The double-consciousness of the academic historian.

We in academe like to think that we are set apart from the rest of the world. It is not only, that, as Peter Stearns notes, as a group we historians are more liberal than most Americans, and that probably most of us have been dismayed by the rightward turn American politics took with the election of Ronald Reagan. Even when national political trends are more to our liking, we still stand apart from our society, for it is our role to be critics. Yet at the same time that we stand at a distance from our society, we are also deeply enmeshed in it, both by virtue of what we take from it and what we give back. We are paid, many of us by public institutions, to teach, and our worth to our students is measured by how well we prepare them for entry into the very society that we must criticize. With apologies to W.E.B. Du Bois, we experience a double-consciousness, situated as we are both inside and outside of our societies. The tensions that this situation produces are inescapable, and at times like the present, when the distance grows between the society that we would wish to inhabit and the one that we necessarily serve, those tensions can seem almost unbearable. Yet it is only by facing this double-consciousness squarely and by understanding its implications that we will be able to confront the current crisis in our profession, of which the assault upon social history is a part.

I believe that most of us understand our role as critics well enough that I need not discuss it any further, although it should perhaps be noted that our critical role itself embodies a tension, between the ideological premises upon which some of our critical perspective is grounded and professional expertise, which is supposed to be free from ideology. As critics and as experts, we take nothing for granted; all is grist for the mill. Received wisdom, no matter from whom it is received, is always to be held up to scrutiny. It is by engaging in criticism that we draw the ire of those who are today most heavily invested in traditional interpretations of American history, those on the anxiously self-congratulatory Right. Peter Stearns has asked us how we should confront this anger. Most of his proposals focus on how we should present ourselves as critics. I would suggest that we begin by remembering that we are simultaneously participating members in the very society we hold up to scrutiny. Lack of clarity about the nature of our work has enabled our adversaries to gain an advantage in the struggle to capture public support.

Let us begin by considering what happened to us in the 1980s. According to right-wing critics, a bunch of '60s radicals got tenured; at the time that the rest of the nation was turning to the right, academe was offering permanent refuge to those who supposedly were out of step with the country's new direction. Yet anyone who has worked on a university campus since the Reagan revolution knows that, far from resisting Reaganomics, academic institutions adopted it almost without question. At most universities, the social hierarchy replicates the one in the rest of the nation. At the bottom are the untenured, part-time instructors, almost 40% of college and university faculties nationwide.(1) At the top are the professors with endowed chairs, whose salaries, exclusive of benefits, begin at six digits. The rest of us are somewhere in between, making a comfortable living, although far less than our friends who have gone into medicine, law, business or other professions that require advanced degrees. Rather than questioning our own system, most of us try to play its angles, and why not? After all, it would be nice to be able to afford to send our kids to the universities at which we teach. Take this complaint to the Dean and he will tell you that if you bring him (or occasionally, her) an outside offer, he will match it, but otherwise there's nothing he can do. Like good Reaganauts, we go out to demonstrate our worth on the open market.

Now we're in the '90s, the age of "downsizing." At my university, it's pretty much the same as in the rest of the economy: We have fewer tenure-track professors, more adjuncts, and a steady number of superstars. Those of us in the middle are being asked to pick up the slack, most of it the result of downsizing but some produced by cutting the teaching loads of superstars. In Ohio, for example, the politicians are demanding more work out of the professoriat, while at my university, the administrators are beating the politicians to the punch, telling us that we'd all better work harder before the politicians and angry parents scream for our hides.

Surely it is too late for such rearguard actions. From all sides, the academy is under assault. In New York, the state next to mine, both the governor and mayor of New York City are calling for massive cuts in funding for higher education and significant increases in tuition. Current recommendations include doubling the tuition at both the SUNY and CUNY systems, laying off 1000 tenured faculty members at CUNY, and shutting down six of the SUNY campuses. In New York City, the mayor has told students to "get a job" to finance the increase in tuition, as if the vast majority of them were not already working to pay for their educations. The leader of the Republican minority on the City Council has been even less encouraging, explaining that "a lot of those kids don't need to go to college. They can do clever things with their hands and their bodies."(2) Newt Gingrich has gone him one better, suggesting the elimination of the final year of high school.

