Alpers on the Future of the Discipline

The 50th anniversary issue of Perspectives on History (Vol. 50, No. 9, Dec. 2012), my copy of which arrived in the mail on Thursday, features a forum on the Future of the Discipline.  Guest edited by Lynn Hunt, the forum includes a piece by Ben Alpers, "The Future of the Profession." 

As noted in Perspectives, Ben's contribution to the forum grew out of a talk he gave last year at the University of Texas at Dallas.  Ben was the keynote speaker at RAW, our annual symposium sponsored by the Graduate Student Association of the School of Arts & Humanities.  

Our theme at last year's symposium was The Future of the Humanities.  Historians are notoriously (and wisely) cautious about predicting the future, and Ben was no exception there.  But he did do an exceptional job of sketching out for a packed audience of grad students and professors some of the present pressing problems that cast a worrisome shadow on that future.  And he made some practical suggestions for what we can try to do about it. 

Ben published a revised version of his keynote speech on this blog.  His post, "The Academy in Peril," is well worth reading -- as is his article in Perspectives.  

Members of the AHA can access Ben's article online using this link:  

http://www.historians.org/Perspectives/issues/2012/1212/Future-of-the-Profession.cfm

The History Wars and Detachment

In her post, “A Canon Canon,” L.D. asks readers to suggest books related to the canon debates of the 1980s, which crystallized with the Stanford “Great Books” debate, L.D.’s dissertation topic. L.D. seems both excited and worried about her topic’s continued relevance, about how such relevance should or should not inform her approach. As she writes: “At some point—and I haven’t quite identified that point yet—the debate about canons and canonicity shifts from a historic moment that I am examining to a current critical discourse into which I am, as the argot of academe has it, ‘making an intervention.’ This is one of the (many!) tricky methodological challenges of my dissertation.”

In the comments section, I posted the bibliography of the most important books I used and/or analyzed in my chapter on the topic of the canon wars (one chapter of nine on the history of the culture wars). My list of books provoked this response from L.D.: “This is both informative and illustrative. Your list instantiates exactly the oscillation I see ahead—a toggling between immediacy and remove, a scholarly debate as a historic ‘event’ and ‘detached’ scholarship about the event.”

Does writing about topics in such close proximity to our lives—temporally, professionally, epistemologically, politically, perhaps even psychologically—change our approach? Are we more likely to engage our subjects as contemporaries? Are we more likely to enter into the struggles that we are seeking to understand and analyze? I find these methodological questions fascinating.

I admit that when I first chose the culture wars as the topic of my second book, I had similar concerns. I had a dog in the race, so to speak. But I did not want to write yet another culture wars polemic, yet another missive against all that is wrong in the world. To my happy surprise, once I began my research I felt less of a subjective pull. I started seeing historical subjects worthy of historical analysis. Yes, I disagree with many culture warriors (and I even agree with a few). But I also feel detached from them. I suppose this is as it should be (although my former self would be surprised not only by my detachment but also by my comfort with such detachment).

None of this is an endorsement of detachment in and of itself. Sometimes, I think, a full-throttle polemic is in order (as I hoped to make evident by the example of my very un-detached essay on Teach for America). But I also think learning how to be detached from the culture wars has improved my ability to understand them. In writing my chapter on the canon wars, I felt like a distant observer, much as I would if I had written a chapter on the Constitutional Convention. I held no more affinity for a poststructuralist obliterator of canons like Stanley Fish than I did for a traditionalist defender of them like Allan Bloom. I identified no more with Richard Rorty than with Dinesh D’Souza (this definitely came as a surprise). Of course, this does not mean I sought faux “objectivity” in the fashion of some half-wit television host like David Gregory: “Let both sides present their case, the truth must lie somewhere in the middle; or, at least we won’t be accused of bias, the ultimate sin of political reporting).” No, in writing my canon wars chapter, detachment meant I had the freedom to point out the contradictions that inevitably formed the arguments of all of my subjects, such an approach being a means to a better historical understanding.

