The President's Corner

U THE PRESIDENT'S CORNER by George Huppert In my lase column, I found it useful to peer over the shoulder ofa New York Times reporter covering the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association. In this way I was able to touch briefly upon a distressingly banal topic, namely the high jinks some of our academic colleagues engage in when they play at revolution. Such gesturing is cause for amusement , but it is also cause for concern, because it turns conferences, committee meetings, journals, and classrooms into ideological battlegrounds, usually ofa truly silly sort. Such practices have spread to other continents; they travel from one discipline to another, so that debates over the literary canon, already halfforgotten in California, resurface in South Africa, where a committee composed of (white) high school teachers decided to recommend the exclusion ofShakespeare's Hamlet from the curriculum (too eurocentric). It is probably true that American academics occupy pride of place in the contest for the most ferocious expressions of ideological bias in the western world. This distinction has been duly noted for some years now in serious critical publications such as the Times Volume 3, Number I Historically Speaking The Newsletter of The Historical Society 656 Beacon Street Mezzanine Boston, MA 02215-2010 617/358-0260 Fax: 617/358-0250 histork@bu.edu www.bu.edu/histork I diior: Kirse G. May Assistant Editor: Sarah M. Abbott Literary Supplement and the New York Review ofBooks. More recently, the disturbing facts about academic politics in the United States are actually being discussed in textbooks written for beginners. A case in point is a new British manual for history students written by l.udmilla Jordanova called History in Practice (London: Arnold and Oxford University Press, 2000). The author is a historian of art and science who has taught at the Universities of Essex and York. She presents herselfas a feminist and as someone on the Left. Her advice to students strikes this reader as wholly admirable. After reviewing the various epistemológica! challenges faced by historians in recent years, Jordanova concludes that there are indeed "clear standards by which historical work can be judged," a position which has, as we know, been vociferously challenged by "critical theorists"—the uncritical theorists have not been heard from, as yet. Jordanova insists that historians have ethical obligations: "we are not free to say whatever we like about the past." She also recommends that we adopt a "greater willingness to write for the general public,"—a desideratum, it should be pointed out, that is wildly at odds with the jargon-possessed scribbling we often come across. Above all, Jordanova calls for openness . Although her own sympathies "lie more with the Left than with the Right," she insists that she is not automatically uninterested in or disapproving ofconservative history, "so long as it is done well." She admits to being "enraged" by the kind ofwomen's history, for instance, that makes "simplistic, universalist claims about the oppression of women." This makes not only for poor history, she points out, but also for poor politics—and, she insists, "these shortcomings are not forgivable just because we might be on the same side." Of course, she concedes that one cannot keep politics out ofhistorical scholarship , but she stresses the importance of being open about it. "Never, ever, should disagreements be personalized or allowed to get nasty, leading to the blocking ofjobs or publications," she cautions the student reader, while admitting that most historians "will witness some such behaviour in the course of their careers." Readers of History and Practice will not be left in doubt about the leading part played by Americans in the politicization of the discipline, especially in the field of women's history. She explains that what was new about women's history was its "overt association with a populist women's movement " and that the main impetus for women's history as a distinct field coincided, especially in American universities, with a "second-wave feminism, when more women were trying to make academic careers in male-dominated institutions." To this extent, she concludes, "the development of women's history could be seen as a move that served the...