Where’s The “Us”!
Dear Editor:
I noticed that in the caption under the illustration of the 1893 Columbian Med al in the November issue of Perspectives, the name of Augustus Saint-Gaudens was shortened to “August.”
Elliott S.M. Gatner
Dangers of Quantification
Dear Editor:
Clayborne Carson’s “Graduate Schools of Academic Historians” (November Perspectives) contains some fine examples of the possible dangers of quantification based on incomplete data. Carson, to be sure, cautions us that his analysis of the placement of PhDs granted in the period 1975–80 covers only employment in institutions listed in the 1983–84 Guide to Departments of History, and notes that many are not listed in the Guide. His statistics, as he himself concedes, are useful, if at all, only as a rough indicator of placement in large universities.
But the fact is that many PhDs are, and always have been, placed in smaller liberal arts colleges, many of them of high quality. Now these are precisely the sort of institutions that are underrepresented in the Guide. A cursory, totally unsystematic glance through the 1983–84 issue reveals that the following are among many other colleges and universities not listed: Allegheny, Bates, Connecticut, Davidson, Earlham, Hamilton, Hobart, Kenyon, Reed, University of the South, Washington and Lee, and Wooster.
A university that places a relatively high proportion of its PhDs in such institutions is bound to show a correspondingly low placement percentage in Carson’s Table 3, yet it would surely be difficult to argue that its placement record was any worse than that of one which placed them in large institutions, not necessarily of higher quality.
Carson’s analysis, for all the disclaimers of scientific accuracy in the fine print, strikes me as being potentially misleading, and in some respects dangerously so. It should certainly be used with the greatest caution by undergraduates confronting a choice between different graduate schools, and not at all (as Carson suggests it might) by administrators “seeking to determine the optimum size of history graduate programs.”
David E. Underdown
Brown University
