Administrative Post 28

It is end of the semester time at the Naval War College and the end of the school year here is like the end of the school year, elsewhere: finals, graduation, what-are-you-doing-next questions, and so on.  Given the craziness of this time of the year, the blog will take a short vacation for the rest of the month.  See you in July.

Blog CLI (151): A New Blog

I am proud to announce that I have started a new blog.  It is called "The World War II History Guy" and you can find it at: http://sarantakeswwii.blogspot.com/. 

The blog is a running diary of sorts about my next two book projects.  Both are on World War II.  The first is about the battle of Manila and the second is about the U.S. home front, specifically the activities and contributions of the Boy Scouts of America. 

The blog is about the writing of these two books rather than on Manila or the BSA.  As a result, my expectation is that it should be of interest to other historians, even those that do not share my same research interests.  I plan to discuss issues selecting a research topic, audiences, finding images, and so forth.

I hope you will visit it often. 

Blog CL (150): Option One: Texas Style

The cover story of the October 2012 issues of Texas Monthly focused over the battles being fought by the Board of Regents of both the University of Texas and to a lessor extent Texas A&M University against the administrations of those two schools. (Texas Monthly is a 40 year old publication that is something akin to The New Yorker for the state of Texas.)  The author of the story is Paul Burka, one of the best political reporters in the state.  If that sounds like a fairly minor distinction, keep in mind that during Burka's 30 year career, two Texans have ended up in the White House (George Bush and George W. Bush), three have made serious runs for their party's presidential nomination (John Connally, Phil Gramm, and Rick Perry), another made two serious independent runs for president (H. Ross Perot), another was the vice presidential nominee of his party (Lloyd Benson), and a dozen or so have served in the cabinet. 

The article "Storming the Ivory Tower" concentrates on the efforts of Governor Rick Perry and his appointed regents to change how big universities operate.  A series of conservative reformers want to stem the cost of tuition, and develop degree programs that depend less on research driven faculty and more on marketplace forces, using part-time instructors.  The need to stem skyrocketing tuition is legitimate, but in the case of Texas, Perry is one of the people most responsible for this huge growth when he pushed the state legislature to allow each school to set its own rates.  That move backfired.  The major schools in the state increased their tuition rates as fast as they could and the minor ones kept them as low as possible.  Since then Perry has been pushing for a degree that will only cost $10,000.  This goal is reasonable, but one that ignores the very real issue of inflation.  One of the very few schools that has managed to put together that type of cost structure is Texas A&M University--Commerce (where I once taught).   

Other parts of the reform project are more problematic.  The use of on-line instruction, part-time instructors and market driven needs sounds nice if you are trying to develop responsive vocational schools, not leading universities on a national scale.  It also seems more relevant for law and business schools rather than liberal arts programs.    In theory, these new communication technologies could be cost saving devices, but there are a lot real world problems with that theory.  Many of these issues have been discussed on previous postings on this blog.  I also feel that the reformers are focusing are missing some really important issues, since they are coming at this from outside the profession.

Normally, I like to reprint articles from media outlets that scholars do not regularly consult.  Not this time.  While Texas Monthly is not a magazine that regularly addresses issues of higher education, this article is a long, long read and it is probably best if interested readers go to the Texas Monthly website.  It is also balanced, giving both sides their due.  In addition, it is a good and entertaining read, which is not surprising given Burka's long career. 

In a little postscript, in the blog that Burka runs he notes that the "Battle for UT" is hardly over as the Board is trying to get the president of the university removed.

One final word, whatever happens in Texas, more of these type of confrontations are coming unless academics do a better job of confronting their own professional shortcomings.

Blog CXLIX (149): "Reform Time" Part III

A new hard copy issue of Perspectives on History is out and I now feel like I can reproduce in full my article that appeared in the April issue.  If you want the traditiona citation it is: Nicholas Evan Sarantakes, "Reform Time: Some Proposals to Help Solve the Job Crisis" Perspectives on History, vol. 54, no. 4 (April 2013), 38-39.  Here is the article:

The biggest problem now facing the history discipline is the job crisis. In 2011, Anthony T. Grafton, then president of the AHA, and James Grossman, executive director, published "No More Plan B: A Very Modest Proposal for Graduate Programs in History" in Perspectives on History, generating much discussion. "We're trying to say, 'Wake up. Times have changed. There are more opportunities and that's a good thing,'" Grossman said in a subsequent interview.

