How important is teaching to college professors? The woeful inadequacy of campus support for good teaching has been well documented in these pages. Nonetheless, even while teaching is poorly assessed and rewarded, and despite the scant pedagogical training provided by graduate schools, most faculty members we know will tell you they take teaching very seriously. Is that sentiment real, or just pious murmuring? To find out, we looked at an unexamined source of evidence: obituaries written by faculty members for their dear departed colleagues.
Why obituaries? “I read obituaries every day,” wrote Sarah Manguso, an American writer and poet, in The Guardians, “to learn what sorts of lives are available to us.” Others share the habit: In Maira Kalman’s The Principles of Uncertainty, she wrote: “I read obituaries first thing in the morning. With a cup of coffee. Maybe it’s a way of trying to figure out, before the day begins, what is important.”
That’s why we read obituaries: to learn what academics think is important for a successful academic career. Sure we could ask our fellow professors directly. But it is always revealing to look for evidence on the slant where individuals might not realize they are divulging their views.
Our data source was the obituaries published in the back pages of the American Historical Association’s monthly, Perspectives on History. With more than 11,000 members, the AHA is the largest membership association of historians in the world. Each obituary in Perspectives offers a window into the essence of a life. But together, the tributes provide tantalizing clues to the importance of teaching vis-à-vis research, service, and other professional obligations.
Keep in mind: With the exception of its “Long Overdue” commemorations, which began in 2023, the AHA itself neither writes nor commissions the “In Memoriam” obituaries published in Perspectives. Its open invitation for obits says they should “focus on the subject’s professional life, but above all should be a historian’s appreciation of a fellow historian, including their influence on colleagues, institutions, their field, and the discipline.” It further states that the decedent need not be an AHA member.
Our project began with memorials in Perspectives from 2021 and worked its way backward in five-year increments to 1996. We then scrutinized the resulting 150 obituaries. For each year, we broke down the tributes by the decedents’ ages, genders (per personal pronouns), and institution categories (research-oriented versus teaching-focused).
We coded the content of the obituaries for language pertaining to the standard faculty work triad of research, teaching, and service. We set a relatively “high bar” for phrasing related to scholarship — for example, we didn’t count mentions of graduate-level activity unless it explicitly resulted in publication. For teaching, we included any language in the obit about classroom performance, working with students, teaching awards, and textbook publications. And for service, we counted any verbiage about a professor’s work with professional organizations, as well as chair responsibilities and administrative posts unrelated to history.
Our findings. The amount of obituary-column space devoted to research dwarfed that of teaching and service, sometimes by a factor of greater than 10 to one. Not only was teaching undervalued in the obits, it was often mentioned even less than service, a category of faculty work that typically is the weakest third leg of the triad. Moreover, we found, research-related obituary content crept upward over the past 25 years, reaching its apogee at 42 percent in 2016, and dropping only slightly by 2021 to 41 percent. Teaching and service, meanwhile, bumped along the bottom, sometimes changing positions with each other, but never eking out more than 17 percent (service) and 14 percent (teaching) of an obit’s total content.
Our sample exposed that some types of academics are more likely to be eulogized than others. This is significant because, as Bridget Fowler, a sociologist at the University of Glasgow, wrote in her study of obituaries, the death notice is more than a simple announcement; rather, it is nothing short of “a verdict, derived from professional peers, about the worth of the dead person’s contribution.” If the relative volumes of obituary column space are testimony to what academics value, the message is clear: Research is perceived as a far more significant career achievement than is teaching or service.
But, readers might be thinking, is that really a surprise? Wouldn’t you expect a professional publication to lean toward emphasizing research in its obits, given that scholarship, by definition, seeks to reach a national/global audience while teaching reaches a local audience? So more people around the country would know scholars by their research than by their teaching, right?
We argue that it’s both surprising and even unfortunate that the obits are tilted so heavily toward research for the following reasons:
- The AHA isn’t just a national scholarly organization. It’s an umbrella group for all historians, including high-school teachers, community-college instructors, and adjuncts. Yet the many AHA members whose careers don’t revolve around scholarship are conspicuously absent in the Perspectives obituary pages.
- The overwhelming attention paid to research in the tributes is maybe not so surprising for academics at research-oriented institutions. But as our data show, even the obits for historians at teaching-oriented locations focus primarily on scholarship. That was unexpected, insofar as these colleges typically present themselves with a “teaching-first” mission.
- The AHA increasingly promotes the importance of teaching, yet that effort has had demonstrably no effect on how historians remember their fellow historians. This is further astonishing since academics admit to devoting more time to teaching than to any other professional activity.
Who were the decedents? Not surprisingly, their gender was highly skewed toward males, who made up 85 percent of the sample. The gender skews in any given year seemed to be artifacts of earlier employment conditions. But women were not the only underrepresented demographic.
Given the AHA’s broad invitation for obituaries, the complete absence of high-school teachers, contingent instructors, and community-college faculty members (just one instance of the latter in the sample of 150 obits) illustrates another important selection bias. Overall, the obituary sample included nearly four times as many notices for faculty members at research-oriented institutions (69 percent) than for those at non-research-oriented locations (18 percent) in the U.S.
