I want to pose a question to historians, as a profession: Did we make a decision in the past that has had consequences, presumably not positive ones, for our present and future? The question invites looking backward as a way to think about the future. Were there possibilities we missed? Did we lose part of ourselves sometime in the past?
The question is related to the plea recently made by the president and the executive director of the American Historical Association to consider nonacademic as well as academic careers as proper outcomes of doctoral education. This issue is forcing serious thinking not just in history, but in the humanities generally. And it affects not just our professional lives, but our lives as citizens.
The cultures of our departments too often discourage open discussion of nonacademic careers. One of the dirty little secrets discovered by the AHA Committee on Graduate Education, which I and others reported in The Education of Historians for the Twenty-First Century (2004), was that graduate students from various institutions were afraid to tell their advisers that Plan B, a nonacademic career, was for them Plan A. They preferred to pursue the profession of history in museums, historical societies, filmmaking, and the park service, among other possibilities. But they worried that if their advisers learned of that ambition, they could expect little or no future support from them.
Equally unsettling, the study reported that survey research covering thousands of doctoral students showed that graduate students in history, more than any other discipline except philosophy, entered graduate school to become teachers and left wanting to be researchers with as little teaching responsibility as possible. That really narrows the definition of our profession.
Somewhat out of character, let me deploy my own biography here. I received my Ph.D. in 1971. That was in the beginning of the job “crisis” in history. It was sudden and definitely unexpected. Moreover, senior faculty had not a clue about what was happening at AHA meetings where, they assumed, jobs would beckon us. There was no published job register then, and students scurried around hotels on the basis of rumors and little signs posted on bulletin boards announcing interviews. Wait for things to return to normal, the elders said.
After almost a half century, we must acknowledge a new normal. The employment situation in academic history is endemic, structural. We face disinvestment in higher education at all but the wealthiest private universities, and the long secular decline in humanities enrollments that began around 1970 and has not been significantly reversed. The structural mismatch between the production of Ph.D.'s and positions available in academe will continue and perhaps worsen. And our professional association has no mechanism to control that production and even less chance of increasing demand.
But turning back to my experience in 1971: I was lucky. I got a tenure-track job. It was at the University of Wisconsin’s then-new campus at Green Bay. The job was not, however, in a history department. In fact, the campus did not have a history department—or any disciplinary departments. In response to the educational critiques students were making in the early 1960s, all departments were interdisciplinary, with an environmental focus; student activism was encouraged (required internships for all); and cosmopolitanism was a major objective. There were history courses, but no history major.
I considered myself to be an intellectual historian, but my dissertation was about 19th-century ideas concerning industrialization, social welfare, and city planning. That gave me enough background to offer courses oriented to urban development and reform as well as questions of community in contemporary urban life. There was one course that I had to teach if I wanted the job. They had a name for it: “The City Through Time and Space.” By that they meant a global history of cities from their invention thousands of years ago to the present. The course kept me up late, but it was in a real sense the foundation of everything I have done since.
Unfortunately, the curricular experiment at Green Bay was too radical and proved short-lived. But in my time there, I flourished in that nonhistory department that included city planners along with a cluster of various people from the social sciences. I was happy to be educating students who would be equipped to make urban lives better whether as citizens or urban professionals. I moved to New York and New York University, and I have for many years been delighted teaching undergraduate majors and doctoral students in history.
My point, though, is that both the work I did in Green Bay and the work that I now do in New York appeal to me. Surely we can have both, and we can prepare our students for a broader menu of professional work. It would mean an expansion of who we are as a profession. Or rather, it would mean going back to the founding ideals of our profession. Can we go back to the future?
When the Johns Hopkins and Columbia Universities established the first graduate schools, they described them in civic terms, not in narrowly academic or disciplinary ones. They proposed to educate civic leaders. In his annual report for 1880-81, the president of Columbia explained that a new graduate faculty was created to develop the “mental culture” of postgraduate scholars. Starting with the School of Political Science (the title is a clue), which would soon become the Faculty of Political Science, the new faculty took its work to be the training of men for the “civil service,” the “duties of public life,” and to be “public journalists.”
Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson both responded to this vision of advanced learning. Roosevelt enrolled in the Columbia program in “Public Law,” offered jointly between the law school and the new School of Political Science, while Wilson enrolled in Herbert Baxter Adams’s seminar at Johns Hopkins. Both men intended to pursue careers in public life. A very large proportion of the key journalists and reformers identified with the Progressive movement were in those programs, as well as the one established at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1904.
