My big argument against tenure is related to what Bessner said about conservatives not becoming professors. I lean right and have tenure, but I don't actually believe that tenure would protect me if I started voicing various right-leaning opinions, and there have been some recent cases in the US where tenure wasn't enough to protect the professor.
Even when tenure is enough, it usually involves a long legal battle that most people don't want to bother with.
Or let's say that you voice some heterodox opinion that other professors and admins don't like. Yes, maybe they can't fire you because of your words. What they can do, however, is start digging into your past to find something that CAN be used as a foothold to make a case that you should lose your job.
As always, conservatives focus not on the theoretical (tenure means you can say what you want without being fired) but rather the practical (people with tenure have been fired)
In sum, if tenure doesn't REALLY protect you, what's the point? As far as I can see, it only really protects you if you have an opinion that you believe to be "unconventional" or "fighting the power" but it's actually an opinion that everyone around you shares.
look its a black nazi blitler women sexual assaulter beater murder threatener, watch your back traitor, us americans will arrest you nazi traitors, enjoy gitmo 2.0 you fu/cking who/re son of a bit/ch youre lucky we dont hang our traitors anymore you reagan pig fuc/k you dic.k rider pu/ssy cow/ard cointelpro closet nazi grifter you will pay for your crimes against america, mark my words you wh/ore bit/che bastard of wh/ore
Perhaps the "death" of academic history as a profession is merely a subset of the larger questions around what the word education even means anymore. We've only had a few decades properly in the Information Age, and before that, it wasn't possible to look up countless treatises and primary source documents online. Now anyone can be a historian.
As our interviewer points out, there isn't the same kind of objective proving ground for historians as in other professions. Someone who consults Dr. Google is not a doctor, but is someone who looks up history online and forms an opinion about it not a historian?
As Dr. Loury is at Brown, I note that iconic horror author HP Lovecraft has a vast repository of documents stored in Brown's university library system, which are often accessed for novel historical work by unpaid fans doing work that actual literary historians are either lacking in interest or lacking in number to do (I refer fans to the Voluminous podcast). In doing so on their own time, such amateur experts may have effectively driven the economic value of being an academic in this field close to zero.
Why would anyone pay a history professor to tell them things that can be found in a search engine? And if their contribution to the world is things that can't be googled, why pay them to do things that will be done by hobbyists for free? And for things that no one cares enough to do as a hobbyist for free, is there anyone that cares enough to pay money to have them explored academically? And this is before the AI revolution. We all may be obsolete soon enough. Some sooner than others. Maybe the problem with academic history is that the profession is actually declining in value rather than being stabbed in the back by some extrinsic force.
Ideological capture has not helped history. Neither has the insistence to view all events and people of the past through the lens of the present. It's an anti-history perspective that cuts context out of the equation and discounts any discussion about how things have changed between then and now. When the Founders are reduced to no more than the time in which they were born, no one is learning a thing. And while castigating the long dead for the sins associated with the time in which they lived, the people assailing them often act in identical manner while convincing themselves otherwise.
Today's fixation on identity is no better than previous fixations on identity. The only difference, for now, is that it has not reached the point of mass murder. It has, however, gotten to where it is acceptable to abuse those folks in other ways, be it through hiring (or non-hiring), college admissions, promotions, board seats, or revising "history" to use them as proxies for blaming every bad event that happened on people who liked them.
Let me take a counter position... I see the history, profession, or especially the interest in history by people of all ages, but specifically men who know they were taught garbage throughout their public education... Know that they were taught garbage as a part of their university and college education.. You may not be seeing the interest in history because you're for it in the wrong places... Looking for it in the old places. Podcasting and YouTube is where history is... Where it's become alive again and blossom flourished into an enormously rich and diverse and academically rigorous yet bold and exciting.. adventurous again.
Everyone knows Dan Carlin... I would put him at the top of a list of individuals who have reinstilled a passion for history in the US and around the world. Sure you get the PhDs and scholars at enormously esoteric small slice of the pie bits of of history.. They despise Carlin and those like him because they represent the layman's approach to history and not the postmodernist approach... The ivory towers of the academy have transformed something that is enormously interesting in and of itself.. transformed it into something completely. Unlikable and uninteresting and boring and pretentious unreasonable unreadable., In Every way most academic historians have danced with the demons that gave them tenure and that give them awards and grants for ridiculous fields..
