At many colleges and universities, history departments have grown over the last several decades while the number of students taught has been falling. Why is that?
Retired history professor David Kaiser thinks he knows. As he argues in today’s Martin Center article, students are losing interest because academic historians are increasingly peddling politically correct material that they, the faculty, find appealing. He writes:
I believe that the main reason for the decline in history is that students don’t care for the product the faculty is offering. Most history courses are now too specialized and often politically slanted to interest them.
He finds the roots of this sad situation back in the 1960s, when young radical historians were allowed to do their own thing rather than teach history in the traditional, neutral fashion. Those young faculty members eventually became today’s tenured radicals (as Roger Kimball calls them) and now history courses are increasingly trendy and “woke.” It’s hard to find courses that deal with topics such as political leadership. As Kaiser writes, “By the turn of the new century, even to study the political leadership of Western countries in detail had become suspect in history because it supposedly reinforced white male hegemony in society.”
The meetings of the American Historical Society show what now gets history faculty enthused: gun control, gender and power, etc.
Kaiser concludes:
One doesn’t have to view American history uncritically or ignore our frequent failures to live up to our ideals to regard this story as a fascinating and inspiring one. Yet that is the story that most university history courses today choose to ignore, in favor of meditations that reflect the personal interests of the faculty rather than the needs or interests of the students. That is why history and the humanities have lost the central place they occupied in our universities a half-century ago, and why they will have so much trouble regaining it.