Aha!

By the time my plane touched down at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, the Colleagues were already dropping out of the air like houseflies on a cold autumn morning, and the buses departing for the Conrad Hilton on South Michigan Avenue were scraping their tailpipes beneath the weight of a small army decorated with clanking academic degrees and carrying briefcases. The keepers of the record of mankind were assembling for the 89th annual jamboree of the American Historical Association.

Appropriately enough, the Hilton Hotel has become the temple of the historical profession. That profession, like the once elegant lobby of what was formerly Chicago’s Hotel Stevens, has seen, I fear, better days. Time was when history in America was written by dignified men of civilized habits and tastes, both intellectual and otherwise. Today, as a result of increasing “professionalization” and the expansion of so-called higher education, the average historian is a fellow of no breeding, little breadth of knowledge, and still less imagination who devotes most of his working hours to following his popularity in the student polls, clawing his way into inconsequential administrative positions, composing monographs that read like a report filed for a (long defunct) social service agency, and, increasingly, castigating his state legislators and battling to save his job. For the academic boom of the past decade has turned to bust: a bust, this time round, perpetrated not by cops but by a precipitous decline in student applications to the national campi and, one likes to think, by a diffuse but palpable retribution visited upon the academies by the taxpayers and politicos whose shins the professoriat and the kids kicked during higher education’s Sixties binge. Speaking generally, the Colleagues were, last week, a subdued and rather sorry lot.

CW

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Chilton Williamson Jr.

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By the time my plane touched down at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, the Colleagues were already dropping out of the air like houseflies on a cold autumn morning, and the buses departing for the Conrad Hilton on South Michigan Avenue were scraping their tailpipes beneath the weight of a small army decorated with clanking academic degrees and carrying briefcases. The keepers of the record of mankind were assembling for the 89th annual jamboree of the American Historical Association.

Appropriately enough, the Hilton Hotel has become the temple of the historical profession. That profession, like the once elegant lobby of what was formerly Chicago’s Hotel Stevens, has seen, I fear, better days. Time was when history in America was written by dignified men of civilized habits and tastes, both intellectual and otherwise. Today, as a result of increasing “professionalization” and the expansion of so-called higher education, the average historian is a fellow of no breeding, little breadth of knowledge, and still less imagination who devotes most of his working hours to following his popularity in the student polls, clawing his way into inconsequential administrative positions, composing monographs that read like a report filed for a (long defunct) social service agency, and, increasingly, castigating his state legislators and battling to save his job. For the academic boom of the past decade has turned to bust: a bust, this time round, perpetrated not by cops but by a precipitous decline in student applications to the national campi and, one likes to think, by a diffuse but palpable retribution visited upon the academies by the taxpayers and politicos whose shins the professoriat and the kids kicked during higher education’s Sixties binge. Speaking generally, the Colleagues were, last week, a subdued and rather sorry lot.