History: a stellar past, an uncertain future

To hear John Merriman tell it, you would think the old bard himself had descended on Yale's history department. "It's very Shakespearean," the Professor of French history muses, "Everyone in the business is falling, but we're falling more rapidly and from a greater height."

The recent string of unfortunate deaths, abrupt departures, denials of tenure, and pending retirements has left many like Merriman wondering whether the department has just fallen on bad luck or if perhaps something is rotten in the state of history at Yale. More importantly, in this modern era of downsizing and two-career households, rebuilding a department as eminent as Yale's is no longer simply a matter of drawing up a wish list of scholars Yale would like to call its own but often, like the frugal child of the 90's who asks Santa for a bike even though he'd really like a new PowerMac-of going after what it can realistically expect to get.

While everyone knows that age is the most natural, if tragic, reason for attrition in academic institutions which revolve around life-long appointments, the multiple deaths and retirements have uniquely plagued the history department whose most distinguished scholars, hired in the late 60's and early 70's, are now collectively coming of age. Yet even if the attrition is incidental in origin, certain areas, such as Russian and Medieval have been assailed with such force that current graduate students are applying elsewhere, and neither program has been able to admit any new students for the coming year. Because the department cannot count on replacing full professors at a senior level for a myriad of socio-economic factors, these fields and others which have been similarly depleted, while they will bounce back, may not necessarily do so with the same dominance.

In assessing the scale of the losses suffered when scholars depart from Yale and the history department in particular, Associate Professor David Bell, who will begin teaching at Johns Hopkins in the fall, likes to imagine an aircraft carrier because "it's very big, leaves an incredible wake behind it, is very difficult to sink, and can take a lot of hits." Of course, the question still remains of what to do with the water streaming into the ship from all sides, which may not sink it but nevertheless still functions as a debilitating dead weight causing some, who have received other offers, to think about jumping ship.

(See History...)