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Welcome AHA Institutional Services Program Members!
This double issue of the Council of Chairs Newsletter marks the first which will be distributed to the members of the American Historical Association's Institutional Services Program (ISP). The new arrangements with AHA, which will increase the subscriber base to the Newsletter by several hundred, should make the publication increasingly attractive as a forum for the exchange of ideas and information. The current issue focuses on graduate education and the need for better information with which to plan for the future. The data presented in this issue of the Newsletter represents only a sample of what is available. We hope it will stimulate department chairs and others to share with us their problems and needs along these lines. Another new element of the Newsletter will be a regular column on minorities. By any standard of measurement, the number of minorities recruited into the historical profession is unconscionably low. In the past, history department chairs and others have noted that they could benefit from a regular reliable source of information about special fellowship, travel, and other opportunities for minority graduate students. They would also like to hear of programs and policies that have proved to be successful elsewhere. If you have special fellowships or programs you would like to advertise or an information request of your peers, please contact the production editor, Michael Regoli, at the OAH offices in Bloomington. History Faculty Demographics Several important indicators in the latter part of the 1980s suggest that graduate education in history had begun to undergo at least a modest renaissance. The numbers of doctorates awarded annually, after declining for a decade or so to a low of 543 in 1985 finally began once again to climb. The increases in intervening years have not been large, but they have been more or less steady. (See National Research Council, Summary Report, 1987, p. 72). Similarly, the Council of Graduate Schools reports that graduate enrollments in history have increased 10% from 1986 to 1988. Enrollment data from the American Historical Association's Guide to Departments of History for 1989-90 confirms this pattern of growth. Such data also make it clear that the pattern of growth in enrollments varies significantly from one institution to another. History departments may take cheer from these recent developments, but they should also approach the 1990s with a certain wariness, for there is every indication that a period of turbulence lies ahead. In Prospects for Faculty in the Arts and Sciences former Princeton President William Bowen and Julie Ann Sosa (Princeton University Press, 1989) offer several different possible models for projecting supply and demand in relation to higher education faculty. In all but one of these models, however, they assert that by the end of the decade supply of the arts and sciences doctorates will reach only 70% of de- mand. But NEH Chair Lynne Cheney challenges this assumption, calling it ``highly debatable'' and arguing that many replacement faculty can be found among the ranks of those who previously had sought employment outside the academy and from those Ph.D.s now holding only part-time appointments. (New York Times, September 28, 1989). Mrs. Cheney takes particular issue with a January, 1990, policy statement, ``The Ph.D. Shortage: The Federal Role,'' from the Association of American Universities, in which they urged Congress to provide NEH with the statutory authority to support research assistantships to avert the expected shortage. Howard R. Bowen and Jack H. Schuster in American Professors: A National Resource Imperiled (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986) consider the changed working conditions and compensation of higher education faculty and assess their impact on quality of new entrants into graduate programs. 1994 will mark the end of mandatory retirement for higher education faculty, a circumstance that might suggest a lower rate of retirement in the next decade. But some researchers (see studies by G. Gregory Lozier and Michael J. Dooris of Penn State as reported in the The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 4, 1990) believe that the rate will increase, although they acknowledge it will vary by discipline, type of institution and geographic location. Planners at the departmental level are faced with an increasingly difficult problem: too much data to absorb, too little analysis to guide its use, and not enough specific detail for individual disciplines. Much of the information pertaining to the discipline of history that now exists is collected with the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Other important studies are funded by the U.S. Department of Education or private organization such as the Council of Graduate Schools. Researchers using these data bases soon learn that it can be difficult to make comparisons from one to the other, because of the varying ways in which humanities fields, particularly history, are defined. In its 1985 reauthorization of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Congress broadened the mandate of the agency to collect data and disseminate studies needed by those responsible for planning in humanities and higher education institutions. The 1990 NEH reauthorization hearings have focused on the need to have an effective mechanism for insuring that this information gets into the hands of those who need it, in timely and usable fashion. OAH Acting Executive Secretary Arnita A. Jones is one of those who recently testified on behalf of NEH's data collection efforts and the need