"The Collapse of Academic History" Topic

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History faculties are in deep decline.

When I started university many, many years ago, one of my ambitions was to go to grad school, get my doctorate, & teach history. I had a few professors that suggested that life might be easier if I did something else. Including some that suggested using my degree to get a paralegal certification. I ended up not going into academics, but into the private sector, because in the end I made more money doing jobs without a degree, than if I paid for a lot of expensive education, as an historian. This was all the way back in 2002. when I graduated.

I sometimes think about going back to get a master's degree, but only for myself, not for academia. My wife thinks I should get a teaching job down here in Ecuador (I already do teach, but I teach English as a second language), but the state of history & historians in Ecuador is even worse; anyone with an interest in history teaches in high schools, not work in a University, as far as I know (the local university is uleam.edu.ec Here is their list of programs: link No history listed…). So it is a situation not limited to the US, I think.

Damon.

by enlarge that true of most of the liberal Arts if it not STEM no money.

Never mind, I did find Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador offers an undergrad degree in History. But they are in Quito & I am in Manta (8hr commute!)

Damon.

Thanks, Bill, for improving the title. No idea how it ended up on Ironclads!

I taught in the UK – De Montfort – and we saw it coming some years ago and the emphasis now on on STEM areas the sciences and technologies.

I agree the culling of the history subject is the act of philistines and should be resisted.

the problem is how, raising the profile of the subject, making the subject more attractive to students and the powers that be.

if i understand it right the idea of liberal arts degree is how it is approached in the us but maybe the students want single subject degrees which is the approach in the uk.

that would make any subject more specialised from the start and give students a deep commitment to the subject which would boost the masters level studies.

my interest in the subject started at 16 when I did A level History ( The Stuarts) as a third of my studies. We study 3 major subjects before university and then specialise at university.

another approach would be to combine with a second related subject – like the Oxford PPE (politics, philosophy and economics.)

I would hate to think that history was doomed.

Based on my experience with liberal arts academia and universities
1 history needs a football team otherwise there is no money for them.
2 the Deans want higher salaries for themselves but not the staff
3 finally most state politicians do not care about education, especially funding it keeping the public dumb from politically stupid ideas

Richard

1. in the UK sport -any sport- is irrelevant to unis in terms of finances except where sports degrees are done the only uni I can think of is Loughborough who produces coaches and sporters but theres no real money in it.

2. high managerial salaries and the casualisation of academic staff (no tenure for most) is rampant plus little extras like accomodation, chauffeur driven cars expense accounts.

3.politiians dont have too much to do with us as our universities are not linked to counties but to cities but are financed by student fees backed by central government loans to to repaid after graduation but their actions hit unis. the current anti immigrant feeling by the governing party will cut overseas students access down and many unis have a third of their income from overseas students studying in the uk. we also get the odd idiot politctian playing party politics this was obvious during the Brexit debacle where any lecturer questioning the Brexit logic was to be reported to a particular MP. it failed by universal riducule but it did represent step 5 to a facist state.

It's not just histpry, but many if not all academic fields are in massive decline. A good friend that is a major player in a science program continues to amaze me with tales of how they "have to" crank kids through, even though not too long ago they would have bounced them for being too stupid to graduate.

History is 'squishy' so it's easy for poor performers to get ahead if they are able to schmooze and be political in the department.

My college recently decided to cut majors in music, theatre, and history. This is supposed to be a temporary thing for three years or so. I have my doubts, though.

I do think 2022 was a good year for politicians and others to demonstrate how very little they actually know about our history.

Grelber

I think the issue that is ignored is relevancy. Whether we like it or not, if the subject is not relevant it won't attract students, which requires professors, which requires resources.

I love history. I received my BA in history and, later in life, I received my masters in War Studies from King's College London. Trust me, you can't study war without studying history. Studying history for the sake of the knowledge of history is fun, and it's what attracted me to history to start with. However, in today's world and given the cost of an education, not many students want to pay tens of thousands of dollars to get a degree that has little application outside of academia.

