The Working Group on Evaluating Public History Scholarship: An Update

Kristin L. Ahlberg

Improving the review of public history scholarship for promotion and tenure remains the focus of the Working Group on Evaluating Public History Scholarship. Established in 2007 as a collaborative project of the American Historical Association, Organization of American Historians, and National Council on Public History, the working group has spent the last two years reviewing tenure practices and guidelines, devising a web-based survey to allow public historians to share their opinions and experiences, and hosting informational, open sessions at the annual meetings of the AHA, OAH, and NCPH (1). In an August 2008 article for the OAH Newsletter, working group member Gregory Smoak described the group’s origins as rooted in earlier conversations regarding the evaluation of public history scholarship and influenced by other disciplinary and interdisciplinary attempts to broaden the definition of scholarship beyond the single-authored monograph (2). Smoak also highlighted the two, interrelated issues emerging from the discussions at the annual meetings: the need for both an equitable system of peer review and a redefinition of evaluation categories to validate and recognize publicly engaged historians. In response, working group members strove to devise a set of best practices and recommendations for hiring, review, and promotion of public historians in academic institutions and devoted the remainder of 2008 to preparing their report.

The draft report, entitled “Tenure, Promotion, and the Publicly Engaged Historian,” asserts that the definition of academic scholarship must be expanded to include the scholarship done by public historians. Such a redefinition is necessary considering the exponential growth in public history programs over the last decade and concomitant hiring of public history faculty. These tenure-track historians must be evaluated on the basis of the work they were hired to do. Too often, they must juggle the demands of building a robust public history program with simultaneously pursuing their own research agenda. Fair evaluation of public historians requires the application of equitable standards for tenure review, standards that reflect and value the contributions public historians make to their universities, multiple communities and constituents, and the historical profession.

Our report seeks to both advise public historians on the tenure track on how to define and explain their work and offer department chairs and university administrators a set of guidelines for evaluating public history scholarship approved by the major professional historical organizations. Drawing on survey results and public input, the report offers suggestions for evaluating public history scholarship from within the traditional, three-pronged review categories of scholarship, teaching, and service, recognizing that the best strategies will vary according to departmental and university culture. It also underscores the relevance of community engagement in all aspects of a public historian’s work. The report is organized into five sections that demonstrate how public history fits into the traditional promotion and tenure categories and how these categories might be expanded. Each section—Review of Existing Standards; Community Engagement; Scholarship; Teaching; and Service—contains an overview, delineation of critical issues, and recommendations for best practices. The remainder of this article will summarize the report’s key findings and recommendations and describe the next steps in this initiative.

Our review of tenure guidelines collected from thirty-five colleges and universities confirmed that promotion and tenure standards vary by university and too often do not reflect the reality or entirety of public history work. Many colleges and universities prioritize the peer-reviewed scholarly monograph as the criterion for tenure. Other institutions, however, have adopted guidelines that address the unique concerns of public historians. In order to value public history productivity, the working group urges departments in the process of hiring public historians to review equitable promotion and tenure standards established at other colleges and universities. While public colleges and universities seem to be leading the trend in supporting publicly engaged faculty, private institutions also need to be aware of the specific issues, problems, and possibilities that public history presents.

Community engagement is an essential, yet often undervalued, component of public history. The very nature of public history requires historians to establish active scholarly partnerships with various communities in order to create and/or apply knowledge to benefit multiple constituencies. By forging these connections, public historians help to fulfill their institutional missions, obtain external funding, and raise the university or department’s public profile. Colleges and universities that value community engagement should devise equitable strategies for evaluating this type of scholarly work. While these policies will assume various forms, the working group suggests that institutions rethink workload categories in order to prioritize community engagement, allow public historians to renegotiate their contracts to adjust workload expectations, create a peer review process for collaborative work that includes qualified external reviewers, and permit public historians at the assistant level to pursue community projects that will count toward promotion.

Public historians’ scholarship fits the definition outlined in the AHA’s Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct: the discovery, exchange, interpretation, and presentation of information about the past (3). The difference, however, lies in the type and scope of public history scholarship, which often does not fit the overly narrow equation of scholarly output with the publication of a monograph. The traditional three-pronged evaluation system tends to relegate public history work to the oft-maligned service category. Thus public historians find themselves in an untenable situation. In order to maintain their scholarly reputations in their area of practice, public historians must engage with local and regional audiences, other practitioners, and students. By doing so, they limit their opportunities within the current tenure system or they shoulder a double burden of scholarly work. Embracing the expansive definition of scholarship, laid out in the Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct, and developing adequate evaluation guidelines could ease this double burden. The working group suggests that each department establish an inclusive definition of the sources, content, and format of scholarship and define how quality public history scholarship should be documented and evaluated. The working group recommends that departments and universities consider the following suggestions: in promotion and tenure criteria, departments should provide an expansive definition of historical scholarship that values the output produced by all faculty; public historians seeking tenure and/or promotion should provide clear documentation as to how their work constitutes historical scholarship; departments should clearly explain how public historians’ work meets high standards for historical scholarship when communicating with university promotion and tenure committees; and departments should support public historians in their scholarly pursuits.

