James Hankins, a Harvard historian, has written an astute essay for the Martin Center about the difficulties facing a graduate student who wants to study traditional history. Such a student is one “who dislikes mixing contemporary politics into every historical dish and is out of sympathy with the perfervid evangelism of the modern progressive academy.”
These potential students, whom he calls conservative (but may not be conservative in the usual sense, just eager to study traditional history), are increasingly avoiding the academy. They find themselves out of sync with “social justice” agendas, and sympathetic would-be mentors are increasingly entering retirement.
I highly recommend Hankins’ article. In addition, it gives me a timely opportunity (in journalism, a “news peg”) to share my own experience as a history graduate student at North Carolina State University, from which I will soon receive a master’s degree.
In a word, it has been wonderful. At my age (let’s not be specific), I offered no professor any benefit if I was successful, nor harm if I did poorly. I was there to pursue an avocation, not a career. How that cut exactly, I don’t know, but I suspect it led to more freedom for me.
As a land-grant science and technology school, NC State does not have a Ph.D. program in pure history. Thus, many students are there to get a master’s and teach in a high school or community college. Thanks to the school’s new Ph.D. in public history, however, others are preparing to work in museums, libraries, or nonprofit organizations. Thus, it is not an academically pressured program, but a serious one. The professors I got to know are accomplished academics respected in their fields, which include French intellectual history, religion in Britain, the law, history of technology, and the European Middle Ages, among others.
What struck me most was that the history professors (some of whose classes were quite demanding) gave me wide latitude in choosing the subjects I wanted to write about. They allowed me to write historiography, that is, what historians have said about historical events, rather than burying myself in archival research, studying minutiae, as academic graduate students are often expected to do. They were friendly, encouraging, and willing to take the trouble to help me learn. I even had a chance to lead a class (learning in the process that I was wise not to have chosen teaching as a profession).
Most of what I have written about on this blog I learned from NC State. A couple of my professors appear to be Marxists but that merely exposed me to a way of thinking I was largely unfamiliar with, and they didn’t push their viewpoints on me (unlike a boss I had at Business Week, who said, “Jane, remember, we don’t live in Adam Smith’s era anymore.”)
Here are some examples of what I wrote papers on, all topics chosen by me. (The links are to articles on this blog). They included private correspondence schools in the U. S.; the impact of primogeniture in the High Middle Ages; Kenneth Pomeranz’s path-breaking book The Great Divergence on why the Industrial Revolution started in Britain, not China (even though my professor thought it would be a big “snooze”); Caribbean sugar plantations as proto-factories; the poor laws in England; proto-industrialization (a concept that largely has disappeared because it had no predictive power); Frédéric Bastiat’s views on government and socialism; academic debates over the impact of guilds in Europe’s industrialization, and a comparison of the role of guilds in the wool industry in England and France.
My thesis was titled “How Have Historians Explained Working Conditions in the Factories of the Industrial Revolution?” and it incorporated some of these topics. (It has been uploaded to thesis heaven at NC State’s Thesis Depository.)
Let me conclude by saying that while I learned from all my professors, I am most grateful to my thesis chairman, K. Steven Vincent, and I very much appreciate the other two members of my committee, Charles Ludington and Julia Rudolph. They’ve already okayed my thesis, so this is not a politically motivated thank-you. It is a real one.
Photo of NC State by wileydoc from Pixabay.
Professor Hankins is, I think, right on target. I’m a constitutional scholar whose research focuses mostly on the Founding Era. During my last year before fleeing academia, my dean started pressuring me to find an “environmental” aspect to my research, presumably to facilitate obtaining grants. (I can imagine a title: “John Adams: Environmental Despoiler” or perhaps “The Environmental Stewardship of John Dickinson”). Anyway, I flatly refused.
Prof. Hankins notes the “unscrupulous” way university officials misuse grants designed to support traditional studies. He says that “A possible model for protecting donated funds from unscrupulous university officials might be found in the group of private humanities institutes that have sprung up in the environs of major universities around the country in recent years.”
That is also correct. Any conservative—or moderate—who donates to most universities today is very misguided. The institutions that can make better use of the funds are (1) those such as Prof. Hankins mentions and (2) the many “think tanks” that are increasingly attracting conscientious scholars who want to avoid immersion in academic politics. Jane’s own former employer, PERC, is an example. My think tank, the Independence Institute, is another.