How Fares History? Part II

In the spring of 1985, the Council of the AHA asked me, as the incoming president, if I would be willing to visit some history departments around the country. The tour’s purpose was to obtain a sense of the state of our discipline and in the process, “to show the flag” of the Association.

The  idea appealed to me on several grounds. I like to travel, I enjoy visiting college campuses, I relish talking history, and I wanted to do something of possible  value for the Association. Besides, it was conceivable that departments might like to have a visitor from the  rather distant AHA.

These interests were satisfied, thanks to the generosity of my department and Stanford University, which relieved me of teaching for a quarter (April to June) while continuing to pay my salary. I was also substantially aided in the endeavor by the warm welcome the idea received from the chairs of those departments to which I invited myself. The first portion of the report on my trip appeared in the December 1986 issue of Perspectives. What follows here is part II.

Unlike my observations of undergraduate history students, who on a whole maintain a positive outlook on the study of history, graduate students, as one might expect, are less enthusiastic about their situations.

Though few expressed really serious complaints about the programs in which they are enrolled, job prospects, naturally, were prominent among their con­cerns. Their apprehensions, however, seem more pessimistic than realistic. As I told them, jobs and job seekers in history are presently balancing, though not in some specific fields. And the demographics of higher education promise within five years to upswing in the demand for college and university teachers of history.

Given the students’ frequent expres­sion of their strong commitment to his­tory, I was not surprised to find that students and faculty alike recognize the worth—indeed the necessity—of find­ing ways to bring history to the general public. Most faculty were as distressed as they were surprised to learn of the inability of the Association to find seed money to finance a popular magazine comparable to those in Germany, France, and Britain. As one faculty member pointed out, there  are three such magazines in Spain.

Furthermore, no one challenged the observation that Americans seem to be deeply ahistorical, lacking appreciation of the way in which the past shapes the present and therefore the options available in the future. No one, unfortunately, came up with any novel ways of altering this lack; all agreed that we must continue to assert and demonstrate the importance of history in our classrooms and in our public speaking and writing.

Change in the context of history curricula, is another area I hoped to explore on my visits. I had heard much about new courses, new approaches, and new subjects ever since the upheavals of the 1960s. Yet in the departments  I visited, I did not find as many innovative or  unusual courses as I  had anticipated. Perhaps my expectations were too high.

Virtually all of the departments I visited give some recognition to women’s and black history.

A number of institutions, as pub­lished reports have attested, have intro­duced, or were about to introduce, courses on the Vietnam war along with courses on the 1960s. Needless to say, such courses draw high enrollments. Military history, in general, is more pop­ular than at any time I can recall, much to the satisfaction of the public histori­ans working in that field for the federal government.

Among the less traditional courses I encountered, some of which I sat in on, were “Sex and Society” and “Medicine and Society” taught by a historian of medicine at the University of Houston, “Deviance in Early Modern Europe” at Grinnell, “History and Human Nature” at the University of Pennsylvania, and “History and Film” taught at Emory University by a historian of the South. The latter course, which I attended, is not concerned with the history of the cinema, but with the use of movies as historical sources. At Iowa State Univer­sity, a standard course in local history that emphasizes family history attracts a high enrollment.

Virtually all of the departments I vis­ited give some recognition to women’s and black history, though student and faculty interest in such courses varies greatly. As one teacher of black history at a predominantly white university in­formed me, he attracts the black stu­dents in his black history class and the white students in his history of the South. Between them, he reaches both races.

A similar pattern of self-segregation was evident in the women’s history class­es I visited or learned about. Most of the students were women, with perhaps 10 to 15 percent males. I encountered only one male teacher of women’s history, though several male faculty members said they included the history of women in their courses. The impression I re­ceived from students and many faculty was that the integration of women’s his­tory into standard history courses is still a goal rather than an accomplished fact. Among undergraduates at several de­partments it was not rare for a woman student to express annoyance at what she perceived as a lack of departmental attention being given to women’s history departments; where attention is being given, it seems to be a result of just such pressure.

Interest in women’s history on the graduate level is confined, so far as I could see, to women. Indeed, at one institution in the South, I was told by a woman graduate student in the presence of men that the interest among males was zero. She was not contradict­ed. On the other hand, at a black wom­en’s college in the South, a lengthy dis­cussion with a class revealed that wom­en’s concerns are divided between racial equality and gender equality—a division that inevitably affects attitudes toward the history of women as a subject of interest.

Another question I raised at each visit was how departments felt about some of the recent innovations in historical scholarship, such as the growth of quantification, the dominating presence of social history, and the decline in political and diplomatic history.

The question, however, soon became something of a perfunctory inquiry since few departments seemed to recog­nize a problem. The usual reaction was that the department was not divided, much less disrupted, by the newer ap­proaches. And the evidence lies, for example, in the widespread offering of women’s history or in the report at the University of Oregon that 200 students were enrolled in a course in diplomatic history from 1776 to the present. If there are divisions in departments, and some were discernible, they derived from efforts to improve the quality of faculty, a goal that sometimes results in division between generations.

The one new approach to historical inquiry in which I have a personal inter­est, but which produced almost no reso­nance among the faculties I visited, is psycho-history or the use of psychology in exploring the past. It is only slightly short of the truth that some department members did not know what I was ask­ing about or else did not deem the question worthy of discussion. Students were similarly uninterested, when not bewildered, even in a class in which Freud’s work was being discussed.

