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My annual Christmas survey of my army of cousins showed this year that all of them -- every single one, without exception -- have now made it through college without taking a single history class between them. It's so boring, what's the point? How are you gonna use that in a job? Our last brief conversation ended in a long silence when someone asked what I had been up to, and I told them. (Someone finally managed to say,"Why would you do that?" Then we moved on.)
Similarly, when a few family members headed off to the Claremont Colleges, I always gave them my version of the discussion about Oh my god, you have to take... You have to take the class on the cultural history of Weimar Germany at CMC! Twentieth century China! So many great classes!
Try to guess the effect of that discussion.
At my daughter's pre-school, conversations with other parents usually work around to the So, what do you do? phase. Again, answering this question usually produces an awkward moment of silence.
Do other people have substantially different experiences? Do you say that Oh, I study the cultural history of the Han dynasty, and strangers lean in to hear more? (Gender relations in the Gilded Age!?!? Oh, I'm clearing my calendar, do go on!)
And yet somehow we have this urgent discussion underway in print about how academic history is under attack, OMFG, they all want to silence us! Anthony Grafton knows that professors no longer live quiet lives of thought and study, because they all keep waking up"in the middle of media storms." What news channel is broadcasting this 24/7 stream of OMFG A NEW INTERPRETATION OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF FRENCH NATIONALISM, WE HAVE TO STOP THEM!!!!, and is it on a cable network here on earth?
Man on a sidewalk rants to himself, passers-by swinging out to the edge of the sidewalk to steer clear of him before they go on by and forget that he exists. All day long, he is locked in an existential struggle with forces that seek to destroy him!
The threat to academia, and particularly to academic history, is that not many people care that it exists. History departments struggle to find students. History professors publish papers that get a few hundred readers, or a few dozen. Books on university presses do not routinely threaten to storm the ranks of the top ten bestsellers. If you don't write biographies about Founding Fathers, or narrative history of great battles against Nazis, not many people are watching. You think the forces of darkness are frantic to assault the bold radicalism of your pedagogy? Reader, they are not.
It seems to me that academic history, and academic inquiry more generally, is genuinely threatened. It's threatened by a broad indifference: you study that?
And so some hapless fools took a weak punch at William Cronon, and the academic world went into a sublime swoon: an attack! It's McCarthyism all over again! Then a week passed, and UW-Madison had calmly managed the matter at hand to an unremarkable conclusion.
I suspect the urgency of the intervening discussion was driven by our sense that no one is watching us, not by the sense that everyone is watching us.
They did, certainly (not an expert on the 60s either, but I've had colleagues from that era....), but the political situation seems like it stabilized for a good while, then changed again. The combination of the curriculum wars of the '90s, the attack on climate science, and the post-9/11 anti-multiculturalist movement seems like it all came together into one big, ugly wave.
Andrew D. Todd -
4/5/2011
Part of the rationale of education programs is essentially to keep school-teaching from being a kind of high-level unemployment insurance, eg. an engineer teaching math and science in high school, while waiting for a high-tech industry slowdown to burn itself out. Back in the 1920's, John T. Scopes, of monkey-trial fame, was teaching while waiting to get into grad school, and eventually wound up as an oil-company executive, having started as a geologist. That means the professional school-teachers have to create a sort of esoteric mumbo-jumbo in order to have long-term careers. The whole point is to make school-teaching unattractive to highly qualified people with only a year or so to spare. You understand, I went to a New England prep school in the 1970's, where the junior teachers were all like that. I learned much of my chemistry from a pre-med-student, who wanted to save a bit of money for med school, and who also taught a short course in the Rationalist Philosophers (*). I very much doubt that the pre-med-student had ever taken a course in how to teach science-- all he had was a thorough grounding in organic chemistry, biochemistry, and molecular biology.
(*) Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza; a group of leading seventeenth-century mathematicians and physicists who made a last effort to prove the existence of God before science and religion parted company.
As for Business Administration, I dug out an old University of Oregon catalog, and looked at the recommended program for pre-business-administration majors:
Freshman year: Freshman English, Math, Psychology or substitute, Literature/Foreign Language, Business Administration/elective.
