BY HANK REICHMAN
“We are deeply concerned that the crisis of the American university–the decline of tenure-track jobs and universities’ eroding commitment to the humanities and social sciences–has created a structural crisis for scholarship.” So write the editors of the Journal of the Early Republic, published by the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR), in a preface to an important and remarkable symposium on “The Material Conditions of Historians’ Labor,” published in the journal’s Winter 2022 issue, for which I was privileged to write a contextual introduction. Contributors include public and academic historians, contingent and tenured faculty members, and even a university president/former provost. Although focused on the discipline of history, the symposium’s observations are more than pertinent to other fields of study
Pervading the entire effort is the recognition that, to quote the contribution of Erin Bartram, School Programs Coordinator at The Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford, Connecticut and co-founder and an editor of Contingent magazine, “the primary factor shaping the scholarly productivity of many historians is the absolute collapse of the tenure-track job market in history.” Adds Bartram,
With the departure of so many scholars from academic history and the consequent loss of new scholarly production, a loss that only grows with each passing year, the question facing those who remain in secure academic positions is whether they are willing to acknowledge honestly these conditions and work to change them. If this work is not done, if these conditions are not changed, then future conversations about how best to support the production of new scholarship in the field become moot. The field will no longer exist in any meaningful way.
My introduction, entitled “Academic Capitalism and the Crisis of the Professoriate,” traces the emergence of a new academic order that has reshaped universities in accordance with market logic and market priorities. This order is characterized most vividly by the emergence of a system of stark and increasing inequality between a relatively privileged minority of institutions and professors, themselves internally differentiated and besieged, and a growing mass that lacks the security and resources to engage in scholarship.
The picture I draw, fleshed out further by my co-contributors, is a depressing one. Like Bartram, I worry that if trends are not reversed–and if we faculty members, tenured and nontenured alike, do not strive to reverse them–it is not only my own discipline that will no longer meaningfully exist. My focus, unsurprisingly, is on the potential danger not only to historical scholarship but for academic freedom more broadly. Recalling in my concluding paragraph how during the Red Scare of the 1950s too many scholars ignored the ideals of their profession and overrode the civil liberties of their colleagues, “I tremble at what could now happen in colleges and universities more stratified, fragmented, and competitive, in an era more politically and culturally polarized, not only to individual scholars but to scholarship itself.”
Nonetheless, as the Journal editors note, although “we must continue to fight for the university,” we need also “to ask ourselves not just how we can support the continued creation of existing forms of scholarship, but also what forms of scholarship might work best given new material realities.” They ask, “What things can we do to enable the continued production of scholarship in our pages given the changing material conditions we are facing? What should change about how we approach scholarship? What shouldn’t?”
These and related questions are addressed with insight and creativity by each of the contributors. The essay by Liz Covart, creator, host, and producer of the award-winning podcast Ben Franklin’s World and Digital Projects Editor at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, argues that “the lack of alignment between the incentives and labor structures of scholarly publication and the twenty-first-century reality of what it means to be a working historian when most scholars lack access to the time, money, libraries, and intellectual communities they need to support scholarly production, is problematic. It means we lose the important ideas and contributions of scholars just because they either chose a different line of work or could not obtain research university tenure-track employment.” She goes on to explore ideas for how scholarly organizations can better support and help their members produce scholarship and include them in scholarly publishing and peer review.
Simon Finger, who has taught on a series of contingent contracts at multiple institutions, asks whether some of the accommodations offered during the pandemic could be adapted to help adjuncts and other contingent faculty contribute to the historical discipline and publish more original research. “It can often be difficult for historians with long-term contracts to understand the challenges that their more tenuously employed colleagues face,” he writes, “but for a moment Covid-19 threw us all into the same boat. . . . Ironically, those accustomed to working with less were perhaps better prepared to employ familiar strategies to compensate for lack of resources.”
