Bancroft Prize
Thomas M. Doerflinger, a securities analyst at PaineWebber in New York, received the Bancroft Prize, Columbia University, for A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise: Merchants and Economic Development in Revolutionary Philadelphia, University of North Carolina Press. The book, which has already won the Herbert Feis Award from the American Historical Association, is a comprehensive examination of Philadelphia’s merchant class between the years 1750 and 1791, when the city was both the nation’s largest port and its most important banking center.
Vietnam War Microfilm Collection
Materials relating to the war in Vietnam are being prepared by University Microfilms International, of Ann Arbor, Michigan. The collection, History of the Vietnam War, will comprise reproduc tions of the books, newspaper articles, maps, and other items dealing with the war that are part of the Indochina Archives at the University of California at Berkeley.
Douglas Pike, director of the archives, will oversee the project. University Microfilms will release the first of the ten units expected to constitute the edition this summer.
“Nonacademic” Historians and Careers for History Doctorates
Last month we examined the state of the academic job market, reporting that for the 543 history doctorates in 1984–85 there were approximately 330 advertised positions. But the picture for those who will find work outside academe is not as stark as these unadorned statistics would seem to indicate. A recent report to the National Endowment for the Humanities (“Non-academic Careers for Doctorate Recipients in the Humanities” by Karen N. Gaertner of Georgetown University) points to the relatively strong position of history graduates compared with graduates in other humanities disciplines.
Furthermore, because of public history positions, “there is far more opportunity for historians to practice their profession outside the academy than for doctorates in English literature and philosophy” (“Non-academic Careers … ,” p. 48). When asked if they had found employment related to the discipline in which they had received their degree, 25.7 percent of those who had received history doctorates in 1983 and worked outside academe agreed, while the comparable figure was 16 percent in English literature and only 2.4 percent in philosophy.
Of course, before academic historians existed as a self-consciously separate breed, history was the province of individuals who would now be considered public historians. The study of history became an academic discipline at the end of the last century, when the German model of graduate education, based on the production of a dissertation, was adopted by American graduate programs. This is not to say that henceforth there were clearly academic and nonacademic historians; the careers of George Bancroft and Charles Beard, who have generally been considered part of a tradition reaching back to Thucydides and Polybius, demonstrate the dangers of drawing hard and fast distinctions between historians working inside the academy and those employed outside academe. Bancroft taught at Harvard and founded Round Hill School before turning to writing and government service, and Beard taught at Columbia for a decade before he could support himself by writing.
The division between academic and public history has always been blurred (the division itself was a product of the expansion of the discipline in the 1960s), but a perceptual boundary has existed nonetheless. Howard Green of the New Jersey Historical Commission writes that this perception is evident in charges that public historians engage in “hired gun report writing” (“A Critique of the Professional Public History Movement,” Radical History Review no. 25 [1981], p. 168), which means, as another historian puts it, that “history must be cost-effective or drop dead” (Terence O’Donnell, “Pitfalls Along the Path of Public History,” The Public Historian, Winter 1982, p. 68).
Such characterizations are blatantly unfair and inaccurate, and only the uniformed now use such arguments to dis miss or ignore the work of public historians. Instead we find a slow reversal of the tendency towards academizing history. Employment in museums, archives, corporations, and other “public” spheres has become attractive to a growing number of historians not just be cause of a depressed academic job market but because of an increasing sophistication in the work of historians outside academe. Until quite recently careers in such institutions were seen as “alternatives” to academic positions, but, as Noel Stowe has reminded us, “alternative careers is a pejorative term. We know historians outside academe really do academic work-so to say they are nonacademics is wrong” (“Promises and Challenges for Public History,” address to the annual conference of the National Council on Public History [NCPH], New York, 1986).
The development of public history as a discipline is evident in the strengthening of links between historians employed in the academy and those who work outside academe. Two historians whose professional experiences are indicative of these links are Barbara Howe, executive secretary of the National Council on Public History and an associate professor of history at West Virginia University, and Sylvia Fries, director of the Headquarters History Office of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
Professor Howe decided before pursuing graduate study that she did not want to teach immediately upon graduation. While studying at Temple University she worked as an archivist and preservationist and, after graduating, worked as Regional Preservation Officer at Heidelberg College in Ohio be fore moving to West Virginia University.
