brief section did take me aback.
Many of these spies left little biographical evidence after their careers and lives ended. That was part and parcel to being a spy. For one, a Joseph Curtiss, Graham turns to his dissertation. "A dissertation is an autobiography," Graham writes; "that's what scholars say, and they're right." Well, that's the first time I've heard that assertion. Graham goes on to explain that "the idea that a dissertation is, on some level, a confession of the self, an attempt to methodize one's nature, is so commonplace that advisers warn their students not to write dissertations on sexual topics."1
Unfortunately, I have saved none of the notes, comments or pieces of advice from my beloved dissertation advisor, Dr. David Nordloh, but I am pretty sure none of them included the tidbit "stay away from phallic symbols." Of course, he represented the American Studies element of my research more than the Literary Theory element, so that might have been enough to ensure I stayed away from anything sexual. On the other hand, academics are a devious lot; probably someone somewhere snickered at my dissertation title: Restricted Space: The Urban Tenement and the American Literary Imagination. "How tight is that space, Fleming?" they joked in the faculty lounge.
More importantly, how accurate is Graham’s statement that every dissertation is an autobiography? I mentioned this to a friend (fellow doctorate earner) who thought the key here was Graham referencing “scholars” as researchers, separating one set of doctoral students from another that see the dissertation and degree as the means to a professional end (often earned by professionals already in the higher education workforce). I don’t disagree, but that probably doesn't apply to me. I was in my mid-20s, fully committed to graduate school, when I began thinking about a dissertation topic, recognizing the subject as a kind of intellectual passion that would bring closure to my life as a student.
So, I will play along with Graham. How is a dissertation on depictions of urban living at the end of the nineteenth century by a middle-class kid at the end of the twentieth century autobiographical? The answer is probably no more esoteric than the claim that a dissertation on a seventeenth-century astrologer (William Lilly) provided an autobiographical insight into a World War II spy. Part of Graham's evidence comes from a quote in Curtiss' dissertation that "astrologers were expected to serve as the detective bureau of the day."2 Graham admits that when Curtiss wrote his dissertation he would have "no way of knowing he would be caught up in a wartime revolution of knowledge like the one Lilly worked up," going on to the conjecture that Curtiss saw "the life he'd like to have if the world was a little more magical."3
To answer a similar question for me and my dissertation I've had to do something I haven't done in 30 years, and wasn't sure I would ever do again: read my dissertation. Trust me, I am proud of completing it, and recognized quickly that it was the means to any end I desired in academia; nevertheless, I didn't ever acquire my own bound copy of it. As far as I know, the only bound copies are still in the University of Michigan library system where many dissertations end up. I saw no reason to purchase a bound copy; I had my drafts and I had the floppy disc on which it was saved. Why would I want to clutter my bookcase?
This week, however, I kicked myself trying to read through a final loose-leaf draft. That floppy disc is, of course, no use to me now. And I read trying to foresee a future, much like Graham did, having the hindsight to look back at an author's career developed decades after the dissertation was completed.
I didn't need to re-read my dissertation to answer the question superficially: Why did a middle-class kid from a college town choose American urban tenements as the subject of his dissertation? To some degree, this was the question asked by a couple of faculty at Indiana University, where I did my doctorate, right off the bat at my mock job interviews. Unfortunately, they weren't shy in showing their displeasure with my answer. I had digressed a little to describe reading Henry Mayhew's study of 19th-century London tenements a few years earlier, and the mocking quickly went to how Un-American Mayhew was. (Maybe I needed to say, "since I've been a child I have wanted to immerse myself in the seedy world of prostitutes and drug addicts. The tenement tower was the perfect phallic imagery for my sublimations." Perhaps that would have satisfied them and allowed me to continue.)
Still, I am willing to explore the idea that my dissertation is somehow a confession of my self, my exploration of my nature. The answer I did give in mock and actual interviews at the time was that from an early age I was fascinated by How The Other Half Lives (the title of Jacob Riis's seminal investigation of American urban life in the late 19th century). While I didn't know that book (or even its title) when I was seven years old, that didn't stop me from internalizing the images I saw in the streets of Calcutta or New Delhi, India, or along the waterways of Bangkok, Thailand, while traveling with my parents. I may have been born and lived in Morgantown, West Virginia, but by the time I was 10, I had already experienced some major cities in the world: London, Rome, Calcutta, Bangkok, Amsterdam, Montreal. And while I am sure my parents were conscious of us avoiding the slums, I would have been aware enough to notice some class differences along the way. In addition, my mother had been researching houses and homes, especially their architecture, so why wouldn't I want to address housing, connecting it to my fascination with American literature?
Thus, the fact that I would choose a study that shone a light where there wasn't much light is not too surprising. For one thing, it set me apart from hundreds of other recent Ph.D. graduates. One of the great challenges I have always had in talking about my dissertation in casual academic conversations is that I could name few primary sources my audience would know. Stephen Crane's Maggie was the only recognizable source for general audiences, even academic audiences. Naming Riis usually produced silence, although if I had the capacity to share one of his photos along with the reference, a few faces might light up with familiarity. However, in departments that revered Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Kesey, and Morrison, names such as Lillian Betts (The Story of an East-side Family), Abraham Cahan (The Rise of David Levinksy), Isaac Friedman (By Bread Alone), and Alice Wellington Rollins (Uncle Tom's Tenement) were generally unknown and unlikely to be elevated into any canon. For me, these names cloaked me in a protective armor. Let's face it, I was unlikely to run into another expert on American tenement fiction who might make me look foolish.
