Abstract
The evolution of the historical profession in the United States in the last 50 years provides much reason both for celebration and sorrow. An unprecedented amount of scholarship and teaching is being devoted to regions outside of the traditional American concentration on itself and Europe. New subjects of study—gender, race and ethnicity—have developed. At the same time, political correctness has both narrowed and distorted enquiry. Traditional fields demanding great intellectual rigor, such as intellectual and economic history, are in decline. Even worse, education about Western civilization and the Enlightenment has come to be treated with increasing disdain at colleges and universities. There has instead been a considerable expansion of cultural and women’s studies, including women’s and gender history. These have contributed greatly to the holy trinity of gender, race and class that seems to dominate history departments today. Affirmative action hiring for greater racial, ethnic and gender “diversity” has had an equally great effect on the historical profession. Many of those who were hired preferentially on the basis of past and present discrimination (either real or imagined) continue to emphasize that theme in their research and teaching, since it is their chief claim to professional legitimacy. As a purely intellectual movement, oppression studies cannot last. Any school that leaves out too much about the past is not something to hold serious minds for long. But since it in a small way supports a nationally based political spoils system of racial and ethnic preferences upon which the futures of many politicians rest, it might be expected to have a long life. This is one of the greatest challenges facing historical scholarship today. Even this pales into insignificance in the face of the looming changes in liberal arts education. History is in the process of being reduced from a requirement to an elective on many campuses. This is part of a national trend to move away from the acquisition of knowledge in favor of more broadly based skills. In this way history will suffer the same sorry fate as so much of traditional education in America.
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Notes
The New York Times, September 17, 2012
The notion of a “clash of civilizations,” first mentioned by Bernard Lewis, was later developed by Samuel P. Huntington in a 1993 Foreign Affairs article “The Clash of Civilizations?” and again in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996).
As California Association of Scholars president John M. Ellis, author of Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities has observed, “in the span of less than a generation, university humanities departments have experienced an almost unbelievable reversal of attitudes, now attacking and undermining what had previously been considered best and most worthy in the Western tradition … (and) far from being valuable in bringing political perspectives to bear, present politics that are crude and unreal.” While referring primarily to literary criticism, his remarks are equally valid for a good deal of history writing (and teaching) today.
Niall Ferguson has attacked the notion that the way to understand history is not to study other cultures in addition to our own, but instead of our own. The notion that Western culture and ideals, as well as Western industry and technology, were eagerly adopted by the rest of the world, rather than forcefully imposed, is never quite understood. John Searle agrees, observing that “first, student should have enough knowledge of his or her cultural tradition to know how it got to be the way it is. This involves both political and social history, on the one hand, as well as the mastery of some of the great philosophical and literary texts of the culture on the other. For the United States, the dominant tradition is, and for the foreseeable future, will remain the European tradition. The United States is, after all, a product of the European Enlightenment. However,” he goes on to say, “you do not understand your own tradition if you do not see it in relation to others. Works from other cultural traditions need to be studied as well.” Niall Ferguson, “Civilization: is the West History?” Television series; and Searle, “Storm Over the University,” The New York Review of Books, December 6, 1990.
So is much of international law. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, first adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948, is largely the codification of Western Enlightenment values, and so represents one of the greatest cultural coups in history. It became an element of international law in 1976 after being ratified by a sufficient number of individual nations.
(Chakrabarty 2000) quoted in Barbara Weinstein, “How Much Have We Decentered the Historical Profession?” Perspectives, March 2007.
Ibid.
This according to a study by the National Association of Scholars, as reported in the article “Decline of ‘Western Civ?’, Inside Higher Ed., May 19, 2011.
The NAS examined the curricula of a group of 50 “top” universities and compared them with data it had on those colleges from 1968. The Association also surveyed an additional 75 large public colleges. It found that 50 years ago, 10 of the 50 “top” colleges mandated a Western Civilization course, while students at 31 of them could choose such a course from among several that fulfilled general education requirements. Today, none of those 50, and only one of the 75 public universities (the University of South Carolina) mandates one semester of “Western Civ.” Sixteen of the “top 50” do however list Western Civ among several choices in their general education curriculum, as do 44 of the 75 public institutions. Having surveyed only 125 colleges, the NAS admits there are limits to the conclusions that can be drawn from the study. “The Decline of ‘Western Civ’?” Inside Higher Ed, May 19, 2011
Ibid.