Dr. Fries, by contrast, went from graduate work at Johns Hopkins University to teaching positions at Vassar College, Southern Methodist University, and the University of Maine at Orono before being offered the directorship of the NASA Headquarters History Office. An intellectual historian by training and a cultural and urban historian by choice, she was a member and then chair of the NASA History Advisory Committee before becoming director of the Headquarters History Office.
When asked about the distinction be tween “public” and “academic” history, both agree that while there is a distinction it is exaggerated and misunderstood. Professor Howe noted that this dichotomy is slowly losing its validity and is disappearing as more and more academic historians pay attention and contribute to the work of public historians. One example of this, she claims, is the way academics are following the lead of the NCPH and the Society for History in the Federal Government in “recognizing that they also have to be concerned about professional ethics.”
Dr. Fries concurs that while there is a distinction it is “not the difference that most academic historians perceive it to be. I believe that the common perception is that public historians are a lower order of historian, … [that they] are those who are unable to secure tenure or academic appointments, and there fore have had to go out and sell their wares on the street.” The real difference, she contends, is not professional or economic but cultural, a function of the process by which historians “retreat ed into an academic cloister” and pursued increasingly narrow, esoteric concerns.
To those who say that the whole concept of public history “provokes reflection about the future of history as a scientific approach” (Henry Rousso, “Applied History, or The Historian as Miracle-Worker,” The Public Historian, Fall 1984, p. 66), she argues that “one of the … points of contention between academic and other historians, is that public historians can’t be objective. This is one of the great conceits of all time, because it assumes that academic historians are objective. My answer is that the pursuit of objectivity is a chimera.” The rhetoric of objectivity is a product of the misguided belief that “there is some objective body of truth out there that academic historians, because they operate in this pure cloister of the university, can achieve but public historians, because they’re on the street, can’t. Every historian has an agenda when he or she begins work. Herodotus had an agenda, Luke had an agenda, Thucydides had an agenda, Machiavelli had an agenda, Charles Beard had an agenda, Arthur Meier Schlesinger had an agenda, Oscar Handlin had an agenda, we all have an agenda.”
In reference to the vexing question of what constitutes public history, Professor Howe defines it as “history that uses the skills of the historian in research, problem solving with a perspective of time, and writing in a public arena in some way.” The last means that a public historian works with the assumption “that the product of the work is going to be used by someone who may not be a historian and that the producer does not have total control over the final disposition of the product.”
For Dr. Fries the nature of the audience distinguishes the public from the academic historian. “The academic can get away with reaching only his peers, but the public historian must address three audiences: an academic audience for the sake of professional credentials; a wider, ‘public’ audience; and the organization that hires him/her.” To amplify this point she argues that public historians must continue to demonstrate the importance of their work by reaching out to an ever-wider audience, both specialized and nonspecialized.
Assessment
In the most recent pursuit to assess how well students are learning at public colleges and universities, a new study, sponsored by the Education Commission of the States, the American Association of Higher Education, and the State Higher Education Executive Officers, has shown that legislators and university officials are skeptical of state wide examinations. The study was based on a survey of higher-education officials in all fifty states.
This study is counter to earlier predictions of a rapid spread in uniform statewide testing such as was passed in the state legislatures of Florida and Georgia.
The report notes that many of those who participated in the survey expressed concerns about the use of statewide assessment programs. These included the fear that statewide programs would limit assessment to standardized examinations, fail to measure writing and other skills create expensive bureaucracies, and be used to eliminate some programs. The report also showed that state leaders have adopted a variety of measures to encourage institutions to develop their own methods of assessment. Some states, such as Colorado and Missouri, have simply required all public institutions to develop assessment programs.
Other states, however, have chosen to finance assessment programs at selected colleges to serve as models for other institutions. In the December 1987 issue of Perspectives, we are anticipating a re port on the effects of assessment on a history department from one of the colleges selected as a model for its state. Still other states—Alabama, Arizona, Kansas, and Rhode Island—require institutions to report on their assessment programs as part of the budget review process. College assessment programs, according to the report, are as diverse as the colleges themselves.