And this is where historians are missing the boat. History has relevancy in the real world, but most professors, or even hiring managers are not aware of the skills that go with a history degree. Here's a few I found in my career:

1. Ability to write and communicate.
2. Ability to articulate a sound argument.
3. Research skills.
4. Analytical skills.
5. Critical thinking skills.

I read, study, and write history for fun, but if you want a healthy history program you need to be relevant.

Although the article presents the loss of teaching positions, it doesn't examine the (probably) related loss of student. I'll wager that the number of history students has declined just as bad, or worse; no students, no professors, no resources.

The point about STEM is germane; at universities with STEM and humanities programs, admin often complains that the STEM faculties are subsidizing the humanities (which they often do) – but that is not such a bad thing as government throws wads of cash at STEM programs

They told us in 1974-5 not to go on to graduate school in History, and of my graduate school classmates, no white male was ever offered a full-time position. (One of the females got a two-year appointment at the University of Swaziland in Kwaluseni, one of our black males already had a position and the other one turned down a teaching job to go into administration. So by 1983, not a single one of us was teaching History who hadn't already been teaching History before entering the PhD program.) My old department is now the "Department of History and Political Science."

Yes, student numbers are down. If they were filling the seats, they'd keep the funding. But if all History departments do is serve warmed up sociology and political science, why major in History? There's an award at my old department for the best research paper. Since it's named after my wife, I get copies. They're not encouraging.

raylev3 is right, of course. And don't neglect the value of learning the facts of history. You recognize patterns after a bit, or you wind up being the only man in the office to understand why the foreigners are doing this or that. I made the same points in a sort of career day presentation--but the development of research and analytical skills only works if the faculty prefer sound research and analysis over being agreed with. I can't prove anything, but some days I have my doubts.

Any more gloom I can add to the discussion? Some time in the next hundred years, the situation will improve. But we haven't hit bottom yet.

And non-academics are still turning out some very good work.

I went to a university with a strong history program that included a wide variety of topics from very woke classes to hard-hitting military history. Also happened to be the premier teacher preparation university in the region that turns out more high school history teachers than any other regional university. I had a great experience. Definitely saw some students who had no business being in college

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." – George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1905.

As a professor at my college for 36 years now this is very real for me.

For one, the idea of a Liberal Arts college/university is dying. They are moving towards a Tech type college system. Just throw in majors that are all about doing a job.

I have seen the humanities, including my field of history, become smaller and smaller while programs like "sports science" and "sports management" increase. Every time a professor retires in humanities it goes over to one of the new majors that are being promoted.

My guess in a few years majors like English, History, Political Science will be done away with at my college.

Grattan54+1

Yes, this is a problem. At my school(UND), in the past ten years or so we've gone from 120+ majors to around 50, from 11 tenured/tenure track faculty to five, and our graduate program has been eliminated. We survive mainly as a service department, fulfilling students' general education requirements in humanities and diversity.

I would argue, however, that the problem is basically that what higher ed. means to students and management has changed. When I started at university back in the Pleistocene (1975) at the University of Washington, tuition was something like $160 USD per term. Even considering inflation, that was far -- FAR -- less than what our students are paying today. And we mostly thought about our classes as education broadly conceived: yes, we we aimed to get a job, but we also were (mostly) happy to take classes that also made us more complete human beings and that allowed us to avoid being full fledged grown ups for a few more years. But these days, without the government support that it was, and with tuition rising accordingly, yeah, I'm not sure that taking classes in history or in any of the other humanities could be considered a good investment.

Today, for the most part, schools conceive of themselves as being in the business of delivering a product and the most successful deliver what the customer wants. Students (and their parents) want a credential that will gain them a leg up in their quest for a lucrative career. As long as that's how folks in the US think about higher ed. -- and considering what students are paying, I cannot blame them -- the humanities are going to have a tough time justifying their existence.