Niall Ferguson, Civilization: the West and the Rest, (2011). This conclusion seems unavoidable. I speak from personal experience. My own modern world history courses, beginning with the scientific and industrial revolutions, and the rise of modern political and economic theory, begin with the work of Galileo and Newton, John Locke, Adam Smith and Karl Marx. The spread of industrial manufacturing is traced from Britain to continental Europe, the United States, and then outward. Without first establishing the principles, and precedents of these (Western) individuals and movements, subsequent world political and economic developments become incomprehensible. The remarkable creativity of the West is in this way highlighted in a world setting.
“A Crisis of Competence,” an 87 page report addressed to University of California’s Board of Regents, The California Association of Scholars, 2012.
And beyond. Jean Francois Revel’s Last Exit to Utopia (1999), has flayed France’s radical intellectuals for their refusal to admit the moral and economic bankruptcy of communism. Having escaped the burden of defending the Soviet Union, as well as other communist states, they have retreated to a spre-1917 dream world, in which, to use Revel’s happy phrase, they “continue condemning that (world) which exists on the basis of something which does not.”
Ferguson, “Civilization: is the West History?” Television series.
There was an exciting notion that social history was not only new, but also “progressive.” It is no wonder that between 1975 and 1995 the proportion of American professors in the field rose from 31 % to 41 %.
One of the most important subfields to emerge in the 1970s was demographic history. This was encouraged by the belief that older literary evidence, usually elitist, and inevitably subjective, was untrustworthy. The quantification and analysis of births, marriages, deaths, and wills, recorded in registers by disinterested clerks, and made easier by the use of demographic methods facilitated by the rapid development of computers, was believed by some to be able to produce an objective, “scientific” picture of at least some aspects of the past. Some of us who grew up in the profession in those days well remember SPSS, the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences, and the remarkable stacks of punch cards which were then necessary to run programs. One quantifier, Paul Johnson, reminds us that one historian said that “anyone who did not know statistics at least through multiple regression should not hold a job in a history department.” (Paul E. Johnson, “Reflections: Looking Back at Social History,” Reviews in American History Volume 39, Number 2, June 2011.) In any event, the combination of a chance to share the prestige enjoyed by the hard sciences and the panache of radical politics proved irresistible. Those were heady times indeed. Closely related to this was the rapid growth of labor history, as well as the history of African Americans and various immigrant ethnic groups. The history of the family also received increased attention. Among the most important contributions was Louise Tilly and Joan Scott’s Women, Work, and Family (1978), which was able to tie family history with the history of labor. It is in this period too that women’s and gender history became important. The study of cities provided yet additional opportunities for quantifiers. Stephan Thernstrom’s innovative use of census records for nineteenth century Newburyport, Massachusetts, to study the social mobility of different ethnic groups in his Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth Century City (1964), created another happy marriage of labor and number crunching. A considerable number of similar studies of American and European cities followed. Today, social history has to some extent been overshadowed by its offspring, especially women’s, gender and ethnic history. Its most serious challenge has come from the dramatic expansion of cultural history, with its rejection of quantitative methods in favor of a study of customs, beliefs and popular entertainments. While the “radical” impulses that informed much of the earlier social history remain, the new methodology is at once less rigorous, and more impressionistic and subjective.
Tilly, a remarkably protean historian, sociologist and political scientist, helped pioneer the development of historical sociology, one of the most innovative methods of historical inquiry in the 1960s and 70s, as well as the use of quantitative methods. His first book, The Vendée: A Sociological Analysis of the Counter- Revolution of 1793 (1964), used sociological methods to explain grass roots opposition to the French Revolution in western France. Some of his most important subsequent works were “Clio and Minerva” pp. 433–66 in Theoretical Sociology, edited by John McKinney and Edward Tiryakian (1970); “Collective Violence in European Perspective.” pp. 4–45 in Violence in America, edited by Hugh Graham and Tedd Gurr (1969); “Do Communities Act?” Sociological Inquiry 43: pp. 209–40. (1973); As Sociology Meets History (1981); The Contentious French (1986); and The Politics of Collective Violence (2003).
Post-colonialism, the study of the legacy of colonialism and imperialism, is critical of the ways in which the dominant European civilization has defined non-European cultures as inferior. Thus, Edward Said in the 1976 book Orientalism attacked previous European scholarship that had disregarded the intellectual perspectives of the Asian and Middle Eastern peoples. He is particularly critical of portrayals of the “Orient” as backward and irrational, and the West progressive and rational. Other post-colonialists have sometimes even gone so far as to criticize “European ways of thinking,” including the use of deductive reasoning, and belief in the rule of law. More broadly, Dipesh Chakrabarty in his book Provincializing Europe (2000) has suggested that Europe should only be seen as “one region among many.” The problem is that European civilization is now dominant in the world, a fact attested to by the eagerness with which other regions have adopted European style democracy, science, technology and mass culture.
