what do we do when the elite members of a profession abandon the profession? a critique of philip j. deloria’s column in the american historian.
What do we do when the elite members of a profession abandon the profession?
This is the problem with Philip J. Deloria’s recent Organization of American Historians President’s Column, “Rethinking Graduate Education,” published in The American Historian magazine. Deloria embraces the idea that history doctoral programs should teach “disciplinary expertise applicable to all social sectors,” as Robert Weisbuch and Leonard Cassuto argue in the 2016 Mellon Report, Reforming Doctoral Education. Rather than train historians for teaching and research history itself, Deloria wants to know “what would it look like if we imagined ‘flooding the zone’ of the United States with advanced-degree historians?” He continues with a list of the most expected, unsurprising, so-called “disruptive” ideas for transformation. Many sound good, and indeed are good, but the questions of how they would actually work, who would run them, and on what terms, and the kinds of labor practices to which they acquiesce remain alarmingly vague, concealed behind the legerdemain of flashy higher education “innovations.” Sadly, the proposals Deloria offers seem designed more to please administrators and boards of trustees outside the profession, or maybe self-satisfied elites within it, than actually help aspiring students have the time and resources to study history deeply and probingly in service of the public good. Seeking to save the historical profession, the recommendations in Deloria’s column may well destroy it. Here are some of the shifts in graduate education he waves before our eyes:
Reduce time to degree to four years. Throw out the comprehensive exam structure and replace it with a portfolio demonstrating broad expertise. Connect the historical toolkit with real quantitative skills and scientific literacy, particularly around climate issues. Build collaborative lab models for teaching and learning. Rethink the semester seminar, perhaps turning instead to modular and tutorial formats. Create high-end practicum and internship opportunities and connect graduate programs with an array of local, regional, and national institutions. Recognize the range of non-tenure track teaching and craft pedagogical training accordingly. Encourage dissertations that are not only books in the making, but that utilize digital formats, offer multiple public-facing essays, develop community-based projects, and explore other innovative forms. If on a full-funding model, then leverage small cohort size to create faculty teaching and mentoring clusters that break down traditional learning based on geography and chronological periodization. If on a tuition and teaching model, consider admitting more students, leveraging quicker time-to-degree and a range of engaged learning opportunities. Ensure that new strategies are geared to a more diverse range of students, enabled rather than constricted by changes in timing, format, and goals.
Some of these ideas might well expand what historical graduate education can do and who can do it, and for that great, but they hardly confront the main problem they seek to address: decent, stable employment for the teaching and researching of history. Maybe they solve the problem of justifying to administrators and boards of trustees the most elite programs in historical doctoral education, and maybe they can make the most elite professors in the profession feel good for being able, possibly (although even this remains dubious), to place students in other elite quarters of the professional-managerial classes, but in the process they largely abandon the historical profession itself: the insistence that it is a specialized path of highly skilled labor; the need for the field to stop the exploitative adjunctification of scholarly labor; the sacrifice of a wider field of sustainable scholarship by the many for the cheap thrills of a few select superstars who concentrate their own power within a rotten system, even at the expense of the careers of their own students as historians.
Deloria’s proposal feels like a smokescreen, I hope an unintentional one, that floats atop a smoldering ruin. That ruin is the abhorrent labor practices currently dominating higher education, particularly in humanities fields such as history. Instead of confronting those squarely as the leader of a prominent national professional organization, Deloria proposes that graduate programs should try “flooding the zone” of other professions with advanced-degree historians (although in his vision this advanced degree is no longer exactly that, it’s more of a sort of in-between Masters and PhD). “Flooding the zone” is a funny phrase to use, given that the last prominent person to use the term was Steve Bannon, the white nationalist right-wing political strategist. He described the conservative path to power as best accomplished through continual work to “flood the zone with shit.” I highly doubt Deloria wants to do such a thing, but his proposals for transforming historical graduate education certainly move in a rather putrid direction.
Maybe there are some other ways to think about historical graduate education. After all, there are, despite shifting demographics, still plenty of students to teach at the college level in the United States. Yet the historical profession’s most prestigious members seems oblivious to this fact. So focused on the most elite programs and how they might connect to other elite areas of American society, Deloria forgets the historical profession itself, the many regional universities and community colleges and smaller institutions. These could, with insistence on their value, offer a more egalitarian labor model for good jobs studying and teaching history. Yet in place of fighting for and insisting on the end of adjunctification and the demand for more stable, middle-class, tenure-track professorships across the ranks of regional universities and colleges, Deloria imagines instead a set of superficial, ill-defined transformations: speed ups to degree, abandonment of traditional comprehensive exams, portfolios, labs, internships, collaborative partnerships.
These are solutions only a managerial class could love: training for only more of the contingent labor practices and devaluing of intellectual labor that is precisely the current problem! Deloria’s proposals would maintain his and other elite faculty positions for the very few while precluding the preservation of time needed for difficult, extended historical research and discovery by graduate students. It’s a substitution of shiny, “save the world” fantasies about what historical education can do laterally in other fancy fields instead of a concentration on the need for affirming and insisting upon the basic employment conditions and infrastructure needed for sustaining the profession itself—and for making it better.
Here’s the most insidious dimension of the kind of thinking embraced by Deloria in his column. This kind of “rethinking” of graduate education not only undermines the profession at a moment of crisis, it also serves, troublingly, to maintain the very prestige system within the profession from which Deloria and others currently benefit. The fewer tenure-track professorships exist across America’s rich range of regional universities and community colleges, the more privileged and powerful the few historians at the top become. The “innovations” that they think are saving the profession in fact doom it. Their brilliant disruptive transformations allow them to sit atop rotting foundations. Eventually this will lead to the whole field’s collapse, as is already happening. At some point, why wouldn’t any higher ed administrator worth their managerial salt say: who needs historical graduate education? Why not just have a bunch of ersatz-historical degrees as part of the public policy program or the business school or marketing department?
