Gray Lady Wakes Up

The dearth of history courses in American colleges and universities has become so obvious that even the New York Times has noticed. “In 1975, for example, three-quarters of college history departments employed at least one diplomatic historian; in 2005 fewer than half did,” Patricia Cohen reported in an article that appeared in The New York Times on June 11, 2009. “The number of departments with an economic historian fell to 31.7 percent from 54.7 percent. By contrast the biggest gains were in women’s history, which now has a representative in four out of five history departments.”

And she’s not even tabulating courses in European or American history. “At the University of Wisconsin, Madison, out of the 45 history faculty members listed (many with overlapping interests), one includes diplomatic history as a specialty, one other lists American foreign policy; 13 name either gender, race or ethnicity,” Cohen writes. “Of the 12 American-history professors at Brown University, the single specialist in United States empire also lists political and cultural history as areas of interest.”

“The department’s professor of international studies focuses on victims of genocide.” Ohio University historian Alonzo Hamby gave Cohen an idea of how the transition from traditional and factual to experimental and vague works. “In his own department of about 30 faculty members, a military historian recently retired, triggering a vigorous debate over how to advertise for a replacement,” Cohen reveals. “(A handful of faculty members had the view that ‘military history is evil,’ Mr. Hamby said.)”

“The department finally agreed to post a listing for a specialist in ‘U.S. and the world,’ he said, ‘the sort of mushy description that could allow for a lot of possibilities.’” Intentionally or not, Cohen gives us a chilling idea of what gets lost in the translation—namely, history itself.

Hamby himself is the author of such books as:

• For the Survival of Democracy: Franklin Roosevelt and the World Crisis of the 1930s (Free Press, 2004).

• Man of the People: A Life of Harry S. Truman, (Oxford University Press, 1995).

• Liberalism and its Challengers: From FDR to Reagan, (Oxford University Press, 1985).

• Imperial Years: The United States Since 1939, (Weybright and Talley, 1976).

“Pressing issues today like terrorism, global warming, infectious diseases, population growth, piracy, intellectual property, by contrast, don’t easily fit into a box with a single country’s name on it,” Cohen explains. “So students still study, say, World War I and the cold war, but while a traditional class would focus on the actions and statements of presidents and secretaries of state, a newer approach might look at how the imperial powers treated their colonies in the Middle East or how Soviet propaganda that tried to tarnish democracy by pointing to racism in America may have contributed to President Harry S. Truman’s decision to integrate the armed forces.”

BTW, Truman was never known to cave into such pressure, whatever his faults and virtues. Moreover, the civil rights plank of the 1948 Democratic platform that he refused to jettison led to the walkout of the so-called Dixiecrats from the party’s convention and, eventually, the election itself.

Truman bragged to his biographer Merle Miller, that he won the presidency outright without carrying New York or the South. Soviet propaganda has thus survived the late unlamented Soviet Union itself, at least in the media and academic circles in which reporters such as Cohen travel.

Several congressional committees used to keep busy during the Cold War deconstructing such campaigns. As well, federal agencies and state legislative bodies worked overtime doing so.

“For the past four or five decades higher education hasn’t provided a classical Liberal Arts education in history, philosophy, market economics, ethics and religion,” Christopher G. Evans, director of admissions at Yorktown University states. “The most important aspects of the Judaeo-Christian tradition have been ignored and several generations of educated Americans have experienced the loss of history of their country, the civilization of the West and the fundamental truths of limited government.”

An online university, Yorktown is one of a dwindling number of institutions, about 20 or so by our count, where one can go to rectify this imbalance.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.