Call me Chicken Little, but I think these are ominous signs. Consider also the proposals to cut Federal student grant and loan programs, as well as the ongoing attempts to eliminate or cut funding for the NEH, the NEA, the NHPRC, the Fulbright exchange program, and the Department of Education. As Bob Dylan once said, "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." Virtually the entire publicly-funded higher education system of the United States is being downsized, not because there is less demand, but because the public does not appear to want to pay the cost. To be more precise, our opponents are attempting to persuade the public that higher education and the related institutions of knowledge are not worth the social and economic costs.

Downsizing higher education, however, not only reverses the historic trend of the expansion of educational opportunity, but it also poses a direct challenge to Americans' faith in higher education as a means to upward mobility. Most of our students and their parents believe that higher education is an almost certain path to a higher standard of living, and by and large, they have been right.(3) In fact, the belief that education assures a higher income is one of the tenets of the American doctrine of success. With very few exceptions for example the New York councilman who thinks that poor kids can do clever things with their hands - no one on the Right is prepared to challenge directly this tenet of the doctrine of success. Arguing that education is not an avenue toward advancement is patently and provably false, while saying that the mass of young Americans should not have access to education flies in the face of the American dream.

Here we face one of the dilemmas posed by our double-consciousness. As critics, we are well aware of - indeed many of us have written about - the illusory aspects of the American dream of success. Nonetheless, we are training our students to succeed within that very system, just as we ourselves are, by and large, attempting to succeed in it and on its terms - comfortable homes in good neighborhoods, the best education possible for our own kids. We are at once elitists and democrats, critics of and purveyors of the American dream. When we are most honest, we recognize this tension and we become critical of ourselves. When we are most dishonest, we think only of our own aspirations and lose sight of those of our students. And our lack of self-consciousness gives our opponents the opening they need.

As elitists - outsiders, critics, scholars, professionals, experts - we make an easy target for today's ultra-conservatives, who are using a populist rhetoric to sell their anti-democratic agenda.(4) They dare not attack the ideal of education itself, but when they claim that America's college teachers are a bunch of overpaid, overgrown unpatriotic hippies: now that's a theory with legs. By a clever piece of legerdemain, they insinuate that because we are all wild-eyed leftists, we cannot be good teachers, and hence we are overpaid. Using this theory as their opening gambit, they pit us against our students: Either universities cut the salaries and benefits of the faculty and increase our workloads to the point where we have no time left to dabble in dangerous ideologies, or tuition goes up so high that the poorest of our students are driven from college.

This, I believe, is the context in which the current attacks against social history, the National History Standards, the NEH, the NEA, and all the rest may be understood. These are ideological assaults intended to weaken national support for access to higher education. We make a serious mistake if we underestimate how serious, how reactionary, and how fundamentally dangerous these assaults are. We delude ourselves if we think that by trimming our sails a bit, we will be able to make it safely to port. I think that we also make a mistake if we defend ourselves by focusing upon our role as outsiders to the exclusion of our function as insiders, educators of America's youth. Our opponents have succeeded all too well in depicting us as, to use one of Lynne Cheney's favorite terms, "academic elites."(5) In fact, even when we have played our insider role most responsibly, they have still branded us as elitists.

Consider the way in which they have framed, or, to be more precise, usurped the debate on the National History Standards. The misrepresentation of those for American history - my field of expertise - is nothing short of grotesque. Far from "pursuing the revisionist agenda" or manifesting a "great hatred for traditional history,"(6) they are remarkably mainstream. They follow the standard political narrative, much like the Advanced Placement curriculum, making one wonder whether the ultra-conservatives will go after the A.P. teachers next. True, the Standards have added a considerable amount of social history, including the history of women and minorities, to this narrative, but they integrate social history without eliminating the familiar political history that critics such as Lynne Cheney falsely claim is now missing. The real surprise in the Standards is how demanding they are. Only those high school students who have been through a rigorous A.P. program could at present meet them. How many students entering your college could answer questions such as this: Explain how differences concerning support for the French Revolution, foreign policy issues (such as the Genet affair, the Jay and Pinckney treaties, the XYZ Affair, the undeclared war with France), and immigration contributed to the emergence of an organized opposition party led by Jefferson and Madison.(7) (Needless to say, such questions give the lie to the charge that the Standards manifest a "great hatred for traditional history."(8))

