Well, yah, ... So What _is_ Wrong with the UCLA History Department?

by Cliopatria

Poor Andrew Jones. His moment in the national spotlight is so disappointing. Google up his name and he's trumped by a transgendered Andrew Jones, who'll be speaking at the University of North Texas. Hiram Hover points out that three prominent members of the advisory board of his Bruins Alumni Association (Harvard's Stephen Thernstrom, former United States Representative James Rogan, and UCLA professor emeritus Jascha Kessler) have resigned. At Crooked Timber, on a scale of 1 to 5, Kieran Healy gives him a humiliating ½ a McCarthy. Perhaps the worst: he's denounced as irresponsible and threatened with a lawsuit by David Horowitz.

So, it was a bad day for UCLA alum Andrew Jones. Actually, I think there's a sense in which Jones is more responsible than at least one of his accusers. He's willing to pay for hard evidence. Horowitz pays himself over $300,000 a year and can't be bothered to hire fact checkers to verify which of his urban legends have elements of truth in them. Hiring students to spy on professors is a bad idea, because it perverts the student/teacher relationship, but being willing to live less high on the hog in order to substantiate your claims is a good thing.

I'm gonna risk the ire of my colleague, Ambrose Beers, and his legion of fans, however, to ask: So, What is Wrong with the UCLA History Department? [Ed.: Five years later, the guy still commands a loyal following. See:"Retroblogging" at Dymaxion World and"Exciting Discovery of the Early Afternoon!" at The Reference]. Two things, I'd say. In the first place, to my knowledge, it hasn't bothered to hire a showcase conservative to cover its ass. As I pointed out yesterday, Andrew Jones's list of the"dirty thirty" largely concentrates on UCLA's Law School and its history department. The Law School could count on Eugene Volokh to say something responsible to his largely conservative and libertarian audience. Over the last twenty-five years, it would have served the interests of UCLA's history department had it once – even only once – hired a high profile conservative or libertarian scholar, who might now speak a similar word to a similar audience.

The other thing, of course, is what my colleague, KC Johnson, has repeatedly pointed out. UCLA's history department is one of the nation's most important research faculties, with 21 active, full-time appointments in American history. Do any of them do mainstream American political history? Well, no. Constitutional, diplomatic, legal, military? None of those, either. Full in the knowledge that it was losing its primary recent American political historian, Jessica Wang, UCLA conducted a search this year for someone in recent cultural, environmental, labor, and urban history. More coal for Newcastle, please.

Two years ago, my colleague, Tim Burke, put the question in terms of the perfectly baked pie. Of course, he was correct. The issue is: how, with limited resources, do you allocate faculty positions? UCLA has a very large pie, but the filling tips heavily to one side of it.

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David Lion Salmanson - 1/26/2006

Can someone explain to me what Stephen Aron, Ellen Dubois, Joan Waugh and Craig Yirush are not practitioners of political history? If a history of the sufferage movement isn't political history, is the definition so narrow as to be only Congress? Is anything in the territorial period not political history?

Ralph E. Luker - 1/21/2006

Leo, Do you read? Where have I failed to say that what Andrew Jones did was just plain wrong? Have I done anything other than to mock it? It is you, my friend, who is indifferent to and unwilling to defend the rights of conservative academics. When you speak up for the rights of people with whom you disagree, I'll regard you as a civil libertarian. Until then, I'm afraid that you're simply another person on the left and I'll defend your right to be that.

Leo Edward Casey - 1/21/2006

But I thought that was the point I was making, since it cuts both ways. Those on the left who want to talk about schools of business but not departments of sociology are not any different than those on the right who want to talk about schools of business but not departments of sociology. Academic freedom is a classic civil libertarian area, and if you can only profess concern when individuals on your side of the political spectrum are the target, you lose credibility. UCLAProfs would be the ideal instance for conservative academics to say this is just plain wrong, just as it would be wrong if it were a liberal hit list of conservative academics, but I don't see it happening. Volokh is a case in point.

The fact that 'the dirty thiry' is not a very serious threat, largely because of the political truculence with which it has been launched, does not change it character.