In sum, L.D.’s “tricky methodological challenge” is not necessarily mine. For the most part. I am currently writing a chapter on a topic from which detachment is proving more difficult. The topic is the “history wars” and the chapter deals with some of the infamous controversies about public history from the 1990s, especially the brouhahas over the Enola Gay and National History Standards. It also is an intellectual history of the methodological debates about the historical discipline that were embedded in these larger public history struggles. Historians are the main subjects; historiography is the central content. In other words, this chapter hits close to home. The reason for this is not because I want to take sides, although I am more tempted here than in my other chapters. Rather, I am finding detachment more difficult because the explanations and arguments offered by historians are my own. I have been trained to think like my subjects. More than that, given that my subjects are some of the most influential historians of the last few decades, given that their books have often been de rigueur in graduate historiography seminars, it’s not too far fetched to claim that I have been trained to think like my subjects by my subjects.

By the early 1990s, a debate had ensued about the proper approach historians should take to the past. On the one hand were traditionalists, who caustically criticized the hold social and cultural history had taken on the larger discipline, to the demise of traditional political and, yes, intellectual history. They charged that New Historians were relativists who no longer believed in the longstanding purpose of the historical craft, to shed light on the truth. For instance, Gertrude Himmelfarb, one such traditionalist, maintained that privileging the “holy trinity” of race-class-gender was an ahistorical imposition of present concerns on the past. On the other hand were postmodernists on the order of Hayden White, who provocatively claimed that the work of the historian was no more than “a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse.” The contours of this debate were not new, but the political urgency of it was unique, given the larger context.

Most professional historians sought to carve out a middle ground in these historiography wars. In their 1994 book, Telling the Truth About History, Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob sought to “take on both the relativists on the left and the defenders of the status quo ante on the right.” Eschewing both epistemological (if not political) extremes, they argued in favor of “a democratic practice of history [that] encourages skepticism about dominant views, but at the same time trusts in the reality of the past and its knowability.” But, while charting this middle ground, Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob offered a compelling analytical framework that explained how historiographical developments had contributed to a traditionalist-postmodernist binary that seemed false. Social historians, who came of age in the 1970s on the heels of the sixties liberation movements, wrote histories of marginalized groups, predominantly blacks, women, and workers, that complicated traditional, often triumphalist narratives of the United States. But they accomplished this with traditional methodologies and epistemologies. “Social historians did not oppose the standards of objectivity or the codes of professional discipline; they used those very standards to challenge the traditional interpretations which had excluded marginal or nonconforming historical groups.” That said, no matter their objective intentions, social historians undermined the premise of historical objectivity by revealing that historical narratives were always partial, always political. “It is as if the social historians with their passion for breaking apart the historical record had dug a potentially fatal hole into which history as a discipline might disappear altogether.”

I can’t detach from these subjects because their analysis seems, well, truthful. As such, I see Telling the Truth as both a primary and secondary source. (The same goes for a few other sources, especially Peter Novick’s brilliant That Noble Dream, which emerged from the same historiographical crisis about the "objectivity question.")

Professing History: Not for the Faint of Heart

Among the sessions I attended at the AHA in Chicago this past January was the special session designed to address the crisis in employment for newly minted history PhDs, and to do so "from the demand side." 
In other words, the point of the session, moderated by outgoing AHA President Anthony Grafton, was not to lament that academe is producing way too many history PhDs who have no chance of landing the kind of jobs for which they we are being trained.  Rather, the point was to explore whether and how the AHA as a professional organization could do anything to increase the number and kinds of jobs available to all these newly-minted PhDs.

I will not summarize the arguments presented by the panelists, Jesse Lemisch, Edward Balleisen, John R. Dichtl, and Lynn Hunt.  History News Network has posted a brief but apt summary of the session, along with video remarks from each speaker on the panel. 