John Searle,“Storm Over the University.”
That same spirit seems to inform the decisions of the University of California administration as well. The CAS report noted the “increasing reluctance of department heads and administrators to discipline faculty members who devote class time to ideological proselytizing, to ensure that campus-sponsored conferences and symposia on hot-button issues fairly present a range of views, or to prevent radicals from disrupting on-campus speeches and other forms of free expression by those with whom they do not agree.” California Association of Scholars, “A Crisis of Competence.”
In 1975 only 1.1 % of full-time faculty indicated “women” or “gender” as a field of specialization. By 2005 that number had increased to 8.9 %, while the proportion of departments with at least one faculty member in the field grew from 17.9 % to 79.6 %. This, and other quantitative data cited here, comes from a survey of history departments between 1975 and 2005, based on department Guides/Directories for 1975, 1980, 1985, 1990, 1995, 2000, and 2005, undertaken by the American Historical Association. It was published in the AHA’s Perspectives in January 2007.
Casey Miller and Kate Swift, Words & Women, 1991.
As KC Johnson has observed, “with the rise of the race/class/gender approach, subfields perceived as excessively “traditional” or overly focused on “dead white males” have gone into decline—or, in the case of political history, have been “re-envisioned” in the hopes of transferring focus to topics oriented around themes of race, class, and gender. “In History—the Obsession with Race, Class and Gender,” posted by KC Johnson, Minding the Campus, October 1, 2012. The problems “herstory” creates was also pointed out by Christina Hoff Sommers in her book, Who Stole Feminism?, which was critical of the attempts to propagate ideology at the expense of knowledge. Who Stole Feminism: How Women Have Betrayed Women, 1994.
John Searle, “The Storm Over the University.”
This is certainly suggested by the program for the 2013 American Historical Association conference in New Orleans, both because of its heavy emphasis on race, class, and gender, and the way that more “traditional” topics are frequently reconfigured to conform to the trinity. As K.C. Johnson points out, one of its most striking elements is how many of the panels are devoted to topics that could be deemed “traditional” (U.S. diplomatic, military, political, constitutional), but which are in fact arranged to conform to the race/class/gender paradigm. U.S. diplomatic history sessions feature panels on “Religion and Sexuality in America’s Cold War” (seeking to examine “the intersections of religion with Cold War foreign and domestic policy, on the one hand, and the conflation of sexual and political agendas, on the other”) and “The Bodies of Cultural Diplomacy, 1945–65,” examining how the U.S. government “saw the physical body as a site of cultural diplomacy” during the first 2 decades of the Cold War. Legal history sessions are similarly almost exclusively focused on issues of gender, race, or Native Americans. “In History—the Obsession with Race, Class and Gender,” posted by KC Johnson, Minding The Campus, October 1, 2012
Some feminists are of course genuine Marxists.
The academy, politicians, and social causes continue to intersect, sometimes in the most curious ways. A current California bill, awaiting the governors’ approval, proposes obliging teachers in the state’s university system to provide some form of social service as a condition of achieving tenure. Dan Walters of the Sacramento Bee writes that the bill “appears to give great weight to political or at least semi-political activities favored by those on the political left. They include, in the words of one analysis, ‘developing programs for underserved populations’ and ‘outreach programs developed to promote cultural diversity in the student body.’” This is part of a series of attempts to politicize higher education, such as the recent move at UCLA to approve advocacy in classrooms. “Politicians Push Professors Leftward,” posted by John Leo Minding the Campus.
National Association of Scholars, “The Decline of Western Civ.?”
This tendency towards interdisciplinary work has led within the historical profession to a less audacious, but still innovative blurring of fields across different geographical regions. While this is not entirely new (one thinks of R.R. Palmer’s The Age of The Democratic Revolution, as well as the work of Fernand Braudel), it is now more common. This has led Weinstein to speculate about “future erstwhile Europeanists (becoming) scholars of colonialism whose geographic concentration spans several areas, or borderlands historians (becoming) as indistinctly U.S. Americanist and Mexicanist as the region they study. “Weinstein, “How Much Have We Decentered the Historical Profession?”
