The Dangerous Decline of the Historical Profession

[Nevilledog]

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/14/opinion/american-history-college-university-academia.html

No paywall
https://archive.ph/XS3OR

When I received my Ph.D. in history in 2013, I didn’t expect that within a decade fights over history — and historiography, even if few people use that word — would become front-page news. But over the last few years that is precisely what has happened: Just look at the recent debates over America’s legacy of slavery, what can be taught in public schools about the nation’s founders and even the definition of what constitutes fascism. The interpretation of the American past has not in recent memory been as public or as contentious as it is now.

Maybe it started with The New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, which sought to “reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of our national narrative” and which accompanied a national reckoning around race. That provoked, perhaps inevitably, a right-wing backlash in the form of “The 1776 Report,” a triumphalist, Donald Trump-directed effort. Then came a raft of laws in conservative-governed states across the country aiming to restrict and control how history is taught in public schools.

History, as the historian Matthew Karp has written, has become “a new kind of political priority” for people across the political spectrum, a means to fight over what it is to be an American: which values we should emphasize, which groups we should honor, which injustices we should redress.

The historical profession has likewise been roiled by controversy. Last August, James H. Sweet, the president of the American Historical Association, published an essay in which he argued that present-focused narratives of African slavery often represent “historical erasures and narrow politics.” The piece engendered a firestorm of reproach, with scholars variously accusing Dr. Sweet of attempting to delegitimize new research on topics including race and gender; some even accused Dr. Sweet of outright racism.

*snip*

[WarGamer]

1. good read... +1000

[dalton99a]

2. Kick

[erronis]

4. Wow. It's like some mind-parasite has invaded academia. Wonder why...

Unless some groups have an interesting in dumbing us down.

Glue everyone to a tiny screen playing games with their thumbs? Hmmm.

[former9thward]

6. Increases in math, science and engineering are "dumbing us down".

Wow. It looks to me just the opposite.

[exboyfil]

7. I am an engineer and I do think there has been a dumbing down of classical thought

Dead Poet's Society comes to mind


"We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race, and the human race is filled with passion. Medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for."

I think both the left and right are wrong when considering liberal education (the right far more wrong, but the left isn't doing a good job either in engaging in the debate or considering alternative viewpoints).

[former9thward]

10. People need to make a living after they get out of school.

Whether that school is high school, college, trade or something else. Poetry and the like is fine for those who like it but very, very few can make a living doing it.

[cyclonefence]

3. A long time ago, a lawyer friend was talking about his career

and he said, "after college I went to a trade school." He meant that his training was no longer academic but guided by what he would need to know to practice his trade, i.e. the law.

Since then I've delighted myself in classifying degrees like MD as certificates from trade school. I see that the top majors in the list above are for trades. Tsk tsk.

Academic degrees, of course, include the liberal arts and not much more. An academic degree is one that pretty much guarantees you won't be able to get a job in that field.
I'm an English major, and I know.

[erronis]

5. Good points. And we'd be better served by treating these professional degrees as job certifications

And we should have much more apprenticeships leading to certifications. We don't need more university professors who haven't really practiced what they preach.

[exboyfil]

8. Medicine, nursing, engineering, accounting are all vocational degrees

And I am an engineer. Part of the problem is a liberal arts education should be for a lifetime. It is far easier to understand Physics or Calculus than Shakespeare for a 19 year old. We used to recognize the importance of rhetoric, literature, and social studies/history in our education, but our very complex world has required the above vocational degrees to spend most of their academic period (the time you are allowed to learn without the financial obligations of supporting your family) just becoming good at those professions.

The problem is after college, so many become mostly interested in non-classical subjects (such as football, hunting, etc).

[GenThePerservering]

12. I have a degree in English

and worked in documentation, tech writing and quality assurance in medical documentation for many years as an editor.

Tech firms have been looking for some time for people with degrees in English because they need the literacy, sorely lacking in the field.

I worked with two physicians very prestigious in their fields who said they owed their success to having an English degree before going onto medical school - not only did they learn to quickly read, comprehend and synthesize large amounts of text, but it trained them to really *think* - and they also had the enjoyment of it in their private lives thereafter.

My feeling is that there is a lot of mistaken, often stereotypical thinking on what, exactly, liberal arts can do.