Stacey Robertson, since July 2022 president of Widener University and formerly provost at SUNY Geneseo, argues that in order to support continued scholarly productivity among junior historians faculty and academic leaders must collaborate to revise tenure and promotion guidelines with an equity mindset and create increased opportunities for integrated scholarship.
Important perspectives from outside the academy are offered by Jessie Serfilippi, an “historical interpreter” at Schuyler Mansion State Historic Site in New York, and Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai, Director of Research at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Serfilippi argues that public historians and historical interpreters are often misunderstood by academic historians. They face challenges such as their work being undervalued and being underpaid, and she offers a sobering example from her own work. “I experienced first-hand this perception of public historians from the general public after the publication of my essay, ‘‘As Odious and Immoral a Thing:’ Alexander Hamilton’s Hidden History as an Enslaver,”’ she writes.
I did not expect my research to get much attention outside of the local history world of Albany. That is why when it was covered by the Schenectady Gazette, then the New York Times and Smithsonian Magazine, among others, I was shocked and thrilled that what I’d written could reach a wider audience, allowing them to learn more about the history of one of the nation’s most famous founders, but, more importantly, to learn about and remember the people he enslaved.
The excitement that I felt about this information making it to the public did not last long. Within hours of an article about it being published online by the New York Times, the attention—not on my research, but on me—began. I was naive and did not expect to face so much hate. A lot of the attacks were personal, attempting to discredit my research by discrediting me. One of the most common attacks I faced was people claiming I had no credentials to write such a paper. My title, “historical interpreter,” was misunderstood at best and mocked at worst. It was only because of the support of my colleagues and historians I’d long admired who reached out to me via Twitter that I was able to first weather the storm, then ignore the hate.
This experience showed me the importance of mentors and how the gap between public historians and academic historians will only grow larger if there is little to no interaction between the two fields.
Wongsrichanalai hopes “increasing public awareness about the importance of and difficulties facing historical scholarship may help restore and equalize support at all levels” and that historical societies and libraries can provide a helpful “bridge.” He offers an example: “The New England Regional Fellowship Consortium (NERFC) offers a model that benefits researchers and archives, large and small alike. Although it began with a handful of organizations, NERFC now consists of 31 libraries, archives, and university special-collections departments all across New England. By pooling resources, these institutions are able to provide travel fellowships.”
Historians and other scholars need time, money, and community to support their research, writing, and scholarly production, as all the contributors recognize. But, as the editors acknowledge, pursuing scholarly work can be “a big risk and a big commitment for those whose jobs do not demand it and who may be trying to write in whatever spare time they find after work and caring for family.” The symposium’s participants offer useful suggestions for practices that might ameliorate the problem, but it is impossible not to agree with Bartram that these “will not make up for the knowledge production that continues to be lost with the collapse of academic hiring. If we desire a thriving field, collective action is the only path to a long-term solution.”
The Journal of the Early Republic is, like most academic journals, behind a paywall at Project Muse. Sadly, the existence of such an obstacle to access is itself an illustration of the problem. Those who can read and download these essays via an institutional account (or who can afford to purchase them) will be well-served by doing so. And, please, share them with colleagues. Once again, the symposium is available at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/49305.
Contributing editor Hank Reichman is professor emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay; former AAUP vice-president and president of the AAUP Foundation; and from 2012-2021 Chair of AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. His book, The Future of Academic Freedom, based in part on posts to this blog, was published in 2019. His Understanding Academic Freedom was published in October, 2021.
Dear Hank, I have three questions, aimed to prompt discussion and contextual understanding.
First, why do you not recognize that modern “academic capitalism” began during World War II and accelerated during the 1950s and 1960s? It was clear when I was an undergraduate at a selective college 1967-1970 with its dependence on TAs and push for business and engineering, govt. and corp. contributions. When I completed grad school in 1975, there were no jobs in either the humanities or the social sciences. You are perpetuating the myth of a “golden age.” Capitalization underlies the long and deeply criticized The Academic Revolution.by Jencks and Riesman. Jencks revised his own understanding.
