Letters

The State of Intellectual History

To the Editors:

Thank you for putting together the forum on the state of intellectual history (September 2009). I am grateful that Historically Speaking took on the topic. The forum did not disappoint. The contributions touched on a great many issues for the U.S. branch of intellectual history. I believe it already qualifies as required reading for all graduate students and working professionals in U.S. intellectual history. I call your readers’ attention to a three-part response to the forum I am posting on the U.S. Intellectual History Weblog: http://us-intellectual-history.blogspot.com/2009/10/moving-beyond-everywhere-and-nowhere.html .

Tim Lacy
University of Illinois at Chicago

Barriers to “Becoming Historians”

To the Editors:

In “Becoming Historians: An Interview with James M. Banner, Jr. and John R. Gillis” (September 2009), only Professor Banner mentions (and that in passing) the most pressing and pertinent characteristic of the historical scene in the 1960s and 1970s: the collapse of job opportunities for historians. There was indeed “widespread disappointment” with the graduate school experience at the time. But this was due in large measure to the way such departments prepared their students for tenure-track jobs that simply were not there. We were told that if we were “good enough,” we would find work, or that the market would open up soon enough (“Patience, my boy!”).

The situation has only gotten worse. The majority of graduate students face years of gypsy labor, with few benefits, no office, little secretarial help, and often a near contempt from the tenured faculty (“Well, if she’s so good, why can’t she find a tenure-track job?”).

As one who lived through the boom and the bust years, I think I know what I am talking about. I have a good Ph.D. (London University) and an above-average publication record; you would not believe the number and the quality of the places that have turned me down over the decades! On the other hand, I was occasionally on the hiring end of the process and can well remember the something like one hundred applications for one opening. I was fortunate to find a public history berth as a command historian for the U.S. Army before I retired on a reasonable pension. (I now host a weekly call-in radio history program.)

As if matters were not dismal enough, well after the job collapse of the late 1960s, a number of universities, for no discernable reason other than empire building, began to offer their own little history doctoral programs. For example, all three of the Mississippi public universities and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro now lure graduate students to their graduate history schools. However meritorious these doctoral programs may be, their products must compete with hungry applicants from the likes of Princeton, Stanford, Duke, Wisconsin, etc.

Stanley Sandler
Spring Lake, North Carolina