Grafton and Grossman realize the history business has serious problems and made an effort to be constructive: offering more sessions at the AHA annual meeting on career issues and using the AHA website to make the profession "less hierarchal." Still, they argue that solutions to the job crisis must come from history departments that produce the PhDs.

I understand their view, and it is legitimate—the AHA is an umbrella organization and can hardly order a history department to do something—but they are arguing for their limitations. I found much of the essay vague, but I was also disturbed by an important implication of their approach. The authors have written off scholars who have finished their PhDs and are now in the unemployment lines. They discussed making changes to shape the future, but said little about helping some of the most vulnerable members of the AHA in the present.

There is still a lot that the Association can do even within the existing structure. The purpose of this article is to offer some realistic ideas in that regard:

1) Sponsor a conference on what the AHA can do: Make this a weekend, nonacademic conference. Invite 30 to 40 historians (much more and it becomes counterproductive) who have taken the lead on job issues. Make the mission of this conference one of brainstorming on concrete initiatives for the AHA to undertake. Maybe there's little the Association can do, but outside perspectives might generate new ideas that the AHA had not considered.

 

2) Sponsor a conference on what departments can do: This will prevent departments from having to reinvent the wheel. Make this a weekend, nonacademic conference, like the one above. Invite 20 to 30 department chairs and directors of graduate education, who can speak for their institutions and are deeply involved with graduate student education, to brainstorm and generate ideas. Possible discussions might include creating departmental alumni networks, reducing the course load, time given to write the dissertation, and so on.

 

The two ideas above are different from the AHA's Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded initiative to explore nontraditional careers. While this project will be extremely helpful in garnering data, my proposed conferences are about tapping into the significant creative energies of the profession, being "less hierarchal," leveraging the authority of the AHA, and pointing a diffuse discipline in certain general directions.

 

3) Create a new AHA division for K–12 teachers. This division can offer important advice to interested AHA members on the requirements for teaching jobs, which can vary significantly from state to state. The AHA has secondary school representatives on the Teaching Division and the Council, but these individuals cannot offer systematic programs to help AHA members find employment.

 

4) Discount advertising: The AHA should offer steep discounts to organizations other than history departments—archaeology departments, public history firms, state agencies that do historic preservation, etc.—for job announcements in Perspectives. By steep discount, I mean one dollar per ad, two dollars for longer ads.

 

Apparently this idea has been discussed and rejected. Some members of the AHA Council believe that budget-constrained departments should not pay more than a corporation. The problem with this argument is that it puts the interests of departments ahead of the larger needs of the discipline, newly minted PhDs, and the AHA itself. This suggestion would make the AHA an asset for organizations other than history departments, in order to be inclusive to all those who study the past; increase employment opportunities for AHA members; and increase the membership of the organization.

 

5) Add other disciplines to the AHA presidency rotation: In the past the AHA had presidents in closely related disciplines like political science, library science, and archaeology. Since the end of World War II, the AHA has been dominated by academic historians. It is time for the AHA to make efforts to bring others into the organization. Broadening the leadership of the AHA is the first step in expanding the organization's knowledge of other careers where the history PhD can find employment and contribute to our understanding of the past.

 

6) Develop an AHA alternative career speaker series: Most AHA members have gone from grad school to employment as professors, and often do not have ideas about or contacts in other fields. Many historians in alternate careers have done significant trailblazing that the rest of the discipline does not appreciate. An AHA-sponsored speaker series can make these experiences better known while enhancing the reputations of archaeologists, political scientists, librarians, archivists, journalists, documentary filmmakers, historical preservationists, professional writers, museum curators, and editors who explore the past. This series will start the conversations that Grafton and Grossman want to have take place. Academic historians are not talking to these professional communities regularly and the AHA should take the lead in initiating these conversations.