In fact, it seems to me that, if anything, the National Standards show how we may resolve the tensions between our elitist and democratic tendencies. It might be useful to remember that the movement for national standards began in the 1980s as educators and scholars became dismayed by what they perceived to be the poor quality of much of public education in the United States. In this context, the only thing radical about the Standards is the expectation that all school children in America, and not just the beneficiaries of elite, A.P.-type programs, could master so challenging a curriculum. By holding up so high a standard and insisting that it be applied to all our children, we combine our elitism and our commitment to democracy. And by demonstrating how the knowledge that we have acquired can be taught to children in every school in the nation, we have provided a model for responsible action by modern academics.

Yet our actions have been met not by applause, but by what Peter Stearns calls the "intransigence and sloganeering" of the "leading conservative spokespeople." He might have mentioned their mendacity as well. In her opening salvo against the History Standards, Lynne Cheney howls that "not a single one of the 31 standards mentions the Constitution." Perhaps recognizing that she has distorted the document, Cheney quickly adds that "true, it does come up in the 250 pages of supporting materials."(9) Yet Standard 3 of Era 3 insists that students should understand "the institutions and practices of government created during the revolution and how they were revised between 1787 and 1815 to create the foundation of the American system." And if anyone thought that standard could possibly be met without a thorough understanding of the Constitution, Standard 3B explicitly requires students to "demonstrate understanding of the issues involved in the creation and ratification of the United States Constitution and the new government it established...." The next two pages detail the ways in which students may demonstrate their understanding of those issues, mentioning the Constitution, the Convention, and the ratification debates no fewer than thirteen times.(10) Oh yes, the Constitution does come up - again and again and again, although one would never know it from Cheney's piece of fraud.

Although less shrill than Cheney, Diane Rayitch also distorts the History Standards, complaining that they are "indifferent to the Western democratic tradition."(11) One would never guess from this lament that the Standards suggest that junior high school students "explain the historical antecedents of the Declaration of Independence in key ideas of Enlightenment thought; in traditions of English common law, the English Bill of Rights, and the Glorious Revolution; and in the traditions of natural law and the Judeo-Christian heritage which hold all persons to be of equal worth before God and before the state."(12)

In fact, the History Standards are so balanced, so mainstream, and so demanding that they would seem to be a curious target of right-wing ire unless one recognizes that they are simply a means to an end, an attack upon the academy more generally. In her most recent diatribe, "Mocking America at U.S. Expense," an op-ed in The New York Times, Cheney puts them right next to Karen Finley and Andres Serrano in the parade of horribles that she and her cohorts always trot out to discredit the NEA and now the NEH. And just as the entire "art world" is smeared by Karen Finley's chocolate, so "academic elites like the leadership of the American Historical Association" are tainted by the History Standards.(13) In testimony before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior and Related Agencies, Cheney has made it clear that it is not simply a small elite that is to blame, but all historians in academe. As Cheney put it - and this is Page Putnam Miller's paraphrase of Cheney's testimony - "at this time the state of study of history in higher education is such that she did not believe that any national group of historians would be able to promulgate standards that the committee could accept."(14)

So in the end, it's not just social history that is under attack, but professional, academic history itself. When Raymond Smock, a mainstream historian, finds himself fired as Historian of the House of Representatives and when the CBS "Evening News" reports as if it were a shocking revelation that 762 historians work full time for the federal government,(15) then social historians must recognize that they are not being singled out.

My diagnosis, I hope, suggests my proposed cure. We must defend ourselves in both of our capacities, at once as members of an intellectual elite and as democrats, although reconciling these stances is not always easy. Considering the longstanding American anti-intellectual tradition, which Peter Stearns notes, we should mount our strongest defense on the grounds of democracy: access to education; the benefits, tangible and intangible both, provided by knowledge; the democratic ideal of free and open debate. We must show our opponents for what they are: reactionary ideologues who would limit access to higher education and silence anyone with an opinion that differs from theirs.

