Eric Mlyn at the Dead at Duke exhibit Photo by Rusty Jacobs, WUNC

We were very pleased to collaborate with each other this fall on the class “Long Strange Trips: The Grateful Dead and American Cultural Change.” This first-year seminar is part of a series of approximately 12 for incoming students designed to help them be successful and thrive at Duke. One of Eric Mlyn’s primary goals for the class, as course instructor, was to expose students to the rich resources of the university, including the personal knowledge of its community members—exemplified by the opportunity to meet alumni who had attended one or more of the concerts that the Grateful Dead played at Duke between 1971 and 1982 and Duke faculty and staff who loved the band—and to work in the Duke University Archives to learn about the resources of our libraries.

In pursuit of this last goal, Eric reached out to Assistant University Archivist Amy McDonald in summer 2021 (for a class start date of fall 2021) to ask if she might guide him to the parts of the University Archives that might shed light on the concerts, and work with his students to better understand why universities have archives containing these kinds of items. Amy responded enthusiastically. Eric spent a day in the archives over the summer and decided that the major class assignment would be an end-of-semester exhibit of the Dead at Duke, using the University Archives as a primary resource.

The Grateful Dead’s Duke shows are evergreen sources of reference questions for the Duke University Archives staff, but Amy had never used any of the material for instruction—and Eric’s class proposed basing the entire instruction session on the Grateful Dead. Fortunately, she discovered there was plenty to work with. The class could make use of the expected photographs, posters, and student newspaper articles, of course, but a deep dive into the organization of a handful of concerts meant that students could delve into the hierarchy of the university, exploring how different campus offices and student organizations communicated and made decisions. For a group of first-year students just learning to navigate provosts and deans and offices like Student Affairs and the Union, this would hopefully help to define the campus network they would be spending their next four-plus years in, and maybe even help demonstrate how they might work with those same campus partners to implement their own ideas. We were both confident that this would serve these first-semester students well as they continued to navigate this complicated university.

ENGAGING WITH THE MATERIAL

It’s easy for archival instruction sessions that involve browsing through material to overwhelm students. As Amy selected folders, sets of photos, and campus publications for the class session, she realized that she couldn’t hope to effectively involve the students in the documentary history of all of the Grateful Dead’s Duke shows: documents would get jumbled across classroom tabletops, students would jump from one show to the next without keeping dates clearly in mind, and we’d all end up confused. Instead, it seemed to make sense to divide the class in two, with half of the students focusing on the Dead’s 1971 Duke show (the first one) and the other half focusing on the 1982 show (the last one). This turned out to be a wise heuristic decision.

Amy encouraged the students to give thought to the types of materials represented on the tables in front of them—yearbooks, student newspapers, reports from the Duke Police, contract negotiation documents between the band and the Duke Union—as a way to model the documentation they’d need to look for to tell the stories of the other three shows. This had the added benefit of prompting the students to return to the University Archives to continue their research, further practicing the skills they began to develop in our class session. The arrangement also allowed them to discover a show within a large group so that they could compare statements, exclaim over funny passages, or wonder about unanswered questions together with their classmates. Amy owes her thinking on this to the wonderful coordinators of Dartmouth College Library’s Librarians Active Learning Institute, who privilege teaching that helps students connect emotionally with archival documents over instruction session basics like searching finding aids (still important, but perhaps better tackled in smaller research consultations).

OPEN OUTCOME

T-Shirt from Dead at Duke exhibit Photo by Amy McDonald

Chatting with colleagues about how the semester was shaping up, Amy would often mention the Grateful Dead class. Every colleague wondered about an entire class focused on the Dead: Would students even know the band? Most did not, but it didn’t matter—or, may have been a good place to start. Eric intended that students see the importance of an open process of exploration. This is a point that Amy has found to be vital in her own instruction work with special collections materials. Archival research takes practice and attention to the process as much as to the content. Students tend to focus on what it will take to assemble a polished final product—they want a checklist to complete to get a good grade—and the idea of simply exploring a body of archival materials without knowing what might develop from the outset is often daunting. Eric’s class, however, modeled an alternate approach, one that encouraged students to find a personal, involved interest in the topic and that encouraged exploration before determining a final outcome.

“Archival research adds another dimension to learning,” said Sophia Lehrman, who took the class last fall. “Having access to the extensive Duke archives allowed me to put my knowledge from the classroom into a greater context. During my archive visits I was able to explore the relevance of the Grateful Dead throughout Duke history.”

These rich archives were but one source of information in an exhibit on the student wall of Duke’s Perkins Library. They supplemented archival research with oral histories of Duke alumni who attended one or more of these concerts, and with more general book and internet research about the Dead at Duke. This all culminated with an exhibit opening at the end of the semester that featured a cover band made up of Duke faculty and staff playing songs by the Grateful Dead, students talking about their experience in the class, and over 100 people viewing the exhibit. Interest has been so great that we are working with a student from the class to put together an online exhibit from our archives. We are both GRATEFUL for our collaboration and what we and our students learned from this exciting use of our archives.

Eric Mlyn is a Lecturer in Duke University’s Sanford Schools of Public Policy and a Distinguished Faculty Fellow at Duke’s Kenan Institute for Ethics. He teaches courses on civic engagement, citizenship, and the Grateful Dead. Amy McDonald is the Assistant University Archivist for the Duke University Archives.