The November issue of Historically Speaking, the bulletin of The Historical Society, has a forum on “Military History: The State of the Field,” featuring short essays by several eminent military historians. The Historical Society blog reprints one by Brian M. Linn, a professor of history at Texas A&M and president of the Society for Military History. The whole thing is worth reading, but here’s an observation I particularly liked:
Certainly the state of military history in the ivory tower is cause for concern. But what characterizes a successful historical field? For far too long, academic military historians have judged their specialty by the opinion of their colleagues and their deans, and then publicized their dismal findings. The result has been a widespread perception that the field is in precipitous decline. But is ephemeral and subjective academic prestige going to be our sole criterion for judging the state of military history? Perhaps as the child of an academic I was born cynical, but I often wonder if the average college department is capable of establishing consistent and verifiable indices for excellence. If there were such standards, why have so many departments hired so many faculty whose dissertation topics went from “cutting-edge” to “traditional” in the time it took them to come up for tenure? Why are faculty who “popularize” history, whether to enthusiastic students or the reading public, regarded as lacking in academic rigor? And why is publishing a 400-copy monograph that is favorably reviewed by another specialist in a journal with a circulation of a few hundred other specialists seen as the apex of scholarly achievement? I could go on, but the academic readers already know why so many murder mysteries, dramas of dysfunctionality, and vicious satires are set on campus, while the rest of you still would not believe what passes for normal in most departments. Clausewitz and Sun Tzu emphasized the importance of picking the battlefield, so why should military historians not heed their illustrious ancestors and look outside of the narrow confines of college departments to judge the state of the field? . . .
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Surely, it may seem ludicrous, to propose that a Military Historians night on “Dancing With the Stars” would be apropos. Not to make fun, but perhaps by such hyperbole I may illustrate the idea: That there must be some cultural significance of military history and historianship. I wonder if it’s all been recognized, in such regards.