Is History dying?
A summary of dozens of conversations with historians about the state of the profession
This year, as I continue my job search, I’ve spoken with dozens of historians on both sides of the Atlantic about the state of the humanities.
Other than my essay about turning in my corrected dissertation, The Sorrow of a Rite of Passage, I haven’t ended up writing about it. The twists and turns are constant and yet also somehow repetitive: a potential path forward emerges, hope builds…and then it is inevitably dashed. Rinse and repeat.
Rather than dwell on my own experience looking for jobs, I thought it might be more interesting to take stock of what professional historians have told me this year, given that I have spoken with so many.
Established Historians
On the whole, the historians who have reached the top of their profession are—to be completely frank—out of touch.
One tenured historian at a R1 institution denied a truth I told her about the job market.
“I can count the number of tenure track positions in my subfield this year on one hand,” I told her. She denied it to my face, even though I was the one on the job market looking at the job ads constantly. She told me that couldn’t be right; I was wrong.
It wasn’t her subfield, so she can be forgiven I suppose. But the obliviousness is representative. The lack of empathy as well.
I was back in Cambridge in the spring, and my supervisor actually apologized to me for some of his comments about the U.S. job market. He pointed out that there were jobs in our field in the U.K., even if the pay wasn’t great. In part through conversations with me, he was starting to realize how bad things were in the U.S. academic job market.
If in a minority, other established historians like David A. Bell at Princeton do get it. In a contribution earlier this year to the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled “So You Want to Be a Historian,” Bell accurately sums up the state of academic history.
Citing research by Jon K. Lauck, he notes that undergraduate majors in history have been plummeting. Professional historical organizations are struggling. Conferences are sparsely attended. Of the 1,799 new historians who received Ph.D.s in 2019 or 2020, only 175 had landed full-time faculty jobs in history.
In his own case, Bell’s graduate students went from almost 100% tenure track placement to almost 0% tenure track placement over three decades. And remember, Bell is a very well-respected historian at an Ivy League university.
In response, Bell proposes a solution, which he admits will be unworkable: a nation-wide agreement among all schools that admit doctoral students. It is a classic collective action problem. There’s no way to get everyone on the same page.
And then there is generative AI. In 2021 and 2022, I spoke and corresponded with a major historian at Oxford about my project since he had consulted the same archives as me on a different project. At that time, he offered to collaborate with me on an academic article if I wanted.
When we spoke again this spring, all he could talk about was ChatGPT.
He told me how he used it for teaching and for writing all the little contributions people asked of him. “This changes everything,” he repeated several times. There was no further mention of collaboration. Instead, he encouraged me to get a job in development. “You get to talk to interesting people, the pay will outstrip anything you could ever make while teaching, and they fly you first class.”
He has two offices at Oxford, and he also told me that neither will probably be filled by a historian after he retires.
Surely, we are at some kind of inflection point.
Early-career Scholars With Tenure
What I found most interesting in my conversations the past six months was what early career historians who have achieved the holy grail of tenure have said publicly or have told me privately.
Surprisingly, some tenured academic historians that I know are seriously considering leaving academia altogether. Some, who are at smaller liberal arts schools, cite the possibility that their program will close and just want to get ahead of the curve. But others are at R1 schools. They cite the same dynamics that Bell mentions in his essay.
I was amazed that some of them identified with what I wrote on Substack back in March. From my perspective, they have stability and success. Sexy projects that get eyeballs and funding, fully sponsored conferences, multiple publications, the leadership of a department… I would kill to have that.
And yet they feel the precarity too, somehow. There is a humility I don’t see in the more established scholars. Almost all of them cite luck in obtaining their current job, even if they’re all brilliant scholars.
One recently tenured historian at a R1 university told me that he refused to become Director of Graduate Studies when offered the position in part because he believed it was unethical.
The general advice that almost all of them offered was to get out while I can.
Several signposted me to a historian who now works at Amazon and now runs his own career consulting service for ex-academics (who, as it turns out, I already know from our shared time in France).
One historian, who held a series of very high-profile post-docs and ultimately only obtained a tenure-track position through a spousal hire, told me the process was “corrupt.” You have to know someone who knows someone who understands the in’s and out’s of the institution’s hiring process to even have a chance.
It’s worth stating that scholars I know who have served on hiring committees strenously deny this. They insist that everything is on the up-and-up and that some of the received wisdom on job applications is just wrong since every hiring process is different.
All the same, without any direct impropriety (and, obviously, beginning with a very good CV), it still seems entirely possible to game the system with inside knowledge.