We must also defend the principle of expertise. We might begin by asking the amateur historian who derided the footnotes in an academic historian's book as "the purposeless accumulation of knowledge,"(16) how can the accumulation of knowledge ever be purposeless? Just ask Robert McNamara, who now recognizes that the government didn't have a clue about the culture and history of Vietnam because all the experts had been purged by the McCarthyites.(17) The point is, you never know when a little expertise will come in handy. Unfortunately, this is a case too many of us no longer know how to make. Too many of the articles in the special issue of The Journal of American History, "The Practice of American History," bemoan professionalism and expertise; too few speak of the reciprocal rewards of research and teaching.(18) One historian, who identifies himself by the town in which he resides, rather than the university that pays his salary, counsels his peers to "ignore the official rewards of the system. Teach classes that are meaningful to you and that engage that portion of your students who are reachable. Ignore, in other words, the very idea of professional wisdom. Only write what you want to write. Once you have job security ... don't write if you don't want to."(19) Of course there are all sorts of things wrong with the profession, but I would hope that staring the ultra-conservatives in the face would concentrate the mind - and instill a sense of responsibility.

And finally, we must make the case for education and for knowledge. How ironic that the so-called defenders of Western civilization have been able to cast us as its enemies, when it is we who stand for its highest principles. This is the case we must take to the public: that knowledge, like art, is intrinsically good; that education is one of the surest paths to self and social improvement; that the free exchange of ideas is one of the noblest ideas ever conceived. If we cannot make this case, who is going to make it for us?

Department of History Newark, NJ 07102

ENDNOTES

I would like to thank Barry Bienstock, James Grimmelmann, and Scott Sandage.

1. Mary Elizabeth Perry, "The Invisible Majority: Myths, Realities, and a Call for Action," Perspectives: Newsletter of the American Historical Association 33 (May/June 1995): 11 n. 1.

2. Robert Fitch, "New York Budget War: 'Spread the Pain'? Tax the Gain!" The Nation, 260 (May 8, 1995): 628-632.

3. For example, the earnings of those who have received four or more years of higher education have consistently been significantly higher than of those with less education; in fact, the differential has been increasing, for both women and men and whites and blacks, over the past several years. U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, The Condition of Education, 1994 (Washington, D.C., 1994).

4. See also Louis Menand, "The Trashing of Professionalism," The New York Times Magazine, March 5, 1995, 41-43.

5. She uses this term twice in her Op-Ed, "Mocking America at U.S. Expense," New York Times, March 10, 1995, A29.

6. Lynne Cheney, "The End of History," The Wall Street Journal, October 20, 1994, A22.

7. National Standards for United States History: Exploring the American Experience (Los Angeles, 1994), 89.

8. Lynne Cheney, quoting a member of the National Council for History Standards who "wishes not to be named," in "The End of History."

9. Cheney, "The End of History."

10. National Standards for United States History, 82, 84-5.

11. Diane Ravitch, "Revise, but Don't Abandon, the History Standards," The Chronicle of Higher Education XLI, 23 (February 17, 1985): A52.

12. National Standards for United States History, 74, 49.

13. Cheney, "Mocking America at U.S. Expense."

14. Page Putnam Miller, "NCC Washington Update," 1, 4 (January 24, 1995), distributed by H-Net.

15. This news report is described by Raymond W. Smock, "A Cheap Shot at Federal Historians," Chronicle of Higher Education XLI (April 14, 1995): A52.

16. Arthur Quinn, Review of Stephen Innes, Creating the Commonwealth: The Economic Culture of Puritan New England, New York Times Book Review, April 9, 1995, 12.

17. Robert S. McNamara, with Brian VanDeMark, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (New York, 1995), 32-4. See also Theodore Draper's review, The New York Review of Books XLII (May 11, 1995): 11.

18. "The Practice of American History: A Special Issue," The Journal of American History 81 (1994).

19. Kenneth Cmiel, "History Against Itself," JAH 81 (1994): 1173.