Instead let me tell you a little bit of what it was like to be in that packed-out room, both during the panel and during the Q&A that followed.  I know I wasn't the only PhD student in there, sitting on the edge of my seat, desperate to hear something that would give me a modicum of hope as I look ahead at what appears to me and many others to be an absolutely abysmal academic job market. 

Man, did I get an earful. 

That panel was a Clash of the Titans, with Jesse Lemisch on one end and Lynn Hunt on the other, and no love lost between them.  I mean, it was intense.  Imagine being the most junior of junior scholars, just a PhD student, a mere acolyte in the great tradition of history as philosophy, as vocation, as profession -- imagine sitting there, witnessing two senior historians whose work I have been reading and reading about since I started my program, go head to head in an intellectual contest that was no mere intellectual exercise. 

Lemisch and Hunt are historians with a capital "H." They don't just produce riveting and revolutionary scholarship -- they don't just "do" history; rather, they are history.  They and their fellow senior colleagues are the profession.  They instantiate and exemplify and model what it means to be a historian.  They weren't just arguing about their competing views of the profession and its future; they were arguing about their identity, their values, who they are, what makes their work matter, what makes all our work matter.  It was astonishing to witness. 

I listened to Lemisch, and I could not help but admire his rhetorical ferocity and  his uncompromising idealism.  (My guess is that he would say that if more people would commit to his ideals, that idealism would become realism.)  I listened to Hunt, and I was stunned by her bold brilliance -- superseding even what I've read on the page -- and her ability to sharply illuminate the context and subtext of the debate in a way that makes her vision impossible to deny or ignore.  (My guess is that she would say that the insistence of some people to do just that -- deny and ignore that context and subtext -- is precisely what is so problematic about the historical profession.)

I don't mean to short or shortchange the other two panelists; they were not just potted plants.  (Dichtl in particular took some heat from Lemisch, and did his best to give as good as he got.)  But their most crucial contribution to that panel may have been simply to put some distance -- intellectual, polemical and spatial -- between Lemisch and Hunt.  Yeah, it was that intense. 

Indeed, I think all of us in the audience were probably somewhat relieved when Anthony Grafton got up and opened up the discussion to questions from the floor.

Our relief was short-lived.

The very first question from the floor came from a historian who was also an administrator at a small regional college -- the college president, if I am not mistaken, though I didn't write it down in my notes and so I couldn't swear to it.  Anyhow, coming from a small department at a small school, this questioner had served on every search and been a part of every hiring committee for history professors at his institution since his arrival there. 

Here is part of what he had to say about why history PhDs are having trouble finding jobs:  "A large percentage of the graduates from your programs are not really worth looking at."  Out of scores of applications, this commenter said, "maybe the top ten percent are head and shoulders above the rest," and the rest do not seem to be qualified for academic work period.  He said that PhD programs are producing sub-par scholars.  "And," he concluded, "I haven't heard any of you address this."

The silence in that packed-out room was deafening.  Nobody moved.  Time seemed to stand still. 

I don't know what anybody else was thinking.  I didn't know what to think myself.  Here I was at my first AHA meeting, at practically the first panel I attended, and I had just had the astonishing experience of listening to two senior historians engaged in an intellectual and ideological battle that left me in slack-jawed shock with my head still spinning.  And now this? 

What was I as a PhD student, and as someone who spends a great deal of time thinking about the idea of the university, supposed to do with this?  What was anybody else in the room supposed to do with this?

I was sitting on the end of a row, about twenty rows back from the panel.  I was looking all around the room trying to make eye contact with somebody -- anybody -- to see if I was alone in my shock and awe.  The panelists all looked as astonished as everybody in the audience.  There was Anthony Grafton, standing at the podium, stunned into silence.  He wouldn't know me from Adam, but he happened to look out at me just as I glanced up at him, and our eyebrows went up in unison.  The effect of that commenter's remarks on that room was something to behold.

After a moment -- what seemed like an interminable moment, from where I sat -- Grafton simply said, "Next question?" 

