Great piece by John Miller on military history. Apart from the regrettable topic, it reveals something frustrating about ideological bias in academia, something hard to document and harder still to pinpoint. It is: the operations of vias through curricular choices which, in turn, may implement the bias in submerged ways.

Here, we have a donor giving money for a particular field. The money goes into an account, but sits untouched. Nobody’s hired. The explanation gives the customary fudge: “We won’t search for a candidate this school year,” says John Cooper, a history professor. “But we’re committed to doing it eventually.”

Press them further and you get lots of talk about “priorities” and “relevance.” Yes, they say, military history is important, but we need to hire someone in women’s labor history. They may find someone strong in labor history, but the original decision to bypass military history is obscured. And who wants to argue with the outcome? An academic trend has been satisfied, and we always have next year to hire a military historian.

It’s a workable strategy. Has anybody been harassed? Anybody discriminated against? Not at all. The system worked, and an adjustment in the department’s focus was completed.

It’s a self-fulfilling action. With the delay in hiring military historians, fewer courses are offered. The subject begins to look marginal. Graduate students don’t specialize in it, leaving fewer job candidates in the field. The pipeline dries up. A curricular change has been made, and a personnel action was taken, and if ideological bias was at its heart, it never had to come to the fore.