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.
But while the department may have endured an unprecedented number of hits in an unusually brief period of time, efforts are well underway to bring it back up to speed in the form of eight search committees, three of which have already turned up successful results. Stewart Schwartz, a colonial Latin-Americanist was recently hired at the senior level and Steven Stoll, an environmental historian, as well as Michael, a ?, have been hired at the junior level. In addition to search to fill the Reformation slot for which Lee Wandel is no longer being considered, the department is still looking to fill vacancies in Tudor-Stewart England, African-American history and the Medieval period which resulted from retirement, departure and death respectively.
Of all the areas in the department, the outlook for Medieval studies is the most grim and likewise the most sad. The deaths of John Boswell and Harry Miskimin and the retirement of Jaroslav Pelikan, all three of whom held endowed chairs, have "blown Medieval out of the water," according to the Chairman of the Department Paul Bushkovitch. While a search is underway to hire a Medievalist at the senior level by the beginning of next year, it will be some time before Medieval will truly regain its balance. Lior Halevi, GRD '00, a Medievalist has looked into other options because, while he acknowledges that the losses are "coincidental," he is uncertain about how Yale plans to "repair the loss."
The coincidence can largely be attributed to a generational ebb and flow to which no institution of higher education is immune. As professors of history are wont to do, many love to recall the glory days of the late 60s in which resources and talent seemed endlessly available both to the department and to Yale. Because history made so many peak appointments during these expansive years, it is not surprising that certain of its most eminent scholars have already retired or plan to do so in the near future. Although by no means particular to Yale, the recent(?) federal ruling prohibiting mandatory retirement has made it increasingly difficult to plan for the future, especially for a department with many of its senior members over 60 years of age. William Cronon, who left Yale in 1992 for the University of Wisconsin to raise his children in the company of his family, sees the period as an imminent changing of the intellectual guard for the department. Because the department has traditionally had, "a disproportionate number of giants in their field who are irreplaceable, it must now figure out who the next generation of great historians will be," an project which rivals fortune telling in its impossibility.
In anticipation of the ripple effects of the removal of the mandatory retirement age, the Provost's office required that all departments in the Arts and Sciences set up planning committees in order to at least make a stab at predicting the future actions of its aging members. In addition, the University has recently instituted the option of "phased retirement," in which professors gradually reduce their commitment to the university over a two year period-an option currently being exercised by history professors-which at least somewhat lightens the burden of those prognosticating the broad-range intellectual makeup of their departments.
However, the problem is more than one of a department's predictive capacity since "aging faculty are blocking women and minority appointments which means that departments can't make room for young excellence," Professor Emeritus John Blum, who retired ? years ago from the department, said. He thinks that the intellectual climate in a department with scholars overstaying their prime inevitably tends towards "inbreeding which results in ossification." To facilitate more varied appointments at the senior level, in particular, Yale allows departments to overlook normally binding financial constraints when making minority appointments of exceptional candidates, a process which resembles taking out a mortgage on the future gain from a potentially lucrative intellectual asset. Where women are concerned, the university agrees to "temporarily lower field or economic barriers," Assistant Provost Charles Long, said. But although the history department has tried to court several women at the senior level, they have yet to hire a single, already-tenured woman from the outside.
But age was not the only thing on the minds of the members of these committees who also had to take into account Yale's unique "one for two arrangement" in which two junior faculty members equals one senior member. When a junior faculty member leaves, for whatever reason, the department automatically holds onto one Junior Faculty Equivalent(JFE), but when a tenured member of the faculty leaves, it retains one JFE and the other returns to a divisional pool spread across the humanities. This "time bank of faculty slots," as Assistant Provost Charles Long refers to it, instills the system with a degree of flexibility necessary to departments, like history, with broad ranging interests whose interests invariably evolve with time.
Unfortunately for those in charge of planning the future of departments who would like to bring in new scholarly blood in, the number of JFEs not only cannot grow but must diminish slightly under the Provost's "restructuring" directive. In conjunction with the Restructuring Program passed in 1990 by Benno Schmidt and under the auspices of then-Provost Frank Turner in order to reduce the University's mounting deficit, over a period of seven years, each department has had to downsize by about seven percent which, in the case of the history department, meant giving up four of its JFEs. In light of the culmination of the restructuring program next June, the losses could not have come at a more advantageous time for the department which, thus far having given up only one and a half JFEs, may have been spared of some tough decision-making.
