In Defense of Old-Fashioned Political History (And What One School Is Doing About It)
Yet, even the Education Department’s FIPSE program (Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education)—which is hardly known for its “traditional approach” to higher education—conceded in its recent guidebook that “many students know surprisingly little about the fundamental institutions and processes of American civic life. They lack a basic sense of the history and governmental theory of our country.” Over the past generation, accommodation to the teaching and research interests of previously excluded faculty has sometimes led to crowding out of fields that long dominated in the academy and that performed critical curricular services. Among the most directly affected offerings have been those in topics related to the study of political institutions, such as political, diplomatic, or constitutional history.
Regular readers of HNN know that I have been concerned about this issue for some time, and that I do not believe that budget concerns alone explain the profession’s response to this question. It certainly would be difficult to argue that important questions related to these topics have been fully explored. In his 1990 book On the Law of Nations, for example, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan termed the insufficient treatment of Congress the “scandal of American scholarship”; studies of the legislature published in the last fifteen years have not begun to dent the problem that Moynihan correctly detected. The richness of the Presidential Recordings Program transcripts alone compels historians, political scientists, and specialists in public policy to reexamine the political and diplomatic events of the 1960s and early 1970s—as the recent edited volumes of Ernest May and Philip Zelikow on the Cuban Missile crisis and Jonathan Rosenberg and Zachary Karabell on civil rights suggest. And the March 2004 opening of the Harry Blackmun Papers reminds us how much work remains to be done on legal matters. The appeal issued by William Leuchtenburg for more focus on the American state remains as compelling now as it did in his 1986 presidential address before the Organization of American Historians.
Yet while intellectual, curricular, and citizenship-training needs would seem to justify a continuing attention to political, diplomatic, and constitutional history in the academy, many departments at high-profile public institutions have moved in a radically different direction. Marc Trachtenberg commented a couple of years ago on what he “saw as a growing tendency to treat historical work as a kind of bludgeon for advancing political agendas,” with professors who adopted this approach seeming
to be the ones who were most interested in pushing fields like diplomatic history—and to a certain extent even political history as a whole, not to mention a whole series of other fields—to the margins of the profession. They talked a lot about “diversity,” but in practice they certainly did not embrace a live-and-let-live philosophy.
The social historians dominating many large departments’ Americanist contingents have proved Trachtenberg’s point, hiring professors whose interests mirror their own when they have deigned to fill positions in U.S. political, diplomatic, or constitutional history at all. This cross-pollination of sub-disciplines has proceeded only in one direction: I know of no department with more than ten Americanists that has staffed its social history lines exclusively with professors who specialize in, say, the social history of politics or women and foreign relations. Yet departments such as the University of Illinois, UCLA, the University of Washington, and the University of Missouri have exclusively hired practitioners of the “new” political or diplomatic history, whose work is often indistinguishable from women’s, African-American, or cultural history. The University of Michigan’s department, meanwhile, has all but eliminated the fields from its faculty.
At CUNY, we have attempted to address the problem by establishing the CUNY Free Institutions Initiative, based at Baruch College’s School of Public Affairs. The program, which came into existence with a grant from the Achelis/Bodman Foundation in late 2004, seeks to expand research and courses from CUNY faculty in themes such as the relationship between a democratic polity and the enactment of public policy; leadership in the policy arena; the constitutional separation of powers and system of checks and balances; the cultural and philosophical underpinnings of U.S. and western European political institutions; the relationship between political institutions and civic society; and the development of grand strategic thought for ordering international affairs.
As CUNY’s only educational institution devoted to the task of a better understanding of the procedures and outcomes of American governance, the School of Public Affairs is, by its very nature, the appropriate home for a program devoted to stimulating research and teaching regarding American political institutions. Moreover, the CUNY undergraduate population is almost uniquely well suited to be the targets of such an initiative. The University’s nineteen undergraduate institutions have an unusually high percentage of immigrants, who cannot be assumed to have received any secondary school education on the development of American political institutions or culture; and most of our other students matriculate from the New York City public school system, where coverage of such matters is sporadic at best.
The initiative would not have been possible without Chancellor Matthew Goldstein’s conception of CUNY as an “integrated university.” By creating an institutional environment that encourages cross-campus cooperation, Goldstein’s vision allows tapping into the intellectual strength of all of CUNY’s senior colleges. In addition, the “integrated university” concept ensures that all CUNY senior college students will have access to Free Institutions courses, regardless of the individual campus that houses the classes. I’m an example of the “integrated university” ideal—I coordinate the initiative, even though I’m on the faculty of Brooklyn College.
For the 2005-2006 academic year, the Free Institutions Initiative will offer grants of roughly $5000 in eight research projects, mainly on topics relating to public affairs and U.S. public policy. We also are providing comparable grants to fund development of six new courses around the CUNY system dealing (half at Baruch, half at other CUNY schools, including Brooklyn, Lehman, Hunter, and the CUNY Graduate Center) with topics such as the functioning of the American bureaucracy; American political development offerings in the presidency and U.S. political campaigns; and history courses in international grand strategy and the history of civil liberties in the United States. Over the long term, we hope to develop a CUNY-wide curricular minor in Free Institutions and to fund an endowed chair in the topic (to be filled by an outside scholar), although these goals will depend on our ability to obtain additional grants and raise the necessary outside funds.
Obtaining outside moneys to offer courses and fund research in topics that institutions of higher learning should be addressing in any case is, obviously, a less-than-ideal solution to the assault on “traditional” methods of studying the American past. And, as we’ve recently seen at the University of North Carolina, faculty members determined to drive more “traditional” approaches from the curriculum sometimes object even to this approach. Yet the Free Institutions Initiative is attempting to do its small part to fulfill the vision of the academy outlined by Cole in 2003.