What's Killing the History Profession?
with Daniel Bessner
History keeps chugging along, but academic history departments are in trouble. In this excerpt from our recent conversation, I talk with historian Daniel Bessner about the economic and institutional pressures that are threatening the professional study of history.
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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.