Here's a list of YouTube channels I found in the last 6 months that are just beyond interesting.
And we're done with western civilization and all of its gifts of innovation and knowledge and literature and music and art and architecture and culture being made out to be inconsequential at best and at present being the second coming of Mephistopheles multiplied by Darth Vader Hitler and Mr. Burns... The caricature of the western philosophy on life on the individual on the state on human nature is so abort and disgusting that it is turned generations of men away from so-called academic historians... They have force-fed pseudo historical lived experience made up history down our throats... Made all white men proclaim themselves as the Hitler to their own individual stories and as a non inconsequential prevail of sin and evil and genocide. And death and rape.. to make western civilization be the archetype of what not to do... How Not to act... All evil. No good.
That story isn't being listened to anyone seriously anymore.. Yes, they're just getting introduced to it and don't know anything else. They're the ones.
History is always but a passion of mine... I read Volume one of gulag archipelago When I was in eighth grade... I dug deep into Russian and German military history. Also had a deep curiosity for ancient Greek and Roman military history... The battles of Alexander fascinated me.. continue to I find them endlessly interesting... I'd say over the past five to 10 years... I've been feeling in the gaps where military history had given me a point of reference a so-called scaffolding... I've really been able to layer in the philosophical the cultural the political... Really trying to find human beings at our worst... Moments of mind bending depravity... Miraculous survival... Near misses that saved millions... Near misses that cost millions...
When you put yourself in the shoes of a somewhat prosperous peasant farmer in the year 1300.. society and culture has had almost 350 years of warmer than normal weather., The medieval warming period. Over that time the population of Europe is doubled... Farmers Had been able to plant multiple crops per year. Greenland had crops and herds of grazing animals... Wine was being produced in Scotland... Then around 1300 at all fell apart... As global temperatures fell a degree or two... What's called the little ice age.... Disaster struck a society and a culture that had expanded to a capacity that was no longer mathematically possible...
From 1315 to 1327ish famine was everywhere... There were years when it just rained... And there was no chance for the seeds to even take root because there was no sunshine. There was a warmth.. out of a European population of say 90 million going in to 1300... 10 to 15 million were said to have died from the famines in the 1310s and 20s...
Then be getting in the late 1330s... The black death.. The bubonic plague.. spread from Crimea to Italy to France to Spain to Great Britain to Germany to the Nordic countries to Eastern Europe... Ravaging cities... Sometimes lost 80 to 90% of their population.. bodies stacked as highs walls... One hint of it in the gossip of the town one day... By the end of the week everyone was dead....
I just say all this to show how much I love history... And how much? I truly believe that knowing deeply knowing history is the only way to get prospective on any individual life experience.. When I see what my ancestors had to go through in order to grant me this gift of life and freedom and so many inventions and ideas that took a collective millennia of the smartest people who have ever existed concoct and perfect... I stand in awe.. my and my soul bleeds gratitude to these giants... These men and women this culture that brought us the idea of the individual... Idea of the citizen... Idea of the abolition of slavery... The idea of universal rights... The idea of free expression protected by law...
What is killing history is the lack of curiosity about the past-an anti-intellectual mentality that has prevailed in this country since the 60's. There are too many people in college who do not belong there because they lack the academic and intellectual temperment that is essential to true and valuable learning. Too many alumni babies, semi literate athletes, a vetting process that allows too many marginally competent students to attend, grade inflation, the cost of college, professors who do not want to teach, too many students who view a degree as a mere guarantor of a well paying job, a lowering of standards, the politization of the humanities and a lowering of standards for admission and graduation. Colleges have one function and that is to teach their students about the acquired knowledge of the past as well as the transmission of new knowledge and the search for the truth no matter where it lead. They cannot do this if speech codes and the harassment of speakers and students of a conservative persuasion are not allowed to participate in the academic arena. Until colleges throw off their leftist tilt and return to an open university that encourages respect for the truth and mutual respect for people of different views and an atmosphere conducive to integrity and maturity the university will continue to flounder between a no mans land of confusion and public disgust.