Ralph E. Luker - 1/20/2006

When David Horowitz is threatening to sue him and his board of advisors is falling apart, you can let down the defenses because Andrew Jones is pretty well finished. Of course, those of us on the left want to talk about Business Schools because we're not in them and the pinch won't touch us. Willingness to criticize those "others" is common enough. What I'm asking for is a willingness to be _self_ critical.

Leo Edward Casey - 1/20/2006

I think it is a mistake, Ralph, to raise the issue of departmental balance in this context. It lends a legitimacy to the 'dirty thirty' list that it most assuredly does not deserve.

I have written quite critically about the political positions assumed by a few individuals on that list in other contexts, and I imagine I will do so again. But there is a world of difference between reasoned criticisms of, let us say, McLarens' writings in the field of education, written for the purpose of showing errors and the lack of supporting evidence in his arguments, with an ultimate goal of advancing educational thought, and the sort of lurid tabloid-style prose on UCLAprofs, written for purposes of fueling a political witchhunt. It is essential, I think, to maintain such a distinction.

Indeed, what I fear is that this sort of effort will fall flat on its face in terms of its own goals, but make it that much harder to make substantive, scholarly criticisms of some of these individuals, for they will immediately be lumped in with this sort of debased discourse.

So there is a legitimate discussion to be had about political balance in academia, but it does that debate a disservice to raise it in this context. Let us discuss in its own time and place. I would be most interested, for example, in an explanation of why those debates always manage to avoid schools of business, where the ideological disposition is at least as skewed as any social science or humanities department, but in the opposite direction.

Chris Bray - 1/20/2006

Take a look at the UCLA Profs profile for Mark Sawyer, who apparently doesn't do any traditional scholarship in real political science: "...Sawyer’s rising star continues to climb, fueled by race, race and more race." And then, directly below the claim that this scholar only does work in the apparently empty field of race, race, and more race, we get a list of his research interests, including "Race and state development" and "Immigration(,) race(,) and citizenship."

State development isn't a real topic in political science, now, if it's contaminated with the topic of race.

Many, many scholars who are doing work coded as "identity studies" are working in traditional areas of political history, but approaching those topics from a different direction than, say, the consensus historians. Many people have said this here, but let's say it again: The lines are not that clean.

Oscar Chamberlain - 1/20/2006

My apologies. You did not conflate them.

Timothy James Burke - 1/20/2006

I think what Simmons and Bollinger are doing is an important thing to look at and praise. This is, I suppose, my inclination to look more at models with a kind of generosity rather than hammer on people in negative terms.

But the other thing I would look for, KC, is whether political history as you imagine it is doing the job it needs to do in order to compel historians to respect its intellectual virtues. And here too my answer would be optimistic, in that I think you can see the ways in which social and cultural history in many fields are turning a lot of attention to topics like law, sovereignity, civil society and so on. In my own field, after a long relative lack of interest, the formal character of colonial states and 'indirect rule' are becoming central topics of concern again, in part spurred by work from political scientists and political historians.

There may be plenty of political history out there that you're overlooking because of a feeling that it has to be "pure". It seems to me that the field of colonial American history is particularly affected by this in a great deal of recent work, that the insights and methods of political and diplomatic history are shifting what social and cultural historians write about and teach. That's how social history's ascension occurred thirty years ago: it went from a practice of relative outsiders to being broadly incorporated into what any historian felt obligated to write about and think about.

If what you expect from political history is instead the antithesis of social history (as opposed to a new hybrid form) then I think you're actually retarding the improvement of knowledge over time. I'm actually somewhat whiggish in this respect, that we know more and know better over time, that if you want to work on American constitutional history, yes, you also have to think about the social history which interrelates to it. What you're right about is that the obligation has not been felt in the opposite direction by many of the orthodox figures of a certain generation of social and cultural historians--some of them felt safe writing out "dead white men", and so on. But I think that's changing, quite noticeably in many respects. The product of that change should not be a reversion to formal separations between rigidly maintained specializations, it should be a new hybrid practice which then generates new research projects and problems for discussion.