to insure their widest possible dissemination. Jones is a former Program Officer for Planning and Assessment Studies at NEH and has outlined in her testimony reprinted here the kinds of information needs faced by history department chairs. She has also suggested some cost-effective ways of meeting this need. One efficient way for NEH to meet its responsibilities to provide information to its constituency is to support analysis and/or increased sampling of studies undertaken by other agencies. One example is the ``National Survey of Postsecondary Faculty, 1988,'' the first comprehensive survey of higher education instructional faculty to be conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics since 1963. It gathered information regarding the backgrounds, responsibilities, workloads, salaries, benefits, and attitudes of both full-and part-time instructional faculty in their many and varied higher education institutions. In addition, information was gathered from institutional and department-level respondents on such issues as faculty composition, new hires, departures and recruitment, retention, and tenure policies. Selected tables from this study, which will be published later this year, are reprinted below. In 1986 the Council of Graduate Schools launched a new Survey of Graduate Enrollment. Supported jointly with the Educational Testing Service, it includes approximately 580 institutions in the United States which offer graduate programs and is conducted annually. Selected data from the 1988 survey are also reprinted. Testimony on the Reauthorization of the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965, Presented on Behalf of the National Coordinating Committee for the Promotion of History, May 2, 1990 Arnita A. Jones I am Arnita A. Jones, Acting Executive Secretary of the Organization of American Historians, a professional association numbering more than twelve thousand individual and institutions concerned with the research and teaching of American history. I am representing today the National Coordinating Committee for the Promotion of History, a consortium of more than fifty historical, archival and scholarly organizations which was founded in 1976. During the last quarter century since the National Endowment for the Humanities was created, historians have some of the most numerous of its grant recipients, while historical programs and projects are among its most visible and successful activities. Including some of the most narrowly focused scholarship NEH supports as well as many of its highly acclaimed public programs, the field of history is a large and varied enterprise. History is, furthermore, a constituency within the humanities that in recent years has undergone considerable change. Historians in colleges and universities, for example, have been drawn into collaborative efforts to reform the teaching of history in the nation's primary and secondary schools efforts such as the National History Education Center at UCLA or the History Teaching Alliance, both recipients of substantial support from NEH. Academic historians have begun to play a substantial role as curators and researchers for exhibits in museums and historical societies, while professional historians in museums, archives and historical societies have begun to develop educational programs targeted toward the K-12 classroom. History teachers at all levels Kindergarten through graduate programs through adult education must relate to an increasing number of different audiences, while over the years these audiences themselves have changed dramatically in the ways they approach historical knowledge. Professional associations such as my own, as well as the others represented in the National Coordinating Committee, find themselves very much in the middle of these changes and competing interests. It is to us that individuals, institutions and even news media frequently turn for information about current trends and developments in the humanities. Through our members and the efforts of our various committees we are frequently creators of information about the status of professional historians or the number and nature of a particular kind of program. For our own organizational planning and development we are users of data from large national studies like those concerning the doctoral popula- tion conducted with NEH support at the National Academy of Sciences. Most typically we are brokers and disseminators of information we and others develop to provide a basis for institutional planning. It is from this vantage point that I want to speak today concerning the efforts of the National Endowment for the Humanities in carrying out its mandate to ``...develop a practical system of national information and data collection on the humanities, scholars, educational, and cultural groups, and their audiences.'' Since 1977 I have had a close personal involvement with the efforts of the National Endowment for the Humanities to provide information about its constituency. That year I joined the staff of the American Historical Association to become the first director of the National Coordinating Committee for the Promotion of History. The organizations that comprised the NCC were begin- ning to realize the need for reliable information on the production of history PhDs. At that time, of course, our primary concern was to ensure that departments offering graduate programs be adequately apprised of the size, scope and pervasive nature of the imbalance between supply and demand for history doctorates. Subsequently, I joined the NEH staff to become program officer for Planning and Assessment Studies and had for several years responsibility for initiating, monitoring and disseminating studies on