For Cynthia Russet, a member of the original planning committee in the history department, combining Yale's "one for two" system with the restructuring program unfortunately means that "you can never count on replacing senior people," a fact which is particularly disturbing to a department at such a crucial hiring juncture. "It is much more of a niggling processyou have to be very thrifty and bright ideas often come to naught," she said. While many in the department share Russet's feeling that "the maneuvering space is infinitesimal," Long maintains that the University has been and will continue to be generous with the history department whose teaching burden is among the largest in the University. He concedes that because of the uniqueness of the department's scope of "the whole world and all of human history, [it] has got to make some choices," leading some to question how these choices might revise department's commitments to particular regions and periods of time.
With Chairman of the Department Paul Bushkovitch on leave next year, Mark Steinberg, who teaches modern Russian history, feels one of these choices has been "to allow this area to flounder." After the University was unable to express a commitment to obtaining another JFE in his field he decided to look elsewhere and will begin teaching at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which boasts one of the nation's most cutting-edge Russian studies programs. Because there is no search underway to fill the Russian spot, one cannot help but agree with his hunch.
Of course even in an ideal world in which the money tree is forever in bloom, the history department could not, and does not, always attract the scholars it aims for. "The three major problems facing the University right now are the spouse problem, the city problem and the financial problem," said David Bell whose decision to transfer to Johns Hopkins was partially informed by the fact that the Baltimore metro area held considerably opportunities for his wife too. Indeed in the past few years, several searches have failed at the senior level-such as the one to replace John Blum which resulted the hiring of two junior professors-precisely because of these related sociological realities which do not impinge as much on younger scholars whose roots in a particular region often not as deep-seeded.
As far as the "city problem" goes, while at others of the nation's top history departments, such as Princeton or Harvard, whose appeal to potential faculty members is often augmented by the institution's locale, New Haven does not hold the same powers of sway. When departments are compelled to hire at the junior level, they hire people who know that their stay in New Haven will most likely be a transient one because of Yale's tenure policies. These newcomers who often rent as opposed to buy are augmenting the city problem by "pulling down Yale in the eyes of New Haven," explained Doron Ben-Atar who will begin teaching at Fordham in the fall because he was denied tenure.
Of course, to a certain extent, the department still banks on its historic reputation to override these three factors, especially in its efforts to lure "Targets of Opportunity," or scholars of such singular stature that the University allows the department to bypass the operative search guidelines and financial constraints. And just as some students in certain departments have applied elsewhere and others are considering following Geoffrey Parker, the University's successful snaring of a Target of Opportunity could reverse this apparent retreat. In this sense, the time of rebuilding is also a time of great potential gain for the department. Although he acknowledges the sadness of the losses, Director of Graduate Studies Frank Snowden feels that this time "time of renewal for the department can also be a time of creative growth to explore new interests and enhance what it does." He adds that although Yale may lose some of its graduate students, "it's quite likely that the [new appointments] will not only bring students with them but attract new ones."
But as trying times and scarce resources have a tendency not only to bring out the best but often the most skeptical among us, the recent departures have augmented the divisions in a department, which largely because of its size, already suffered from a degree of fractiousness. The decision not to hire David Cannadine, one of the world's most eminent British historians and the husband of Linda Colley, in the wake of Peter Gay's departure left the department "irreparably divided, " said one member while another called it "an incredibly stupid decision."
Beyond individual differences of opinion, the department has always had a reputation for being socially fragmented-a feeling which, in times of crisis, exponentially reproduces itself. Unlike at Princeton where weekly departmental seminars, which commune both junior and senior members of the department to discuss a paper, foster a sense of intellectual cohesion, at Yale "there is no arena for people to present ideas to one another," Linda Colley said. However, Robin Winks, who will assume the position of Department Chairman next fall and who concedes that the departures and the downsizing have "lea[d] to a certain fractiousness" hopes "to explore the possibility of creating a faculty lounge or gathering place" as well as substantially increasing the frequenting of faculty meetings in order to encourage a more open exchange of ideas.
Winks also acknowledges that for better or worse, the Yale history department has always had this image, even back in days before restructuring when the department boasted intellectual giants who had yet to cross the threshold of middle. Frank Turner shares this anxiety that in times of crisis people have a "tendency to create a past which never was present." In an age when scholars are increasingly challenging once firmly held notions about the past, perhaps even the world's most distinguished historians are not immune to the mounting tide of revisionism.
Copyright 1996, The Yale Herald, Inc. All rights reserved.
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