 

7) Develop conversion programs: The AHA should invite a number of these other professions to a series of small weekend workshops on the skills needed to work in other fields. While a PhD in history is a great credential, the training does not always translate easily to other professional career paths. The AHA needs to help its members find ways to leverage the assets of the degree.

So, how does a history PhD trained to become a professor convert to another field? To provide an answer, a conversion program needs to address certain questions: Will new PhDs need another degree? Are internships important? Where do you go to find these jobs? In which organizations and conferences should one participate?

 

The products of these small workshops can include: a series of AHA pamphlets, such as The History PhD as Documentary Filmmaker, etc.; a series of sessions at the AHA annual meeting; templates or syllabi for similar efforts by history departments; or an AHA speaker series on alternative careers. At the last annual meeting, the AHA took a good, first step in this direction with "The Malleable PhD" mini-conference—eight sessions exploring employment opportunities in business and government. More such efforts are needed on a systematic basis.

 

8) Develop an incentive program for closing down PhD programs: Many of these proposals are designed to alleviate symptoms. The root of the problem is the overproduction of history PhDs. None of the symptoms will go away until that problem is resolved. Reducing the number of individuals holding the history PhD is a good thing for those who already have it; when supply goes down, demand—the form of job opportunities and salaries—goes up.

As a result, the AHA should encourage departments to shut down their PhD programs. Market forces will necessitate this type of action anyway. The number of history departments with PhD programs is not sustainable because faculty in these programs often carry light teaching loads, and PhD programs do not generate as much revenue for departments as undergraduate courses. The problem is faculty will resist because professional reputations are bolstered by advising PhD candidates. Another consideration is that the AHA has no authority over departments.  

The AHA can, however, offer incentives to encourage departments and individuals to do voluntarily what administrators will force on them eventually. The AHA can offer free job ads and lower rates on departmental directory listings to departments that drop their PhD programs.

This is unlikely to be enough; departments are made up of scholars who place their careers above the interests of their institutions. The AHA, however, can appeal to their concerns. Members of departments that voluntarily shut down their PhD programs can be rewarded with guaranteed inclusions in AHA publications: five book reviews in the American Historical Review; a promise by the AHR to review their next two books; an article in the journal within five years, or a promise that their submission will only be sent to three reviewers and that only two positive reviews will be required for acceptance; or a guaranteed article in Perspectives for each member of the department. These historians can also be promised sessions at the annual meeting. The AHA can hedge its bets by limiting this program to, say, the first five or ten departments that downsize.

Okay, these are my ideas. I am offering them in an honest effort to follow up in a tangible way on the "Plan B" article. If readers of this publication have better suggestions I would love to hear them, and I suspect so would the AHA.

Blog CLXVIII (148): Option 1 Revisited

It has been a while since this blog reproduced a report from another media.  This article in the Times Higher Education offers a good reason to return to this practice. It is a good, even handed reporting and analysis on trends taking place here in the United States in the history business.   It combines issues recently discussed in this blog, including: 1) the ramifications of rising tuition and 2) the real possibility that outsiders will intervene in higher education to fix the huge surplus of people holding the Ph.D. degree.  This article was written by John Marcus and was published as: "U.S. Historians Defend their Discipline."  Here is that article:

Some history professors in Florida are paying more attention these days to the future than to the past.

The historians have organised themselves to promote the value of their discipline against a growing sentiment that history is “non-strategic” in an economy that needs more engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs and workers in the health professions.

This is no longer just an academic issue. Like several other US politicians, Florida’s governor, Republican Rick Scott, has questioned whether taxpayers should continue fully subsidising public universities to teach subjects he says are in low demand. Academics in the humanities and some social sciences fear this threatens the survival of their departments. 

“If I’m going to take money from a citizen to put into education, then I’m going to take that money to create jobs,” Scott told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. “Is it a vital interest of the state to have more anthropologists? I don’t think so.”

The Republican governors of North Carolina and Wisconsin have made similar pronouncements. “If you want to take gender studies that’s fine. Go to a private school and take it,” said North Carolina’s governor, Patrick McCrory.

