DR. LAWRENCE LEE INTERVIEW, PART TWO

GREG BENNICK: The combination of science and theory here gives us a lot to talk about, especially because while most people would likely agree that the young numismatist is the future, what you're saying from a scientific approach is essentially show me the money, and show me the studies.

DR. LAWRENCE LEE: Yeah, show me a study. The more information, the better off.

GREG BENNICK: So, with that in mind, I wanted to talk about your taking of an academic approach to the hobby as this certainly ties into that. While I am not a traditional academic, I tend to run in those circles due to research I have been doing for a book on a cultural anthropologist who was rooted in psychology and philosophy. I was really interested when I read your "Rethinking Education" article and how numismatic education might work in the current education system of the United States. I would love to know about that article. Maybe you could tell listeners about that article and then maybe amidst that, we could talk about this idea: did numismatics ever hold a position of revered status in the USA as an academic discipline?

DR. LAWRENCE LEE: Okay. That was a mouthful, but it's a really thoughtful, deep mouthful! It comes down to this question. Why are there no such things as experts from a legal standpoint in numismatics? There are no coin experts in the United States, at least from a degreed standpoint. In other words, there's no degree that you can point to that says, "Oh, I went to this school and got this PhD in this numismatic class. And so, I can now be an expert like this doctor or this lawyer is an expert because of their degree."

In other words, how has numismatics reverted to just being about coin collecting? How did we go backwards on this scale? Because there was a time in the 1860s, just when the observational sciences were first starting to form - geology, archaeology, and numismatics were starting to form into actual academic disciplines - where we could have continued on and become like geology and archaeology today, or like numismatics is in Europe, where it's part of the art or the archaeology department, and it's possible to get a PhD or a Master's in Numismatics in those academic settings. But not in America. There is not even a single high school class taught in coin collecting that is recognizable on the next level up, except as an elective. Well, instead of the chess club, you joined the coin club, and okay, you get extra credit.

But there's no academic recognition whatsoever. We lost that. We had it. So, my PhD dissertation was about: how did that happen? How did it come about that the status of numismatics fell from an academic discipline down to where it's simply a hobby and the goal of late-night charlatans on TV selling slabbed coins? How did that fall from grace happen? Basically, what I found out was that we, that is, numismatics, did not develop a methodology, a way of studying and presenting our observational data. Our testing methods were never put to academic rigor, or became a discipline per se. And thus, coins became associated with the classics department, the language department.

As Greek and Latin, and the classics, lost stature over the years, then those collections started being sold off. One of the things my PhD did was measure the loss of numismatic standing within the academic world by measuring the selling of various coin collections over time. Without a doubt, between 1880 and 1980, hundreds of colleges, large and small, including every large college in the United States you can name, such as Harvard and Yale, sold portions, if not all of their coin collections. This partially was done for endowments for other uses, but mostly the collections were sold because they no longer met the mission statement academically. Coins could still be in the museum, they could be props within the classic department, but as an academic discipline, they were no more relevant than stuffed fish from the 1930s or whatever.

I note in my PhD dissertation that if you show an American a coin they've never seen before, they ask, "Oh how much is that worth?" If you show the same coin to a European, they will say, "Oh what culture did that come from? Well, how old is that?" The very approach that we take, that the older it is the more it's worth, the American approach is just totally different than the European or Asian approach. There, the reverence or the overall importance is the country and the culture and what's happened through history, rather than a coin's investment potential.

Observationally I think America is the only place where grading companies could have arisen because we look at coins as the two factors in the value of a coin as rarity and condition. The rarity is basically the mintage report and the condition is whatever the slab says on it. That's what determines both the value of the coin in the marketplace, and that's why that's the American approach to it.

GREG BENNICK: What you're suggesting, is that in other cultures their value system is entirely different. We look at a coin and ask, "What it is worth and how can we justify that valuation?" The extension of that thought is, "Thank God there's a slabbing company to tell us how to justify that valuation."

DR. LAWRENCE LEE: You got it.

GREG BENNICK: Somewhere else could see a completely different approach and there might not even need be a slabbing company. Because what slabbing company is going to be able to define the value of the culture that created the numismatic object in the first place? So, with full disclosure to listeners, I've read Larry's dissertation, his PhD dissertation, and I found it interesting. So, my question to you, Larry is, "Rethinking Education," your dissertation, publicly available currently?

DR. LAWRENCE LEE: Well, it's been publicly available since I published it. And so far, 52 people have looked at it worldwide. Most of those are from an educational perspective where it's seen within the broader context of curriculum and curriculum development. In there, I give my suggestions, say, if you were to have a degree program at the Master's level, what courses would be in it? You would start on how to do research, and you'd ask what's the difference between qualitative and quantitative research? What are the five different methods of qualitative research? You would figure out how to standardize what you're learning within parameters, so you can tell it back to the world in a way the world accepts as an academic discipline. We don't do that in numismatics. We have very few peer-reviewed journals. That's not to knock a lot of the numismatic journals. There are some great journals out there. But not very many are peer-reviewed. And not very many of them are well footnoted, documented, etc. But they are getting better.