Sorry if this sounds a tad bitter -- I'm retiring shortly and perhaps it's taking a toll on my perspective.

Why spend all that money on a degree in history? All you need to do is go look at a statue.

@machinehead

They have removed all the statues.

"Condemned to repeat it." First time as tragedy, second time as farce. If you know nothing about history, you will believe anything.

History is what the Present finds useful to remember about the Past. Right now too many forget that! And it shows.

I had an interesting conversation with a highly-educated academic some years back. I was getting young colleagues who really had few reasoning skills. If you asked them why they thought something was so, they couldn't produce a coherent answer. Many had money available to them for college courses, so I asked her where I should tell them to go and what they should study to improve their reasoning. She told me she had no idea. Evidently this is not something the modern university system concerns itself with.

Which is why I say we haven't hit bottom yet. A concern for facts and reason will be the first sign of recovery.

1989 PhD in African history. Landed three tenure track positions at three crappy institutions and was successively driven out of each one by 1994, either because the positions were eliminated or they changed the description in order to hire minorities or women to fulfill diversity quotas. After 1995 I lost every search to diversity applicants. Started a remodeling business that I ran for 26 years. Now retired and working as a jewelry artist which I started doing in 1978 and should have done as a career. I still consider myself blessed by good fortune in life and have never been happier.

Majoring in job skills is nothing new just magnified by the cost factor. I have a History BA and in 1981 people always said what are you going to do with that teach? (I went into the Army instead!)

@Captain Avatar: You are wrong, statutes to those deserving of them remain.

in the uk we have suffered the marketisation OF HIGHER education where occupational outcomes are key and students are told education is an investment rather than something for its own sake.

with some degrees this is true = medicine, engineering , the law, archeology, languages.

where a student has to pay high fees they need a quick return so they often pick degrees with a direct route into a job.

only the wealthy can afford to take a degree for the subjects sake.

when students got grants to study without the need to repay they could pursue their interest in a subject and not worry about their financial future or go into work from scratch.

in the uk we have widened access to HE not as much as we need to. at my uni when i was a student in a class of 150 only 6 of us came from working class backgrounds and none from ethnic backgrounds.in my last teaching post 63% of my students were british born from ethnic minority backgrounds and 35% were from working class backgrounds. that was achieved with no preferential treatment for different students nob quotas no positive action.

I had a college history professor who used to leap onto the stage and announce in a dramatic voice "You want relevance? I'll give you relevance right here in 1970!" to start a lecture. He put drama and excitement into his narrative style, humor, and all the twists and turns of a good movie. He understood that the stories and characters were full of real emotion. He acted out his lectures and held us all spellbound.

Maybe we should teach history as part of the Drama Department. Let people feel the emotional relevance of the stories of the past so they can navigate the future better.

Rant deleted. I'll read the article and then rant.

George Santayana – one of many famous and noteworthy alumni of Boston Latin School.

Blutarski – a not so famous alumnus of Boston Latin School.

We both spent six years at BLS studying English, Latin, Math, US History, European History, Ancient History, and a secondary language study – French, German or Ancient Greek.

Do a Google search of famous alumni/ae of Boston Latin School sometime. You'll be surprised, I think.

The school was founded in 1635, oldest public school in America, a year older than Harvard. It is currently being destroyed from the inside by the new lefty politicians running Boston. What a crime.

B

"You are wrong, statutes to those deserving of them remain."

Not necessarily. Frederick Douglas, Abe Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, the 54th Mass.

All attacked, toppled, or removed.

