An open letter: crisis in the history department

By Aiyaz Husain

Dear Dean Brodhead/Provost Richard:

It has been less than a year since I graduated, and I can't help but be shocked by the degenerative ailment that seems to have stricken our esteemed history department. It continues to turn away its most energetic scholars. Understaffed, overflowing classes fuel suggestions for hiring teaching assistants from neighboring universities. And basic, introductory level courses on European and Asian history continue to evade the curriculum while innumerable strains of bizarre new committees, councils, and departments spontaneously evolve out of the humanities.

Recent furor over these issues and, particularly, the departmentıs refusal to renew the contract of one of its most capable and innovative young professors, William Lee Blackwood, canıt help but remind me of an issue several of us raised not so long ago as undergraduates: the debate over faculty appointments in history.

It has been years now since Professor Diane Kunz's tenure bid was rejected; since the University administration decided that a Tenure Appointments Committee for the Humanities knew better than an academic department whether or not a scholar was qualified to receive a permanent faculty appointment within that department; since various student organizations energetically adopted the crusade for themselves; since these same organizations abandoned the campaign for fair rules of procedure governing the assessment of prospective Yale history faculty; and since a new campaign embracing "faculty diversity" spawned yet another generation of undergraduate activists.

The state of crisis has intensifed, even worsened, while the history department remains unresponsive to forces from within and without that threaten to rend asunder its traditions of excellence in teaching and scholarship. Instead of reforming its systems of peer review for temporary and permanent faculty appointments, the department insists on privately concentrating authority over appointment decisions in the hands of a select few at the hierarchical summit of the faculty pyramid.

This scheme limits legitimate candidates' opportunities for securing appointments in favor of third- and fourth-rate scholars (who are either members of powerful intra- departmental alliances, of underrepresented demographic segments backed by maniacal lobbies, or both). Most disconcerting of all from an ethical standpoint, it also restricts the total number of junior-level appointments, and therefore, the number of qualified teachers, by employing selectivity arguments. As a result, the few coveted spots for lecturers and assistant professors are awarded to ignorant, incapable graduates of the Ph.D program‹who just happen to be the gracious servants of certain senior faculty.

As a result, teaching duties at Yale are spread among three tiers of instructors: a select crop of senior professors, who teach a limited number of high-profile lecture courses; a largely underqualified junior faculty‹many of whose abilities as instructors are as deplorable as their scholarship; and sprawling, standing armies of TAs from other departments that are raised to carry the bulk of the teaching load.

For courses of instruction in history, the latter two categories have included fellows and graduate students from a variety of other faculties and graduate departments, including, but not limited to, those of political science and international relations, as well as the new array of interdisciplinary fields of study which are being awarded study councils, second majors, and even departments of their own. The deplorable conditions that exist at the moment have left Ph.D and Masterıs degree candidates in several of these disparate disciplines, who lack training in key topic areas addressed in several introductory survey courses in history, attempting—and failing—to lead discussion sections for these courses. These conditions have also relegated the responsibilities of reading and grading senior departmental essays in history to faculty members in other departments who, in some cases, have never been exposed to the methods of historical inquiry that they purport to evaluate in the works of their undergraduate advisees.

The treatment for this debilitating ailment threatening the study of history at Yale comprises several parts. First, the University Administration must reconsider the systems of peer assessment for evaluating junior faculty members in history who are up for periodical review or tenure. Second, the department should encourage efforts to increase graduate enrollment in order to compensate for the demand for TAs who are needed to lead sections for the largest lecture courses. It is this increase in the size of the graduate student body that should engender increased competition for coveted lecturer-ships and fellowships—not the restriction of these slots to pre-selected candidates. And finally, while the proliferation of interdisciplinary programs and courses may now be beyond the Administration's control, steps must be taken to quarantine the history department from the degenerative effects of these mutations, that survive by sucking the lifeblood of the classical disciplines, their faculties, and their resources. While such anomalous groups and their offspring continue to multiply and dilute the undergraduate curriculum, the traditions of academic excellence in departments like history can and will never rest assured. Please help us find a cure.

Aiyaz Husain, Class of 1999, was a student in Timothy Dwight.

Back to Opinion...