Demystifying and Rethinking the Study of History: An Interview with Gerda Lerner

Twenty-six years ago, at the behest of OAH President Gerda Lerner, the organization began a new and exciting Distinguished Lectureship program. Today it stands as one of the organization’s most engaging accomplishments, as it brings leading scholars to audiences across the country, both to impart a greater understanding of the American past and to raise money for the OAH. Gerda Lerner is widely recognized as a major force in the creation of Women’s History. She was only the second female president of the OAH, the first in fifty years. Last month, I had the opportunity to speak with Professor Lerner about her thoughts on graduate education, the OAH, and the future of the profession.

Graduate education in history remains a topic of heated discussion among scholars, and it has received significant attention recently from the AHA’s report, The Education of Historians for the Twenty-first Century (2004), to the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate initiative. Through her long career, Lerner has been an integral part of changes in the profession. I asked her for her thoughts regarding changes in graduate education that are needed to better prepare future historians.

	When Lee Formwalt visited Gerda Lerner in her home in Durham, NC, last winter, she pointed out the colorful quilt on her wall: “It is wonderful to get honorary degrees, but for me the hood that came with the degree also symbolized the millennium of exclusion of women from universities. I wanted to change this patriarchal symbol into an art object, which would honor a traditional craft of women—a quilt. To do so I spent a year ripping the fourteen hoods apart to salvage the beautiful fabric. Then a professional quilter in Madison created this quilt after my design. Now it has a place of honor on my living room wall.” Lerner continues to receive honorary degrees and their accompanying hoods.

“The first thing I have to say is that we are always being questioned as though there were two different aspects of what historians do—teaching and research—two really separate things. I don’t believe that, and I don’t believe in coming out with anything that says do one OR the other. I think, however, many improvements can be made in what we do in the training in research. Historical training should impart to the future historian a deep and abiding passion for presenting the past to the present. It seems to me that if we don’t make students feel that history matters and matters profoundly, we are missing the essence of what we are doing. Many people are so busy with career-building strategies that they never get to think about the larger and deeper meaning of what it means to be a historian. I feel that if you don’t have that and you don’t impart that, there is no point in doing what we do.”

Lerner noted that she has observed that graduate students often pursue history because of their high school experiences with history. “Over and over again, when I’ve asked incoming graduate students what made you decide to become a historian, they said, ‘well, I had this teacher in high school.’ So it’s this teacher in high school that I want to address, that I want us to begin to honor as a professional, because this teacher in high school is really doing his or her job without which what we do is impossible.” Breaking down the barrier between research and teaching is central to Lerner’s understanding of how best to train future members of the profession.

For Lerner, imparting this passion requires that we train future scholars not just as researchers, but as teachers and public historians. “I think we need to have actually three different goals for training, and these three different goals should be explicitly stated, described, and discussed with every student, and probably after the first year, the student should make a choice which track he or she wishes to pursue. That would, of course, require a fundamental change in the profession, because each of these three strands should be equally rewarding economically and in terms of prestige, but they are not so now. The three strands are, first, research and writing; second, teaching at every level; and third, applied history in the community, or public history.” Those “are the basic courses, but the main goal of the basic foundation should be to inspire students to really understand what history is, what the use of history can be, and secondly to get them to learn the methods by which you think critically. These are learnable.”

To achieve these goals, said Lerner, we need to “demystify the process” of graduate education. “This is a radical idea, it’s not a new idea with me, a lot of people have already said that. Essentially, the profession, as it developed out of the medieval cloister-like atmosphere, became interested in keeping itself alive and creating clones and mystifying as much as possible the process of what we are doing. If you demystify the process, students flock to you.” One must “be open with the student and treat the student as a partner in a continuous conversation you are going to have over the several years of graduate training. You must be forthcoming about what it is that you want the student to learn and how the student can learn. It is good practice to evaluate at regular intervals the student’s progress from both the student’s and teacher’s viewpoint. Testing, too, needs to be demystified. Graduate students have to run an obstacle race with hurdles, the various tests they are called to take, and the tests are never explained or justified. I believe there should be testing, because like anything that you are learning, you have to know where you stand, but students should be tested in a way that does not create terror and panic.”

