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Well, yah, ... So What _is_ Wrong with the UCLA History Department?

Poor Andrew Jones. His moment in the national spotlight is so disappointing. Google up his name and he's trumped by a transgendered Andrew Jones, who'll be speaking at the University of North Texas. Hiram Hover points out that three prominent members of the advisory board of his Bruins Alumni Association (Harvard's Stephen Thernstrom, former United States Representative James Rogan, and UCLA professor emeritus Jascha Kessler) have resigned. At Crooked Timber, on a scale of 1 to 5, Kieran Healy gives him a humiliating ½ a McCarthy. Perhaps the worst: he's denounced as irresponsible and threatened with a lawsuit by David Horowitz.

So, it was a bad day for UCLA alum Andrew Jones. Actually, I think there's a sense in which Jones is more responsible than at least one of his accusers. He's willing to pay for hard evidence. Horowitz pays himself over $300,000 a year and can't be bothered to hire fact checkers to verify which of his urban legends have elements of truth in them. Hiring students to spy on professors is a bad idea, because it perverts the student/teacher relationship, but being willing to live less high on the hog in order to substantiate your claims is a good thing.

I'm gonna risk the ire of my colleague, Ambrose Beers, and his legion of fans, however, to ask: So, What is Wrong with the UCLA History Department? [Ed.: Five years later, the guy still commands a loyal following. See: "Retroblogging" at Dymaxion World and "Exciting Discovery of the Early Afternoon!" at The Reference]. Two things, I'd say. In the first place, to my knowledge, it hasn't bothered to hire a showcase conservative to cover its ass. As I pointed out yesterday, Andrew Jones's list of the "dirty thirty" largely concentrates on UCLA's Law School and its history department. The Law School could count on Eugene Volokh to say something responsible to his largely conservative and libertarian audience. Over the last twenty-five years, it would have served the interests of UCLA's history department had it once – even only once – hired a high profile conservative or libertarian scholar, who might now speak a similar word to a similar audience.

The other thing, of course, is what my colleague, KC Johnson, has repeatedly pointed out. UCLA's history department is one of the nation's most important research faculties, with 21 active, full-time appointments in American history. Do any of them do mainstream American political history? Well, no. Constitutional, diplomatic, legal, military? None of those, either. Full in the knowledge that it was losing its primary recent American political historian, Jessica Wang, UCLA conducted a search this year for someone in recent cultural, environmental, labor, and urban history. More coal for Newcastle, please.

Two years ago, my colleague, Tim Burke, put the question in terms of the perfectly baked pie. Of course, he was correct. The issue is: how, with limited resources, do you allocate faculty positions? UCLA has a very large pie, but the filling tips heavily to one side of it.

Posted on Friday, January 20, 2006 at 1:39 AM | Comments (15) | Return

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