In that respect, if a given department (like UCLA) says, "We want to hire in cultural history", I can well imagine that the person they hire might actually also end up being in a meaningful sense a political historian. For example, a historian who works on memoralization and public memory might well become someone interested in the state, in governance, in laws. A social historian might become someone interested in political elites, and from that interest increasingly move into sounding more and more like a traditional "political historian". A cultural historian who researches the history of passports and cross-border travel in Europe might turn into a a scholar resembling diplomatic history, studying the formal relations between states and the inter-state institutions. And so on.

The pressure you need to bring to bear to allow those kinds of evolutions is not the kind you've conventionally hammered on, I think. It's not, "Hire more formal specialists in a certain field". It's more in the cut-and-thrust of substantive criticism of what people actually write and teach. I think you affect scholars far more when you ask, "When you wrote about yeoman farmers, why did you rigorously leave out any discussion of gentry?" or "When you write about customary law in colonial Africa, why don't you write about the political history of imperial governance?" When you complain about syllabi, I think the complaint is powerful only if you register it in tangibly canonical terms. Like, "How can you justify teaching a class on this subject without teaching X or Y book?"

Those are the complaints that sting scholars, and often spur them to change their pedagogy and their publication--or to feel a need to hire or solicit specialists who can address those oversights and absences. Or at the least, they spur the kinds of statements of refusal where you really can argue strongly against the close-mindedness and narrow ideological premises embodied in such refusals. That's where you sort out people of good faith and people who really are out to reproduce a narrow orthodoxy: when you go to a specific point of exclusion in their work or their teaching and ask, "Is that deliberate? Why are you doing that?"

Ralph E. Luker - 1/20/2006

Tim, It isn't so much shouting at individual cooks, though that works well for criticizing us, as it is offering examples of the problem. As KC points out, we could point to Michigan or Illinois or any number of top tier research departments. I do think that in Sean Wilentz's work at Princeton we might be seeing a harbinger of better times ahead -- in the work of a social historian who draws on the range of new insight that social history has produced -- in order to weave a new political narrative.
Having said that, I'd also say that I'm a part of the generation that drove political, constitutional, legal, and military history into their current hidy-holes, but it never occurred to me that we would leave mainstream political history largely unstaffed, untaught, unresearched, at major research institutions. It has been a major blunder.

Robert KC Johnson - 1/20/2006

As Chris noted in a post below, I've repeatedly argued that UCLA is in no way atypical of larger public university departments. For a variety of reasons (such as their posting of syllabi), it's possible to speak in a little more detail about the curricular effects of hiring practices at UCLA than at other institutions. But Ralph's comments could just as easily apply to, say, Washington, or Illinois, or Berkeley.

I'm fully aware of both the political and pedagogical underpinnings that led to the rise of social history, as well as the resistance of more "traditional" historians at the time to social history's emergence. And I agree with Tim completely that it's easy to offer an institutional explanation for the hegemony of social historians in most Americanist contingents.

Obviously UCLA making one token hire in a more traditional field won't do much to alter the broader state of the academy. But the initiatives of administrators like Ruth Simmons at Brown or Lee Bollinger at Columbia to address the broader problem of a lack of intellectual diversity seem to me a reasonable approach to addressing the question of pedagogical imbalance. I agree, though, that we see little interest in that area, and the outside pressure (too few "conservative" profs, too many "radical" ones) seems to me to miss the main problem.

Ralph E. Luker - 1/20/2006

Oscar, What you have said here is a cheap shot that didn't even bother to read what I said. I have never accused my friends on the left of being anti-American and _you know it_. I have found them sometimes to be unwilling to acknowledge the singularity of their hearing range. Look at the UCLA department. Is there a major conservative voice in it? That's one question. Does it have a political, constitutional, diplomatic, or legal historian in it? That's a different question. I haven't conflated them, except in your mind.

Timothy James Burke - 1/20/2006

I will repeat what I have said to KC: making this a simple matter of volition, and a simple case of what one department has done, is simply the wrong thing to do. It puts any department so criticized in a "have you stopped beating your wife lately?" position, and isolates their circumstance from the broader circumstances that have produced the common distributions of specialization within the discipline and the common distributions of political inclination in the profession. You don't even know if the Department of History at UCLA has ever had a search in which the kind of scholar you imagine presented themselves as a possible hire, whether there is an actual road not taken.