Glen, this is the important question. History is a vital subject. Lord knows we want to avoid being condemned to repeat it. But even if we have thriving History departments and many available jobs, we remain at risk for that same condemnation if we don't get the history right.
History can be dull and lifeless. It can be of the fairy tale variety of the sort we in the USA have long gotten in elementary school. We pick up a few easily digestible myths about George Washington, our Revolutionary War, the Civil War and so on. The identity influenced by those early myths in turn influences our voting as adults. We cite the Constitution as it suits us, usually never having read it or any scholarship around the forces and considerations which shaped what was included or left out.
If we're to avoid being condemned to repeat our mistakes, our study and understanding of history must be accurate. It can't be written or taught by ideologues. Or for political purposes. Or the product of the filters of motivated reasoning. Here's an example of a good, thought provoking history book: The Scars of Independence by Holger Hoock. He's a serious historian. (his credentials are on the back flap) Its focus is on violence, both physical and psychological, used during our revolutionary war. I would guess it isn't widely read, which is a shame. I mention it simply because it seems responsible to cite an example if I'm going to post a comment.
But here's the trouble with the way it seems history is still taught and which leads down the path of inaccuracy and that sticky phenomenon of condemnation. It seems history is still thought of and taught in the way it has long been, well, historically. In my opinion, historians would do well to genuinely study other fields bearing on human behavior a great deal more. It's fine to cite what someone or a group has done but to leave out why is a terrible lost opportunity. I'm thinking of social sciences (e.g. social psychology) and evolutionary biology.
Just saying what the Nazis did, for example, and simply calling it evil or unique to 1930s Germans is a terrible mistake. Failing to understand the manipulations of the Marxism at the time the Soviet Union got off the ground is another. Failing to understand the human psychology of why people were receptive to messages or unable to resist them at scale makes us more likely to repeat scenarios.
Here's an example from evolutionary biology I'll try not to butcher via concision. A piece of territory can support 10 farming families using existing methods and, lo and behold, 10 families begin to occupy it. A technicalogical advance (the invention of the wheel, for example) means that same territory can now support 20 families. Kids are birthed, "others" move onto it and things are fine until we're at 20 families. That's capacity. Then the 20 lose a war or something, the shells they trade with "others" lose their value and things on the territory get tight. Harmony is strained. People start to look at each other funny. "Us's" and "Others" become more top of mind. Scapegoating begins and that scapegoating starts to make a hell of a lot of sense. I mean, there's only so much to go around and we need to make some hard decisions here. And so on. Kind of like 1930s Germany.
This isn't our (human's) first rodeo at this.
But it seems that on one side of campus the evolutionary biologists and psychologists studying individual and group human behavior, right down to the epigenetic level, are treading one path, while on the other side of campus the history department is still doing things their old way, missing large and valuable points and writing inaccurate (through omission) histories. That path seems to be the path to irrelevance.
I mean, come on, people. Marketers in the business department study what it is about human nature which can be used to sell products. Politicians at least focus group people in order to tailor their messages to be most appealing to likely voters. This is practical social science. And if it doesn't work (is inaccurate) in the human arena, it's back to the drawing board.
Once again, Jonathan Haidt's brilliant The Righteous Mind documents social science methods being used to study the human nature of moral psychology. His points are well argued. The data are recent human history and the conclusions prescient. There is much accuracy in that book. More should read it.
What's killing the History Profession is the history profession.