The public history faculty member’s responsibilities include not only classroom instruction but the supervision of interns, collaboration with students, and engagement in the wider community. Teaching and learning in public history is a collaborative enterprise. However, the evaluation of teaching in higher education has emphasized classroom instruction and has often consigned other activities to the service category, even though such efforts are an extension of teaching. The working group urges departments to acknowledge the variety of venues where public history teaching takes place (4). Departments continuing to prioritize the three-pronged system of review might consider adjusting upward the weight assigned to teaching. Time devoted to establishing internship programs and supervising interns should also be factored into a faculty member’s workload; such effort should be considered and rewarded both as teaching (under the tripartite system) and as scholarship (relating to the continuum model). Departments also need to recognize that courses with a significant student project component demand more instructional time than traditional courses. Public programs should be valued and recognized as a form of teaching. All of these activities do require rigorous peer review to maintain appropriate qualitative standards.

Service is, perhaps, the most undervalued category of promotion and tenure review. Nevertheless, many of the duties that fall under service are vital to the health of public history programs and the departments in which they exist. Public historians work hard to build public history programs and establish and maintain positive connections with university and community partners. While overlap exists between the categories of service and civic engagement, many administrative and programmatic tasks cannot be counted as civic engagement. These tasks include, but are not limited to: recruiting students, overseeing budgets, hiring clinical faculty, managing websites, and tracking and reporting the achievements of the program. Public historians also facilitate collaborative and public relationships. Respondents to the working group’s survey advocated maintaining the service category, but pushed for a greater recognition and valuation of public historians’ administrative service. The working group notes that departments and universities can better recognize and reward administrative tasks by evaluating the demands of running a public history program prior to hiring a public history program director and including administration as one of their primary duties. Departments might also consider hiring at the associate level, rather than requiring junior faculty to complete monographs while establishing public history programs. Similarly, program administrators should be provided with administrative assistance. Departments should consider offering them the same course reduction that department chairs receive in order to both maintain their programs and pursue their own research.

The Working Group on Evaluating Public History Scholarship is currently soliciting comments on the draft report, which is available online at <http://www.ncph.org/Portals/13 /Careers%20and%20Training/WGOEPHS%20DRAFT%20REPORT-22April09.pdf>. All suggestions, comments, and concerns are welcome. After revisions, the report will go to the governing boards of the AHA, NCPH, and OAH for formal consideration. We invite all historians to read the draft report and offer feedback.

Kristin L. Ahlberg is a historian in the Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State. She is a member of the AHA Professional Division and chair of theOAH Newsletter Advisory Board. Her book, Transplanting the Great Society: Lyndon Johnson and Food for Peace, was published by the University of Missouri Press in 2008. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and/or those of the Working Group on Evaluating Public History Scholarship and not necessarily those of the U.S. Department of State or the U.S. Government.

Endnotes

1. Representing the OAH are Constance Schulz (University of South Carolina), Gregory Smoak (Colorado State University), and Susan Ferentinos (OAH Public History Manager). William Bryans (Oklahoma State University), Kathleen Franz (American University), and John Dichtl (NCPH Executive Director) represent the NCPH. The AHA members are Edward Countryman (Southern Methodist University), Kristin Ahlberg (U.S. Department of State), and Debbie Ann Doyle (AHA Public History Coordinator). I would like to thank my fellow working group members for their comments and helpful suggestions and my colleagues on the OAH NewsletterK Advisory Boardl for their support.

2. Gregory E. Smoak, “The Working Group on Evaluating Public History Scholarship,” OAH Newsletter, Volume 36, Number 3, August 2008, pp. 1, 8. Reprinted in Public History News, Volume 28, Number 4, September 2008, pp. 3, 10–11 and Perspectives on History, September 2008.

3. American Historical Association, Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct, approved by the Professional Division, December 9, 2004 and adopted by Council, January 6, 2005. (Wholly revised from an earlier statement adopted May 1987; amended May 1990, May 1995, June 1996, January and May 1999, June 2001, and January 2003) <http://www.historians.org/pubs/Free/ProfessionalStandards.cfm>.

4. American Historical Association, Redefining Historical Scholarship: Report of the American Historical Association Ad Hoc Committee on Redefining Scholarly Work, December 1993 (<http://www.historians.org/pubs/Free/ RedefiningScholarship.html>).