For copies of the report, Assessment and Outcomes Measurement: A View from the States, send $3 each to AAHE, Publications Department, One Dupont Circle, NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20036. The ECS will publish a summary of the survey’s findings for each state. That report will be available from ECS, 1860 Lincoln Street, Suite 300, Denver, CO 80295.
Should you wish to read further about the topic of assessment, we offer the following brief bibliography:
Bennett, William (Secretary, U.S. Department of Education)
The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 15, 1986: text of address to Harvard College 350th anniversary celebrations, with rebuttal by Robert Atwell (American Council on Education).
The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 26, 1986: text of speech on education costs delivered at Catholic University.
Bok, Derek (President, Harvard University)
Higher Learning (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986) “To ward Higher Learning: The Importance of Assessing Outcomes,” (excerpts from the book), in Change, Nov./Dec. 1986, pp. 18-27.
Boyer, Ernest (President, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching)
College: The Undergraduate Experience (New York: Harper and Row for CFAT, 1986)
“College: Raising a New Vision,” interview with Ernest Boyer in Change, Nov./Dec. 1986, pp. 10-17.
Department of Education, Washington, DC
A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, report of the National Commission on Excellence in Education, reprinted in The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 4, 1983
National Commission on Jobs and Small Business
Making America Work Again, report of the NCJSB (Washington, DC, 1986).
Change, The Magazine of Higher Education (American Association for Higher Education)
Variety of articles appearing in Sept./ Oct. 1986, Nov./Dec. 1986, and Jan./Feb. 1987.
“Open Files”
A superior-court judge in a California courtroom will hear arguments claiming that the way in which professors at the University of California are now reviewed for tenure and promotion violates their constitutional rights.
Six academics, who say they have been mistreated under the current confidential system, are trying to pry open the reviews and give tenure candidates complete access to their files. Joined by the University Council, an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers (AFL-CIO), they have sued the state court.
The university maintains that its current procedures are constitutionally correct and that confidentiality is absolutely essential to preserving an outstanding faculty. Without the protection of confidentiality, they say the quality of reviews will suffer, and so will the quality of the faculty granted tenure. A trial is expected later this year.
The professors’ suit seeks to make access to files a normal practice, not just for the research of discrimination claims. The ramifications of this case could be far-reaching, if it is successful.
Alice Paul Papers
More than 200 cartons containing the papers and books of Alice Paul, one of the leaders in the fight for woman suffrage and for women’s rights and author of the Equal Rights Amendment, first introduced in Congress in 1923, have arrived at Radcliffe College’s Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America.
The collection, according to Patricia King, director of the library, constitutes “one of the most important collections for women’s history that has recently become available.” It is the gift of the Alice Paul Centennial Foundation. The Foundation was able to purchase the Alice Paul Collection at auction in Philadelphia in February for $26,575 thanks to the support of many nationally known celebrities, politicians, and scholars. Among the AHA members on the honorary committee established to spearhead the drive to acquire the collection were: Mary Frances Berry, William H. Chafe, Joan Ridder Challinor, and Nancy F. Cott.
“Advance Reserve” at Library of Congress Available to Patrons Outside Washington, DC
Advance Reserve service is provided by the Special Search Section of the Collections Management Division of the Library of Congress for any item in the general collections.
Patrons coming to the Library of Congress from outside the Washington, DC metropolitan area may request advance reservation of materials they need. Special Search will accept requests for up to three items per letter or call. Patrons should include in their requests as much bibliographic information as possible. Patrons will be notified whether the item is located or unavailable. Items will be held on reserve for a period not to exceed fifteen days from the time the patron is notified. Patrons are encouraged to time their requests to correspond with their expected arrival at the Library in order to reduce the amount of time the reserved items are not avail able for others.
Patrons interested in using the Advance Reserve service may call 202/287-7488/9 between 8:30 a.m. and 4 p.m. Monday through Friday. Written re quests should be addressed to the Special Search Section, Collections Management Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC 20540. Please include a telephone number and a time you will be available to receive during business hours.