I didn't even hear the rest of the questions.  I was thinking the whole time about what that commenter had stood up to say.  In part, I was thinking, "Is this true?"  And if it's true, what does it mean?  What does it mean for me and my colleagues?  What does it say about the state of the university in America?  What does it mean for the future -- the future of our profession, the future of our culture?

I'm still thinking about this man's remark -- about the justice or injustice of it, the truth or the mistakenness of it.  But at the time, and even more since, what I have mostly been thinking about is the extraordinary courage that it must have taken for him to stand up and say it in the first place, and then face the indignant or angry or perhaps simply bemused silence of that room.  He wasn't going to win any popularity contests with that remark.  And he knew it.  And he said it anyway -- not because he wanted to be obnoxious or contrarian, but because he thought it was important, and he thought it was true.

What do I think about that question, and about the whole panel?  I'm not sure yet.  I'm still working it out. 

But I can tell you this much:  when the session was over, I didn't leave the room thinking, "What is the future of the historical profession?"  Instead, I walked out of there thinking, "What the hell have I gotten myself into?"  

Good question.

Children’s Literature as Intellectual History

Because of my research interests in education, I would guess I am more familiar with the scholarship on children’s literature than many intellectual historians. Most of the work on children’s literature seems to come from American Studiers or from researchers housed in colleges of education, or, increasingly, from the new and growing interdisciplinary field of “childhood studies,” spearheaded by the program at Rutgers University-Camden. I am currently reading a book from the Rutgers Series in Childhood Studies: Michelle Ann Abate, Raising Your Kids Right: Children’s Literature and American Political Conservatism.

One thing about the historiography on children’s literature that leaves me unsatisfied is that there are few compelling notions about why children’s literature is important. That children’s literature is, in fact, important, is inarguable, I suppose, to the degree that it is not argued. Perhaps intellectual historians are better situated to offer answers?

Take Abate’s book, about children’s literature produced by conservatives since the 1990s. She argues that right-wing children’s literature—William Bennett’s The Book of Virtues, Terri Birkett’s Truax (an anti-environmentalist parody of Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax), Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series for children, Lynne Cheney’s picture books, The O’Reilly Factor for Kids, etc.—needs to be considered as part and parcel of the larger Christian Right counterculture. She writes: “Although children’s literature has often espoused didactic lessons, offered conservative morals, and even contained political themes, the new crop of books for young readers that began appearing in the early 1990s did so in a new and far more overt way” (4). She contends that these recent conservative children’s books contain “the broad spectrum of subjects that comprise the U.S. culture wars…” (4)

Although Abate adds an important component to the rapidly growing historiography on recent American conservatism, she does little to explain the importance of children’s literature, other than to show that adults consider it important. But again, this is common. Even the best addition to this historiography, Julia Mickenberg’s Learning from the Left: Children's Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States, does little, from my vantage point, to explain why scholars should pay attention to children’s literature. Mickenberg is quite right to say that children’s literature is potentially influential given its vast audience—a “ready market provided by school libraries.” And she provides tons of fun material from leftist children’s book authors, such as by M. Boland, whose “ABC for Martin” (1931) began with the following clever refrain: “A stands for Armaments—war-mongerers’ pride; B is for Bolshie, the thorn in their side.” (Now that’s poetry!) But still…

Like in the history of education, it seems clear that the history of children’s literature pivots from Robert Hine’s oft-repeated quote: “What society wants its children to know reveals what that society wants itself to be.” But this sentiment is about adults. What does reading literature do to children? What do children make of literature? Personally, I think growing up reading literature made me a much more empathetic person, someone much more likely to root for the underdog. Perhaps this was due to the literature put into my hands by my mother, a high school English teacher with decidedly liberal sympathies. Or perhaps this was due to the very genre of literature, the very act of reading literature.