ETA: I think the same goes for studies in history.

[Kid Berwyn]

9. And some never look in the rear view mirror.

[Lonestarblue]

11. Liberal arts teaches people a broad variety of subjects, and I hate to see it dying off.

The humanities aren’t just about art and poetry. They are about broadening the mind, learning about different cultures, different ways of seeing and being. Haven’t enough of the MAGA crowd to know that education only for a job can lead to a narrow minded focus on the way the world works. I’m all for STEM education, but we also need our artists, writers, poets, and especially now historians who do the research to tell future generations about our own.

[Solly Mack]

13. K&R

Well worth the read.

[ancianita]

14. Historian Jill Lapore brought this problem up three years before the 1619 project.

She addressed it in her intro to These Truths -- a History of the United States (2018) and her pocket sized discussion, This America -- The Case for the Nation (2019). Both important books of history and of the considerations for historians.

In her pocket size book's chapter entitled "Race and Nation," she notes:

..." 'Nations are something rather new in history,' the French philosopher Ernest Renan observed in 1882, in a widely read essay called 'What Is a Nation?' ... Two years later, the American Historical Association was founded. Historical inquiry, in the United States and in Europe, was becoming a profession at the very moment when nationalism was taqking a turn away from liberalism and toward illiberalism, beginning in Germany with the 'blood and iron' of Otto von Bismark...Illiberal nationalism is often thought of as what happens when a nation-state demands extraordinary sacrifices from its people -- especially by participation in wars of aggression -- and requiring their consent, asks for that sacrifice in the name of the nation...

But illiberal nationalism is an outgrowth of other late 19th Century developments... including mass politics, mass communication and mass migration...The smaller and more fluid the world became, the flimsier were stories of ancient nations ...united by a shared line of descent, and the more eagerly people keen for political power searched for rationales for exclusion, discrimination, and aggression. New racial "sciences," above all the quackery of eugenics, puported to cull the worthy from the unworthy; sorting out peoples into "nationalities" very soon meant sorting them out by "races, to be ranked hierarchically.

In 1882, the year Ernest Renan asked, 'What Is a Nation?,' the United States passed its first major law restricting immigration, the Chinese Exclusion Act...To restrict immigration, a practice associated with the rise of illiberal nationalism, is to regard foreigners who arrive from friendly nations as invading armies. In the United States, founded as an asylum for the oppressed, this was a very bad turn...."

In that small book Lapore argues that defending liberalism requires making the case for the nation.
But that American historians largely abandoned that defense in the 1960's when they stopped writing national history.
By the 1980's they'd stopped studying the nation-state altogether and embraced globalism instead.
"When serious historians abandon the study of the nation, nationalism doesn't die. Instead, it eats liberalism." But this small book is her attempt to pull liberalism out. "In a world made up of nations, there is no more powerful way to fight the forces of prejudice, intolerance... than by a dedication to equality, citizenship, and equal rights, as guaranteed by a nation of laws."

I also highly recommend reading the 1619 Project, and especially for those interested in deeper African American history writing, reading Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain's Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019 (2021).

[Rhiannon12866]

15. In too many places these days, they're prohibited from teaching the facts about history

And we know exactly what that means for the future...

[ancianita]

16. Right. However, education professionals are not limited to "approved" texts to teach. Often, they

can assign readings in addition to the minimum curriculum of the state, and so they don't violate state curriculum rules.

Smart educators "supplement" approved history texts. I never had complaints from parents all the years when I had done that.

[Rhiannon12866]

17. I remember many of my history classes, I was with a group of girls who did "reenactments"

I remember one in which I portrayed John Hancock and another where I portrayed James Garfield. I'm sure that the latter wouldn't be allowed today, it involved a cap gun that scared the %#$! out of our pregnant teacher...

[ancianita]

18. lol I never went in for "reenactments." Cute story. We did do poetry slams, though, in April,

which is National Poetry Month. Seniors only, though, since they'd already done the hardest work of the year.

[niyad]

19. KNR and bookmarking. For later.

[Torchlight]

20. I think educational priorities will be lopsided

as long as we continue to allow our consumer market based on popularity rather than quality to dictate our priorities.

This is an insightful article I've been reading throughout the morning. Thanks!