On Interdisciplinary and Student Demand
IA noted that we might see the rise in social history classes as a response to student demand. I think that’s very clearly true in the late 1960s and 1970s, when there were widespread student calls for greater attention to previously excluded areas such as women’s history and African-American history. But, having taught at three very different kinds of institutions—Arizona State, Williams, and now Brooklyn—I’ve noticed strong student demand for courses in political, diplomatic, and constitutional topics, which seems to me is part of a broader change in student attitudes. John Leo wrote about this issue in a recent US News column, and some might also recall a discussion of the question from a couple of fascinating New York Times articles (now locked in their archives) from this past fall about faculty frustrations that students were not responding to their professors’ calls to protest against the Iraq war.
I am less persuaded, however, than is IA about the ability of student demand alone to serve as a counterbalance. Only on rare occasions do departments make hiring or tenure decisions on the basis of personal demand. Students frequently take courses because of the need to fulfill requirements or because of scheduling issues. And even if a department responds to student pressure by offering more courses in"traditional" historical topics, if the department's faculty is dominated by social or cultural historians, the students are likely to get the unusual approach to more “traditional” fields that the UCLA course structure exhibits. In the end, while a syllabus alone can’t tell us for sure about what is being taught in a course, it does provide some sense of the course’s intellectual content, and it’s the only guide that we have (absent student postings on a site such as noindoctrination.org). Of course, as a couple of posters at IA noted, the students might wind up migrating to Political Science—a good case can be made that the rise of American political development as a PoliSci sub-discipline relates to the decline of political history within History. Speaking as a historian, however, a solution that finds students majoring in another discipline is one I’d rather avoid.
A broader issue here is what I see as the usefulness of defending some sort of line between both disciplines as a whole and the sub-disciplines of history. Obviously, in smaller departments, there’s no choice but to teach across sub-disciplinary lines. Nor am I speaking of fields outside of US history, where relatively few departments hire sufficient numbers of historians to break down into sub-specialties. But my postings on this issue have focused on larger departments—the sort of places that (a) set the broader trends in the study of US history; and (b) have the choices to hire in sub-specialties if they so choose.
In part, my opinion on the issue is a product of my employment environment—I teach at a school with an administration that promotes interdisciplinarity with a zealous aggressiveness for quite dubious academic reasons. As an appropriate organizational model, our provost has cited Cal. St.-Monterey Bay, which has no History Department, instead opting for an interdisciplinary “global studies” department whose course content is highly politicized (CSUMB, for example, offers no courses at all on European history, on the grounds that it's more important for students to learn about Mexican and East Asian history).
In part, though, my opinion flows from what seems to me an assumption quite widespread in the academy today that approaches crossing either disciplinary boundaries or lines within the discipline so obviously produce more enlightening scholarship or teaching that the proposition needs no defense.
It seems to me, on the contrary, that interdisciplinarity is outcome-neutral: in and of itself, it is neither good nor bad, and its usefulness depends on the question that the historian is asking. While in answering some questions, crossing either disciplinary lines or boundaries within the discipline can yield impressive scholarship, doing so can just as easily produce faddish or weakly argued work.
An example from my own field (diplomatic history) is the new emphasis on"gendered language" in US foreign policy. This approach certainly crosses bounds within the discipline—but as a tool for understanding US foreign policy, its value is minimal indeed. About the only good book I can think of that employs this approach is Elaine Tyler May's Homeward Bound, and that is essentially a women's history work that is useful in diplomatic history classes (I've used it at both the undergrad. and graduate levels). An example of this approach’s deleterious effects in teaching can be seen in one of the courses I linked to at UCLA, which examines inter-American relations through the issue of gendered language and cultural images. This may be an interesting course—but unless students enter the course with some background knowledge of US relations with Latin America (which they can’t get anywhere else in the UCLA History catalog), it seems to me they’re going to leave this course knowing little about inter-American relations, and knowing what they do know from a highly skewed angle.
My point here is not that interdisciplinarity or (for lack of a better term) intradisciplinarity within history is dubious—just that its value, in either scholarship or teaching, cannot be taken as a given. Historians should not start with the methodology they will employ: instead, they should begin with the question that they want to answer, and then determine whether an inter- or intra-disciplinary research or intellectual approach is the wisest course of action.