Being the ‘Other’: Teaching U.S. History as a Fulbright Professor in Egypt
Bibliographic record
Abstract
If for Russell Johnson the experience of teaching the Gilded Age and Progressive Era in Turkey was that of being in a “not so strange land,” my four months as a Fulbright professor at the University of Alexandria in Egypt were often quite the opposite. There I was truly a stranger in a strange land. But it is important to note right from the start that by strange I mean foreign in the sense that American history of any sort is not part of the Egyptian university curriculum. So much so that before I arrived in Egypt I had been given only a hazy idea of what I might be teaching. Once there I quickly found that I had to jettison the proposal that I had submitted for the Fulbright competition – to teach about the processes and ideas of democracy in U.S. history, most especially in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. The reasons for my inability to teach what I had proposed help explain much about the place of U.S. history, indeed all of “western” history, in Egyptian universities, and how the situation differs enormously from those described for Canada, Mexico, and Turkey. In these “post-eleventh September” days, it seems to me especially important to understand that while in the U.S. we seek to expand our university history curricula into a world vision, in Egypt exactly the opposite has been happening. Why this should be so in the age of globalization, and what lessons it has for U.S. historians, I think are among the valuable insights that can be gained from a Fulbright teaching fellowship in the Arab world.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.016 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".