the conditions of the humanities in the United States. Since leaving NEH I have been both an officer and executive of national organizations which depend heavily on NEH-supported studies for their own and their constituencies' planning needs. Unlike its elder sibling the National Science Foundation the National Endowment for the Humanities did not begin its existence with a mandate to gather and create information on the disciplines for which it was assigned responsibility. To a certain extent this circumstance was perhaps predictable, for humanists, unlike social and other scientists, have little inclination toward the statistical study and analysis of their own behavior. Efforts in this direction by nongovernmental agencies in the field of history have been fitful and, as a result, frequently inconclusive or misleading.Two examples from the field of history may illustrate. A study of graduate education was conducted in the late 1950s by the American Historical Association. The study predicted a shortfall of supply over demand and encouraged the growth of doctoral programs. No follow-up studies were done, however, and soon supply far outstripped estimated need. Similarly, joint committees established to investigate the teaching of history in the high schools early in this century and again in the 1940s conducted surveys and formulated recommendations but developed no means for monitoring programs or implementing reforms. In both cases efforts at reform are likely to have been more productive had they been accompanied by better and more regularly collected information. The growth and development of NEH over the past quarter century has occurred during a period of unprecedented expansion and change in the world of higher education where most scholars of the humanities still make their homes. For history it has been also a time of unparalleled growth in the number and nature of organizations more oriented towards the public museums, archives, historical societies. Over the years NEH has compiled a respectable record of gathering and disseminating necessary data on these changes and many important issues surrounding them. Compared to those of NSF or the Department of Education its efforts have been modest and piecemeal, but the Endowment has also been creative in its exploitation of existing data collection efforts of other governmental agencies, and has often undertaken new studies when necessary. For example, through a variety of studies supported by NEH we now have an excellent data base on the doctoral population in the humanities. We know the exact number of PhD's produced annually, by discipline, and we know a great deal about the career patterns and goals of a representative sample of them. Through special studies and analyses conducted over the years we have even more detailed information about particular segments of this popula- tion women and minorities, for example, or those in public history careers. ACulture at Risk, which surveyed the world of historical societies and museums, provided benchmark data on their staffing, financial resources, and program activi- ties.Through the Higher Education Survey mechanism supported jointly with NSF and the Department of Education, NEH has the capability regularly to provide comparative data on such issues as undergraduate history enrollments. From the forthcoming survey analysis from the UCLA Center for History Education we hope to learn a great deal more about the history curriculum and the needs of history teachers in primary and secondary schools. NEH studies of the role of private philanthropy and as a source of support for humanities institutions and programs have provided important guidance for initiatives to stimulate more funding from this sector. NEH efforts to develop and disseminate data on conditions in the humanities have been and remain important. The recognition of the need for these activities by the Congress in its 1985 reauthorization legislation was both wise and appropriate for it signaled an acknowledgement of a federal role in this area beyond that which can and should be played by humanities professional associations, higher education or other humanities institutions. During the time I have been closely associated with the efforts of NEH discussed here today I have witnessed a very substantial and healthy change in the humanities institutions in their ability to incorporate sound and accurate analysis of data into their planning processes. Most professional associations, for example, now regularly incorporate data and analyses from a wide range of NEH-supported studies into their regular communications with members and have begun to develop their own capabilities for generating complementary information. And over the years NEH has developed its own capacity to disseminate needed information to disciplinary and other associations. We have come a long way, but we still have a long way to go before the humanities fields have any understanding of themselves their resources, their problems, their needs comparable to that of the sciences. As I have noted earlier, professional associations such as the Organization of American Historians frequently play a key role in the kind of communication we are discussing here and perhaps as a result are in a unique position to perceive both problems and limitations of the existing system. Two recent inquiries to my office can illustrate.One of these was a question from a history professor in an urban community college in the south. He first called because he was concerned to know what might be involved in the sponsorship of a small journal his institution had been ap- proached to publish. Happily I was able to direct him to another historian, a former