Let’s juxtapose those figures with other data points about the actual makeup of the higher-ed history faculty. According to the AHA’s own “Where Historians Work,” only 28 percent of Ph.D.s from 2004-13 secured tenured or tenure-track positions at research-oriented campuses, compared with the 48 percent of comparable historians at teaching-oriented colleges. More recent data show that it has become even harder for history Ph.D.s to secure tenure-track positions of any kind, let alone at research universities. Remembering Fowler’s observation that obituaries are a verdict on decedents’ professional contributions, the present sample of Perspectives In-Memoriam subjects speaks volumes when considering who achieves remembrance — and, just as important, who does not.
That so many more entries paid tribute to historians at research-focused institutions predicted that scholarship would loom large in actual obituary content each year. But what about the tributes to professors at non-research-oriented institutions? Did they emphasize teaching?
Our data showed a relative emphasis on research regardless of institutional type. Obituaries of historians in research-oriented posts devoted 39 percent of their content to scholarship, compared with 31 percent for professors in teaching-oriented jobs. For the latter group, whose careers played out in environments where you might expect greater attention to teaching and service, only 11 percent of the typical obit was devoted to teaching and 7 percent to service — proportions that are quite close to the research-oriented obituary cohort (12 and 11 percent, respectively).
In a setting like Perspectives, where commemorations of research-geared academics regularly dominate the obituaries section, professional values and/or modes of remembrance seem to have trickled down more than up. Given the clear centrality of scholarship across institution types, the split between different types of institutions becomes a distinction without much difference.
So why is teaching discounted in historians’ obituaries, even at teaching colleges? It hardly makes sense when you consider that, as one study showed, the typical college professor gives 62 percent of their work week to teaching, but only 18 percent to research.
In his book, The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America, Jonathan Zimmerman offered an answer that makes sense to us. Because there is no consensus on how to assess quality teaching, he posits that there is a corresponding dearth of language to discuss it meaningfully. If an AHA obituary has only trite things to say about a former colleague’s instructional prowess, much of it might owe to an inability to go beyond such proxies as lecturing talents, popularity with students, and personal charisma. That is unfortunate, insofar as teaching is a potential lingua franca connecting academics not only across subspecialties, but entire disciplines.
Since the 1990s, pedagogical reformers have sought to elevate the status and effectiveness of college teaching. Historians are well-represented in that movement, and the AHA has worked to advance history pedagogy with regular columns on teaching. A 2015 essay from its executive director, James Grossman, was even titled “To Be a Historian Is to Be a Teacher.”
But has any of that activity moved the needle on academic priorities for historians? Their obituaries suggest not. Is it harmful that only a small slice of the historical profession is represented in those tributes? Or that some career activities are privileged over others? We say “yes” to both questions.
Consider faculty hiring practices. A recent study found that a mere 20 percent of U.S. universities produced 80 percent of the tenured and tenure-track faculty members at doctoral institutions, setting up prestige hiring patterns favoring a small handful of degree-holders over all others. Such exclusion and intellectual inbreeding were not lost on the study’s authors, one of whom told The Chronicle that “we are almost surely missing out on many extremely talented people and innovative ideas.”
Hiring committees have the power to block candidates from entry into the faculty ranks. While there is no such rigid impediment to obituary placements in Perspectives, an informal barrier seems to be operative, nonetheless. Academics (and their would-be eulogists) whose positions and/or accomplishments do not harmonize with those at research-oriented universities appear to self-select out of the commemoration process. A 2007 study of newspaper obituaries called such omissions “systematic forgetting.”
Gone are the stories from the myriad high-school teachers, two-year college instructors, part-timers, and adjuncts. Underrepresented are the voices of women and academics of color. Unwritten are the values of those whose careers did not revolve mostly around research, but whose classroom contributions were no less important.
The fact that the great majority of AHA death notices represent just a small minority of practitioners and institution types gives a warped impression of who historians are, the work we do, and the value attached to it. Our findings track with a 2011 survey of more than 2,000 academic historians that revealed that, while faculty members at teaching-driven colleges were more likely to rate teaching as highly important than their peers at research-oriented universities, all different types of respondents confirmed the priority given to scholarly productivity. In an era of depressed history enrollments and public skepticism toward the usefulness of higher education, such values may be counterproductive to the health of history departments and the institutions housing them.
It is hard to turn a very big ship. The nautical term for doing so is “advance and transfer.” When the helm is put hard over, for a while nothing happens, as forward momentum pushes the ship in the direction of its previous course. Eventually, though, the rudder causes a change of direction. The bigger the ship, the longer it takes to steer to a new heading.
As it is at sea, so it is in higher education. A quarter century of calls for a course correction in the status and practice of history teaching has moved practitioners in some ways, but the profession over all continues to coast on the old heading. A reading of obituaries written by historians about historians suggests that the profession may not be adjusting to the massive changes currently reshaping the landscape of American higher education.
If there is good news, it is that many of the perceived problems appearing here are largely of historians’ own making. Changing values is difficult but it’s well within our collective ability to commemorate careers that have hitherto gone mostly unnoticed. The AHA extends an open invitation to such memorials. It is time for eulogists to take up that generous offer.
