The introduction to one of the textbooks I’m assigning for next term’s “Early Modern Europe” history survey contains an interesting sentence:

Overall, at least in the editors’ judgment, the academy has emerged bruised but resilient: more conscious of its limitations, more tolerant of alternative pathways, more cautious about general conclusions, but otherwise in remarkably rude health.

C. Scott Dixon and Beat Kümin (eds.), Interpreting Early Modern Europe (Routledge, 2020), 9

What is interesting about this is that it is hard to imagine anyone inside or outside professional academia — “the academy” as commonly understood — looking around in 2023 and saying such a thing. In the US and UK, history programs are shrinking, history teaching being made casual or eliminated, departments being merged with those from other more or less distantly related disciplines. In Canada, my own university is in the midst of an indefinite hiring freeze, while the administration has just — with the full-time faculty union’s shameful approval — doubled the proportion of full-time faculty jobs that can be non-tenure-track. The academic job market has been so bad for so long that it feels cliché even to mention it; the Canadian Association of University Teachers presently lists six jobs in history in all of Canada, of which one is an LTAship (that is, a limited-term appointment with no guarantee of rehire and no possibility of tenure) and another a research chair for someone already in a tenured position. That leaves four tenure-track jobs in the entire country for the whole cohort of candidates hitting the market this year — plus everyone from earlier cohorts still trying for a steady job. Things were perhaps somewhat better back in 2020, with the effects of the pandemic still in the future. But not enough to make abject collapse look like rude health.

The textbook editors, both of whom teach in the UK, are aware of all this. When they write about the academy’s health in their introduction, they have just finished talking about the impact on historians’ practice of a century-long series of methodological developments and theoretical influences: criticisms and debates that have changed how scholars, as scholars, think about their questions, their sources, their analyses and their historical narratives, as well as about the ultimate meaning and significance, as well as the limitations, of the work that they do. Currents sweeping through journals and monographs, then textbooks and classrooms — in the form of new approaches to political, economic, social and cultural history, new subfields such as gender, postcolonial, or environmental history, and new perspectives on the place of academic history-writing itself in perpetuating or challenging social hierarchies — have challenged historians to think more carefully about their work and how to do it. One result has been more imaginative, self-reflexive and critical work. What the volume editors mean by health has nothing to do with the state of the profession, and everything to do with the state of the discipline. Historians’ workplaces are collapsing around them, but the practice of history is stronger than ever.

But how can a discipline thrive while the material basis of academic and learned institutions, steady jobs, and research funding that allows it to exist — the profession — withers away?

It is of course possible to disagree that the discipline is thriving. Conservative and centrist publications, and plenty of liberal bastions too, are awash with denunciations of academic work that is hyperspecialized, jargon-ridden, or simply fails to draw a popular audience by telling a sufficiently big or embiggening story. I think this strain of invective (and really, that is what it is) fails to identify an actual problem. Or at least, it fails to identify a problem that it is anyone’s job to solve. On one hand, academic research is inherently specialized; there is no obvious reason why academic journal articles in, say, early medieval church history should require less background to read, or less willingness to look things up, than academic journal articles in linguistics or economics or cardiology. On the other hand, academic historians — particularly if they have managed to secure continued employment by means of specialized research and less specialized teaching; that is, doing their jobs — routinely write popular histories, magazine articles, blog posts, and so on. (I get email reminders every other day of the Cundill Prize, something which could not very well exist otherwise.) And academic research sustains both popular histories and historical fiction written by non-academic writers, too, whether or not the debt is always acknowledged. So this set of complaints seems motivated by something besides genuine concern for the state of the field.

All is hardly well on the scholarly side, though, even if the loudest voices are wrong about why. The transformation of research into a gamified pantomime of “productivity,” expressed in citation statistics and bibliometrics, abetted by the managerialization of university life, the STEM-ization of research funding and institutional rhetoric, the scarcity of good jobs, and the precarity of bad ones, has created perverse incentives. One is to publish anything that moves. Another is to reinvent the wheel, and then reinvent it again. Big arguments and new ideas are not bad things! But there’s a case to be made that a field made up exclusively of big arguments and new ideas is neither arguing nor thinking so much as building a series of insistently innovative and immediately disposable brands. More prosaically, a push for novelty in bulk and on demand means the neglect — sometimes calculated, sometimes not — of generations of still-relevant older research, as well as of recent and current work from quarters that do not demand and cannot reward recognition. (Why cite a decade-old dissertation written by someone who never got a job when you can cite a brand-new research chair’s brand-new article instead — if you even knew about the dissertation in the first place?) In these and other ways, ostensibly “data-driven” and “meritocratic” research assessment often rewards hasty and overblown claims, reinforcing rather than revising institutional hierarchies, erasing disciplinary pasts and devaluing a great deal of hard-won original research. The more obsessed funding agencies and university administrations are with Next Big Things and research stars, the less reason there is to risk finding out that what you’re doing is neither solid nor new. To express it cynically: only stardom creates the context for your work to endure, anyway.

All that granted — and surely that is bad enough! — it remains true that excellent work is also being done, and some of what makes that work excellent is indeed its responsiveness to new ideas, new questions, new methods, and new connections to scholarship in other subfields and disciplines. At least some of the best work being done now was not, and could not have been, done before. And so one can still just about manage to talk about the state of the discipline (or, still more, of this or that scholarly subfield within it) without alluding to the state of the profession — at least if one’s interlocutors are all tenure-track faculty. Book and article prizes are still awarded, as are research grants (though more of these are cancelled every year, apparently including the one that funded my own dissertation research at the Institute of Historical Research twenty years ago). The flood of publications continues, for now, unabated. But for how long? And what comes next?

As long as doctoral programs are still churning out PhDs, and PhDs still hit the market hoping for jobs, the pressure to publish — already at a preposterous and intellectually counterproductive level — will sustain the appearance of a living discipline. More and more often, though, I have the experience of reading and learning from a piece of research that turns out to have been its author’s first and last: the book or the article that didn’t land the job, the academic career that ended at the start. As funding for dissertation research dries up, and less prestigious programs close, fewer of those contemplating history will make it even that far. Already, undergraduates soon perceive the futility of pursuing an academic career in history, not least because so many of the graduate students and adjuncts teaching them are barely scraping by. We are heading very rapidly towards a profession divided between a small and aging tenured faculty and a workforce of underpaid temps, with at best a thin layer of junior and mid-level tenure-track or tenured historians, their jobs relatively secure only at prestige institutions, in between. The discipline has been living in the ruins of the profession for a while now. It can’t last.