Are History Grad Students Apathetic?
"Can we please keep this list-serve free of all blatantly political announcements? Whether you want your Mumia freed or fried, I’d like to keep this list-serve relevant to issues specific to history graduate students.”
This was the indignant response I provoked during my second year of grad school at Columbia University, when I used a list-serve that is shared by history graduate students to announce an upcoming rally to protest the impending execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther whose case remains a cause célèbre among the far left.
Although I’m mindful of the fact that no one wants their email account used as a dumping ground for unwanted messages, the sharp tone of his reply caught me off guard. For one, I was surprised and disappointed that one of my Columbia colleagues would speak about a person on death row as if he were a strip steak, just so he could make a lame witticism. But I was also bewildered at the assumption that fueled his message. People had long used this very same discussion list to sublet apartments, find homes for pets, and to announce various parties, and no one had ever complained. Yet here he was suggesting that political announcements are so irrelevant that they should never even be mentioned on our list-serve.
I awaited the avalanche of sharp rebuttals that would soon begin to rain upon this poor students’ head. Before long, I was sure my inbox would be spilling over with the replies of dozens of students who would capably defend their craft, avow their partisanship, and insist on the intrusion of politics into academic life. But as it turned out, only a couple of plucky students bothered to dispute his extreme position. And balanced against this, several others even offered support for the idea of banning political expression on our list-serve. It was a disappointing day.
One might think that history graduate students, who operate in a liberal profession, who are heirs to a rich legacy of social activism, and who often contend with difficult questions about the relationship between selfhood and historical consciousness, might be well suited for political action. And in fact, we have seen a recent push in this direction, as pockets of grad students at Columbia and elsewhere have begun agitating for graduate student unions. But generally speaking, social activism does not seem to be a prevailing trend at Columbia or at many other graduate departments. To the contrary, it appears that the bulk of history students today regard their scholarship with something approaching political indifference. Although I suspect most grad students vote, have good ideas, and stay well-informed, I know only a few who intend to enter the professional arena in a consciously political way, or who charge their research and writing with an explicitly political agenda.
To wit: In the five years that I lived in Morningside Heights, I can think of only two examples of formal cooperation among leftist history students. The first was a short-lived Marxist reading group, which was greeted with general bemusement and was killed by a lack of interest around the time students finished Part One of Capital. The other instance – a notable one – was the formation of Graduate Student-Employees United (GSEU), an organization of teaching and research assistants that arose in response to our exploitation as academic laborers. But as of this writing, it remains to be seen whether GSEU will regain its momentum after a period of relative inactivity brought on by the University’s appeal of a recent NLRB decision that paved the way for grad student unions at private universities.
It seems likely that the discouraging political climate among history graduate students owes much to larger social trends. So long as we operate outside the context of a rising social movement, it is probably fanciful to hope that we could redefine the prevailing relations between politics and scholarship. Meanwhile, the hyper-competitiveness of the job market, which on the one hand leads grad students to relate to their professors with timidity and caution, and at the same time sets students clawing against one another whenever a new job opening comes about, does not exactly encourage freewheeling political engagement.
But this has not always been the case. As a historian of the New Left, I’ve lately been exploring some of the ways that grad students of the 1960s tried to connect their scholarship with a larger set of political ambitions. This work has invited some wistful thinking about how things could be if today’s graduate students were to generate some of the optimism, energy, and sense of purpose of an earlier time.
To be sure, leftwing academics of the 1960s sometimes faced an unhealthy pressure to write immediately “relevant” scholarship that could be deployed by organizers; Marx’s Eleventh Thesis was frequently invoked, and pressing political exigencies sometimes drew intellectuals away from their study carrels and into the streets. Nevertheless, today the historical profession is flush with scholars who cut their political teeth in the 1960s, who anchored their radical commitments in intellectual activity, and who self-consciously set out to build a corpus of work that would set us upon a path toward meaningful social change. Paul Buhle, founding editor of the New Left journal Radical America, crystallized this sentiment when he coined the idea that he and his movement comrades were “writing love letters to the future.” Through a serious minded and patient commitment toward building a radical “house of theory,” he suggested, New Left grad students and young professors might one day offer aid and comfort to the movement’s heirs.[1]
In the process, budding scholars also found a useful way to enrich their graduate student experiences. In a 1969 letter, then- Columbia history student Mark Naison evoked this well. “All last year,” he wrote,
I felt exhilarated about doing historical research and writing for Radical America because I felt that people were sincerely interested in learning. I saw a role for myself as a historian in relation to a growing, healthy movement … . I felt genuinely liberated from deeply ingrained compulsions and ambitions. I felt my work was serving an important purpose, and therefore, had few pangs of guilt that I was not a complete activist.[2]
History graduate students at Columbia also had a “Committee for Radical History.” A humorous flyer announcing one of their meetings illustrates how the group literally blended political protest and street theater with academic study.