The one notable exception to these negative reactions or lack of interest was at San Diego State University, where a historian who has published fairly ex­tensively on psychohistory teaches in tandem with a biochemist a course on the mind-body problem in history. But even in this instance, the subject matter is not directly related to psychohistory; on the day I visited the class, for in­stance, a visitor from the classics depart­ment was critically appraising in stan­dard historical fashion Julian Jayne’s use of ancient history in his Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bi­cameral Mind, a text in the course.

After encountering so little interest in psychohistory, I was surprised by the rising interest in courses in world his­tory. Although William McNeill had made a plea for just such an approach to history in his presidential address last year, I had thought he was more a reformer than a reporter.

The Spelman department, to take the most noticeable example, has world his­tory as its basic course, replete with a written rationale. World history is not a basic course at the University of Ore­gon, but it is important and taught by a substantial number of members of the faculty. Portland State is in the process of organizing a full-year freshman course to be offered in 1986–87. The University of Pennsylvania does not have a course in world history, but it does offer a popular course in Third World history. Bryn Mawr’s departmen­tal course ”History of Three Worlds: Europe, Africa, and America,” like Pennsylvania’s course, reflects the same interest in escaping a Europe-centered history that animates the offerings of world history.

Despite the growing number of de­partments teaching world history, the subject is still quite controversial, as be­came evident in several departments when I raised the subject. The fear that it must be a watered down, mish-mash of cultures is deep-seated in the minds of some historians. Yet the subject is taught in many high schools, as I learned from my discussions with sec­ondary school teachers.

Indeed, one of the facts of life for high school teachers is that many of them, who are usually trained as histori­ans of the United States and Europe, are expected to teach world history, although almost none of them has ever been exposed to a college course in the subject. Moreover, as one high school teacher lamented, a number of the text­books in the field are still quite Europe­ centered, escaping outside that center only occasionally to canvas Buddhism or Islam or ancient China.

In addition, several of the teachers of world history, including the president of the professional  organization, whom I happened to meet at San Diego State University, stressed an important point that was reinforced by the course syllabi I collected. A carefully constructed course in world history can demonstrate the importance of context, the nature of process, and the complexities of inter­pretation and explanation, all of which lie at the heart of the study of any period or locale in the past.

Western civilization is still an impor­tant element in history department of­ferings. However, even the most con­servative departments, including those with a limited number of faculty, display a growing sense of the need to look beyond Europe and its offspring in North America.

What, then, is the state of history? The dominant impression I carried away from these visits is that history departments are in better shape than I had expected. A few departments gave vent to dissatisfaction with their administrations, feeling that other fields or concerns had put them on the back burner, but that was certainly not the chief response to my inquiries.

It is conceivable that departments, from the concern for self-image alone, had a built-in tendency to show me a shining face. Yet, on balance, enough negative comments were made to sug­gest that the happy face was not put on just for me. The more characteristic remark was that, given the financial constraints within which most, if not all, of the institutions have had to operate over the last five years, history depart­ments are being treated fairly by their respective administrations. Several de­partments counted substantially fewer faculty than in the 1970s, and several complained that some of their essential work has to be carried on by temporary or part-time instructors.

In institutions in Georgia, Texas, California, and Wisconsin, however, the prognosis is good for increase in faculty and expansion of facilities. Although two departments complained that their graduate programs are being limited by the administration, several others, in contrast, anticipate increased fellowship money and additions to the faculty. Most departments reported an upswing in undergraduate majors after the de­clines of the late 1970s and early 1980s, though almost none is back to the old heights. Two or three reported having experienced no substantial declines at all.

Finally, should such visits be made in the future? There is no doubt that I learned much about what is happening in the profession, as I have tried to suggest here. I certainly came away with a sense of pleasure in having met many young people to whom history is of central intellectual importance and many faculty who seemed to welcome a chance to discuss what they are doing and why. Apparently, departments are interested in such visits. As one faculty member somewhat ambiguously put it: “I never saw an officer of the AHA here before.” Based on letters I have received from several department chairs, the vis­ its seem to have been useful to their departments.

If the tour is done again, departments might be more informed in advance as to what the visits will involve, if only because these have now been reported on. Since this was the first of visits on a large scale, most departments only had a brief letter from me as to what to expect. With more advance knowledge, department members and students might be more inclined to speak up, to criticize, and to expatiate.

In a few departments, for example, no arrangements had been made for me to meet with students though the re­sponsive and flexible chairs involved quickly made the necessary arrange­ments once I arrived and made my interest clear.

Future visits might also deal with is­ sues that I did not directly raise, such as salaries, leave policies, hiring practices, and unions. Occasionally such subjects came up, but I had deliberately defined the meetings as dealing primarily with history as an intellectual discipline and with regard to relations between stu­dents and faculty and between depart­ments and administration. In short, the potential agenda is broad and varied.

Visitations in the order in which they were made: University of Houston; Rice University; University of California, San Diego; San Diego State University; Iowa State Uni­versity; Grinnell College; University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; Riverside Uni­versity High School, Milwaukee; Uni­versity of Pennsylvania; Temple Uni­versity; Bryn Mawr College; Emory University; Spelman College; University of Georgia; University of Oregon; Reed College; Portland State University, Ore­gon; Historians of Department of State; Historians of the Senate; and Historians of the Department of the Army.