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I'm worried also about academic monoculture, about dismissals of intellectual pluralism, about the herd mentality in the humanities and social sciences.
But as a historian, I can't help but feel some disciplinary skepticism when these ills of contemporary academia are portrayed in terms of declension, as a decline from some past imagined state of affairs.
I'd like to invite our contributors and readers to think as historians about history departments in any five or so selective American universities in slices of historical time. Let's say 1926, 1946, 1966, 1986, 2006. It'd take some work to scare up the rosters of the 1926 and 1946 departments, but if anybody has that data at hand, even in fragmentary form, let's put it out there. 1966 lies within recoverable memory, even for those of us who became practicing academic historians long after that date.
Here I'll take a shot in the dark and guess that it would be hard to describe the 1966 departments as markedly more pluralistic in the range of methodologies, specializations, orthodoxies, implied politics, or disciplinary perspectives than the 2006 departments. Very different from the 2006 departments, certainly, but not more pluralistic.
Now you could suggest that the relative absence of say, social or cultural history in the departments of 1966, is simply a consequence of those specializations having only just begun to come into being. You couldn't blame a 1966 department of physics for not having string theorists. But I suspect that the 1966 departments were not neatly incorporative of the range of specializations and methodologies in the 1926 or 1946 departments, that the replacement of once-dominant schools of thought by other dominant schools is a repeated pattern within academic life and has been for some time. It's certainly true in the harder social sciences, where newer orthodoxies often seek to erase the continuing presence of their predecessors within the discipline. The effect may (or potentially could be) eased in history, which tends to have less rigid constructions of theory or orthodoxy in comparison.
Even just thinking through the implied claim that history is increasingly polarized or monocultural might help us to identify more precisely what really is new since 1966 or 1986, which is surely another of the disciplinary specializations of historians. Not just what is past, but what changes over time. Here I'd suggest that the most striking difference between 1966 and now is not intellectual pluralism per se, or a lack of disciplinary tyranny in the earlier era. (I'm struck instead by the disturbing continuities between the narratives of very senior historians about their struggles as graduate students against domineering figures in the discipline in the 1960s and more recent experiences.)
What has changed? Again, a shot in the dark: not politics nor close-mindedness nor a healthy taste for a range of approaches and perspectives. What has changed is the extent to which academic life is shaped by careerism, by highly structured forms of competition for jobs, publication space, prestige and so on. The 1966 departments weren't necessarily more tolerant of approaches outside the span of their own preferred orthodoxies, but they were more genteel and amiable (and also more old-boys' club) in the pathways they took into the profession. Moreover, what they did as academic historians was done in the context of institutions that were less central to American life and at scales of pay and benefits that were much shabbier than what is on offer at most contemporary institutions.
That makes a difference, in all sorts of ways. But it's not the difference that is often being noticed or discussed in the declension narrative offered by many critics. It is a difference papered over or misdescribed when we talk of growing politicization or an increasing lack of pluralism. Zeroing in on and correcting the intellectual and institutional sins of academia is an important conversation, but increasingly I think the public version of it is malformed beyond repair. Because in part, I suspect that to create a more pluralistic model of departmental and disciplinary life, we're not talking about restoring some past healthier regime, but inventing something which has yet to exist.
If you really want to think about how jobs are described you might also want to think about how different types of schools are different. In my experience the smaller and less graduate-oriented places are mostly interested in coverage. They write broad ads that focus on geography and periods, and they tend not to care what your interest in that field is. The places that train graduate students have much more narrow ads. Part of this is that they have more people, but at least some of them consciously think that it is better to have a group of people with similar interests. If your chief goal is offering a nice range of classes for undergrads having three people who do some form of 20th century European social history is not good. If you are mostly interested in training grad students it might be a very good idea. I'm not sure if this dichotomy is a new thing, or if it even exists, but it is the impression that I get.
Timothy James Burke -
6/14/2006
Also on social historians, to some extent, they did get Ph.Ds out of whole cloth. Certainly there were intellectual or scholarly models that they looked to as influential, and as with all changes in paradigms, some courageous innovators who broke with their own training, but a lot of them basically trained themselves.
This is another of the odd things that I think you (and some other critics) tend to assume about graduate pedagogy: that it reproduces itself by its very nature in the succeeding generation. If this were true, all change in academic life would be impossible. Even now, graduate students frequently break with or move beyond what their advisors and professors have to offer them. It's not so much that we need to make that happen; it is that we ought to find a way to decrease the personal and institutional costs of that movement.