One of the most public proponents of the thesis that academic history is dying is Daniel Bessner, an associate professor in the school of International Studies at the University of Washington. He even raised some of these points on Bill Maher’s show, (at least as best you can in a minute and a half on a comedian’s talk show).
Four years ago, Bessner along with Michael Brenes (who is the Interim Director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy and a Lecturer in History at Yale University), argued in the Chronicle that major action, including by the American Historical Association, needed to be taken in order to address the jobs crisis in academic history.
Both Bessner and Brenes have encouraged young historians to get out of academia as soon as possible. Earlier this year, I was trying to finish up edits for a chapter in a collected volume on Cold War Liberalism, and I read tweets by both of them to that effect. It really killed my motivation for a while. “Why spend all this time polishing up my contribution if it won’t help me ever get stable employment?” I asked myself.
I eventually got the edits in and the volume passed peer review, but it was particularly ironic given that Bessner and Brenes are editors of the volume.
Early Career Scholars without Tenure
Among those of us with PhD’s in History who do not yet have stable employment, I hear nothing but doom and gloom. This from some of the brightest people I know. Their dream of researching and teaching, even for a very low salary, has washed up on the shoals of the current job market.
“You can fix that for the book,” we’re told by senior scholars in our dissertation defense. “When? How?” we say under our breath.
Some are willing to toil away at low-paying post-docs or adjunct positions, often without health insurance. Others have an exit plan in place. Some have spouses in medicine, law, or government.
Other graduate students are only emerging from their oblivion. In March, Jacob Bruggeman, a PhD student in History at the Johns Hopkins University, wrote in the Chronicle, “History is facing a jobs crisis. Why doesn’t the field talk about it more?”
No one is talking about it except, of course, all the people writing the Chronicle pieces I’ve quoted above….and dozens more besides.
Seriously, people have been talking about it for years. You just had to pay attention.
Admittedly, though, the crisis has gotten worse. I went back to graduate school knowing the truth, but I thought I could eke out a stable job with a Cambridge PhD. Bruggeman, who did his MPhil at Cambridge and now studies under Angus Burgin at Johns Hopkins, clearly though the same.
One strain of response from colleagues that I noted was an identitarian one. “If you looked different, Chris, you would have a job,” I was told more than once. “You should change your sexuality or religion,” one joked with me, “since you can’t change anything else.”
It’s true that since 2020, a significant number of new jobs in academic history are related to African-American history, indigenous history, and the history of other marginalized peoples. And that preference is given to historians from those communities. So statistically, they might be right to some degree. But historians of all backgrounds are having a hard time finding jobs right now. I am not alone.
This, I might add, is from Democrat-voting historians. (There are virtually no Republicans in the History profession, or at least I have almost never encountered them. I have many thoughts on the different ways conservatives and progressives do not support academic history and on the ways they could potentially make common cause, but I will save those thoughts for another time.)
So is History dying?
Is academic history going the way of the dodo?
Yes and no.
The decline in public funding for the humanities, the overproduction of humanities PhDs, and the rise of generative AI will all indelibly change academic history. When we die, the state of the humanities when I first went to undergrad will be long gone. That particular configuration of academic history is on its way out, and it will not come again.
In the coming decades, very few historians will find stable employment as historians in the United States. Those that do will be concentrated in R1 and top SLAC schools. Academic conferences are going to mostly move online. Journals will die out or become shadows of their former selves (some already have). Research topics will become more and more concentrated in issues that are considered timely or relevant.
It will also be a struggle to teach new generations of students to read extensively and synthesize vast amounts of material on their own when they have tools like ChatGPT that do it for them. Some people will still be able to do it, of course. The skill won’t die out entirely. But it will become further devalued just as mental arithmetic is now that computers are constantly at our fingertips.
This is all deeply unfortunate, because it is a wonderful social good to have a group of people who devote their lives to understanding the past. As we fund real people less and less to do it, as we increasingly silo our humanities research in “relevant” fields and then outsource the remaining work to computers, we will lose something essential of what it is to be human.
Civilization loses.
And yet, some aspect of history will continue. There will always be a demand to explain the past. Always people writing books (or producing documentaries and podcasts) about the past. Elite universities will never get rid of the humanities. Brilliant people will always work there.
And then, at some point, politicians, voters, and administrators will realize that they went too far in defunding the humanities, and the pendulum will swing back the other way. They will realize that there is something essential to having humans master parts of our past and share it with the rest of us.
History will not end. Somehow, it will go on.
The only question is whether any of us today will be around to see the moment the pendulum begins to swing back…