Sophomore year: Math, Economics, Business Administration, Literature/Foreign Language, elective (science).
Technically, this meets distribution requirements, but it is still pretty narrow. History is usually classified as a social science, and is driven out by Economics and Psychology, social sciences which purport to be technologies of manipulation. The mathematics isn't to a very high standard, but business administration does not attract the mathematically talented, so the business administration students would have work at learning enough mathematics to understand accounting. Someone who had done enough Spanish in high school to secure exemption from the freshman course could take the sophomore course as a freshman, and then a Spanish composition course as a sophomore, and gain a usable command of the language.
Chris Bray -
4/5/2011
I don't disagree at all with the distinctions you've drawn, although the boundaries between them are going to bleed. Broadly, the academy is not wholly apart from the discourses around it, and should be comfortable engaging those discourses.
I'm not remotely an expert on the 1960s, but didn't the New Left argue for the academy to take a more directly political role in the larger society? Correct me if I'm wrong, but that posture could explain some of this change around the academy that you've identified.
Jonathan Dresner -
4/5/2011
Academia is inherently and inescapably political.
You're conflating a whole bunch of different policy- and power-related phenomena at that point to create a single catch-all category from which we can never fully escape. That's your prerogative, but at that point you're surrendering to the post-modern reactionaries who want to delegitimize the academy so that their short-term bottom-line decisions drive everything.
I see a distinction between scholarship which is policy-related and scholarship which is politically inspired and scholarship which is politicized. Sure, there is scholarship which falls into all three categories, but that doesn't mean that all scholarship does. (There's also scholarship which is as abstract and un-political and policy-irrelevant but which wouldn't exist if the academy as an institution didn't serve the needs of power. No quick and simple formulation there, I'm afraid.)
I don't actually think that the ratios between these kinds of scholarship have changed much over the last 20 years: the change is in the discourses around the academy, and the degree to which sound scholarly results are routinely challenged in the public sphere.
Chris Bray -
4/4/2011
Definitely -- I'm too stuffy.
Alan Allport -
4/4/2011
... if you don't explain it in terms that are going to make sense to a non-expert. I used to work in an Electrical Engineering Department, and the research that the faculty did there was far more arcane and bewildering than anything historians work on. But the faculty - well, some of them, anyway - were able to explain how their research applied to the real world quite successfully, using simple metaphors where more technical language would have been confusing. So if your preschool pickups are less than enthralling, perhaps the problem is not history but you?
Chris Bray -
4/4/2011
"Standards-based" education and state-approved textbooks are exactly why my daughter will never go to public schools. It's certainly not an approach that belongs in or near the university.
The phone calls and websites don't bother me, within reason. (Office phone, sure. Home phone, dear god no.) We had an undergrad at UCLA who solicited audiotapes of professors' lectures so he could expose them online as leftists, and I posted by own request for audiotapes of the undergrad in question, so I could expose his acts of speech -- that one ended before it even got started. I think it's possible to tolerate the normal chaos of free speech while keeping a jealous eye on the boundaries around it. Anyone who wants to send me an email telling me I'm asshole is welcome to it. I've recently been directed to kiss a Princetonian arse -- it made my whole week, like a Christmas gift in March.
I don't think the intellectual field has been politicized in the last ten years, btw. Academia is inherently and inescapably political. Nineteenth-century racial science: not political? Dunningite history: not political? Cold War area studies programs: not political? (Cold War physics...)
The production of knowledge, or the things taken to be knowledge, is always associated with the use of power. Look at something like the Brandeis brief, which used "scientific" data (about the ineluctable weakness of the female form, natch) to create case law. I don't buy this narrative in which intellectuals were once disinterested seekers of truth, but then the right wing came and polluted the field. Professor Cass Sunstein and Professor Samantha Power, for a couple of extremely easy examples, certainly sought to influence policy from within the academy, and will return to the academy from their government jobs.
Jonathan Dresner -
4/4/2011
First, I don't think the problem is entirely about partisanship, though there's considerable overlap between the anti-intellectual, anti-liberal, and "standards-based" communities. The pressure that we get from state agencies to create "Master Syllabi" and "Learning Assessments" and to participate in nationally normed examination theater exercises isn't specifically Republican, but it sure moves faster under Republican administrations.
