Egads! Have the Radicals Really Taken Over Our History Departments?

The scene: Miss Havisham wanders the halls of her blog, where she has stopped all the clocks. Marxists and postmodernists line the tables, untouched since that fateful day in 1986…

Oh, for the old days, when history professors like William Archibald Dunning and Frederick Jackson Turner just told the objective truth and kept their politics out of their scholarship. Today, our universities are crawling with Marxists and postmodernists; in our history departments, we study nothing but race, class, and gender. Dead white males are strictly excluded as topics for research and the classroom. The search for the truth, once respected and embraced on university campuses, is dead.

"The postmodern game," Fred Siegel recently explained," consists of an insistence that objective judgments are impossible, since all knowledge is riddled with prejudice, power considerations, ethnocentric assumptions and so on. The trick is that these prejudices infect only those who differ from the (almost always left-wing) positions of the professors." Siegel explains that postmodernism has triumphed"on campus after campus -- where the tenure system ensures that only like-minded scholars are accepted and deters those with different ideas from even considering the academy as a career choice."

Indeed, the entrenchment has assured the persistence of all prior schools of historical interpretation, the Dunningites and the Beardians and the Turnerians among them, locked tightly into place by the tenure system and self-selection. (Is anything more popular on campus these days than the Turner thesis? Ah, the lazy afternoons whiled away on the campus lawn, chatting carelessly about the significance of the frontier and the conquest of savages…) Legislative intervention is clearly needed, given the intransigence of the academy, and David Horowitz has started the ball rolling. Fortunately for conservatives, legislative social engineering no longer comes with unintended consequences.

To see the red stains of Marxism, postmodernism, and identity group studies spreading across the academy, take a moment with the American Historical Association’s Directory of Dissertations in Progress. As an example, let’s search the index of dissertations currently underway at my own university, UCLA. The contempt for traditional historiography and dead white males is manifest in every radical project:

• "The Engine of Expansion: Fiscal Reorganization in 13th-Century Aragon"
• "Statute Books and the Professional Civil Servant in England, 1250–1350"
• "The Late Enlightenment Periodical Press in Hamburg, 1767–87"
• "The Development of Early Christian Thought on Forgiveness and Reconciliation"

In the U.S. field, UCLA dissertations in progress not listed at the AHA site include critical biographies of Henry Adams and Thomas Nast, both generally believed to be white, male, and dead. You can almost feel this next generation of historians panting and sweating as they fight to destroy America.

Or, you know, maybe not. It’s a confusing time to be a grad student, awash in the curiously unreal stream of Horowitzian ranting and spurious legislation for"academic freedom." Victor Davis Hanson tells me that the contemporary university is a" counterculture circus" dominated by"race studies, queer studies, gender studies, etc." FrontPage Magazine tells me that I’m surrounded by snarling, intolerant communists and oh-so po-mo truth-deniers who hate America, white males, and anything identifiable as a tradition. A professor at the Virginia Military Institute tells me that academic historians – identified in her text only by such helpful labels as"the Queer Theorist,""the Feminist," and"the Multiculturalist" – are condescendingly intolerant of anything even vaguely military in nature.

And I, a white male heterosexual former infantryman who has become a grad student in a history department at a major research university, continue to enjoy going to the meetings of my advisor’s dissertation group, where we discuss the latest chapter of a Ph.D. candidate’s monograph on Henry Adams. Someone is confused.

This quarter, I’m working as a teaching assistant for a historian described by FrontPageMagazine as"typical of a large cohort in what have become the thoroughly politicized humanities" and a"militant feminist." And, indeed, the topics this professor has chosen to cover so far in her survey course on nineteenth century U.S. history are noteworthy for their radical militancy. She has taught students about republicanism, federalism, Jacksonian democracy, the nullification crisis… And the tragic list goes on. Look away, ye who seek historical truth! It is indeed an outrage that historians in our universities could be allowed to teach such radical feminist subjects as"the presidency of Thomas Jefferson."

So let’s get that David Horowitz legislation passed before it’s too late for America’s young people, and they all turn into queer theorist postmodernist Marxist feminist postcolonial multiculturalists. Because once they go funny like that, it’s only a matter of time until they start writing about those damn statute books and professional civil servants in England from 1250–1350.

In the meantime, doesn’t Victor Davis Hanson owe us a jeremiad against the beatnik menace?