“But I don’t want to subsidise that if that’s not going to get someone a job.”

Wisconsin’s governor, Scott Walker, has said that public technical colleges in his state should be judged on whether “young people [are] getting degrees in jobs that are open and needed today, not just the jobs that the universities want to give us.” 

This debate about the relative worth of the sciences versus the humanities is not new. But it has been propelled by the escalating cost of higher education. 

As students fall deeper into debt to pay for their tuition, more than two- thirds now believe the goal of going to a university is to increase their earning power, according to research by Arthur Levine, president emeritus of Teachers College, Columbia University. 

About 88 per cent of this year’s first-year undergraduates in the US say that “getting a better job” is the top reason they enrolled, according to a survey by the University of California, Los Angeles’ Higher Education Research Institute (The American Freshman: National Norms Fall 2012). In 2006, 71 per cent gave that reason.

Internal Division
The debate has even driven a wedge between conventional four-year universities and some two-year community colleges, which enrol about half of the nation’s post-secondary students and typically focus on vocational education.

“It is time we all accept the fact that a traditional four-year liberal arts education is a poor investment for America’s middle class,” Tom Snyder, president of Ivy Tech Community College in Indiana, has written. “Today’s economy cannot support more art history or philosophy majors.”

In response, several associations of universities with four-year courses are fighting back. The Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) is aggressively advocating the importance of imparting “broad knowledge and transferable skills.”  And the Council of Independent Colleges has established a Campaign for the Liberal Arts that will provide research and data to dispel stereotypes about the discipline.

“There is a new and heightened perception driving this trend that associations and organisations need to help the public better understand the value of the liberal arts,” said Laura Wilcox, the council’s spokeswoman.

The organisations contend that what employers really want from universities is not job training but graduates who can think critically, write and speak well, and solve problems.

“[Employers] say, ‘I want an engineer who can talk to people. I want an engineer who can write a memo. I want an engineer who doesn’t act like a goof.’ Everybody rolls their eyes when [employers] do that, but the data says they’re right,” said Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.

An AAC&U survey of corporate executives found that nearly 90 per cent want workers with verbal and written communication skills, 75 per cent are looking for graduates who understand ethical decision-making, and 70 per cent say they need innovative and creative employees.

“None of this is to [criticise] the disciplines of science and engineering and technology, but we also need to train people in the art of understanding the world around them, where they fit into society and all of those sorts of things,” said Norman Goda, a history professor at the University of Florida who has helped to organise a petition against the governor’s proposal to charge lower fees for “strategic” majors in high workplace demand and more for “non-strategic” - largely humanities - majors, such as history.

“I can’t predict the downfall of man if there are fewer history majors but the cumulative effect over decades would surely not be a good one,” he added. 

Class Divisions
Others say the trend could deepen class divisions as some students will continue to be able to afford a humanities education while others will have no choice but to seek specific job skills.

“The rich get education and the poor get training,” Carnevale said. “It’s a way of reproducing class. The higher education system is now in cahoots with the economy to reproduce class.” Already, he added, “there are a lot of kids who are not getting a real education any more. They’re getting training.”

Reversing that shift will not be easy. The proportion of students majoring in the humanities has already fallen to just 8 per cent, according to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, down from a peak of more than 17 per cent in 1967.

“The issue of questioning the value of the liberal arts has been going on for more than just the past few years. It’s been going on for decades,” Goda said.

“Part of the problem that the liberal arts has always had is that you really cannot quantify what we do.

“The possibility of someone with a nursing degree going into nursing is very, very high. Someone with an English degree or a history degree could go into any one of a number of fields. They train you for a number of careers - not necessarily one,” he added.

More Likely to Get a Job
Yet no matter what the university associations say, students with degrees in the sciences are incontrovertibly more likely to get a job and make more money than graduates in the humanities. The unemployment rate in 2012 for recent history majors was 10.2 per cent, compared with 7.5 per cent for students who majored in engineering, the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce reports.