I read recently that only 10% of full PhDs in History had jobs teaching - at any post-secondary level, under any contractual status, by a full year after the completion of their doctorates. I’ll look for the citation. Ok, that’s staggering and rather demoralizing in the big picture “forest” sense. But how about this re: the culture war “trees”, if that’s all it is. I heard the following, directly, in face to face conversation, this year, from a still youngish tenured professor in history at a major public research university in a reddish-purple state. He’s left-leaning, of course, but is more today’s version of a liberal Dem than a left-wing, identitarian progressive. He was describing his and his colleagues participation in the recent hiring of three tenure-track faculty members. He indicated that it was overwhelmingly clear to all, in spite of this criterion not quite being made entirely explicit, that the result was preordained: all three new tenure track faculty hires must be black. That was basically the one known, threshold requirement, before anything anything else about the candidates was presented and considered. He told me that, in his opinion, the most impressive candidate by far was a white woman whose research focus might’ve been appealing for “diversity” reasons - but, alas, her own identity, however, was not. He said the first candidate chosen was also very impressive and was likely to have been a serious contender to be shortlisted if not chosen, under any circumstances. He said the second candidate chosen was “perfectly fine”, but wouldn’t have been near the top if skin color hadn’t been the essential and primary qualification. He told me the third candidate chosen was, “at the very best, completely middle of the pack” - out of hundreds of serious applicants. All three candidates chosen for the three tenure track positions - these increasingly rare, enviable positions, for which brilliant young scholars devote several years of intense pressure and accumulated debt by slogging through the PhD process in near-poverty, just to have to opportunity to apply and compete to show their erudition, their intellectual mettle, perhaps even their teaching ability - were all black. In the end, that was the only criterion that mattered. If administrators and faculty hiring committees don’t really care about DEI, they’re putting on quite a substantively impactful show. If faculty themselves aren’t, in their heart of hearts, entirely on board with DEI certitudes and hierarchies determining who can join them in these few and rarified positions among the most credentialed in society, it doesn’t matter because there is effective near-total conformity - and silence. No one wants to rock the boat, let alone become a pariah in their own department and university, let alone risk their own potential advancement or job security. The professor who told me all this described the process as “cringy and gross”. As this is a newer acquaintance and one who does pay lip service to most of the assumptions of mainstream progressive politics, and, because I could imagine many of his peers thinking and quietly sharing similar reactions to his about how the hiring process was conducted, I took a more sympathetic tack and ventured that what had happened was, whatever else one might think about it, also terribly unfair to the new faculty hired. The brilliant top contender chosen first may or may not have been chosen if skin color hadnt been a threshold requirement. But, under actual circumstances, anyone might plausibly if unfairly question why he was hired, or even his overall qualifications. Hopefully, he won’t be plagued by self doubt himself. The other two candidates have, to varying degrees, even more reason to have their qualifications quietly questioned and even more reason for self-doubt. The professor I was speaking with exclaimed “totally!” (I promise, he’s a brilliant guy). Faculty know this process and these criteria are grossly patronizing, condescending, and implicitly insulting to the very candidates they’re meant to elevate. They know there is a risk of such faculty being shadowed and perhaps plagued by questions of merit, if not corrosive self-doubt. They must know how many younger would-be colleagues are now, on the basis of identity, and often identity alone, being shut out of any realistic chance at being hired, no matter how much actual disadvantage they’ve overcome in their own lives, how brilliant they are, how hard they’ve worked, what unique perspectives and skills they might bring to their scholarship and teaching. And, of course, entirely left out of the whole discussion re: whom should be hired and the clear but unspoken primacy of race was any interest in or actual consideration of whether any of the three candidates chosen had actually come from and overcome real hardship and disadvantage in their own lives and whether they actually brought anything of a true outsider’s perspective which might broaden and enrich the department and its teaching and scholarship, for faculty and students alike. No, skin color was simply a univariate proxy for all of that. So, yeah, such jobs might gradually be disappearing - and that’s a tragedy in my view, even as far as universities have fallen. But for the near term, it really depends on one’s superficial identity.
History teachers today deserve their fate for constantly bending their knee to the latest woke condemnation of what white men did to singularly ruin the world across time and space such that every historical event resolves to white man was only ever an oppressive and everyone else was a victim. Anyone could ace an exam or research paper by keeping that simple message consistent throughout. Don’t really need to be smart or dedicated to get a PhD in History now. Indeed a Master’s in DE&I is a prerequisite for a History teacher.
The degradation of history starts at K-12, and then gets a stake driven through its heart by the university. I guess the market isn’t buying revisionism.
My big argument against tenure is related to what Bessner said about conservatives not becoming professors. I lean right and have tenure, but I don't actually believe that tenure would protect me if I started voicing various right-leaning opinions, and there have been some recent cases in the US where tenure wasn't enough to protect the professor.
Even when tenure is enough, it usually involves a long legal battle that most people don't want to bother with.
