Dear Editor:
I enjoyed seeing Jackson Putnum’s letter in Perspectives, May/June 1988. He should know, however, that it is all much too late. I’m 46 too, and have been watching the scene since I got my PhD in 1971. Stupid discriminations seem to be the only way left for departments to deal with the fact that there are more good people out there applying to teach in them than there are good people in there enjoying tenure. Departments habitually discriminate against women, and in favor of women; against youth, and in favor of youth; against whites, and in favor of whites. They show homophobia and homophilia. Some exclude anyone who knows anything about Christianity others Vietnam vets or anyone who is known as a Marxist.
It has all become very silly. Unable to fire a vicious drunk, or a seducer of students, or a sage who has not been sighted on campus in years, they will hire per diems while searching endlessly and without success for a black woman economic historian of South-Central Europe, each inquiry dutifully reported to the state affirmative-action office. So narrowly have departments divided and subdivided formerly open “fields” that they resemble the strips around a medieval village. How else can they suitably shorten the clamorous list of “overqualified” applicants? As a Princeton professor once kindly explained to me, it doesn’t matter what you study or what you publish. As an applicant (supplicant?) you remain a serf on the manor of your dissertation advisor, what he/she made you an “expert” in long ago. You may, of course, be allowed to leave your field, but only after you have been hired and tenured. Meanwhile beware any applicant for a post in French Revolution who has written anything about the 1720s, or an economic historian who has published some thing about music. This whole subject is worth an article with proper evidence, not a tight diatribe in the letters column; and when that kind of work becomes possible, years from now, I hope a historian will have the strength to write it.
Here in the independent schools, we discriminate too. We hire the best historians and teachers we can afford. It has not yet occurred to most of us to lessen the burden of hiring by narrowing fields, though we do like people to have a tillable field within or closely related to history. We are, I suppose, a little leery of anyone with an education degree; but if the applicant can demonstrate that he/she has learned history in spite of this, and loves it, we usually give them a shot. Of course, this means we have to weed through a lot of applications and turn down a lot of qualified people in favor of the few best. Sometimes we get lazy and don’t advertise for jobs, Now and then a casualty of college and university teaching will apply. When we turn them down it is most often either because we can’t afford them or because we think they may not be good enough at teaching to keep our students enthusiastic about the subject.
Maybe that’s why college departments use dumb criteria when searching for new faculty. By doing so they insure that a lot fewer of their more intelligent students will end up with a good teacher and, consequently, a real love of history and urge to go into our overcrowded profession. If that’s why, it’s working.
William Everdell
Dean of Humanities
Saint Anne’s School
Dear Editor:
As another individual who has tried for some twenty years to pursue the vocation of history without benefit of tenure, I strongly applaud the letter of Professor Putnam, Perspectives, May/June 1988, protesting against the widespread discrimination practiced by university departments against the “overqualified.” The subtlest method of implementing this discriminatory policy is the practice (followed in many of the job notices that appear in Perspectives) of requiring “three letters of recommendation” to accompany every application. This practice is unheard of outside the academic profession. It is customary to request references after an interview, or at least after a shortlist of candidates has been chosen. No one can easily meet this requirement except graduate students or very recent PhDs who can simply ask their departments to forward the materials. The rest of us are not going to bother our friends and colleagues to write letters about a job for which there is not the slightest reason to think we are being seriously considered. It would be more honest, and save everyone a great deal of paperwork, if these depa1tments simply stated “only graduate students or recent PhD recipients need apply.” The fact that the teaching responsibilities of a 25-year-old historian and those of a 65-year-old historian are everywhere essentially the same makes this term “overqualified” particularly odious and hypocritical.
Doyne Dowson
Museum consultant
Recently employed to teach at MIT, Boston University, Northeastern University, etc.