In a recent review of Samuel Moyn’s The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, Robin Blackburn takes issue with Moyn’s argument that human rights were invented in the 1970s. Moyn contends that using the framework of human rights to explain political or intellectual history prior to the 1970s is at best anachronistic, at worst a teleological cover for imperialistic impulses of humanitarian interventionists. Blackburn finds a good deal to like about this contention, but maintains that not everyone who fought for rights since the Age of Revolution did so in the name of state power and, as such, often did so in the cause of individual, even "human" rights. Blackburn disagrees with Moyn because he explicitly has in mind abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, who never tied his disdain for slavery to state power. Quite to the contrary, he disavowed the Constitution as a guarantor of slavery. (This seems to come directly from Blackburn’s new book, The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights.)

How does this detour into human rights history relate to children’s literature? Blackburn writes:

We can agree that fictitious lineages help no one. Nevertheless, if the first law of history is that the past is always another country, the second is that it is never beyond the reach of the present. Lynn Hunt’s Inventing Human Rights (2007) sees the appeal to subjective ‘rights’ as a product of the new print culture of the 18th century, arguing that the wider identifications encouraged by the novel endowed readers with a new sensibility and sensitivity to suffering. She traces the emergence of a concern with ‘human rights’ as much to the psychology of the novel reader as to the arguments of the philosophers—with Rousseau, as philosopher-novelist scoring on both counts. While the political pamphlet appealed to the reasoning faculty, the novel or poem encourages the reader to imagine herself or himself in the situation of another. It directly aroused sympathy and de-familiarized oppression... The reader could be invited to identify with those unlike themselves.

Does something akin to this explain the recent importance of children’s literature?

Scholars tend to argue that, for most of its history, children’s literature was inherently conservative in its didactic approach to instilling proper behavior. Only recently has children’s literature more openly explored issues that arouse empathy, or the relativistic side of morality. Thus, Abate argues recent right-wing children’s literature is anti-modern in harkening back to a bygone era and that, as such, it fails to arouse empathy.

But if this is true—that conservative children’s literature fails to invite readers to identify with those unlike themselves—then what explains its popularity? What explains the millions of copies sold? I suppose there is one of three answers to this perplexing question. 1) Empathy is an overrated component of recent children’s literature, which does not, after all, act like the 18th century novel. 2) Conservative literature does, in fact, arouse empathy, just not for liberal academics like Abate. 3) American conservatives are decidedly un-empathetic and don’t want their children to evince sympathy for those who suffer.

My guess is some complex combination of all three is at play here. But this leads me back around to my original question: Why is children’s literature important? Is it merely a synecdoche for adult concerns?

Children’s Literature as Intellectual History

Because of my research interests in education, I would guess I am more familiar with the scholarship on children’s literature than many intellectual historians. Most of the work on children’s literature seems to come from American Studiers or from researchers housed in colleges of education, or, increasingly, from the new and growing interdisciplinary field of “childhood studies,” spearheaded by the program at Rutgers University-Camden. I am currently reading a book from the Rutgers Series in Childhood Studies: Michelle Ann Abate, Raising Your Kids Right: Children’s Literature and American Political Conservatism.

One thing about the historiography on children’s literature that leaves me unsatisfied is that there are few compelling notions about why children’s literature is important. That children’s literature is, in fact, important, is inarguable, I suppose, to the degree that it is not argued. Perhaps intellectual historians are better situated to offer answers?

Take Abate’s book, about children’s literature produced by conservatives since the 1990s. She argues that right-wing children’s literature—William Bennett’s The Book of Virtues, Terri Birkett’s Truax (an anti-environmentalist parody of Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax), Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series for children, Lynne Cheney’s picture books, The O’Reilly Factor for Kids, etc.—needs to be considered as part and parcel of the larger Christian Right counterculture. She writes: “Although children’s literature has often espoused didactic lessons, offered conservative morals, and even contained political themes, the new crop of books for young readers that began appearing in the early 1990s did so in a new and far more overt way” (4). She contends that these recent conservative children’s books contain “the broad spectrum of subjects that comprise the U.S. culture wars…” (4)