Not all students went into nonacademic careers, but a significant number did. And some moved back and forth, like John Huston Finley, who at various times taught political science and edited The New York Times. In fact, 64 percent of the Ph.D. graduates of Johns Hopkins in the 1880s went into academic careers, but the other 36 percent pursued a variety of careers, many of them as civic reformers. Of those who took Ph.D.'s at Hopkins between 1900 and 1920, about 30 percent pursued careers in social or civic leadership and noncollege education, whether in high schools or as educational administrators. According to the AHA, in 1900 roughly 43 percent of all history Ph.D.'s were not employed as college teachers.
As I began reflecting on my own history and that of my profession, I made a count of the job choices of the 40 students whose dissertations I have advised to date at NYU. About a quarter have gone—as a first choice—into nonacademic careers in museums and archives, or into community advocacy, editing, filmmaking, writing nonfiction for young adults, university administration, and news production. Those students included some of the best I have supervised, including one of the three advisees who won the Allan Nevins Prize of the Society of American Historians for the best dissertation. For those students, nonacademic careers had much to offer. We need to work hard to get beyond the Plan B mentality.
I do not have solid evidence on this point, but I think the notion of academe as the only suitable outcome of doctoral education is a myth generated by the highly untypical period from the mid-1950s to about 1970. My sense is that the historical profession (and the human sciences generally) became much narrower and more academic in the decades after World War II. Oddly, not only was this narrowing nourished by the flush times of the so-called academic Golden Age that ended in the early 1970s, but it has even accelerated during the hard times since. We have to get past that Golden Age myth, which turned out to be fool’s gold, and recover our deeper roots of being in both academe and the larger world, using history to change the world as well as to describe it.
In line with that, we need to think about a richer curriculum for undergraduate and graduate historians. That will require working with colleagues in other departments and schools of universities to challenge the fear of change and establish new tracks and new majors.
We should think much more about joint efforts with professional schools and programs; we should more aggressively describe history as a pre-professional major for certain nonhistory careers, most obviously law and public service in both the domestic and international realms. And I would add business as well. Thinking about history as a major or co-major in those ways would not only increase enrollment but also provide a strong historical and liberal education for those who practically shape the world we live in. I want them to do that work with the knowledge and the analytical and communication skills we teach to historians.
But it will require more than catalog copy. It means developing appropriate courses. How many history departments offer a course on the history of the Constitution? Or any form of legal history for undergraduates? How many have a prelaw adviser? Why should we not take over the prelaw constituencies from political science and economics, where students are increasingly indoctrinated in the very jazzy but limited methods of rational choice? I would say the same for students interested in public service. The extension of our knowledge and methods would itself be a public service.
Our most important partners may be education schools and departments. The fate of history (and shall I say the nation?) depends heavily on the quality of secondary-school teaching. The moment is opportune: We are in the early stages of a huge generational change in schoolteachers.
The connection between history and civic life, between history in the schools and the university, was well understood by the early leaders of our profession. Herbert Baxter Adams, Frederick Jackson Turner, Albert Bushnell Hart, among others, all devoted considerable energy to outlining the school history curriculum, and they all spent time on teacher development. Their aims could be ours: Better teaching of history in the high schools will produce more students in our classrooms, as well as elevating general historical literacy and the level of national political discourse.
There are more possibilities for joint programs and degrees than I can list here, but they would include linkages with public affairs, business administration, international relations, social work, and journalism. That would bring historical thinking to the professions and provide students with a means of using that package of knowledge and skills. Whatever the value or lack of it in these specific suggestions, I hope historians will seriously consider resetting the discussion and exploring the value of introducing history and the liberal arts generally into professional training in many domains. That is what we were trying to do in the urban-analysis program at Green Bay long ago.
Although an employment crisis prompts these reflections, there are good educational and civic reasons to think big. Doctoral training in history as it developed in the 19th century included a commitment to civic life and leadership; in the first half of the 20th century, history was at the core of civic professionalism, partly because the social sciences generally were then historicist. With the loss of that perspective in the social sciences, it is all the more important and opportune for history to extend its terrain. I hope we can recover our forgotten legacy as we go forward. Let us indeed consider going back to the future.