Public history should be an important part of history graduate education. “We need a much more flexible and creative approach in structuring graduate programs. That includes something like a public history internship. It might be: working a semester in an archive or in a library, or going to an organization and helping it make a list of important people and record what they did for the association. We need to find an instrument for giving them credit for it, and I did that at Wisconsin, where I got the department to give me a three-credit course we called Practicum. It was probably the most successful thing I did for the students, because when it came to writing their recommendations, I could write a half-page on all the skills they acquired while they were organizing, in my case, Women’s History Month celebrations in the university and the community. Over the years they did seventy-two performances in elementary and high school. They invited speakers and arranged discussion forums. They organized film viewings. When it came to writing a reference for them, I said this student is wonderful in research and great in thinking, and is a competent organizer and it helped get them good jobs. I would like to see that everywhere. It’s practicing history, spreading historical insight and methods into the community. We can build into every course some practical assignments for students. In my practice, I made several such assignments. One of them was interviewing somebody of their grandmother’s generation about a specific event, and then come to class and give a report. Then interview the person sitting next to you about the report she gave, and then give me a written statement of what she told you and all of a sudden they have learned biography, and autobiography, and they have learned the difference between the two.”

For Lerner, passion remains the most important aspect of good teaching. “But on the same line, it’s striking, of course, that in the profession there are people who produce two to fifteen books in their career. There is a large number who produce two books, with luck, and do wonderful things in teaching. Well, I think that is fine, and for the people who wish to go the career path where teaching is their main emphasis, they should nevertheless be given research money and resources to go to conferences, to work on articles, to give papers, so that they are practicing historians. But then they should be honored and rewarded for their good teaching. There is good work being done in this area. I think team teaching is a wonderful way in which you can go out of your narrow focus, you can be transnational, you can be multicultural. What is needed is for faculty to fight for recognition by the university, that preparing a team-taught course takes time, work time. I would say maybe two months to prepare a good three-month course. They should be compensated for that. It should count, like a research grant.”

Professor Lerner’s own experience developing courses on Women’s History provides a good example of how this can be accomplished in a university environment that does not embrace collaborative efforts. “You know, Women’s History was nonexistent when I started in 1963, and in 1970 there were about two or three places where you could take a course in Women’s History, and then it had this enormous expansion. One way in which it spread so fast was that we women historians deliberately changed the cultural attitude about property in courses, and we exchanged course outlines and bibliographies widely. We were happy when one of our courses was being taught by somebody else. Now, the same thing could be done, if a good team-taught course is developed, or if a good introductory course is developed. It seems to me the professional organizations should have an apparatus for people to exchange courses and to talk to each other on the Internet about courses, how to teach a course, and what teaching strategies worked and which ones did not. This we could do.”

Mystery continues to plague the historical profession, but we have made great strides over the last few decades. Lerner remembers in the 1960s the “deep, deep mystery” of getting published, for instance, and her work as “one of the spies that found out how to do it.” After which, she would “immediately send out mimeographs to everybody I knew,” with any useful information she uncovered. But, she says, “The profession is in much better shape in democratic access to professional advancement.” The expansion of teaching and public history panels at the OAH and other conventions suggests further progress, but, Lerner contends that this is “not enough—it has to be year round in some way.”

When looking back at her career, Professor Lerner observed some of the revolutionary changes she witnessed. Women, she maintains, “have changed the tone of the profession in a very decisive way.” No longer would an established scholar come to a convention “with his favorite male student” to find him a job instead of advertising the job, as was standard procedure until the late 1960s. “Women challenged the status quo. We set ourselves the goal right from the beginning of our forming a women’s caucus and women’s committees to put an end to this big boys’ network, and it transformed and democratized the organization to the benefit of both men and women. This is a fact that’s not often remembered. The next step was to insist the job interviews not take place in bedrooms. That was a revolutionary idea; it was considered quite shocking.” People asked, “Why not? What’s the matter with the women? Are they afraid? Answer: yes, and for good reason.”

Lerner remains proud of her work with the OAH, as president and as a member of the executive board. And while she believes “very strongly in the role of the professional organizations,” she also strongly believes that they need to “be advocates of the profession.” The profession needs to do a better job of protecting historians and their labors. “Once in awhile we do, in setting standards on plagiarism or something like that, but we have not been strong advocates for the profession, because if we had been, the scandal of the undermining of the profession by the erosion of tenure and the substitution for tenured faculty, the outsourcing of knowledge with a secondary labor pool, wouldn’t have happened. We have not been strong advocates.”

Although retired, Gerda Lerner remains active in the profession. She spends her summers in Madison, Wisconsin and winters in Durham, North Carolina. She keeps up with the latest developments in the profession and clearly enjoys reflecting on both her career as well as the future of the profession. OAH is indeed fortunate to have had her as president a quarter-century ago and as an active member today.

Lee Formwalt thanks OAH Newsletter Assistant Editor Chad Parker for his assistance in preparing this article.