By: Alexis Jimenez Maldonado
This conversation occurred on December 14, 2022. The transcript of the interview has been edited for clarity.
Charles Petersen is a postdoctoral fellow in the Cornell History Department and the Cornell Society of Fellows. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 2020. He teaches and writes about the history of the United States in the twentieth century.
Alexis Jimenez Maldonado: You joined the Center’s community as a Graduate Fellow in 2018. What drew you towards pursuing a fellowship with the Center?
Charles Petersen: I was a grad student at Harvard, and I was looking for an opportunity to really focus on my research. I'd always wanted to be at the Center because it brought together exactly the kinds of scholars and thinking that makes me most excited about the academy.
Both for the senior fellows and the graduate students, it's usually a combination of people from history, political theory, philosophy, social sciences, and the professions. The year I was there, there was a fellow from the Boston Review which was interesting since I have a background in publishing, magazines, and editing. To have those people in the same room, thinking things through together was awesome. It also felt uncommon — it’s one of the only places where that kind of interdisciplinarity happens.
Alexis: Could you describe your Graduate Fellowship experience? How, if at all, did the fellowship impact your work?
Charles: I spent just a huge amount of time at the Center. I was there every day in my office. By the end of my time there, I filled the bookcases and the whole wall with a mountain of books like two layers deep. I just piled them up! That’s the kind of thing historians like. We just really use the library a lot. The experience gave me so much time to dig into this stuff and go deep on my project.
When I was there, I was working on the part of my project that's focused on Silicon Valley. I had already written a lot of the parts about education and intellectual history. At the Center, I was reading about applying these ideas about merit, meritocracy, and inequality. I was looking at real-world problems, like: how do you run a company? How do people get paid? Why do people have ownership stakes? How did the United States become so much more unequal? It felt like the perfect place to do those things.
Alexis: Your research is currently focused on the history of meritocracy, with a focus on Silicon Valley. Can you talk more about this?
Charles: I'm curious about how inequality comes about. It's not obvious. There's this classic thought experiment from Isaiah Berlin in the 1950s, where he just says, “Why is equality the natural state of things?” And he says, well, if you’re given a cake, and there were five people at dinner, you would naturally cut it into five pieces. If you didn't cut it into five equal pieces, you'd have to give some explanation.
That's a fascinating example to me because I think that is a lot of people's intuition today. But if you were in any number of other times in history, many people would say, well, of course, you wouldn't cut it into five equal pieces. If it's feudal France, say, or if it's the slaveholding American south. I don't want to take this naturalized sense of egalitarianism for granted. Instead, I want to think about this historically. Where do these ideas come from? How do they change?
I look at the modern era in the United States. To do this, we really need to look at things across different disciplines, different areas of study. If you just look at education, if you just look at business, if you just look at politics, you don't get the whole picture. For example, I look at Apple. Steve Jobs often says he wants “A+” players. If you hire any “C” players, he says, then suddenly the whole team will become corrupt. They'll want to hire other “C” players. Only “A” players want to be around other “A” players. I kind of love this metaphor because it's simultaneously about tech workers, and about academic grades, and also, in a way, about athletics. The “A” team is like the varsity team. And that captures some of the relationship between business and the University, where you have this obsession with grades and you have this obsession with athletics. Even in a place like Harvard, many students are varsity athletes or played varsity sports in high school. The admissions office really cares about that.
With ideas about merit in education, a lot of them developed at the beginning of the 20th century, when the research university first became established. Places like Harvard were going from training, basically, pastors and lawyers, to training people who were going to be running businesses. That's when universities first established a lot of these concerns about sports. Universities took some of that from business, but they also then contributed it back to business. I want to look at this dialectic between these different areas. And I do that from roughly the 1880s or 1890s, the rise of modern America, all the way up through the 1990s and 2000s. The project ends with Mark Zuckerberg. So, it's a long period of time.
Alexis: Could you talk about how your academic interests developed and evolved during your time as a fellow and also how you see those interests connecting to the mission of the Center?
Charles: When I was there Danielle Allen was the director and she hosted these weekly workshops. In a lot of scholarly fellowships, not everyone really attends that many events. Here, people were heavily involved, including the staff. Danielle was both great at taking seriously people's work on its own terms and kind of getting into: What's the problem that you're addressing here? She always had this uncanny ability to summarize what you were doing and then ask one question that got to the heart of things. Especially as a graduate student, you can get stuck in these very small questions, and I think the Center really made me think about the big questions. I always took the real goal of the Center to be focused on civic engagement in the largest sense.
Alexis: Can you talk a bit about the work you are currently doing as a postdoctoral fellow in the Cornell History Department and the Cornell Society of Fellows?
Charles: I'm lucky to have this three-year fellowship at Cornell. It's much like the Center; I have no responsibilities other than to focus on my own research. It's very interdisciplinary. Something like half of the fellows are from the sciences. There are physicists, mathematicians, biologists, but also a lot of humanists and social scientists. It's a great community.
Of course, the Cornell history department is amazing. I started the first year of my fellowship during COVID, but that meant I had lots of time just to read, think and write, but not that much community. This last year here has been better. There have been a lot more opportunities to really get to know people one on one. As far as my work is concerned, I've focused on writing a few different journal articles, and then on getting my book together.
I focused on one project about the history of using stock options to pay people, which I find fascinating, because it is a direct way of linking people's concept of merit to the market. And it's not something that's well understood. There's basically no historical work about it at all. And it's also one of the main drivers of economic inequality, at least in the last 40 years.
