More Crocodile Tears for Military History

Cross-posted from Blog Them Out of the Stone Age

Tuesday's Cincinnati Enquirer featured a column entitled, "'Locomotive of history' Derailed by PC Professors." It's basically a re-hash of John Miller's "Sounding Taps" and a New York Sunarticle about historian Mark Moyar's lack of success in securing an academic position, allegedly because he's a military historian with a revisionist perspective on the Vietnam War.

The column implies that military history once flourished on college campuses -- not true -- then points out that no military history courses are taught at Xavier, Miami, or the University of Cincinnati. This is supposedly because of rampant political correctness.

The column makes no mention of the fact that Wright State, which is in the vicinity of the above three institutions, does offer courses in military history. Ohio State, of course, fits awkwardly with the column's thesis, but the author gets around it thus:

Even at Ohio State, known as one of the few universities nationwide that still teaches military history, professor John Mueller, who holds the hallowed Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies, claims there is really no terrorist threat - which must be a surprise to the soldiers who are actually making military history in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Mueller does not contend that there is no terrorist threat. He contends that the threat of a terrorist attack on the United States has deliberately been Overblown -- hardly the same thing.

I took the time to look at the 2006-2007 course offerings at the University of Cincinnati. The descriptions for the relevant history surveys state that they cover the World Wars, the Cold War, Vietnam, etc. There's a course on The United States in World War II (with another on the Home Front during World War II), two courses on War and American Society, and a course on Film and the History of World War II. There's also a course on the American Civil War. The columnist either didn't bother to examine the course descriptions or decided to ignore them -- just as he chose to ignore the fact that Miami University historian Andrew Cayton co-authored The Dominion of War, which again, doesn't fit the thesis of left wingnuts run amok.

The columnist queried the Miami University history department, where Moyar had apparently applied for a diplomatic history position. The chair of the search committee (whom the columnist tendentiously characterized as a"disciple of the 'quagmire' version of Vietnam and Iraq") declined to discuss the search (which is exactly what anyone in his position would have done), except to say that Moyar seemed more of a military historian than a diplomatic historian. Which doesn't exactly sound unreasonable.

I wouldn't mind columns like this if I thought they contributed anything intelligent to a dialogue about academic military history. But with occasional exceptions, they are strident, simplistic examples of political correctness, only this time of the conservative variety.

(Hat tip to David Fahey via Ralph Luker)