GREG BENNICK: Now, your article on this appeared in The Numismatist. Is that true?

DR. LAWRENCE LEE: Yes. The January, 2016 issue I believe.

GREG BENNICK: And how did numismatics - the coin hobby - respond to your ideas from that article?

DR. LAWRENCE LEE: I would say a collective yawn would basically cover it.

GREG BENNICK: Why do you think that is?

DR. LAWRENCE LEE: Well, it's pretty obscure stuff in some ways. Who cares about a Master's degree in the discipline of numismatics? It's a very narrow group of people who would care. And the time hasn't been right. And my guess is the time won't be right for what I'm talking about. But c'est la vie. I offered my curriculum to one of the grading companies for $20,000. So, they would have all rights to it to do whatever they wanted with it. But they thought that was way too much money. It was more than a new slabbing machine. And so, we never saw eye-to-eye on that.

GREG BENNICK: As soon as I read your dissertation, I immediately went to the Internet and thought, "Where can I find a Master's program in Numismatics?" I found something, a graduate program in Austria. I wrote to them and asked how I could sign up for this? They replied, "How fluent is your German?" and they told me that unfortunately, I was not a candidate in that case. So, it's too bad, because I bet there are people who would sign up for this without a doubt. I mean, I expect some of the really enthusiastic YN's today certainly would.

DR. LAWRENCE LEE: The strongest interest came from the University of Chicago, which has a history of supporting numismatics as well as a nice collection. A School of Numismatics could be an adjunct college like some of the other colleges they have there. And there is some money available in Chicago, six-figure money that would go towards it establishing a school there. But you're still talking multi-millions of dollars. And then you have the issue that it would require on-campus learning. Students just have to be there. It's like you can't do Auto Mechanics long distance. You can't do numismatic mechanics long distance either. So, the students would need a campus. Then you have dorms and on-site living and that's a whole different can of worms. The academic part of it is easy. The supporting part is hard. So that's why you have to find somebody to team with. At one time, Colorado College had the opportunity to do so. But I they passed as well.

GREG BENNICK: It's interesting because what you've described in the beginning of your answer is a situation where had geology gone the same route, there wouldn't be Geology. There'd simply be rock collecting and we would show up to discuss these objects, and I would have a piece of sulfur and you'd have a piece of granite, and well, we would simply trade rocks.

DR. LAWRENCE LEE: What a great analogy. That's a great example. Not to say that we're quite on the same level because Geology has much more of a chemical component to it. Though numismatics can be quite complex when you throw in history or economics and then you get technology on top of it. It gets pretty interesting and complex quickly. I'm glad to find somebody else as exuberant about the idea as I am, because, it hasn't worked to this point.

GREG BENNICK: Well, when I read your dissertation, I remember being double digit numbers pages into it, and I thought to myself, "The world must see this guy as a happy lunatic." And that's fine, but it struck me as being the type of thing that somebody is going to pick up off a shelf, blow the dust off of someday, and think, "Oh my gosh, why didn't we hear about this a hundred years ago?" And then all of a sudden, it could take its place in the academic canon of classes. It just struck me as just not being timely, yet interesting and potentially really valuable.

DR. LAWRENCE LEE: Well, I'm glad that long after I'm gone, it's going to be a hit.

GREG BENNICK: And maybe this interview is going to be the method and mechanism by which it, it receives the attention due to it.

DR. LAWRENCE LEE: Let's put it all in the time capsule.

GREG BENNICK: That's what we're doing here today. We're planting the seeds for two hundred years for now for when numismatics becomes the equivalent of Geology and rocks and coins can work together.

About the Interviewer
Greg Bennick (www.gregbennick.com) is a keynote speaker and long time coin collector with a focus on major mint error coins and US counterstamps. He is on the board of both CONECA and TAMS and enjoys having in-depth conversations with prominent numismatists from all areas of the hobby. Have ideas for other interviewees? Contact him anytime on the web or via instagram @minterrors.

NOTE: The interview was conducted in parts via phone, so no video exists, and editing together audio would have been choppy sounding at best. This transcript is an accurate representation of the whole interview experience. Thank you for reading! -GB

To read the full transcript on the Newman Numismatic Portal, see:
Lawrence Lee Interview (https://nnp.wustl.edu/library/book/642577)

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:
DR. LAWRENCE LEE INTERVIEW, PART ONE (https://www.coinbooks.org/v27/esylum_v27n46a14.html)

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