Fernand Braudel’s first, and most influential book, La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen à l’Epoque de Philippe II (1949), measured geographical time, with its slow, imperceptible changes, as well as long-term social and economic changes over centuries, which together make up la longue durée. The third part of the book measured la courte durée of particular events involving individuals by name (histoire événementielle). Carl Jacob Burckhardt’s greatest work was The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). More recently, François Furet’s 1978 essay Interpreting the French Revolution has provided a broader look at political culture outside of the class struggle paradigm preferred by Marxists. Robert Darnton, Patrice Higonnet and Lynn Hunt have made similar great contributions to French cultural history. Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962) has been a very important, broader cultural history of the development of the public sphere, while Paul Connerton has added to the understanding of the importance of memory in How Societies Remember (1989) and How Modernity Forgets, (2009).
Weinstein, “How Much Have We Decentered the Historical Profession?”
World history has grown exponentially, from less than 1 % to 3.6 % of full time faculty devoted to this field. AHA Perspectives, 2007.
The number of European historians in the profession has fallen from 39.0 % to 33.7 %. The Latin American situation is more complex. Having at first declined in the period 1975 to 1990, the number of Latin Americanists has begun to rise again, without yet achieving its 1975 levels. (The number of historians in this field in 2005 was 16.1 % lower than in 1975—from 7.6 % of faculty to 6.4 %. This however is above its all-time low in 1990 of 5.8 %.)
In 2005, 82.0 % of the departments reported at least one Asian specialist (up from 73.5 %), while departments with a Middle Eastern specialist grew from 47.0 % to 54.5 %. The proportion of Africanists grew from 3.3 % to 4.1 % of full time faculty; the proportion of departments with an Africa specialist grew from 44.4 % to 60.2 %.
Diplomatic and international history fell from 7.0 % of faculty in 1975 to 3.1 % in 2005. Economic history faculty declined from 5.1 % to 2.3 %.
In 1975, 54.7 % of the departments reported an economic historian. That fell to 31.7 in 2005. Similarly, 30 years ago 74.8 % of departments listed at least one diplomatic historian; only 45.9 % did so in 2005.
The proportion of faculty fell from 10.5 % to 5.8 %, and the percentage of departments with at least one intellectual historian from 81.2 % to 57.7 %. This might be contrasted with a growth in the number of religious historians (from 1.4 % to 2.8 %); 37.5 % of all history departments now have at least one religious historian. This is in itself quite remarkable, considering the prejudices of most of the historical profession, and of academia in general.
Two other fields, political and (surprisingly) military history, have grown slightly in the last 30 years. The proportion of political historians listed stood at 3.9 % of the faculty in both 1975 and 2005; the proportion of military historians increased slightly, from 2.4 % to 2.6 %. The proportions of departments listing at least one specialist in the two fields has also increased slightly, from 38 % to 43.4 % (in the case of political history), and from 29.9 % to 36.2 % for military history.
In 2005, 22.8 % of full-time faculty had earned their degrees before 1976. But 39.8 % of diplomatic historians were in this group, as were 34.7 % of economic, and 31.7 % of intellectual historians.
Overall, 47.1 % of the full-time faculty earned their degrees since 1989.
Kansas University for example has announced students will no longer be required to take Western Civilization, a reading-heavy two-semester course that had previously been required for all Bachelor of Arts students. Instead, “more flexible options,” will allow undergraduates to avoid some of the “hurdles” their predecessors had to clear, among them Western Civ.. University officials have insisted the new reduced requirements “will still ensure students are learning the skills that a university education is supposed to provide.” One professor, with greater candor, suggested the school was simply “trying to raise numbers of graduating students by lowering standards.” “Western Civilization Classes May No Longer be Required at KU: Desire for Flexibility Cited as Reason to Make Longtime Standard Optional,” Lawrence Journal World (LJWorld.com) September 2, 2012.
“Innovations in the Undergraduate Curriculum,” The Education Encyclopedia: Education Reform—Overview—at StateUniversity.com.
Integrity in the College Curriculum, a 1985 report that underscored the need for reform, is cited as partial justification for these changes. This in turn was based on the “Project on Redefining the Meaning and Purpose of Baccalaureate Degrees” commissioned by the Association of American Colleges. This is ironic, since one of its recommendations to address the devaluation of undergraduate degrees was to help develop historical consciousness.
“Bronx Profs Dis‘credit’ CUNY Plan,” The New York Post, February 12, 2012, on line edition.
National Association of Scholars, “The Decline of Western Civ?”
There are few times when it is possible to date the bankruptcy of a political movement with any accuracy. The fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979 is one of them. The joy with which much of the American Left greeted the triumph of the Islamic revolution marked a clear break with Marxist principles. Instead of supporting the modernizing (albeit corrupt) government of the Shah, many celebrated the success of a clearly reactionary theological movement that was antipodal to Marxist aspirations for a future socialist (and atheist) society.