To talk about the reasons why political or military history is a less common field at this point in the history of the discipline is a complicated and potentially rich discussion. I've tried to have that discussion with KC on a number of occasions and to urge him to explore some of the issues involved, but it doesn't seem to go anywhere. KC's consciousness of the discipline seems about twenty years old and no older, but Ralph, you have a longer sense of the discipline, I would think.

Thirty years ago political history was a much more common specialization, as was diplomatic and even military. The dominant political, diplomatic and military historians of that era were no kinder to rising social historians than the social historians have been in turn to other specializations. Social history surged into prominence partly as a response to changing social conditions outside the academy, and partly because of its intellectual novelty and methodological inventiveness: social historians really were writing about new subjects, doing innovative research, and so on. E.g., their ascension had a good deal to do with the truth of what they had to offer, as it ought to in academia. Once they ascended, of course, they did what academics seem intrinsically predisposed to do, and that's to institutionalize their own methodological and argumentative models and to reproduce themselves within the profession. They did so at a time when the academy was growing increasingly careerist and when professionalization was becoming more rigid, so their dominance of the discipline has been more pronounced and in some ways more intellectually intolerant than the preceding generation.

But all of this suggests that the answer for other specialization in part lies in making a serious, sustained intellectual challenge to social and cultural history, etc., in the substantive, scholarly production of historical knowledge, and offering serious, substantive critiques of the methodological and theoretical assumptions of dominant fields of specialization. The social historians also won their place in departments of history by mobilizing political resentment and by critiquing the existing bias of academia, true. But that's not all they did.

If when you put together a hire in an "old-fashioned" field of history all you see is "old-fashioned" applicants, it becomes a difficult cycle to break. KC looks at this from one side: who is training the students of tomorrow, and if none of them are conventional or traditional political, diplomatic or military historians, none such will appear in applicant pools. You have to look at it from the other side as well: it's a bad idea to have a revolution in one country. If you want the best and the brightest, in general, it's easiest to look where the bodies are thickest on the ground. If you want to make a shift, shifting one position doesn't change the situation: a single isolated professor is no draw at all. If I wanted to do traditional political history, no way in hell would I apply to a department that had a single such faculty member. I'd want to go to a program with pronounced strengths in such areas, that was investing serious resources there. And not all departments should be expected to make that kind of shift. KC (and you) should not be hammering on UCLA as much as asking, "Is there *anywhere* in the discipline where serious strengths in these areas are invested, or where serious institution building is going on"?

All of these discussions, in fact, can only be profitably pursued with a view of the bigger picture and a more tolerant understanding of the bigger histories that have gotten us to this point. The belief that we need to "bake the pie" in a more wholesomely pluralistic way is absolutely fair, but shouting at any single cook who puts out their pie on the windowshelf isn't any way to go about making good on that belief.

Oscar Chamberlain - 1/20/2006

Ralph, KC

Why do you buttress what the Jones and Horowitzs of the world do by conflating being anti-American (which is what their charges boil down to) and not having a good balance of fields.

Other than their charges, what does one have to do with the other? Is an imbalance in fields--in and of itself--an indicator of political bias? Would a balance of fields refute those charges? I don't think so.

And if there is no necessary relationship between the two, then why do the two of you bring the balance question up in this context?

Ralph E. Luker - 1/20/2006

Obviously, a department doesn't advertise like that, any more than it advertises for a "center-left" historian. I'm just suggesting that in some ideologically-blind search over the past 25 years, the department might have hired a distinguished conservative scholar. The lack of such could be considered prima face evidence that searches haven't been ideologically-blind or that the searches have been for scholars who are intellectually compatible.

Chris Bray - 1/20/2006

I don't disagree with the idea of seeking ideological balance in the department -- and I'd like to see the department hire in diplomatic and military history -- but I do very much wonder how that first part would work. What would the job announcement look like? "Wanted: Conservative historian? Must submit affidavit of voting record." Seriously, how exactly does one go about consciously and calculatedly hiring a "conservative historian"? What are the mechanics of that search? Do you send apparent leftists who apply a letter informing them that they've been ideologically disqualified? ("Thanks for your interest, but we aren't budgeted for a center-left hire until 2008.")