The National Association of Colleges and Employers reports that humanities and social science graduates earn $36,988 (£24,437) a year compared with $61,913 for engineering graduates.

“There’s more and more tension about this, especially as prices go up,” Carnevale said.
That tension is clearly being felt in history departments and by faculty in other humanities disciplines.

“When tenured faculty retire, they’re not going to be replaced,” Goda said. “What you may have, and what you have had, is the detritus of history, English and political science departments being combined into a department of humanities.

“And once you tear down departments like those, it’s tough, if it’s possible at all, to restore them.”

Here is my take.  First, as I said before, a very good article that gives a lot of good information.

Second--and people might not like this one--but Governor Scott has a point.  If the market is saturated with history Ph.D.s, then is there really a social need for the State of Florida need to produce more? Scott was talking about the humanities in general and not focusing on the Ph.D. but rather undergraduates, but his question gets to the heart of the issue: supply and demand.  When supply exceeds demand, one of the responses is to reduce the supply. 

Third, while Scott has a good point, Governors McCrory and Walker have taken it too far.  Colleges and universities are not vocational/technical schools.  They simply are not.

Fourth, while they are wrong and right, the governors are certainly within their rights to impose change on colleges and universities.  If the academic community in general, and history in particular, refuses to police itself and respond to broad social and economic factors, then others will do it for them.  Scholars will resent that action, because it will probably do a lot more damage than if they had responded and developed a program or policies of their own.  One easy way to do that is to reduce the costs of tuition, which is a major factor (but not the only one) for this outside intervention.  (There are several reasons why tuition has increased; some of it is beyond the control of colleges and universities; some of it is within their control). 

Fifth, Professor Goda is correct.  Once a department and program gets terminated it will probably stay terminated.  On the other hand, Carnevale is wrong.  There is hardly going to be a new form of class warfare between the rich liberal arts majors and the poor accounting and marketing students. 

Blog CLXVII (147): "Reform Time" Part II

My article "Reform Time: Some Proposals to Help Solve the Job Crisis" is now fully available on-line.  The AHA staff opened the article to the general public (members and non-members alike), so readers will not hit a paywall if they try to access the article. Rather than reproduce it here, I am linking to the AHA's website.  If you want citation information, it is: Nicholas Evan Sarantakes, "Reform Time: Some Proposals to Help Solve the Job Crisis" Perspectives on History, vol. 54, no. 4 (April 2013), 38-39.

Blog CXLVI (146): History vs. Applied History vs. Public History

I wrote an article for the AHA newsletter Perspectives on History that is out in the current issue.  I basically use it to push some reform recommendations on the AHA that will help the organization improve job opportunities for those who are looking for work.  A good deal of editing was involved to get the article down to the required word limit.  I dropped a couple of my recommendations and also eliminated a discussion of history vs. public history vs. applied history.  The purpose of this posting is to expand on that last point since very little of it got into the final version. 

The term “applied history” is not common.  I see “applied history” as disciplines that use existing historical knowledge to address practical problems in other fields and professions.  I wish I could claim it as my own, but the first time I heard it was in 2001 at a teaching workshop when Andrew J. Bacevich, a historian teaching in an international relations department, used it to describe the courses he taught.  It is a pretty good description of the courses that I teach at the Naval War College.  These classes are about two-thirds history (military and diplomatic) and about one-third political science (international relations and political theory).  We are using the history to develop analytical skills among our students so they can become strategists for the armed services (our students are military officers or civil servants working for various agencies of the U.S. government—State Department, Federal Bureau of Investigations, etc.).  Some of the questions we explore are historical in nature, while others are designed to test theories or answer ahistorical issues.

Applied history is also a good term for a number of other professions that study the past on a regular basis.  These career paths include historians teaching in other disciplines, archaeologists, social scientists, librarians, archivists, and editors.

History—and by that I mean the type of study that one regularly encounters in a department of history at a college or university—develops information to explain and understand phenomena, events, and trends of the past.  We can call this “history,” or  “academic history,” or “basic history” or “pure history.”