Although Abate adds an important component to the rapidly growing historiography on recent American conservatism, she does little to explain the importance of children’s literature, other than to show that adults consider it important. But again, this is common. Even the best addition to this historiography, Julia Mickenberg’s Learning from the Left: Children's Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States, does little, from my vantage point, to explain why scholars should pay attention to children’s literature. Mickenberg is quite right to say that children’s literature is potentially influential given its vast audience—a “ready market provided by school libraries.” And she provides tons of fun material from leftist children’s book authors, such as by M. Boland, whose “ABC for Martin” (1931) began with the following clever refrain: “A stands for Armaments—war-mongerers’ pride; B is for Bolshie, the thorn in their side.” (Now that’s poetry!) But still…

Like in the history of education, it seems clear that the history of children’s literature pivots from Robert Hine’s oft-repeated quote: “What society wants its children to know reveals what that society wants itself to be.” But this sentiment is about adults. What does reading literature do to children? What do children make of literature? Personally, I think growing up reading literature made me a much more empathetic person, someone much more likely to root for the underdog. Perhaps this was due to the literature put into my hands by my mother, a high school English teacher with decidedly liberal sympathies. Or perhaps this was due to the very genre of literature, the very act of reading literature.

In a recent review of Samuel Moyn’s The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, Robin Blackburn takes issue with Moyn’s argument that human rights were invented in the 1970s. Moyn contends that using the framework of human rights to explain political or intellectual history prior to the 1970s is at best anachronistic, at worst a teleological cover for imperialistic impulses of humanitarian interventionists. Blackburn finds a good deal to like about this contention, but maintains that not everyone who fought for rights since the Age of Revolution did so in the name of state power and, as such, often did so in the cause of individual, even "human" rights. Blackburn disagrees with Moyn because he explicitly has in mind abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, who never tied his disdain for slavery to state power. Quite to the contrary, he disavowed the Constitution as a guarantor of slavery. (This seems to come directly from Blackburn’s new book, The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights.)

How does this detour into human rights history relate to children’s literature? Blackburn writes:

We can agree that fictitious lineages help no one. Nevertheless, if the first law of history is that the past is always another country, the second is that it is never beyond the reach of the present. Lynn Hunt’s Inventing Human Rights (2007) sees the appeal to subjective ‘rights’ as a product of the new print culture of the 18th century, arguing that the wider identifications encouraged by the novel endowed readers with a new sensibility and sensitivity to suffering. She traces the emergence of a concern with ‘human rights’ as much to the psychology of the novel reader as to the arguments of the philosophers—with Rousseau, as philosopher-novelist scoring on both counts. While the political pamphlet appealed to the reasoning faculty, the novel or poem encourages the reader to imagine herself or himself in the situation of another. It directly aroused sympathy and de-familiarized oppression... The reader could be invited to identify with those unlike themselves.

Does something akin to this explain the recent importance of children’s literature?

Scholars tend to argue that, for most of its history, children’s literature was inherently conservative in its didactic approach to instilling proper behavior. Only recently has children’s literature more openly explored issues that arouse empathy, or the relativistic side of morality. Thus, Abate argues recent right-wing children’s literature is anti-modern in harkening back to a bygone era and that, as such, it fails to arouse empathy.

But if this is true—that conservative children’s literature fails to invite readers to identify with those unlike themselves—then what explains its popularity? What explains the millions of copies sold? I suppose there is one of three answers to this perplexing question. 1) Empathy is an overrated component of recent children’s literature, which does not, after all, act like the 18th century novel. 2) Conservative literature does, in fact, arouse empathy, just not for liberal academics like Abate. 3) American conservatives are decidedly un-empathetic and don’t want their children to evince sympathy for those who suffer.

My guess is some complex combination of all three is at play here. But this leads me back around to my original question: Why is children’s literature important? Is it merely a synecdoche for adult concerns?