Vitalizing a Profession

Jacquelyn Dowd Hall

Taking up my responsibilities as president of the OAH during the annual meeting in Memphis proved humbling and exciting in ways I hadn't anticipated. The shadow of the past was palpable, as we commemorated the thirty-fifth anniversary of the April 4 assassination of Martin Luther King. A second shadow fell across the hallways and meeting rooms as well: the shadow of war, and with it the challenge of using our skills as historians to explore the roots and context of contemporary events. "Those who view historians as irrelevantly stuck in the musty past might be doing a double-take these days," observed James M. O'Neill, a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer ("History Scholars Fight Present War," 10 April 2003). O'Neill then went on to quote Temple University professor Ralph Young, who "called it myth to think that historians are only interested in the 'cold facts of the past. We're concerned with how everything is connected. History is concerned with the future.'"

Enacting that link between the past, the present, and the future, speaker after speaker evoked the memory of King's post-1965 incarnation as a national leader who linked racism to militarism, spoke out against the Vietnam War, and tried to take the movement in a direction that, in his words, would "cost the nation something" by fighting for economic justice for poor whites and blacks alike. Past President David Montgomery and JAH Editor Joanne Meyerowitz organized a standing-room only forum on American foreign policy, which was televised by C-SPAN. The Executive Board, responding to a request from "Historians Against the War," adopted a resolution emphasizing the centrality of dissent in American history and warning against the curtailment of civil liberties in the name of security. But such linkages were not limited to explicit discussions of breaking events. They were implicit in all we did, from oversubscribed tours of the Mississippi Delta to Ira Berlin's riveting presidential address on the resonance of slavery in contemporary politics and culture to the chat room on reparations, which sparked plans for a virtual chat group to follow.

As these debates, discussions, and commemorations mingled with what is always, for me, the key attraction--the opportunity to reconnect with far-flung networks of friends and colleagues, to renew the sense of collective identity that inspires and sustains our intellectual work, the OAH's Executive Board and Standing Committees conferred behind the scenes. I know that the deliberations of professional organizations can seem far removed from the urgencies of politics as well as from the day-to-day struggles of teachers and public historians and from the demands and pleasures of writing and research. But I do think that these are all of a piece, perhaps now more than ever. And those urgencies and struggles lent heightened significance both to our most ambitious plans and to the most mundane tasks.

In the fall of 1998, the OAH Executive Board held a strategic planning retreat which resulted in the mission statement and in a series of changes that have made the OAH an increasingly inclusive and equitable organization. Not least among those changes were new faces on the executive board. Once dominated by scholars at research universities, the board now includes public historians as well as teachers of history at high schools, community colleges, and four-year liberal arts institutions. Four years later, in the fall of 2002, the board gathered once again, to assess how far we've come, formulate detailed plans for further transformation, and consider the bottom line: how to increase our funding so as to ensure greater financial independence and support efforts to serve diverse constituencies, reach broad audiences, and maintain an effective voice in public debates. During the Memphis meeting, the board endorsed the strategic plan we had hammered out at the fall retreat.

In so doing, we were responding not only to the need to maintain the momentum of the 1998 reforms but to new openings and challenges. As Ira Berlin and Executive Director Lee Formwalt pointed out in the November 2002 OAH Newsletter, recent Congressional appropriations and the announcement of a major White House initiative offer unprecedented opportunities for improving history education. More than 350 participants in the "Teaching American History" projects funded by the Department of Education attended a planning conference in conjunction with our annual meeting. With support from the Gilder Lehrman Institute, the OAH also provided travel grants to fifty high school teachers who joined us in Memphis, and we are working with the Institute to increase these grants, improve the OAH Magazine of History (see the April 2003 issue for the first fruits of this upgrade), and strengthen history education in other ways as well. The appointment of Brent Glass, who holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and currently heads the OAH's Public History Committee, as the new director of the National Museum of American History offers equally exciting possibilities. Encouraged by our highly successful partnership with the National Park Service, we met with Glass and his staff in Memphis to discuss the possibility of a collaborative relationship with the NMAH and other major museums across the country. The combination of these developments--federal funding, our partnership with the Gilder Lehrman Institute, and the opportunity to build a closer alliance between the OAH and the museums from which thousands of Americans gain their main glimpse of American history--promises a new era of collaboration between college and university historians, public history institutions, and our eighty thousand colleagues who teach in the nation's high schools.

At the same time, we must be mindful of the fact that neither the OAH nor the AHA was invited to play a significant role in planning these federal programs, underscoring the necessity of asserting our leadership, seeking independent funding, and building strong alliances. Moreover, devastating cutbacks threaten to eviscerate state historical agencies, libraries and archives--the very institutions that guard our documentary heritage and make it possible for historians to practice their craft. Unless reversed, Presidential Executive Order 13233 may well undo the open access to critical sources secured by the Presidential Records Act of 1978. Throughout the country, librarians are protesting against the threat posed by the USA Patriot Act to the privacy of citizens seeking access to the nation's public libraries. These developments are undergirded by dangerous long-term trends, including the resegregation and impoverishment of our public schools; disinvestment in higher education; and the pressure to increase class size, replace tenure-track with part-time and adjunct positions, and, in other ways, undermine the quality of higher education.

Behind the strategic plan lies a conviction that we must act with vision and courage in the face of the large-scale economic changes and political pressures that bear upon our professional lives. I believe that we are well placed to so do. Our membership continues to grow, and it includes increasing numbers of active high school and community college teachers. Our annual meeting in Memphis was our largest outside of Washington, D.C., in the last quarter of a century. We can build on the foundation laid by a series of creative OAH and JAH leaders. We can count on the "can-do" energy and commitment of the Executive Director and the entire staff and the astounding devotion of the volunteers who serve on our committees and on the executive board. But our aim is not only to strengthen a disciplinary organization but to vitalize a profession, and that vitality depends on the active engagement of our members. It also depends on an understanding of academic citizenship that encourages advocacy and institutional change.

In my next column, I will discuss one of our most pressing issues and one of Board's most important decisions: its endorsement of a strong report proposed by the AHA-OAH Joint Committee on Part-Time and Adjunct Employment, which has worked heroically on this issue for several years. This report, which includes both viable standards and an action plan, is aimed at improving the working conditions of part-time and adjunct faculty while, at the same time, halting the erosion of full-time positions. We will also publish the committee's report at that time.

In the meantime, I urge you to read the strategic plan carefully and give us the benefit of your experiences, insights, and ideas.