Or let's say that you voice some heterodox opinion that other professors and admins don't like. Yes, maybe they can't fire you because of your words. What they can do, however, is start digging into your past to find something that CAN be used as a foothold to make a case that you should lose your job.
As always, conservatives focus not on the theoretical (tenure means you can say what you want without being fired) but rather the practical (people with tenure have been fired)
In sum, if tenure doesn't REALLY protect you, what's the point? As far as I can see, it only really protects you if you have an opinion that you believe to be "unconventional" or "fighting the power" but it's actually an opinion that everyone around you shares.
Glenn… can you try to get Matthew Desmond on the podcast to discuss his new book about poverty.
look its a black nazi blitler women sexual assaulter beater murder threatener, watch your back traitor, us americans will arrest you nazi traitors, enjoy gitmo 2.0 you fu/cking who/re son of a bit/ch youre lucky we dont hang our traitors anymore you reagan pig fuc/k you dic.k rider pu/ssy cow/ard cointelpro closet nazi grifter you will pay for your crimes against america, mark my words you wh/ore bit/che bastard of wh/ore
Perhaps the "death" of academic history as a profession is merely a subset of the larger questions around what the word education even means anymore. We've only had a few decades properly in the Information Age, and before that, it wasn't possible to look up countless treatises and primary source documents online. Now anyone can be a historian.
As our interviewer points out, there isn't the same kind of objective proving ground for historians as in other professions. Someone who consults Dr. Google is not a doctor, but is someone who looks up history online and forms an opinion about it not a historian?
As Dr. Loury is at Brown, I note that iconic horror author HP Lovecraft has a vast repository of documents stored in Brown's university library system, which are often accessed for novel historical work by unpaid fans doing work that actual literary historians are either lacking in interest or lacking in number to do (I refer fans to the Voluminous podcast). In doing so on their own time, such amateur experts may have effectively driven the economic value of being an academic in this field close to zero.
Why would anyone pay a history professor to tell them things that can be found in a search engine? And if their contribution to the world is things that can't be googled, why pay them to do things that will be done by hobbyists for free? And for things that no one cares enough to do as a hobbyist for free, is there anyone that cares enough to pay money to have them explored academically? And this is before the AI revolution. We all may be obsolete soon enough. Some sooner than others. Maybe the problem with academic history is that the profession is actually declining in value rather than being stabbed in the back by some extrinsic force.
What a golden turn you made on Bill Maher last night, Prof Loury. Wisdom, dignity, generosity.
I think what’s killing the history profession is insufferable blowhards like Bessner.
Ideological capture has not helped history. Neither has the insistence to view all events and people of the past through the lens of the present. It's an anti-history perspective that cuts context out of the equation and discounts any discussion about how things have changed between then and now. When the Founders are reduced to no more than the time in which they were born, no one is learning a thing. And while castigating the long dead for the sins associated with the time in which they lived, the people assailing them often act in identical manner while convincing themselves otherwise.
Today's fixation on identity is no better than previous fixations on identity. The only difference, for now, is that it has not reached the point of mass murder. It has, however, gotten to where it is acceptable to abuse those folks in other ways, be it through hiring (or non-hiring), college admissions, promotions, board seats, or revising "history" to use them as proxies for blaming every bad event that happened on people who liked them.
Let me take a counter position... I see the history, profession, or especially the interest in history by people of all ages, but specifically men who know they were taught garbage throughout their public education... Know that they were taught garbage as a part of their university and college education.. You may not be seeing the interest in history because you're for it in the wrong places... Looking for it in the old places. Podcasting and YouTube is where history is... Where it's become alive again and blossom flourished into an enormously rich and diverse and academically rigorous yet bold and exciting.. adventurous again.
Everyone knows Dan Carlin... I would put him at the top of a list of individuals who have reinstilled a passion for history in the US and around the world. Sure you get the PhDs and scholars at enormously esoteric small slice of the pie bits of of history.. They despise Carlin and those like him because they represent the layman's approach to history and not the postmodernist approach... The ivory towers of the academy have transformed something that is enormously interesting in and of itself.. transformed it into something completely. Unlikable and uninteresting and boring and pretentious unreasonable unreadable., In Every way most academic historians have danced with the demons that gave them tenure and that give them awards and grants for ridiculous fields..