Steve dubgworth@ I don't completely agree the way student loans are currently factored in the UK you either need a quick return to pay them back as you pointed out. Alternatively if you aren't bothered about earning a high salary you can also go the other way and make sure you don't get a good job and then you don't pay anything back. Currently I think the threshold is 27k a year so you could study history become a writer of history books and probably never have to pay back your loans. My son attend university and got a degree in Football studies (I'm not making that up) I very much doubt he will ever earn enough to ever pay back any but a tiny portion of his student loans unless he some how gets a job coaching at or as an analyst for a premier League football club. A lot is made of student debt in the UK but currently, as it stands, it's probably the best loan terms you will ever get in your life and certainly not one to worry about unless you get a very well paid job.

1989 PhD in African history. Landed three tenure track positions at three crappy institutions and was successively driven out of each one by 1994, either because the positions were eliminated or they changed the description in order to hire minorities or women to fulfill diversity quotas. After 1995 I lost every search to diversity applicants.

A path not taken, though I love history and think it's a critical part of a person's education. I abandoned that idea when I explored what it would take to get a MA in History from the University of California system and then get a teaching job from the JC system to the UC system.

1. Be a Leftist. Everything must be deconstructed and spun into neo-Marxist revisionism, or feminist theory, or LGBTQ+ theory, etc. Your dissertations must serve the prevailing narrative.

2. Be diverse. If you are not "diverse" then you must be good at figuring out how to position yourself on the totem pole of oppression.

3. Confess and comply. You must confess your perceived sins, accept salvation in the Left, walk in lockstep with the group, and never refute or critique the group.

So. No chance. The only few places where this did not seem to apply was in the schools that still maintain an ROTC program, but almost all the people teaching military history are reservists – and I never served. So, not to be…

And in that environment, who cares about history, if history is just an endless boring drone-fest of indoctrination and negativity, blech! The universities have engineered their own demise.

Regarding US tuition, please note that, apart from the GI Bill, the National Guard is picking up tuition these days. And in several fields--medicine, for instance--DoD will support you all the way through a doctoral program in return for a 6-year commitment. About half of all students graduate debt-free. Most of the rest could have, but chose not to.

I also think of what a young PhD told me--"these days, if the school charges you the sticker price, they don't really want you there."

I'm going to be divergent here.

History does not have to be taught, though it does need to be learned. As a life-long independent learner, I am happy to read about history. But I really don't think it needs to be a major, except for the very few who desire to spend a life researching history and presenting it to others.

To me, the trend towards STEM in formal education is a positive thing. The ability to do math, science, engineering and the like is absolutely necessary for a society to progress, and is a ticket to high-paying careers. Even specialized studies in non-STEM fields that actually have commercial reality is a good thing. Young people need to be able to do things which are in demand in the economic marketplace, and if college can teach these things, that's great.

But let's be honest here— the traditional "liberal arts" areas— history, English, philosophy and whatnot— are not in high demand outside of an academic setting. If you can write well, then you have a market for your knowledge; people in general love to read, and love to read about history. But that demand has a limit and that limit is reached much more quickly than the demand for someone who can program a computer or engineer a microchip. History is not and never has been an endeavor towards which the marketplace sends great amounts of money, save for a comparative few. It is an endeavor relying far more on charity than commerce to maintain it.

As for some other liberal arts subjects, many really do not require a college experience to prepare one for or pursue. Theater, journalism, music, art— none of these require anywhere near the level of training that the typical four-year institution claims, and some require little actual training at all. (Journalism may be the single most absurd degree ever offered, IMHO.)
While worthy endeavors, and endeavors with great demand along certain avenues, college is hardly needed to set one on the path to excel at these, and innate talent more often than not is the deciding factor over schooling. Which isn't to say that training and practice and hard work are not a factor— it's just that a college environment is not required for any of that to take place.

In none of this do I mean to imply that liberal arts should vanish from the university structure; rather, that I think the higher education system in the West is currently bloated, hampered by the increasing insistence that everyone should go to college and be allowed in. That's absurd. The truth is, most people are NOT cut out for an academic life, and most people can be quite successful with a lot less schooling and a lot more hands-on experience. Indeed, the latter will get your further than the former in many fields. But alas, we've become a society that expects that "college degree" checkmark, and a society where parents want to push their kids into situations these kids really aren't suited for, and then demand the school graduate the kid even though a hundred years ago that same student wouldn't have a prayer of doing so. Tada— the "easy A" and the LCD major and the diploma mills.