THE COMMITTEE FOR A RADICAL HISTORY
will not be meeting Tuesday, November 14 [1967] so that its members may attend the Foreign Policy Association dinner (black tie) – with its guest of honor Dean Rusk – which will be held at the New York Hilton …On Tuesday, November 21, there will be an informal spaghetti dinner (red shirt) and discussion at 309 W. 106 th St. Apt. 5C, at 6:30 PM. All history graduate students are invited to attend.[3]
Whereas many New Left activists took to the hustings, the scholar/activists I’ve studied also ran elaborate speakers’ bureaus, sponsored internal education meetings, communicated through mimeographed bulletins and journals, devised curricula for free universities, and in 1969 formed a radical history caucus that challenged the leadership and direction of the American Historical Association (AHA) – all driven by a missionary impulse to turn much of the reigning scholarship on its head.[4] As a result, whole new avenues of scholarly inquiry have opened up. Revisionist scholars began taking into account the lives of “ordinary people” – slaves and freedmen, indentured servants, housewives, workers, children, Native Americans, immigrants, gays and lesbians, and other Americans who had long been ignored. In addition to uncovering a broader range of experience, scholars also experimented with new interpretive paradigms. Thirty years ago it was rare for historians to showcase a sophisticated awareness of the ways that race, class, gender and sexuality have shaped the lives of Americans; today it is de rigueur. What’s more, as a result of New Left activity, academic culture has been liberalized in countless salutary ways, and the historical profession is no longer quite the gentleman’s club it used to be. It’s probably safe to say that this reordering of the scholarly enterprise is recognized as a positive development by almost everyone to the left of Lynne Cheney.[5]
So, we can be grateful that a considerable number of former activists have won positions of power and prestige within the academy. But it may also be worth asking whether the institutionalization of these radical impulses has carried some costs as well. Certainly it was a grim sign of the times when, in 1998, Princeton historian Sean Wilentz proclaimed in Lingua Franca that a petition drive against Bill Clinton’s impeachment, signed by some 400 historians, was “the most important academic political effort in the last thirty years.”[6] Was this really something to boast about? What does it say about the current climate when a bunch of historians’ signatures on a failed petition – on behalf of Bill Clinton, no less – is thought to constitute an important political movement?
In spite of the apathy I’ve just described, there are some signs that graduate students are ready to recall a more hopeful and energetic time. The academic labor movement seems critical. In recent years, students at several leading campuses have gone on strike, formed unions, and won encouraging victories in the struggle against the shameful labor practices of modern universities. As contributors to this volume have shown, there remain pockets around the country where graduate student radicalism “of the sort pioneered during the late 1960s” is “alive and kicking.”[7]
According to a history grad student who joined the University of Illinois (UI) Graduate Employees’ Organization (GEO), “the idea of a political community” was a major source of inspiration for graduate student organizers. “What really excited me about GEO,” he recalled, “was that it could be a political community, and we would be able to work with other political groups on campus, and make this campus just a better place, a more politically charged place, and a more democratic place.” [8] In addition to opening up new social vistas, some activists reported that their political efforts had a beneficent impact upon their scholarship. Said another history student, “It only enriches your academic work to be constantly thinking about the factors that shape what you can study, how you can study it, [and] what you write … Being an activist and brining those issues to bear … has only made my academic work better.”[9]
But much work remains to be done. Unionized campuses are still the exception rather than the norm, and wherever T.A. unions have emerged, they have been opposed by counter groups of graduate students who – despite all evidence to the contrary – would rather think of themselves as apprentices in some sort of postmodern guild than as workers with federally protected rights. The apathy and false consciousness that afflicts most graduate history departments is still a big problem.
The good news is that a previous generation of scholars has left us with a rich set of values and actions – by no means unfailing or unflawed – that nevertheless speak to some of the ways that we might embark upon our professional goals with a greater sense of political mission. Furthermore, those intrepid students who are beginning to adopt some of these approaches are finding that activism and scholarship can complement each other in surprising and healthy ways.
If today’s history graduate students truly want to imitate their professors – as frequently seems the case – then we might start by becoming more unabashedly political, by enlarging our notions of academic citizenship, and by looking for new ways pursue the twin ideals of scholarship and social justice. Otherwise, a future historian who examines grad student culture at the dawn of the millennium may well overlook the efforts of a minority of activist students, and conclude that pets, apartments and parties were all more “relevant … issues specific to graduate students” than politics.
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This essay is excerpted from Taking Back the Academy, edited by Jim Downs and Jennifer Manion (Routledge 2004). It was originally printed in a slightly different form in “The Radical Historian’s Newsletter” no. 81 (December 1999).
[1] See McMillian, John, “Love Letters to the Future: REP, Radical America, and New Left History,” Radical History Review 77 (Spring 2000), 23.
[2] Naison, Mark, to Paul Buhle (Fall 1969). Radical America Papers, Box 2, Wisconsin State Historical Society.
[3] Linebaugh, Peter, “From the Upper West Side to West Episcopi,” New Left Review 201 (September/October 1993), 21. On November 14, 1967, some 3000 people protested Sec. of State Rusk’s appearance in New York City; 46 demonstrators were arrested. See “War Foes Clash with Police as Rusk Speaks,” New York Times (November 15, 1967), 1.
[4] See Bell, Robert A., “The Changing Voice of Left History: New Left Journals and Radical American History,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Waterloo, 1999).
[5] According to Cheney, former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, too many of today’s academicians “paint a grim and gloomy picture of the American past, one that emphasizes failure and makes it seem that most of the faults of mankind have here found their most fertile ground.” See Cheney, Lynne V., “Politics in the Classroom is Nothing New,” www.aei.org/news/filter.all.newsID.6027/newsdetail.asp.
[6] As quoted in Greenberg, David, “All the President’s Men,” Lingua Franca (April, 1999), 5.
[7] Mattson, Kevin and Patrick Kavanagh, “Graduate Student Radicalism,” AHA Perspectives (November, 1999).
[8] Vaughn, William, “From Sociality to Responsibility: Graduate Employee Unions and the Meaning of the University,” AHA Perspectives (November, 1999).
[9] Ibid.