project director of a grant for which I had once been responsible at NEH who was involved in the development of an information sharing network among editors of small history journals. Perhaps misled by this experience into thinking I was more knowledgeable about a wider range of other problems than I am, this same professor called me back just last week wanting information about the status of history in two-year colleges across the country, looking to be put in touch with a larger network that could help him in the same way as the network of journal editors had. Alas, I had to say that while NEH had in the 1970s and early 1980s invested substantial resources in surveying the status of the humanities in two-year colleges, much of the information that had been generated was out of date and networks that once looked promising had begun to unravel. The Organization of American Historians, which hopes to eventually use funds from a special endowment campaign to strengthen the role of history in community colleges, has not yet, I have to admit, been able to address this problem. Another recent inquiry came from a history department in a medium sized, state-supported university. The chair there had heard of a report that projected a greatly increased need for history doctorates in higher education in the 1990s and wanted to get a copy of it to incorporate into the department's proposal to establish a PhD program. While I pointed out that there were several reports suggesting an increased need for humanities doctorates, including those in history, I also stressed the fact that all involved a range of predictions and that the many variables involved argued for extreme caution in interpretation. I fear that was not the last of such inquiries. NEH and other humanities organizations have made real progress in developing and using sound planning information. But we need to do better. The next several years promise to be years of substantial change in higher education. Perhaps the fondest dreams of department chairs will materialize and the enormous popularity of history outside the classroom and improved history education at the elementary and secondary level will translate into a greater need for historians in higher education, a need which will be increased by an unusually large number of retirements. Even so, we would still need better information than we now have to meet this growth. Can we, for example, expect replacement faculty to share the same research interests as retiring faculty or will the demand for professors focus more closely on newer fields of research? might not at least some retiring diplomatic historians to be replaced by those with an interest in social history? How many of the retirements will be in two-year and community colleges where teaching is stressed rather than publications and the PhD is not always even welcome? In a period of what will surely be increasingly tough budget decisions, to what extent will departing full-time history faculty be replaced by part-timers? How is history likely to fare in competition for scarce resources within higher education institutions as they pursue a process of what recent press reports have described as ``selective excellence?'' How will all of this impact on public history institutions museums, archives, historical societies and the like and the relatively new MA programs recently established to educate historians to staff them? And how will all of these developments affect new programs designed to encourage more minorities into the ``pipeline?'' These are but a few of the questions historians must answer to address the problems with which they will have to deal in the next decades. Some information gathering and analysis can be done by individual institutions and associations but we need to establish a better partnership with NEH for those which can only be done on a national level or which must be done on a sustained and regular basis. The following would serve to begin the process of close cooperation:
I appreciate the opportunity to voice NCC's support of existing NEH data gathering activities and offer its support in finding ways of making these more effective in the future. History Program Data to Assist in Planning for the 1990s Jeffrey Thomas, Office of Planning and Budget The National Endowment for the Humanities collects data on many subjects of value to history departments. For example, in 1988, only eight blacks completed the Ph.D. in history with five studying United States history. In the fall term of the same year, there were over 4,300 courses being offered across the country. Information from the simple to the sophisticated is regularly available through the data collection and analysis arm of NEH which is charged with conducting surveys and producing reports for Congress. Appended are several tables and charts detailing recent findings of interest to departments. Table two documents the continued racial and ethnic imbalance within the profession. More than 90 percent of the Ph.D. recipients in history in 1988 were white. Table Two points to the startling rise in median years to complete the Ph.D. between 1969 and 1988. The remaining materials report on a broad range of topics and offer useful insights to history departments planning for the future. (The source for the three tables below are from the Survey of Earned Doctorates, conducted by the National Research Council and sponsored by five federal agencies: NSF, NIH, NEH, USDA, and ED.) Table 1: Race/Ethnicity of Doctorate Recipients in History, 1988 Table 2: Median Years to Degree for Doctorate Recipients in History, 1969-1988 Table 3: Percentage Distribution of Primary Sources of Support for Doctorate Recipients in History, 1988* |