Second, not every intellectual deserves a Rove-level response. I've gotten early-morning obscenity-filled phone calls in response to letters to the editor, had David Horowitz's attention for a time, and seen right-wing websites harrass academics who challenged their master narratives and logic. I've never been featured in the NY Times, either, and Japanese labor migration isn't exactly a politically sensitive topic in this country.
Is this the normal chaos of free speech? Sure, so far. Nobody's written to my dean to complain. Yet. Nobody's misquoted or out-of-context'ed something I said in class to attack my credibility or ethics. Yet. Do I think the probability of that happening has increased over the last ten years as a result of concerted effort by the right to politicize the intellectual field and delegitimize academics? Yes, very much so.
Chris Bray -
4/4/2011
"One point I am curious about is what your army of cousins majored in."
Accounting. Education (which requires that you learn how to teach children, not that you learn anything to teach them). Business. Graduate programs in finance and real estate. There was a self-designed "creative studies" major in there, and a media studies degree. I was also pretty amazed that it was possible to take down those degrees without a history class, but there it is.
Andrew D. Todd -
4/4/2011
One point I am curious about is what your army of cousins majored in. Often, in certain undergraduate professional schools, and certain hard science majors, the liberal arts requirements are de-minimus, and can be met in large part with elementary languages courses, and things like "Business English." One of the most common college courses is Elementary Spanish, and that does not reflect an affinity for Hispanic culture, but merely a desire to boss Jose and Maria around more efficiently. I doubt very many people major in core liberal arts fields without taking any history.
Incidentally, I think C.S. Forrester's "Nelson Test" applies. "No X can do very wrong who Y," is the general case of Nelson's fighting instructions at Trafalgar: "No captain can do very wrong who places his ship against that of the enemy." Similarly, no professor can do very wrong who enrages the governor to the point that the governor loses his cool, and adopts the tactics of a Soviet commissar. The mere fact of Cronon having managed to draw fire is, in and of itself, grounds for commendation.
Chris Bray -
4/4/2011
I'll put it this way. Does the problem Anthony Grafton describes...
"Conservative pundits and operators do their best to silence any professor who ventures into the public realm with the kind of unwelcome facts that scholarly and scientific expertise can produce."
...reflect your own experience? Do you find that whenever you try to introduce facts about Japanese history into the public realm, then BAM, there's Karl Rove, and Jonah Goldberg sprinting up right behind him? Do you find that you can't live quietly anymore because you're always in the middle of a "media storm" as the right tries to destroy you?
My perception is that 1.) our right to think for ourselves is fairly secure, and that 2.) not many people care if we do or not.
Chris Bray -
4/4/2011
I'm certain of the value of what we do -- and am engaged in "incremental investigation of new questions and sources" -- and I have a deep disgust for the "true facts about history" stuff. The Florida legislature passed a law a few years ago requiring that high school history classes present history as "factual," not as "constructed" -- I couldn't find that any more depressing.
We can and do think for ourselves. The problem is the next part, where try to tell people about it.
Jonathan Dresner -
4/4/2011
Do other people have substantially different experiences?
Well, doing Japanese history at least means that you get to hear about their relatives stationed in Okinawa, Chinese exchange students they've dated, their martial arts training and their comic book collections.
But does it mean that they're interested in what I study, as such? Not until I start comparing the process to similar ones in the US. Or I mention Hawai'i, in which case it's all about their cruises....
In other words, our research interests are seen as an implicit interest in their relevant experiences. There's something to that, I think, but I'm not sure what yet.
On the bigger question, though, I think you're dodging both the problem and the value of what we do.
The historical profession could be forced by "standards" and "assessment" to spend all our teaching time on what committees of History Channel and 700 Club devotees believe is "true facts about history." We could be limited to approved texts and topics, and silenced in areas which we've read and thought about for years just because we're mostly consumers rather than producers of knowledge.
And the historical profession could be reduced to gotcha journalism and high style rather than the incremental investigation of new questions and sources.
It's not the "bold radicalism" of our teaching which is at stake. It's our ability to think for ourselves and to offer our students a chance to think for themselves.