To be sure, new ways of learning and sharing in the making of historical knowledge are wonderful; but only if they are positioned within a robust professional training of future scholars and a field of career opportunities to practice the scholarly discipline of history. Otherwise, the abandonment of distinctive, specialized training and knowledge are a recipe for disciplinary disaster. So yes, bring on the learning “innovation.” We need more labs, collaborations, internships, digital training, podcasts, websites, public projects, pedagogical training, a wider range of publications that qualify for tenure and promotion, more community partnerships. These are all good as part of an expansion of the core jobs of the profession itself. But if history graduate programs are to embrace these modes, then they need to position them as work done by tenure-track professors, not as a replacement for those positions.
Moreover, introducing these new approaches to history means it should take more time to degree, not less time. Students will need more time to perfect their craft, to train across a wider range of fields, to acquire the extensive administrative skills required to enact complex, multi-partner projects. They will need time and support to possess those while also continuing to hone their capacities as highly skilled, expert practitioners of existing—and promisingly new—historical methods.
What if instead of turning away from history as a profession, Deloria and the OAH doubled down on the advanced nature of what we do? Historians are not all-purpose thinkers at the graduate level, offering “disciplinary expertise applicable to all social sectors.” That might be part of our work as teachers of undergraduates, but at the graduate level, what we do is more like what biochemists or statisticians or economists or other similar highly-skilled specialized “knowledge” workers do. Instead of undervaluing this, what if the leaders of the history profession insisted upon its value for their less prestigious colleagues and their students alongside themselves? What we do requires extensive training. Then it requires an insistence, a demand, to those in power that they economically value that training in their employment practices. Our organizations should protect the significance of extensive, high-level, specialized historical training, not abandon it. Perhaps at an elite place such as Harvard, Deloria is taken in by the allure of his graduate students working in other (also quite elite) fields and jobs, but it leaves the rest of the profession—and even his own students—in the dust.
What if, instead of accepting the awful labor practices that now dominate the teaching of history in higher education, the field’s biggest professional societies such as the OAH organized a new accreditation system that made adjunctification an embarrassment for any institution, big or small? What if they weighed in with professional guidelines for tenure-track employment that department chairs of history departments could wield with their administrators to push for tenure-line hires rather than the use of exploited adjuncts? What if the most elite professors in the profession stopped spreading misinformation about unionization or just shrugging their shoulders as if it wasn’t their problem and got more militant and organized in challenging everything from right-to-work laws to the hiring of anti-union law firms by their own institutions to the Yeshiva decision? What if instead of abandoning history as a specialized, expert, advanced profession, the field’s lead organizations asserted their power to protect the profession, to become the guarantors of solid, expert teaching of history in higher education through the insistence on ethical labor practices?
After all, more tenure-track jobs across the spectrum of higher education are not just good for those who get them; they are also good for the communities in which those professors work. Tenure-track faculty at local institutions promises to foster regional universities and community colleges as thriving centers of community life, engines of economic growth, and spaces of democratic involvement and participation. A flourishing local university or college with stable, sustainable employment practices is as important, if not more so, for locales as landing a corporation headquarters or factory. Moreover, good tenure track jobs at these places enable the possibility for a wider range of public projects, community partnerships, and more creative, available modes of historical scholarship. These are precisely the sort of innovations Deloria dreams of in his column. Tenure-track faculty across the breadth of higher ed institutions in the United States even contributes to a more stable tax base in depopulating areas, and to more healthy, stabilized communities overall. We should fiercely advocate for these good-paying, highly skilled jobs and the graduate training required to filll them, not abandon the kind of graduate education they entail for a fantasy of historians in other professions. None of Deloria’s proposals definitively train graduate students for other professions anyway; they are vague. Even worse, are there really robust employment opportunities in these other fields? And would a four-year advanced degree in history really qualify one for whatever work is out there? Who knows?
The one thing turning away from Deloria’s proposals to these other suggestions might accomplish is an end to the increasingly suspect hierarchy that now dominates the field, a prestige and status system in which fancy historians at a few places are like trophies for administrators and boards of trustees to display upon the mantle of a burning fire of adjunctified, immiserated teachers below them. For the select few, the spoils. For the rest, increasingly less time, stability, or resources to conduct research, not even on how to become better teachers, if they are not forced to subsist on food stamps. Enough of that. The proposals Deloria suggests will only further turn higher education to a flooded zone…of wet ashes. In their place, what if we reassert—or maybe even assert for the first time—the specialization of graduate training, not the generalization of it? Of course, let’s do all we can to fight usurious student debt regimes and other obstacles so that we can open up the doors wide for whomever wants to go for it to obtain that training. Then let’s push for stable, sustainable employment at the end of historical graduate training, for long-term tenure-track jobs that are properly valued for the essential researching and teaching of the past they deliver to American college students and the broader public. If we do that, then by all means, let’s also bring in the portfolios, labs, internships, teams, new modes of scholarship, and the crucial webs of connection to the rest of society. They fit as part of that labor model, but not as a substitution for it.
In short, maybe we should insist upon historical graduate education for, you guessed it, learning the discipline. Otherwise, the intensive study of the past, a practice that any functioning democratic society desperately needs, threatens itself to become history.