If the overall proportion of women enrolled receives a ten percent boost in moving from undergraduate to graduate school, this is hardly the case for history. In a recent article in the AHA’s Perspectives, Rob Townsend reported that women received 40.8 percent of the doctorates awarded by history departments. So it seems that the barriers women face to majoring in history at the undergraduate level are still very much in play at the graduate level.
The 2007 October School Enrollment Supplement to the Current Population Survey of the Census Bureau shows that part of the answer lies in who makes it to graduate school. Hispanics comprise 15.1 percent of the U.S. population, but only 4.38 percent of graduate students in the U.S. Similarly, African Americans comprise 13.1 percent of the U.S. population, but only 6.72 percent of graduate students in the U.S. Within these two racial/ethnic groups, women comprise two thirds of those who are graduate students. If history graduate programs recruited more individuals from these underrepresented groups, this could increase the proportion of women studying history.
Another factor may be one that I have noticed anecdotally. When undergraduate women ask me about my major, and I tell them it is history, large numbers of them say history was their worst subject. When I ask why, they usually say that they weren't good at memorizing dates. But then they are usually quick to add that they enjoyed the stories. I wonder if this is commentary on how history is typically taught in our high schools. Are males socialized during high school into doing better at math, which then carries over into a perception that they are better than females at memorizing dates?
With a little more effort, the American Historical Association could help answer some of these questions. They could code the names in their Dissertation Directory by gender. This would give us a much better sense of how the proportion of ABD history students who are women is changing over time. They could use the Department of Education's IPEDS Dataset Cutting Tool (linked above) to identify colleges and universities where men and women tend to major in history at equal rates and then investigate the factors that cause this to happen. Conversely, the AHA could investigate schools where women are severely underrepresented among history majors and then examine the reasons for this disparity. Lastly, if our profession ever gets serious about vastly expanding our masters programs in history (which would help ease the job market crunch, by the way), the AHA could convene a task force to look into the barriers that undergraduate women face in choosing to major or go on in history.
In a major education address earlier this week, President Obama made the following observation:
Far too few states have data systems like the one in Florida that keep track of a student’s education from childhood through college. And far too few districts are emulating the example of Houston and Long Beach, and using data to track how much progress a student is making and where that student is struggling.
We need the same thing in humanities graduate programs. Within history doctoral programs, for instance, the dropout rate is about 50 percent. The recently-passed stimulus legislation has made $250 million available for educational data systems. I believe the time to act is now.
This concern was raised five years ago by the American Historical Association's Committee on Graduate Education:
The Committee found surprisingly little departmental concern about attrition. Very few departments conduct exit interviews to learn why students are leaving. Instead, anecdote and opinion reign—especially the opinion that most attrition can be accounted for by the students' own needs or (in)capacities. In fact, attrition is more complicated and important than that. On an individual level, attrition has obvious costs for the students involved, while on a programmatic level patterns of attrition may say something important about the admissions process, the intellectual content and quality of the program, and the departmental culture. We therefore strongly recommend better data collection and exit interviews.
Too many history departments show too little concern for their doctoral students. If the dropout rate is 10 to 15 percent in business, law, and medicine professional programs, there is no excuse for why it can't be similar in the humanities. I would like to see student tracking used to improve retention in history doctoral programs and to hold those programs more accountable. I sincerely hope the AHA and like-minded associations will coordinate efforts to tap into newly-available federal dollars and improve our tracking of students in humanities doctoral programs.
The students generally supported this proposal, but it was faculty opposition that killed it. I would have sided with the students in this instance. I agree with President Obama that a teacher's salary should be based on their performance.
Some of you might object to this form of post-tenure review, since it seems like it would involve a lot of extra work. Actually, the people-hours required to process these review could be significantly reduced with the use of technology. I am think of a computer program that, with a little bit of help, could automatically do things like analyzing a professor's student evaluations, tracking the progress of their students beyond the professor's class, measuring their innovations in teaching, recording their usage of new technologies, counting visitors to their blogs, tallying their hours of service on committees, recording their hours spent in community outreach and service, tracing discussions of the professor or their work on the Internet, obtaining figures for their book sales, determining stats for online access of their publications, counting their publications and citations to their publications that appear in research databases, calculating research funds they acquired and used, and evaluating their research progress. For portions of the review that required qualitative responses, individuals involved could fill out brief surveys on a secure web site. With this and other information, the software could then determine whether a professor was meeting or exceeding performance goals and deserves an annual pay raise.
This new development reminded me of a conversation about a year and a half ago between Mills Kelly and myself about the curriculum for undergraduate history majors. Mills made a great point about my recommendations: he observed that I was assuming"the measure of success of an undergraduate history curriculum is the degree to which it prepares majors for graduate school and ultimately for PhDs in history." I think the same thing can be said for above-linked Bologna competencies.
Since then my thinking has changed a bit on what our students should learn in history undergraduate programs. Mills still has a point about asking students what they want to get out of the major. But in my experience few students pick up historical thinking and practice skills unless they are explicitly taught them. I have experimented with quizzes, projects, and assignments to help students learn these skills and met with some success. In future courses I plan to emphasize applications of history skills in society and the workplace, as well as digital skills like semantic search and publishing content online.
I hope the people involved in this Lumina-funded project pay close attention to the recent curricular recommendations issued by the National History Center. I don't think we need to spend more foundation money covering ground that has already been covered by others. It would be great if this new project comes up with more specific learning methods and outcomes for history majors, without falling into the trap of focusing solely on academic applications for history. Our students need a history major that provides a liberal education and prepares them for the technological complexities of living and working in the twenty-first century.
During the 2008 presidential campaign, a team of social network analysts had an interesting idea for measuring political polarization. With data provided by Amazon.com, they created a map of who was purchasing the most popular political books. They discovered that as the election approached the number of books purchased by both liberals and conservatives slowly shrank until these two groups were reading virtually in nothing in common during the last month before the election. This kind of analysis was possible because of the"Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" feature provided by the Amazon web site.
I want to see the same thing done for history books. It think it would answer a lot of questions. Are the readers and writers of history books basically the same people? Or are there some history books that show up in the"also bought" lists for best-selling novels? How many of you believe a social network analysis of history books would provide valuable information? Or have academic historians essentially given up on the goal of writing for the public?
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