Here's a list of YouTube channels I found in the last 6 months that are just beyond interesting.
https://www.youtube.com/@FallofCivilizations
https://www.youtube.com/@toldinstone
https://www.youtube.com/@VoicesofthePast
https://www.youtube.com/@HistoryDose
https://www.youtube.com/@drraoulmclaughlin7423
https://www.youtube.com/@TheHistoryGuyChannel
https://www.youtube.com/@FORGOTTENHISTORYCHANNEL
https://www.youtube.com/@MarkFeltonProductions
And we're done with western civilization and all of its gifts of innovation and knowledge and literature and music and art and architecture and culture being made out to be inconsequential at best and at present being the second coming of Mephistopheles multiplied by Darth Vader Hitler and Mr. Burns... The caricature of the western philosophy on life on the individual on the state on human nature is so abort and disgusting that it is turned generations of men away from so-called academic historians... They have force-fed pseudo historical lived experience made up history down our throats... Made all white men proclaim themselves as the Hitler to their own individual stories and as a non inconsequential prevail of sin and evil and genocide. And death and rape.. to make western civilization be the archetype of what not to do... How Not to act... All evil. No good.
That story isn't being listened to anyone seriously anymore.. Yes, they're just getting introduced to it and don't know anything else. They're the ones.
History is always but a passion of mine... I read Volume one of gulag archipelago When I was in eighth grade... I dug deep into Russian and German military history. Also had a deep curiosity for ancient Greek and Roman military history... The battles of Alexander fascinated me.. continue to I find them endlessly interesting... I'd say over the past five to 10 years... I've been feeling in the gaps where military history had given me a point of reference a so-called scaffolding... I've really been able to layer in the philosophical the cultural the political... Really trying to find human beings at our worst... Moments of mind bending depravity... Miraculous survival... Near misses that saved millions... Near misses that cost millions...
When you put yourself in the shoes of a somewhat prosperous peasant farmer in the year 1300.. society and culture has had almost 350 years of warmer than normal weather., The medieval warming period. Over that time the population of Europe is doubled... Farmers Had been able to plant multiple crops per year. Greenland had crops and herds of grazing animals... Wine was being produced in Scotland... Then around 1300 at all fell apart... As global temperatures fell a degree or two... What's called the little ice age.... Disaster struck a society and a culture that had expanded to a capacity that was no longer mathematically possible...
From 1315 to 1327ish famine was everywhere... There were years when it just rained... And there was no chance for the seeds to even take root because there was no sunshine. There was a warmth.. out of a European population of say 90 million going in to 1300... 10 to 15 million were said to have died from the famines in the 1310s and 20s...
Then be getting in the late 1330s... The black death.. The bubonic plague.. spread from Crimea to Italy to France to Spain to Great Britain to Germany to the Nordic countries to Eastern Europe... Ravaging cities... Sometimes lost 80 to 90% of their population.. bodies stacked as highs walls... One hint of it in the gossip of the town one day... By the end of the week everyone was dead....
I just say all this to show how much I love history... And how much? I truly believe that knowing deeply knowing history is the only way to get prospective on any individual life experience.. When I see what my ancestors had to go through in order to grant me this gift of life and freedom and so many inventions and ideas that took a collective millennia of the smartest people who have ever existed concoct and perfect... I stand in awe.. my and my soul bleeds gratitude to these giants... These men and women this culture that brought us the idea of the individual... Idea of the citizen... Idea of the abolition of slavery... The idea of universal rights... The idea of free expression protected by law...
Okay I'm done rambling...
What is killing history is the lack of curiosity about the past-an anti-intellectual mentality that has prevailed in this country since the 60's. There are too many people in college who do not belong there because they lack the academic and intellectual temperment that is essential to true and valuable learning. Too many alumni babies, semi literate athletes, a vetting process that allows too many marginally competent students to attend, grade inflation, the cost of college, professors who do not want to teach, too many students who view a degree as a mere guarantor of a well paying job, a lowering of standards, the politization of the humanities and a lowering of standards for admission and graduation. Colleges have one function and that is to teach their students about the acquired knowledge of the past as well as the transmission of new knowledge and the search for the truth no matter where it lead. They cannot do this if speech codes and the harassment of speakers and students of a conservative persuasion are not allowed to participate in the academic arena. Until colleges throw off their leftist tilt and return to an open university that encourages respect for the truth and mutual respect for people of different views and an atmosphere conducive to integrity and maturity the university will continue to flounder between a no mans land of confusion and public disgust.