Interestingly, what has evolved instead is a transition of training into new classes of education. What a hundred years ago was "college" is now "graduate school." What was "career training" is now "college." High schools, instead of preparing most students for work life as skilled labor, with a handful expected to go on to college, now is meant to send most students to today's version of college, with almost none expected to be skilled laborers. This is, I think, a great folly.

So, it does not surprise me that history as a major discipline is fading from the university scene— but I'm wondering if that isn't simply a natural correction as to the changing goals of education, and in fact not so much a loss as a "returning to a normative state." In short, too many History graduates facing too little actual demand for their training. That doesn't mean that the entire demand is going away, or has even shrunk. It just means the supply had exceeded the real demand. That we don't need 100,000 more history majors may be the case; but we still might need 10,000 more— and that's still more. It's just we don't need the current structure to produce them.

As for the study of history itself, I would submit that the interest hasn't faded, in fact it may have risen. But as an overall percentage in the noise of everything else, it's harder to see that this has happened.

Why does it seem like he's trying so hard to blame students for the decline in college history departments? Nowhere in the entire article does he mention the incredible increase in tuition costs over the last 50 years. He does mention that only 175/1700 history PhD graduates from 2019-2020 actually found employment in the field.

Requiring an additional 6 history credits for all public college students sounds good in principle, but for 22K a year at public university (in-state) he's asking students to spend 8 or 9 thousand to take classes that may be not at all relevant to their field. I absolutely think history classes should be taken, but when the author graduated 6 credits of college was probably closer to $600. USD I think the solution he's searching for is free or heavily public university, but he seems to be trying to dance around the entire factor of cost for some reason.

It is certainly the case that sky-high tuition is a big factor, and also that undergrads now do high school work and grad students do college.

"The noise of everything else" Well said Parz. This overwhelms us too often these days.

A law professor once said in a meeting that he seen a survey of college presidents that when ask what could help their school the vast majority had answered "more money". A president will come and devote massive amounts of money to a pet project only to leave the school in 4 years to be replace by another President that jettison that project and poor's money into their own pet project. They will say that they are "Data driven" but they're really just about the money and will do anything to keep it coming. There a reason that the most highly paid state employee in each State (save just a couple) are the coaches or athletic directors of the state universities.

I have read claims that American higher education now counts more "administrators" than professors among its employed ranks and that the administrators are generally paid considerably better.

True? Untrue?

B

True.

link

I can only speak as for one segment, in one state in higher ed, "No" but if you talk about executive level our President make about what our Governor makes.

For me, the main collapse in the education system is the lack of growth and adjustment to new things. The last thing we studied was the Langston Hughes persona, which I wasn't really interested in before. I learned about him only after he came to me in the theme of the essay, after reading a couple of examples on one article at least learned about him. And that was my main misunderstanding of why the education itself, if it does not give anything, but only requires to cram a lot of material not on the topic of his profession.

Maybe it's not in decline, it's just being rewritten.

"America's Greatest Generation" had the Little Red School House with all of the students in all grades in a single room with one teacher, no teacher aid or unions, no Dean of Discipline, administrators, etc. Kids could bring guns to school or ride their horses. Also, no Federal Department of Education either. They went on to win WWII, invent space flight, television, digital communications, computers, jet travel, and make many other significant contributions.

So why with all of the increased Federal and State help, money, and enhanced ways to educate children has the US slipped from a top country in education to one of the lower ones in the industrial world? What has happened?

There are many career opportunities for History Majors:
link

In addition to getting a commission in the military with many additional opportunities for more education and degrees.

Wolfhag