Yale history rights and rewrites itself

SARAH ENGLAND/YH

After a year to forget, the number-one department in the country broadens its focus.

Recalling the turmoil that plagued Yale's history department in the final months of the spring semester, Professor Cynthia Russett, GRD '64, paused. An English professor might have sought a telling metaphor or employed a striking adjective for emphasis, but Russett, a historian, chose to let her subject speak for itself. "It was not a happy time," she finally said.

Good teachers have a way of injecting even the driest of observations with a swelling tide of meaning. In the vast ocean of understatements, Russett caught a pretty big fish.

Forgive Russett and other members of Yale's history department if they are reluctant to discuss the 1999-2000 academic year in detail. They began last fall as teachers in the most popular major at Yale and the number-one history department in the nation. But over the course of the year, they were shaken by two upsetting events involving colleagues. The first was the public derailment of their relations with Lee Blackwood, GRD '95, a popular, tenure-track professor who had taught at Yale for 10 years, when the department's full committee voted not to renew the assistant professor's contract.

Not as public were murder allegations leveled by Steven Schwartzberg, a lecturer and the director of undergraduate studies in the International Studies (IS) program, against renowned diplomatic history Professor John Gaddis. Sources within the department confirmed that on an Internet list in May 1999, Schwartzberg, whose contract expired at the conclusion of last semester, first voiced his belief that Gaddis was responsible for the 1998 murder of Davenport senior Suzanne Jovin. He soon made his suspicions—which members of the history department said were considered preposterous, and which he later himself repudiated—known to the New Haven Police. After apparently deciding Yale would not ask him back, Schwartzberg forwarded all IS majors an e-mail he had sent to University President Richard Levin, GRD '74, in which he outlined what he perceived as evidence of the crime. According to an e-mail sent to IS majors in July by Yale College Dean Richard Brodhead, BR '68, GRD '72, the police had known of the allegations for over a year. He added that the University "repudiate[d] Mr. Schwartzberg's charges in the strongest possible terms." Schwartzberg was unreachable for comment at press time.

"[The accusation] was tough because it was so unexpected," said Gaddis, who is on leave at Oxford University for the year. He added that his only previous "significant" contact with Schwartzberg was having read and discussed the former lecturer's book manuscript with him.

"There was a sense of beleaguerment," Russett said. "It was very unusual for there to be two problems of that magnitude affecting people and families. So it generated a lot of real concern."

Between the hostility of the Blackwood situation and the shock generated by Schwartzberg's claims, the school year ended on a volatile note. But professors shrug off notions that last year's episodes will have a lingering effect. "These were, I think, idiosyncratic events, and I'd be reluctant to try to draw lessons from them," Gaddis said.

Blackwood's classroom antics and gruff manner may indeed have been idiosyncratic, but he cannot be wholly dismissed. His grievances about the curri- culum in in particular seem to ring true among history majors.

Bellowing grievances

Blackwood's office in Pierson College is very much inhabited. Posters and clippings of 20th-century Soviet icons crowd the walls, and the desk is a clutter of books and essays. For now, this space, which in a year will be vacant, brims over with the shameless character of a high school kid drunk on ideas and Eastern Bloc instead of beer and guitar rock.

Seated here, insulated from students and colleagues, Blackwood resembles a kid sent to his room to think about the consequences of his actions. And despite the comfort of his office, consequences are everywhere. Last spring, he was the subject of several editorials in campus publications, and in July the Chronicle of Higher Education ran a probing article on his confrontation with the department. Blackwood will spend this, the final year of his contract as assistant professor, on leave. His course, "The History of Modern East Central Europe," was canceled in June. An LSAT review book lay open on his desk; he plans to take the exam later this year. "I've resolved to learn from my mistakes," he said.

Blackwood's mistakes, as he sees them, have been well-documented. He sent two memos to the entire history department in which he vehemently criticized what he saw as corrupting influences governing the search for a senior-level position in post-1917 Russian history. Referring to a letter in which Professor Paul Kennedy advocated Stanford Professor Norman Naimark for the position, Blackwood wrote, "Procedurally, it is a mystery to me how a senior-level search at Yale University can be obstructed, delayed, and twisted by the apodictic, unilateral steps of senior colleagues willing, at best, to circumvent, and at worst, to trample on accepted professional standards."

When the department voted against his contract renewal, overturning the unanimous decision of its own review committee, Blackwood publicly asserted that he had been penalized for the uncompromising tone of his memos, which Professor Nancy Cott described as "out of scale with what was going on" (YH, 3/24/00). A couple weeks later, he lectured to his 20^th Century European History class in drag. Blackwood scoffs at criticisms that he should never have taken his professional gripes into the classroom, but then turns serious. "I think it's part and parcel of education to make students think critically about their environment."

But Blackwood will be the first to tell you he has calmed down. "I really did feel like I was a man on a mission," he said. "I wanted to shake these people up."