Woke revisionism? 1619 Project? Blatant historical lying?
Glen, this is the important question. History is a vital subject. Lord knows we want to avoid being condemned to repeat it. But even if we have thriving History departments and many available jobs, we remain at risk for that same condemnation if we don't get the history right.
History can be dull and lifeless. It can be of the fairy tale variety of the sort we in the USA have long gotten in elementary school. We pick up a few easily digestible myths about George Washington, our Revolutionary War, the Civil War and so on. The identity influenced by those early myths in turn influences our voting as adults. We cite the Constitution as it suits us, usually never having read it or any scholarship around the forces and considerations which shaped what was included or left out.
If we're to avoid being condemned to repeat our mistakes, our study and understanding of history must be accurate. It can't be written or taught by ideologues. Or for political purposes. Or the product of the filters of motivated reasoning. Here's an example of a good, thought provoking history book: The Scars of Independence by Holger Hoock. He's a serious historian. (his credentials are on the back flap) Its focus is on violence, both physical and psychological, used during our revolutionary war. I would guess it isn't widely read, which is a shame. I mention it simply because it seems responsible to cite an example if I'm going to post a comment.
But here's the trouble with the way it seems history is still taught and which leads down the path of inaccuracy and that sticky phenomenon of condemnation. It seems history is still thought of and taught in the way it has long been, well, historically. In my opinion, historians would do well to genuinely study other fields bearing on human behavior a great deal more. It's fine to cite what someone or a group has done but to leave out why is a terrible lost opportunity. I'm thinking of social sciences (e.g. social psychology) and evolutionary biology.
Just saying what the Nazis did, for example, and simply calling it evil or unique to 1930s Germans is a terrible mistake. Failing to understand the manipulations of the Marxism at the time the Soviet Union got off the ground is another. Failing to understand the human psychology of why people were receptive to messages or unable to resist them at scale makes us more likely to repeat scenarios.
Here's an example from evolutionary biology I'll try not to butcher via concision. A piece of territory can support 10 farming families using existing methods and, lo and behold, 10 families begin to occupy it. A technicalogical advance (the invention of the wheel, for example) means that same territory can now support 20 families. Kids are birthed, "others" move onto it and things are fine until we're at 20 families. That's capacity. Then the 20 lose a war or something, the shells they trade with "others" lose their value and things on the territory get tight. Harmony is strained. People start to look at each other funny. "Us's" and "Others" become more top of mind. Scapegoating begins and that scapegoating starts to make a hell of a lot of sense. I mean, there's only so much to go around and we need to make some hard decisions here. And so on. Kind of like 1930s Germany.
This isn't our (human's) first rodeo at this.
But it seems that on one side of campus the evolutionary biologists and psychologists studying individual and group human behavior, right down to the epigenetic level, are treading one path, while on the other side of campus the history department is still doing things their old way, missing large and valuable points and writing inaccurate (through omission) histories. That path seems to be the path to irrelevance.
I mean, come on, people. Marketers in the business department study what it is about human nature which can be used to sell products. Politicians at least focus group people in order to tailor their messages to be most appealing to likely voters. This is practical social science. And if it doesn't work (is inaccurate) in the human arena, it's back to the drawing board.
Once again, Jonathan Haidt's brilliant The Righteous Mind documents social science methods being used to study the human nature of moral psychology. His points are well argued. The data are recent human history and the conclusions prescient. There is much accuracy in that book. More should read it.
What's killing the History Profession is the history profession.