However, here's what I didn't know when I wrote the dissertation, but can now see upon reading it 30 some years later. Ultimately, what I wanted to argue about tenements was that the literary and public perception about them was not necessarily a fair, three-dimensional view of them. I include a key quote by scholar David Fine that buttressed my thesis statement: "the city's 'other half' had become by the mid-nineties [1890s] a product of proven marketability."4 As a result, the public perception of a tenement had become obscured by the marketplace, both the actual one (exploitation of the poor by men wanting to make money) and a literary one (the general public ate up tenement writing). However, what the public was hearing about tenements was often wrong, the fake news of the nineteenth century. For example, I referenced well-known mistakes made by census-takers who entered a tenement at one moment in time during a census, counted the residents, then walked away, completely oblivious that a whole separate group of residents filled the building at night, when the shifts had changed at the local factory, resulting in vast undercounting of people in tenements.
For all of my life, I have dreaded the cliché, struggled when anybody simplified arguments to some kind of black and white portrayal. The tenement presented certainly deplorable living conditions, but that didn't mean its inhabitants were deplorable. (From a young age, I knew deplorable actions could come from the mansion or the frat house as much as from the shanty or the tenement house.) This insensitivity toward people whose voices were muted carried over into my roles as college administrator (and I can guarantee you that in 1994 as I wrapped up the dissertation, a future as a provost was as fantastical a dream for me as wartime spy was for Joseph Curtiss). Sure, I was frustrated by student apathy (it was one of the reasons I took administrative opportunities), but I also never wanted to diminish that they were mostly voice-less in the world of academia.
In other words, what you thought you saw in the tenement was not necessarily the reality, just like what we see in academia is not necessarily the reality. Such incongruity between my outward role and my inward motivations is, to go back to Graham's description, the method of my nature. It has only been in retirement, through "A Life In Words Mostly Unread" (Part III "Of Secret Identities and Protective Devices"), that I have owned up to this.
Thus, with the benefit of hindsight, I now see that the madness to my method aligns with the two most well-known figures discussed in my dissertation: author Stephen Crane and social reformer Jacob Riis.
Crane became the more obvious parallel to my life. Crane’s interest in the slums, prior to publication of Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and George’s Mother, came mostly from an outsider’s observance. The son of a Methodist minister and descendant of a founder of an early American colony, Crane was no more of the immigrant lower-class than I was when I pitched my dissertation proposal. Critics mocked his “year of slumming” as his experience with the subject of slum life. Certainly, my vision of the impoverished classes from bus windows, gondola seats, or junk hulls hardly made me an expert. Even with all of the research done for the dissertation, I still felt quite the imposter as the expert on the subject. When I wrote, “Crane has chosen the role of guide, someone aware and interested in the environment, but not enough part of it to comprehend the environment fully,”5 I might as well have been describing myself, imposter as I was.
I am proud, as I take this time to re-read and remind myself of this dissertation, that I removed some of the pretensions that initially fueled my imposter syndrome. During the proposal stage, I was struggling to find a categorical term for a specific approach some novelists took in describing tenements from a mostly symbolic perspective. Someone on my committee strong-armed me to call it “teleological,” a term I didn’t understand then, and can’t say I understand much better now. Luckily, by the time of the dissertation itself, I had jettisoned that term.
Ultimately, the chapter on journalist/social reformer Jacob Riis parallels eerily well with the method of my professional life developed long after I wrote about him. Riis, passionate about capturing the unfairness of the slums, published two books of essays, photographs and illustrations capturing the reality of life in the slums. His first, How The Other Half Lives, is his most famous work which I summarized as a "testament to the ideals and beliefs of the urban reformer." Ten years later, when he published The Battle With The Slum, he, as I said in my dissertation, "illustrate[s] cynicism and disappointment [due to] lack of significant changes among the tenements." This disillusionment (which I captured as "debilitate[d] . . . enthusiasm and imagination"6) sounds much like my own, where ten years after my satirical novel about academia, the milieu around higher education has not changed. Decades pass, nothing significant changes. In 2010's It's All Academic, I ended my fictional provost's career with his rueful comment that "maybe, just maybe, I could have convinced my colleagues at the executive level to be completely transparent and to truly build a culture of trust and quality."7 I am saddened, 16 years after I wrote that, to know that Cornell University continues to remain mum on the handoff to local police of campus reports regarding the now well-publicized rape at a fraternity house. I am sure it is what their lawyers advise, but so much for transparency.
I doubt I ever had the passion about higher education’s flaws that Riis had about city planning flaws, but when Riis writes “I have not the courage to go back”7 in The Battle With The Slum, I completely get it. Even within hours of announcing my retirement, another institution reached out to see if I would serve in an interim role. I tried not to laugh as I said, "thanks, but no thanks." My sanity survives because I sit here safely and quietly out of the fray.
I guess my life can be found in my dissertation. My apologies for ever doubting you, Elyse Graham. If I show up in a future book, please capture me as a cool spy.
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1 Graham, Elyse. Book And Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II. New York, New York: HarperCollins, 2025. 57.
2 Graham, Elyse. Book And Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II. New York, New York: HarperCollins, 2025. 59.
3 Graham, Elyse. Book And Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II. New York, New York: HarperCollins, 2025. 60.
4 Fine, David M. The City, The Immigrant and American Fictio, 1880-1920. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1977. 38.
5 Fleming, David. Restricted Space: The Urban Tenement and the American Literary Imagination. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University Microforms, 1995. 73.
6 Fleming, David. Restricted Space: The Urban Tenement and the American Literary Imagination. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University Microforms, 1995. 169.
7 Fleming, David It's All Academics.Bloomington, IN: IUniverse, 2010. 299.
8 Riis, Jacob A. The Battle With The Slum. New York: Houghton Mifflin, Co., 1902. 80.
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