This includes Ydanis Rodriguez, the current chair of the New York City Council’s Committee for Higher Education. A picaresque figure from the Dominican Republic, he has considerable power over the City University’s budget. In 2010 he began to insist that CUNY do more to increase faculty “diversity.” Citing the usual percentages—in this case the racial breakdown of New York’s population—35 % white, 24 % black, 28 % Latino and 12 % Asian (with roughly comparable figures for the university’s undergraduate population)—and the faculty—68.9 % white, 12.3 % black, 8.3 % Hispanic and 10.5 % Asian—he pointed out that not enough was being done to bring in “under-represented” groups. This, despite the reassurances of CUNY Vice Chancellor Gloriana Waters that CUNY’s diversity far surpasses national faculty averages. One Committee member, Jumaane Williams, gently suggested that “although we’ve done a lot of good work in trying to get [faculty] diversity, I don’t think we’re there yet.” Charles Barron, a notorious figure in New York municipal politics, and former chair of the committee, was more blunt. “If we’re the new majority, then we should be a majority of the faculty,” he asserted. “CUNY Diversity: While the Student Body is Multihued, Two-Thirds of Faculty is White,” The Daily News, February 28, 2010.
Trends revealed by federal statistics about gender distribution among recent recipients of undergraduate, M.A., and Ph.D./professional degrees suggest that by 2020 women will earn 61 % of all M.A. degrees and 58 % of all B.A. degrees—figures far above their percentage in the total population. KC Johnson believes there is no indication that this trend will reverse anytime soon. Turning to CUNY, he finds the number of women faculty increased from 42 % to 47 % in the period 2000 to 2010. (The total had already risen 5 % in the previous decade.) Considering the small percentage of faculty positions that come open every year, a 5 % overall gain in a decade suggests disproportionate figures in hiring. In one sample year, 2005, 55.5 % of the new hires were women. If this pattern continues, women will be the majority of CUNY faculty by 2020, and be nearly 60 % by 2030. While Johnson sees nothing necessarily wrong about this, he does suggest it does raise questions about the need for gender “diversity” programs. If women are a substantial majority of students at all levels, and are increasingly emerging as the majority of faculty, what possible rationale, he asks, could exist for programs of any type that grant gender-based preferences to women? “Why Are There Still Preferences for Women?” posted by KC Johnson, Minding the Campus.
This is probably in part due to a general sympathy of academics for the policies and rhetoric of the Democratic Party. A report by the California Association of Scholars found that at UC Berkeley, for example, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans was 4 to one in the professional schools, 10 to one in the hard sciences, 17 to one in the humanities, and 21 to one in the social sciences. As the report notes, “left faculty now outnumber right faculty by huge margins in every department, but the margins become virtually exclusionary as politics become more relevant to the work of the department.” Charlotte Allen, “The Radicalization of the University of California,” Minding the Campus, April 1, 2012
Some of the debates within the academy must remain remarkable to those outside. Thus Jurgen Habermas, in his debate with postmodernists (“Modernity versus Postmodernity,” 1981) asked whether, in light of the failures of the twentieth century, we “should try to hold on to the intentions of the Enlightenment, feeble as they may be, or (as the postmodernists would have it) declare the entire project of modernity a lost cause?” Habermas refused to give up on the possibility of a rational, “scientific” understanding of the life-world. It was a close call. Ritzer, George, Sociological Theory, From Modern to Postmodern Social Theory (and beyond), (2008), pp. 567–568.
As John Searle nicely put it, “With few exceptions, those who defend the traditional conception of a liberal education with a core curriculum think that Western civilization in general, and the United States in particular, have on the whole been the source of valuable institutions that should be preserved and of traditions that should be transmitted, emphatically including the intellectual tradition of skeptical critical analysis. Those who think that the traditional canon should be abandoned believe that Western civilization in general, and the United States in particular, are in large part oppressive, imperialist, patriarchal, hegemonic, and in need of replacement, or at least of transformation.” For them, “the history of “Western Civilization” is in large part a history of oppression. Internally, Western civilization oppressed women, various slave and serf populations, and ethnic and cultural minorities generally. In foreign affairs, the history of Western civilization is one of imperialism and colonialism.” John Searle, “Storm Over the Academy.”
Further Reading
Chakrabarty, D. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (p. 28). Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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Gordon, D. The Joys and Sorrows of Diversity: Changes in the Historical Profession in the Last Half Century. Soc 50, 140–151 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-013-9632-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-013-9632-6