We’ve received a few letters in response to my article on military history as an academic field:

Dear Editor: I teach several courses in military history at Grove City Collge, a conservative Christian college in western Pennsylvania. Each course usually fills to the 60-seat capacity in our largest classroom. I also teach a national security course and a course on “International and Domestic Terrorism and Counter-terrorism.” In 1984, while serving in the U.S. Air Force, I earned a Ph.D. in history at George Washington University, with fields in US military history and European military history as well as modern Russia. I wrote a dissertation, which was published, on Air Force search and rescue operations in Vietnam, where I had previously served as an intelligence officer. In 1989, after I retired from the Air Force, with three books published by reputable presses, an edited anthology on the Persian Gulf War and over fifty published articles and several years of teaching experience at academies and as an adjunct, I expect to ! land a job easily. After more than 200 rejections and ten twelve years of effort, I got a job at Grove City College. Meanwhile, I served as a civilian director of research for the Army’s Strategic Studies Institute. A friend of mine in academe, who sat on a search committee which rejected my application to hire a decidedly Marxist who had yet to finish his dissertation, told me that if I left my resume blank from 1969 (when I entered Air Force intelligence) to 1989 when I retired, and listed myself as a “social historian”, and simply let them suspect I was in jail during the twenty years I left blank, I would have had a better chance of getting hired. When I was with the Army, I routinely hired people with doctorates in military history or national security studies from major universities where they had run into career dead ends. It’s a sorry situation and what the history departments do not understand is that they are cutting their own throats. On the ot! herhand, the feminists and social historians would “look ! bad” ; since military history courses normally fill up and theirs do not. Not a lot of kids are interested in courses that focus on homosexuality in the ghetto…not if they can learn about the dynamic interface between culture, society and human conflict. Very Respectfully, Earl H. Tilford, Jr., Ph.D. Professor of History Grove City College