Timothy James Burke -
6/14/2006
Well, a rigid enforcement of students taught and FTEs would pose problems for a number of programs that are staples of the liberal arts--classics most prominently, language instruction another. But I think most institutions observe at least a loose relationship between the two.
Timothy James Burke -
6/14/2006
That's an interesting question for us to actually take up: how were jobs described and defined in 1966, 1986? I suspect that in 1966 the language was considerably more generic, which is an important point. Even the practice was narrow, it wasn't constrained by overly specialized language. Which strikes me as again, a more complicated transition between 1966 and 2006: not of politicization but of over-specialization.
Robert KC Johnson -
6/14/2006
The issue, it seems to me, is less the fair-mindedness of historians in the search process--I suspect most, though clearly not all, are fair-minded. The issue is the definition of lines. Departments such as Michigan or UCLA have elected to define lines in such ways that the department is almost compelled to replicate itself and hire people with pedagogical (and, it seems, political) views similar to the majority already on staff.
To take an example from this year's H-Net, the Case Western open US history position--but with a specialization in "social justice" matters. The most fair-minded search committee in the world would have to come up with a candidate who reinforced CW's social history topheavy nature, because the line required it.
I just don't know enough about how lines were defined in the 1970s or the 1980s to say whether this kind of practice occurred then as well.
Robert KC Johnson -
6/14/2006
I'm not clear what the phrase "hard intellectual combat" means in this respect. I think it's clear that the new social/cultural historians weren't welcomed in many departments. But it's worth remembering that they were trained someplace--they didn't just get Ph.D.'s out of whole cloth. So at the very least, there was a general willingness (with exceptions, of course) to train students with differing pedagogical approaches. I'm not defending the departments of the 1960s--I've heard the same stories Tim has. But there seems to me to be a difference.
As to a consensus view and the 1960s academy, here my expertise colors my opinion: certainly on the war in Vietnam, there was a wide range of views within the academy. And from talking to older colleagues within CUNY, there certainly seems to have been not so much a wider array of views as a deeper one than what currently exists--i.e., not only were there token representatives of most mainstream or radical viewpoints, but there was a critical mass behind all views. Brooklyn College, I'll admit, is unusual, but you certainly couldn't say that a critical mass exists among issues perceived on the right of the spectrum, or even an issue such as support for Israel, which outside the academy is widespread among liberals and moderates as well as conservatives.
I'm not saying that one is necessarily better than the other, or that the change was the result of a direct cause.
As to how balance can be achieved, I wish that more colleges would implement programs such as the one followed at Williams while I was there (it's less in practice now)--a rigid enforcement of the relationship between students taught and FTE's awarded to departments. So a History Department could have all social historians, but at the cost of ignoring students who wanted a more balanced approach and therefore not getting new lines.
Timothy James Burke -
6/13/2006
That's the other side of the story, David, and it's equally important. I've kind of despaired at getting some critics to see what strikes me as the everyday decency of academic practice. We all remember the slights, the abuses, the tyrants--and yes, the structure of academic life now and then gives such incidents and such people extraordinary cover. But it also seems to me that many scholars go about the business of thinking, writing and teaching with a kind of dogged, ordinary decency. This might another thing that's changed a bit: I think careerism leaves more of us on the younger side feeling haunted and paranoid, constantly observed. But still, a lot of folks just, as you say, do what they think is basically right, with little thought to trends or orthodoxies or what have you.
David M Fahey -
6/13/2006
What impresses me is how history faculty members have proved willing to hire people unlike themselves. Certaintly this wasn't by unanimous consent and external pressures sometimes played a large role, but it remains an impressive fact at least in my opinion.
By the way, during my own graduate student years and forty-odd subsequent faculty years, I frequently have changed my teaching and research interests. To the best of my recollection, nobody intentionally influenced what I did and nobody complained. To my embarrassment, I now realize that I rarely noticed disciplinary trends and when I agreed with them it was without intending to march with the crowd. I just did my own work to the best of my ability.
Timothy James Burke -
6/13/2006
I think this is right--that careerism is the mode in which people control the range of views and orthodoxies in the profession.
In this case, I'd say the difference is not in whether 1966 was more open-minded or diverse, but in the extent to which hegemony is exercised openly. Subjectively, I'd say the academics of 1966 were often quite brutal and explicit in enforcing their orthodoxies; in 2006, established figures are vastly more passive-aggressive and insidious in their uses of power. No one is going to stand up and say, "I don't think historians should do political history". They're going to say, "Well, there isn't much of a job market for that." Since they're right in some sense, who can fault them? But it saves anyone from having to make a positive case for the distributions of specialization as they exist. When a "traditional" political historian of 1966 turned up his nose at social history, it was often a gesture made publically and explicitly.