The real question then is how is “applied history” different from "public history”?  In some very real ways it is the same thing.  As I understand it, the term “public history” replaced “applied history” as a basic descriptor.  Needless to say, this term is a bit confusing.  Consider this comment from James McPherson, the Pulitzer Prize winning historian who served as president of the American Historical Association in 2003: “I cannot remember exactly when I first encountered the term 'public history.' It does not seem all that many years ago. And I am embarrassed to confess that I initially thought public history was the story of public events—the kind of history that most of us taught and wrote before the private lives of ordinary people in home and family became an important field of historical inquiry.”

While the term “public history” is one that many historians might recognized instead of “applied history,” it is incredibly vague.  It is often used to describe some very different activities that have little to do with the public sphere. The job duties of "applied historians" like myself and Bacevich are not that much different than what an academic historian at some place like...oh, say...the University of Kansas or Kansas State University might be doing.  In fact, Bacevich is an academic; he is a tenured faculty member at Boston University.  My job is also pretty much the same as some one at Kansas or Kansas State, I grade papers, run seminars, read books, and do service work for the college and my department.  There are many other people that use history to explore the issues relevant to their academic fields and they are often housed in different departments at a college or university.  They include people studying: economics, music, math, art, kinesiology, and business.  Most archaeologists, social scientists, librarians, editors of historical paper collections, and archivists are also academics.

Public historians, I would argue, are primarily those that are interfacing with a large audience comprised of the general, non-academic public. This description is not to say that doing intellectually irrelevant work or having little interchange with academics.  The big difference for them is that history is very often a consumable product for their audiences that might exist for educational purposes, but could also exist for entertainment or for issues specific to certain professional disciplines.  Teaching is usually not in their mission set.  People in these fields include historical preservationists, journalists, documentary filmmakers, professional writers, national historical park staffs, museum curators, staff historians of government agencies, and individuals working for research firms.  Public historians might have a Ph.D. in history, but many times it is something they earn along the way to bolster their other professional experiences and credentials. (In this sense, the Ph.D. is not a two way street; while it helps someone in these fields, the degree does not in and of itself make one qualified to do this type of work).

Much of this discussion got cut from the Perspectives article, which was appropriate.   It took the article off target.  I also wrote at great length about public history in Blog XLVI (46): The History Ph.D. as Public Historian.  It is a good essay and has been one of the more popular postings on this blog.  This discussion, though, explains a major thrust of that previous article.  There is a big, huge divide between historians working in academic history departments and those scholars working in applied or public history.  In Blog XLVI, I quoted Alexandra Lord, a historian for the U.S. Public Health Service, on this matter: “While researching about different careers and the many ways in which one can practice history, I was struck by the academic community’s failure to regard those outside academia as historians engaged in scholarly and valuable work.  Having embraced these foolish prejudices as a graduate student and then a professor, I have come now, as a nonacademic historian, to wonder why these prejudices are so pervasive. What does it say about our profession when we believe that historians who work with senators, reporters, policy analysts, and the general public should not be the among the best of our profession? What does it say when we dismiss the historian who uses his or her degree in a unique and innovative fashion that promotes the study of history?”

So, why is this relevant to an article about reforming the AHA in the hopes of improving the job market?

Glad you asked.  A basic problem the AHA faces—even if it don't know it—is it isolated.  Most AHA leaders have gone from undergrad status to graduate school to faculty positions, and have very little knowledge of other professional opportunities for historians.  The AHA needs to make efforts to reach out to other fields.  One way as I discuss in the article is to open up the AHA presidency to people in these other fields.  That recommendation is in the article. Another way—which got cut—is to create an "applied history" division within the AHA to reach out to scholars working in other disciplines and/or public history.  My hope is that the organization can sponsor conferences and sessions at the annual meeting, arrange for the publication of articles in Perspectives, and provide services like including "applied/public historians" in the annual directory of history departments in a noticeable way (maybe make it a directory of institutions rather than departments) or make advertising jobs in perspective cheap and affordable for other organizations.  The ultimate goal of all this broadening activity is to alert AHA members—be they mentors to young scholars or the job seekers themeselves—to the employment opportunities that exist beyond the history department.