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  • The Almost Nonexistent History of Academic Departments
  • James M. Banner Jr. (bio)

Last spring a large group of historians, aspiring and experienced alike, gathered in Princeton's department of history for a set of lively panel discussions about the department's post-World War II history, its present situation, and its possible future. Because few departments in any discipline have taken an institutional interest in preserving and understanding their own pasts, a workshop about its own history immediately distinguished the Princeton department from most other history departments. But what invites particular note in this instance is that the workshop's organizers were not members of the department's faculty but instead a group of the department's graduate students.1

Those students' interest in their department's history originated in a chance realization that, though students of the past, they were ignorant of the past of the very institution in which they were preparing to become professional historians. That discovery occurred when one of them happened across a 1987 New York Times article on "The Hot History Department," a lively if lopsided and seriously incomplete account of one of the most influential groups of historians then practicing at an American university.2 The irony of fledgling historians not knowing much about the historical context of their own training was not lost on those students. But it seems to be an irony that had also long escaped the members of the department who were directing their studies.

I can write in a critical vein about this episode and its implications because I am a guilty partymyself (as well as a participant in the workshop).3 Before 1987, I had been a member of the Princeton department and was thus as responsible asmy colleagues—some now retired or deceased, some still active—for a failure of professional aswell as historical responsibility. I, too, had done nothing to further the written record of my own department, nor had I made any effort to introduce my graduate students to the history of the particular departmental culture they had entered. Unfortunately, the charge of inattention to department histories can validly be leveled against most other historians. For while you would think that historians, of all people, would take an interest in the history of their own institutions—in the history of the departments in which they practice, in the preservation and interpretation of that history, and in such matters as the traditions that form and sustain their collective approach to preparing others—they rarely do so. At least they rarely do so in a way that would prove useful to the advancement of knowledge, to the preparation of their students, and to the orientation of those who succeed them as members of their departments.4 But more is at stake here than the absence of histories of history departments. In fact, we have almost no histories of any academic departments, most significantly of the great ones in the major disciplines. That fact, the reasons for it, and some suggestions as to what might be done to alter the situation are the subject of what follows.

Academic historians are caught—some would say entrapped—in the intellectual sociology of their discipline. For generations, their professional preferment has derived from their success in creating knowledge in the major subject areas long central to their discipline: originally politics, institutions, statecraft, and foreign relations, more recently the many subfields of social, intellectual, and cultural history. The history of education and of educational institutions has not been foremost among any of those, nor has been the kind of intellectual history that might have grown out of it (the history of academic thought, for example). Academic biographies and memoirs, as well as histories of discrete colleges and universities, have been left to carry much of the weight of academic history, but few of these reveal much about the departments in which their authors have served. Department histories are almost nowhere to be found.

Why this is so is not hard to discern. Institutional history has been at a general discount in recent decades. The history of education has never found a strong place in history departments. Those aspiring historians seeking entry...

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