If this characterization is accurate, then I'd agree it also puts people like KC Johnson in a difficult situation if they want to critique this situation, because by its nature, the hegemony they're criticizing is elusive and implicit. But I'd still say KC would be better off not to pine for a past time (that I think did not exist) and instead map out how to change things without simply inverting current patterns of domination.
That takes more than attacking perceived enemies. It takes a positive description and practice of the scholarly and intellectual life we'd like to bring into being. I think this would be my biggest criticism of the anti-"politicization" folks: they have spent no time at all trying to envision and practice the ideal academic world they claim to want to rescue. The declension story is a fatal temptation, in this respect, whether it's true or not.
Timothy James Burke -
6/13/2006
Ralph points to another kind of diversity, but it's a relevant one especially inasmuch as one sees knowledge entangled with experience. On gender particularly, I know a lot of women who were working through graduate school in the late 1960s and early 1970s who have described open contempt from senior male historians towards virtually all female colleagues and studetns.
On KC's point, I'm inclined to disagree about 1966 as far as diversity of political viewpoint. There was certainly a different distribution of conservative, moderate and left-wing perspectives, but many of them were also very much within a certain kind of consensus view of politics and society. I think Garry Wills' description of the "objective" mainstream liberal intellectual of the era captures it nicely, and could have been applied equally to those who held themselves more or less conservative than the "average". A whole range of other plausible views around even in 1966, both radical and conservative, were not to be found in history departments at that time. Many of today's greybeard historians who came out of the New Left will tell you that they were received with anything but welcome arms for much of their early career. More's the shame that some of them don't seem to have learned some crucial lessons from that.
I also think I'd like to see more evidence on the pedagogical open-mindedness of the historians of 1966. At least some prominent social historians have described their early careers as a hellish struggle against an earlier generation who did their best to suppress social history in both its quantitative and non-quantitative variations. In at least some narratives, social history won its place at the table through hard intellectual combat rather than the generous embrace of open-minded predecessors. Again, if so, it's funny that some lessons weren't learned from that. And it's possible that the gentility I referred to allowed for a kind of open-mindedness.
Ralph E. Luker -
6/13/2006
I can talk about one department, in terms of diversity in 1966: the one in which I became a graduate student. The most senior men (and the department was about 95% male, all white and I think uniformly cultural Protestants) were rather unashamedly racists. They were in the process of handing off the baton to a generation of male leadership that would change things. Political history did still reign supreme in the department in 1966. It was understood as the central theme in history, around which all others gathered. Was it intellectually diverse? Hard to say. There certainly wasn't a Marxist in sight. There was one admitted Republican and he had a last name that could pass for Jewish, but he was an Episcopalian.
Ann-Marie Elaine Szymanski -
6/13/2006
I'm no expert, as I'm not a historian, even though I publish in history journals. I will say that one reason I didn't become a historian (and became a political scientist instead) is because I somehow got the message that political history wasn't "hip." Instead, I received the message that I could do historically-based political science and make a career out of that.
None of this was spelled out to me explicitly, but just grew out of my interactions with young "wanna-be" historians. They would refer to political historians as "out-of-touch" with the profession, even though (as I later realized) these scholars were often very well-respected within the discipline.
So, perhaps, it is not a biased faculty which discourages certain lines of inquiry, but rather, some of the careerism Burke discusses. Could I make a career as a historian, studying an unfashionable area? Or would I be better off in political science, where the Politics and History Section and American Political Development were taking off?
Robert KC Johnson -
6/13/2006
Very interesting set of questions.
I'll throw out two items, neither of which I have an explanation for, but items that strike me as different between the academy of 1966 and the academy of 2006. First, there was greater ideological diversity. As I've said before, I don't think this is the most significant problem facing the current academy, or even a problem easily solved. But looking at the academy on the key issues of the day in the 1960s--the war, ethnic or racial radicalism, the government and poverty--there strikes me as having been a far more evenly distributed spectrum of opinion than exists today.
Second, in History at least, where I can speak most comfortably, even if this earlier generation was more comfortable with traditional disciplinary approaches and often fought to retain their hegemony, they were at least open-minded enough to eventually give way, and also to train graduate students who were more focused on social or cultural history. Of course, we don't know, maybe the generation of 2006 would be similarly open-minded. But I'm unaware of any measurement that doesn't suggest the academy is growing more intellectually homogeneous, rather than less. I'm certainly unaware of any major History Department that has proven open to bringing in new figures with more traditional approaches after social/cultural historians established a majority.
Again, I don't have an explanation for either of these things--but they do seem to me differences between 1966 and 2006.