KATIE ALDRICH/YH

Break

Part of what Blackwood claimed incensed him was what he saw as the deterioration of the undergraduate history curriculum. "If you want to have a serious history curriculum, you want to have basic, bread and butter lecture courses that feed into specialized seminars," he said. At Yale, the lack of such "bread and butter" courses is particularly apparent in the American history field, where there are no lectures courses that explicitly cover either the Revolution or the Civil War. Compared to Harvard's "America: Colonial times to the Civil War," Cornell's "Intro to American history," and Columbia's "Summary of American civilization to the Civil War," the country's number one department looks a little bare, and it has not escaped the notice of students.

"There aren't really any World War I or II American or European history courses," Rich Hinman, TC '01, a history major, said. "I guess it's assumed that you cover this stuff in high school, but people's high schools were different. Even with the requirements, you can get through the major without really taking basic lecture courses on the part of the world that is most immediate. And I found that to be especially true this year."

Yale history professors are the first ones to acknowledge this absence, however. "There's a disinclination among faculty to go over the same old stuff," commented Professor Emeritus Gaddis Smith, PC '54, GRD '61, who taught in the history department for over 40 years before retiring last year. "We assume that if a student doesn't know that much about the American Civil War, he or she can read about it so we don't have to spend class time on it, and can proceed to newer, more original ways of looking at the past."

Mark Lawrence, a former lecturer who now holds a tenure-track position at the University of Texas at Austin, rejects the idea that the absence of such "bread and butter" courses points to a fundamental flaw in the department. "It's true that from year to year, particular courses may not be offered and particular fields may not be filled," he said. "But this is a reflection of the fact that faculty are often away pursuing their research." This year, Assistant Professor Joanne Freeman, who has taught "The American Revolution" in the past, is on leave.

Also, it is generally accepted in academic departments that pushing professors into courses for which they are unprepared is counterproductive. "In hiring decisions, departments try to choose people in order to cover areas they need covered," said Eric Robinson, an assistant professor of ancient Greek and Roman history at Harvard. "But once people are chosen, there's not too much micromanagement that can be done. A chair can go to someone in the field and say, `It would be nice if we could have a course on this, would you be willing to do it?' If the teacher says `Sure,' then great. But it would be a bad idea for the chair to make a person teach an area if he or she lacked experience in it."

The increased emphasis on a broader history curriculum at Yale reflects a nationwide trend. Smith believes that it is history's continuing diversity of focus that has kept it the most popular major since before women set foot in a Yale classroom. "In the earlier part of the century, when English was the number one major, history was basically American political history," he said. "In the '50s, it was almost a giant ethnic studies major. There's been a huge expansion of subject matter—the history major probably offers more variety to meet an individual's interest than any other major."

A prime example is history's reestablished link with the history of science, history of medicine program (HSHM). While the joint major has existed for close to 20 years, there were no searches for full-time tenured faculty until two years ago. According to Department Chair Jon Butler, history is merely following the lead from Yale as the University continues to move from an institution dedicated to the humanities to one in which science plays a strong role—Yale last year unveiled plans for a new $5 billion science complex. "This is the 21^st century," Butler said. "It wouldn't be intellectually responsible to enter the 21^st century without sustaining serious scholarship in the history of science." In what it hopes will be the start of a long-term relationship, the department appointed California Institute of Technology Professor Daniel Kevles to a yearlong visiting professorship.

Rocket Queen

Some feel, however, that the vast ocean of history classes could be made more navigable. "The courses are there, but there's no help in designing a program that's coherent," Emily Levine, SY '01, said, adding that the advising system, in which students must seek out the history fellow of their college, could be more involved. "Professors have these narrow specialties, and they often have trouble seeing the big picture. But [a good advising system] would take the major to such a different level."

And there are intra-departmental concerns that the sheer size of the department—currently 45 full-time tenured professors, 18 full-time assistant professors, and 22 lecturers large—makes it hard for everyone to get to know each other. The danger in this, according to Smith, is that professors feel less involved in the department's business and invested in its well-being. The biweekly lunches in Ezra Stiles, where full-time faculty socialize and a professor presents on his or her research, are poorly attended. "When I first entered the department in 1961, we had weekly lunches and everyone went to them," Smith said. "It was a smaller department, and we could get everybody at this one long table. You can't do that anymore."

The implications of this diminishing collegiality? Had there been a bigger turnout at the meeting at which Blackwood's future was decided, the outcome might well have been different, and much of last year's furor avoided. Out of about 60 full-time faculty members, only 18 attended and voted. "I wasn't there," Smith admitted. "I should have been. All of us should be more involved on issues like this."

As the history department enters the 21st century, it will inevitably revise and expand the number and types of courses offered to students. Though these changes keep the department on the cutting edge, they can bring disorder—or disaster—if they are not well-managed. And that may be Blackwood's most important legacy. Photo of the Hall of Graduate Studies by Katie Aldrich. Design by Sarah England.

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