In a world where social media, information technology, and distrust of cultural and political institutions threaten to destabilize the very notion of truth, we need historians and climate scientists and biologists now more than ever. They remind us that what happened did indeed happen, and that it matters. But some critics, wary of false promises to prospective Ph.D.s, would have us shrink graduate programs in history and other disciplines, because declining undergraduate enrollments mean a shrinking academic job market.
The department of history at the University of New Mexico, where I am a professor, has a long record of sending graduates into careers both inside and outside the academy. Our alumni have brought their knowledge and skill to state history offices, museums, archives and libraries; to national laboratories and branches of the military; to national-security jobs and social-activist NGOs; to the tourist industry; to the corporate sector; and yes, to colleges and universities. We want to see more professionally trained historians contributing more than ever before to debate, decisions, policy, and public culture.
Over the past four years, as one of four pilot programs in the American Historical Association’s “Career Diversity for Historians” initiative, we have focused explicitly on preparing our graduates for diverse career paths. We have not taken on this job because we cannot “place” our Ph.D.s in academic jobs. (We can and do.) But our students come to us with a shared passion for history and widely diverse priorities, needs, and desires. They demand and deserve an education that supports them in bringing what they know to all kinds of professions and audiences, wherever they want to live and work.
Here are three ideas about how to promote career diversity:
First: Don’t sweat it too much. Faculty members sometimes feel ill prepared to teach career-diversity skills. But the same skills that make good professors make good professionals. We need to know how to communicate effectively, in person and in writing; to collaborate with colleagues; to do at least some quantitative work (writing grant-proposal budgets, or balancing department accounts, at a minimum); and to do our work with competence and confidence.
Naming and valuing those skills in our classrooms may lead us to create new assignments, or we may reframe what we are already doing. A book review, for example, is an exercise in conveying information to a particular audience; what happens when the imagined reader is not an academic specialist but, rather, the person who picks up a free copy of the local arts-and-entertainment weekly or subscribes to The New York Times?
Second: Use the whole university. At New Mexico, we have a menu of professionalization workshops, courses, and seminars, drawing on resources that might include the Center for Teaching and Learning and the professional-development programs offered by our university’s human-resources department. We are working with our Graduate Studies office to offer career services for graduate students, and we’re encouraging them to enroll in certificate programs in historic preservation or museum studies, for example, that add to their credentials when they go on the market. We urge them to see beyond disciplinary boundaries, to approach the university as the cornucopia of knowledge, expertise, and opportunity that it is.
Third: Connect with alumni. Our department has long prided itself on the fierce loyalty and delight our alumni maintain in their connection to the university, and to the community of graduates of the program. In some fields, notably Western American, Latin American, and medieval history, our alumni gather annually at conferences, promote one another for positions inside and outside the academy, and hold tight to lifelong friendships and solidarity.
Of course, we endlessly harangue our alumni for contributions, but we think they should get something more than a coffee mug or a window sticker for their generosity. Last year we held an alumni retreat weekend that led to the founding of the UNM History Graduate Alumni Network.
This year we will welcome our first alumni fellow, Evelyn Schlatter, a senior analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center, who will spend a week in residence in the department, giving talks, meeting with students and faculty members, and pursuing her own research. We look to build a sustainable professional, social, and support community for our current, past, and future students.
In the end, career diversity is really about bringing history — or climate science or biology — to the nation we are now, serving the students we have now. A first-generation graduate student taking care of a couple of kids and aging parents may have obligations and desires that make the academic job market too tight a fit. Say he wants to be a historian. We need to expand our vision to meet his needs.
Virginia Scharff, a professor of history at the University of New Mexico, directed its pilot project on career diversity, sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the American Historical Association.