Another project is about the origins of “diversity” discourse and how it connects with ideas about merit and college admissions. The project takes in 150 years of history, and it’s really targeted at debunking some of the claims that have been coming up in the Harvard admissions case before the Supreme Court right now.
Alexis: You’ve written for the New York Times, the Nation, and the New York Review of Books and have been an editor at n+1 magazine since 2007. How has your background both in publishing, but also as a historian, played a role in your research?
Charles: When I was in my 20s, I spent a lot of time working in magazines, writing for magazines, and slowly getting involved with this great little journal called n+1. I just wanted to be a writer, basically, and I didn't give much thought to history, to be honest. I took one history class in college, I studied English, and I spent most of my time writing poetry. As I got more politically engaged, I became more curious.
I'm from a small town in Idaho. I went to college in Minnesota, and after college I spent some time in Montana and in Seattle. I moved to New York City when I was 23. Living in New York, a place I'd only been once before, made me more curious about where I was from and about cultural differences more generally. Coming from Idaho, the east coast is kind of a foreign country. I spent a lot of time reading about the American West. I got interested in history through writers like William Cronon and Patty Limerick.
One of the things I loved about history was that of all the academic fields I think it's the one that is probably most approachable to the general public. And it's the one where you can still get tenure by writing books for the general public that also will be received as serious scholarly works.
Alexis Maldonado: Could you expand on these really interconnected threads of being a literary intellectual and also an intellectual historian that seem to serve as a through line in your academic career?
Charles: My first full time job in journalism was as the assistant to the editor of the New York Review of Books. I worked for the founder of the magazine, Bob Silvers, who died a few years ago. At the time, he was like 78 or 80. And the thing about Bob was that he barely knew how to use a computer. A lot of the job was taking dictation. I’d call him and then read him his emails over the phone, and he would dictate his responses as he got up, got in a cab, and came to the office. And then I would print out the emails and he would read and edit them by hand before finally signing off on them. In some ways, it was an incredibly menial job. But I got to look over the shoulder of this guy who had created this great magazine and who'd been doing this for decades. It was an education in manners more than anything else — like this is how you write a good email! I learned a lot just by osmosis about how institutions work.
I write about the New York intellectuals from the 50s and 60s. People like David Riesman, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer. I think it's very easy to look at these people as kind of brains in a vat, disembodied thinkers. My approach is much more focused on what these people were doing. How is intellectual work a real practice that's in the world?
One common approach to intellectual history is to rediscover the context for thinkers by looking at who else they were reading. But why would you only look at what people are reading? You should look what they're investing in. What did John Locke, for instance, own? How was he running his day-to-day finances? Who was he living with? Who was making his food? How did his everyday interactions like that really affect how he was thinking? Working at the New York Review made me incredibly aware of the embodied nature, the institutional nature, of intellectual work.
Alexis: What projects are on the horizon for you?
Charles: I've been starting to think through and research a second book project, which is a prehistory of the Green New Deal. I’d prefer not to go into too much depth just now because the project is still taking shape. But basically, the idea is to ask how the original New Deal promoted more long-term approaches to business and social problems, with the notable exception of racial conflict. And then to think through what the original New Deal’s successes can tell us about approaching the great long-term problem of our age, the climate crisis, and what the disintegration of New Deal regulation in the 1970s and 1980s can teach us about the potential pitfalls of contemporary proposals for a Green New Deal.
Alexis: How do you unwind when you’re not working, do you have any hobbies?
Charles: I'm really into rock climbing. I did a lot of climbing in Cambridge, though mostly at gyms. During the pandemic I just got desperate to get outside more, like so many people. Over the past year I’ve been to Red Rocks, Yosemite, and a place called Squamish, which is north of British Columbia. Climbing has become a much more central part of my life.
There are a lot of things I love about it, but one of them is that there's apparently some social science research that suggests that people make fewer friends as they get older, because they have fewer new intense experiences. And this is why friends you make in college or in high school remain so close: you go through a lot of changes that breed intense experiences. As you get older, people are less available. Climbing, of course, can be pretty intense. Even if it’s not particularly dangerous, it can feel scary. You have long days on the wall. I find it sticks in my memory in a special way.
I remember going climbing in Yosemite. It was June, the Valley was filled with people, but 100 feet off the ground, there's like no one. And sure there are other climbers, but not that many. It's just such a different way of encountering some of the most beautiful places in the world.
Alexis: Do you have a podcast or show that you are currently listening to/watching?
Charles: There are a lot of shows that I love but I’ve really been trying to watch more movies. I recently rewatched Dunkirk, which I'd seen in IMAX, and it doesn't quite hit the same on my computer, but it was so good. I watched Tár, this new movie with Cate Blanchett, and it's fantastic. Everyone should watch it.
My favorite podcast for a long time is called the Dig, which is hosted by the journalist Dan Denvir. He just dives into books that he has read cover to cover. In some ways, I feel bad because after listening to one of these episodes, you feel like you don't need to read the book. But it's in depth in the best way.
Alexis: What are you most excited about in the coming year?
Charles: I am going to Joshua Tree in California to go climbing for a week in January! My mom and her husband recently retired and they’re moving to the San Juan Islands north of Seattle, where my sister lives. I'm going to go out in May and help her pack up the house. She’s downsizing and there’s no room for all the boxes of my childhood belongings that have accumulated in her basement. So, I have to deal with them. I'm both nervous and excited to go through all of that stuff. I've set myself a limit, I'm only going to bring a few boxes back with me. As a historian, this is pretty tough. It’s my own archive.