How To Renew Traditional Historical Study in Graduate Schools
- sofiapbaker
- Aug 18, 2020
- 1 min read
I’m sometimes asked why it is so difficult for PhD students of a conservative bent to survive and flourish in history graduate programs these days.
It’s not enough to say that conservative graduate students are red drops in a blue ocean, surrounded by people who hold political views antithetical to theirs. I have taught at Harvard for 35 years and there has never been a time when conservative politics had much appeal to the history faculty. The history department where I teach used to harbor more conservatives than it does today, but even in the 1980s we were a small minority.
I’m not really talking here about political conservatives, card-carrying Republicans. I mean “conservative” in the context of the historical profession today. This would include anyone who dislikes mixing contemporary politics into every historical dish and is out of sympathy with the perfervid evangelism of the modern progressive academy…