Second, you also perpetuate the self-serving myth of the humanities and history as “victim.” We must accept considerable responsibility for what was happened. Our disciplines did so little to respond. In addition, the social sciences and somewhat later the central natural sciences share most of the consequences of the humanities. But we refuse to grasp that and to work together.
Third, why do you choose to participate behind a paywall and not insist that JER and Penn Press put such an issue openly online. I read it through my university’s library site. Far from all, as you–and presumably the journal’s editors–know can do that.
Thanks to all
1) You place the words “golden age” in quotes as if I had used that term. I did not. Indeed, for multiple reasons I dislike it. I also did not argue that academic capitalism cannot be found well before the 1970s, nor do Rhoades and Slaughter, the foremost analysts of the concept, argue that. I merely suggest that the postwar decades saw a remarkable expansion of higher education that, in key respects, created favorable conditions for faculty work. These years, however, also laid the ground for the subsequent dominance of an academic capitalist model that had previously coexisted with other trends. Had I been asked to write a different piece, of course, my emphases might have differed. Indeed, in a previous piece — a talk at UCLA reposted to this blog — I offered a more expansive analysis of academic capitalism. You may not agree with it, but it’s here: https://academeblog.org/2019/05/28/academic-capitalism-and-the-future-of-academic-freedom/
2) I also did not use the word “victim,” which you place in quotation marks. And, frankly, I don’t disagree with you on this point, except that I simply don’t see where my piece in this symposium takes a contrary position. In that earlier UCLA talk I spent considerable time addressing the impact of academic capitalism on faculty in the natural sciences. And I hardly implied that faculty members ourselves are not complicit, quoting Sheila Slaughter, who cautioned that “as segments of the professoriate align themselves with the market and make great personal gains from the synergy between their university work and their corporate endeavors, their claims about the need for buffers from external pressures ring less true, undermining their historic stance as disinterested scientists and experts, which is the foundation on which the claim of academic freedom rests.” That said, one cannot make every point in every piece and, to be blunt, in this one I already exceeded my assigned word limit (which the editors were gracious enough to allow).
3) I might simply respond that I chose to accept an invitation to publish in a scholarly journal for the same reasons that I always do and also the same reasons that my books, including those on academic freedom, must be, well, purchased. Except with those books I do receive modest royalties. Scholarly journals, as you know, do not as a rule pay their authors or, for that matter, their peer reviewers and sometimes even their editors. Still, it costs money to produce them. To be sure, this model may be flawed in some ways but, as several contributors to our symposium point out, many adjunct/contingent faculty and “independent scholars” not only cannot afford to access journals (which is why Liz Covart proposes that “scholarly organizations and graduate institutions should help their scholars retain library access to necessary and expensive digital databases”) but also often cannot afford to spend extensive time on work that will, in the end, be unpaid (which is why Erin Bartram’s “first reaction upon receiving the invitation to participate in this forum was, ‘What is the compensation for this writing?'”). I might thus also respond that I chose to participate in the symposium for the same reasons Bartram offers: “Despite the lack of compensation, I chose to contribute to this conversation not only because I thought it was valuable, but because it was an amount of work that I felt comfortable donating . . .”
And I should add to my response to your third question that I would be thrilled if Penn Press agreed to move this symposium out from behind the paywall. I suspect the journal editors would too. Perhaps they will. However, I don’t think it would have been helpful for me, as one invited participant, to make such a move a condition of my participation, which I suspect would have merely led to a withdrawal of the invitation.
I’m sorry that you are unwilling to engage the issues, Hank. I put “golden age” and “victim” in.quotation marks to indicate my usage not yours. The history of the last 3/4s century and the role of humanists/historians/social scientists does matter. We are complicit. And these patterns are not solely 21st century (to refer to a 1998 1st edition of one of your most cited books)