I read recently that only 10% of full PhDs in History had jobs teaching - at any post-secondary level, under any contractual status, by a full year after the completion of their doctorates. I’ll look for the citation. Ok, that’s staggering and rather demoralizing in the big picture “forest” sense. But how about this re: the culture war “trees”, if that’s all it is. I heard the following, directly, in face to face conversation, this year, from a still youngish tenured professor in history at a major public research university in a reddish-purple state. He’s left-leaning, of course, but is more today’s version of a liberal Dem than a left-wing, identitarian progressive. He was describing his and his colleagues participation in the recent hiring of three tenure-track faculty members. He indicated that it was overwhelmingly clear to all, in spite of this criterion not quite being made entirely explicit, that the result was preordained: all three new tenure track faculty hires must be black. That was basically the one known, threshold requirement, before anything anything else about the candidates was presented and considered. He told me that, in his opinion, the most impressive candidate by far was a white woman whose research focus might’ve been appealing for “diversity” reasons - but, alas, her own identity, however, was not. He said the first candidate chosen was also very impressive and was likely to have been a serious contender to be shortlisted if not chosen, under any circumstances. He said the second candidate chosen was “perfectly fine”, but wouldn’t have been near the top if skin color hadn’t been the essential and primary qualification. He told me the third candidate chosen was, “at the very best, completely middle of the pack” - out of hundreds of serious applicants. All three candidates chosen for the three tenure track positions - these increasingly rare, enviable positions, for which brilliant young scholars devote several years of intense pressure and accumulated debt by slogging through the PhD process in near-poverty, just to have to opportunity to apply and compete to show their erudition, their intellectual mettle, perhaps even their teaching ability - were all black. In the end, that was the only criterion that mattered. If administrators and faculty hiring committees don’t really care about DEI, they’re putting on quite a substantively impactful show. If faculty themselves aren’t, in their heart of hearts, entirely on board with DEI certitudes and hierarchies determining who can join them in these few and rarified positions among the most credentialed in society, it doesn’t matter because there is effective near-total conformity - and silence. No one wants to rock the boat, let alone become a pariah in their own department and university, let alone risk their own potential advancement or job security. The professor who told me all this described the process as “cringy and gross”. As this is a newer acquaintance and one who does pay lip service to most of the assumptions of mainstream progressive politics, and, because I could imagine many of his peers thinking and quietly sharing similar reactions to his about how the hiring process was conducted, I took a more sympathetic tack and ventured that what had happened was, whatever else one might think about it, also terribly unfair to the new faculty hired. The brilliant top contender chosen first may or may not have been chosen if skin color hadnt been a threshold requirement. But, under actual circumstances, anyone might plausibly if unfairly question why he was hired, or even his overall qualifications. Hopefully, he won’t be plagued by self doubt himself. The other two candidates have, to varying degrees, even more reason to have their qualifications quietly questioned and even more reason for self-doubt. The professor I was speaking with exclaimed “totally!” (I promise, he’s a brilliant guy). Faculty know this process and these criteria are grossly patronizing, condescending, and implicitly insulting to the very candidates they’re meant to elevate. They know there is a risk of such faculty being shadowed and perhaps plagued by questions of merit, if not corrosive self-doubt. They must know how many younger would-be colleagues are now, on the basis of identity, and often identity alone, being shut out of any realistic chance at being hired, no matter how much actual disadvantage they’ve overcome in their own lives, how brilliant they are, how hard they’ve worked, what unique perspectives and skills they might bring to their scholarship and teaching. And, of course, entirely left out of the whole discussion re: whom should be hired and the clear but unspoken primacy of race was any interest in or actual consideration of whether any of the three candidates chosen had actually come from and overcome real hardship and disadvantage in their own lives and whether they actually brought anything of a true outsider’s perspective which might broaden and enrich the department and its teaching and scholarship, for faculty and students alike. No, skin color was simply a univariate proxy for all of that. So, yeah, such jobs might gradually be disappearing - and that’s a tragedy in my view, even as far as universities have fallen. But for the near term, it really depends on one’s superficial identity.
Short answer: history professors and departments are dying off because they continue to vote for the wrong party. Check the data.
History teachers today deserve their fate for constantly bending their knee to the latest woke condemnation of what white men did to singularly ruin the world across time and space such that every historical event resolves to white man was only ever an oppressive and everyone else was a victim. Anyone could ace an exam or research paper by keeping that simple message consistent throughout. Don’t really need to be smart or dedicated to get a PhD in History now. Indeed a Master’s in DE&I is a prerequisite for a History teacher.
The degradation of history starts at K-12, and then gets a stake driven through its heart by the university. I guess the market isn’t buying revisionism.