Historians are all atwitter over the "Applied History Project", the brainchild of Harvard scholar Graham Allison and globetrotting virtual historian Niall Ferguson. With what would seem like hubris in lesser mortals, the two projectors call on the next US President to create a "Council of Historical Advisers": a body of historians to help with policy much as the current Council … Continue reading If Historians Ran the World
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Historians vs Trump, part 2: Questions for Stanley Fish
Among the books I'm reading is a work of fairly recondite early modern intellectual history. Bucking a once prevalent tendency, the author of this work is at pains to disavow any political context for the intellectual debates s/he traces. For roughly half a century, political motivations have been detected behind ideas about not only politics but also economy, religion, history, and … Continue reading Historians vs Trump, part 2: Questions for Stanley Fish
Stanley Fish, Stop Opining about History
I would have no problem with individuals, who also happened to be historians, disseminating their political conclusions in an op-ed or letter to the editor; but I do have a problem when a bunch of individuals claim for themselves a corporate identity and more than imply that they speak for the profession of history. So … Continue reading Stanley Fish, Stop Opining about History
Academic publishing and graduate students: Thought for the day
My grandfather was born in 1909: not old enough for the First World War and too old for the Second, he served in the US Navy between the two. He had, I think, about three or four years of elementary school before leaving to work; though I remember him as prone to quoting Scripture and Shakespeare and singing lines of … Continue reading Academic publishing and graduate students: Thought for the day
Arguing for history: If not skills, then what?
The quiet, leafy corner of Twitter where I spend increasing amounts of my time exploded this morning with responses to the following statement: Society doesn't need a 21-year-old who is a sixth century historian. It needs a 21-year-old who really understands how to analyse things, understands the tenets of leadership and contributing to society, who … Continue reading Arguing for history: If not skills, then what?
Skills are not the answer: further thoughts on (not) selling history
[This continues an earlier post.] To pick up where I left off: Historians, history departments, and historical organizations are -- rightly -- worried about a decline in the study of history at the undergraduate level. There is no clear evidence for any one cause driving this decline, but a mixture of structural changes to the economy and … Continue reading Skills are not the answer: further thoughts on (not) selling history
Skills, Knowledge, and (Not) Selling History
Why study history? What can I do with a history degree? Why is the history major in decline? These three questions, or variations of them, seem to have been with us forever, or at least as long as I've been studying history (taking in college, that's about twenty years). They're the titles of campus workshops. They're … Continue reading Skills, Knowledge, and (Not) Selling History
Nothing fails like success
Academics love failure, kind of. I say this not only to avoid the stack of undergraduate papers I'm supposed to have graded already and the even larger stack of manuscript pages I'm supposed to have reviewed, but also as a reflection on the runaway success of Princeton psychology professor Johannes Haushofer's "CV of failures." This list … Continue reading Nothing fails like success
Whose Jargon? Or, All of us Creating Teamwork Inventing Opportunities Now
Earlier this month NPR ran a piece decrying academic "jargonitis." (What is "jargonitis", you ask? Well....) That in itself is hardly news. The jeremiad against academic language (jargon, theory, "academic writing" altogether) is a familiar extension of the ivory tower vs. real world dichotomy (sorry: idea that two things are different) that shapes so much media coverage of higher … Continue reading Whose Jargon? Or, All of us Creating Teamwork Inventing Opportunities Now
Not that kind of doctor: questions about the history PhD from near-ground level
One reason that I feel free to try my hand at blogging all of a sudden after all these years on Earth is that a great weight is about to be lifted from my shoulders: the weight of being my department’s graduate program director. When I agreed to take on the job just over three years … Continue reading Not that kind of doctor: questions about the history PhD from near-ground level
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