The item below appeared in yesterday’s National Review Online. Over the course of that day, I received several private emails asking what I thought of it. Later today I’ll have a post on Cliopatria telling what I think, but for the moment, here’s the provocative piece itself:
TAPS FOR MILITARY HISTORY
Why military history is being retiredJOHN J. MILLER
A decade ago, best-selling author Stephen Ambrose donated $250,000 to the University of Wisconsin, his alma mater, to endow a professorship in American military history. A few months later, he gave another $250,000. Until his death in 2002, he badgered friends and others to contribute additional funds. Today, more than $1 million sits in a special university account for the Ambrose-Heseltine Chair in American History, named after its main benefactor and the long-dead professor who trained him.
The chair remains vacant, however, and Wisconsin is not currently trying to fill it. “We won’t search for a candidate this school year,” says John Cooper, a history professor. “But we’re committed to doing it eventually.” The ostensible reason for the delay is that the university wants to raise even more money, so that it can attract a top-notch senior scholar. There may be another factor as well: Wisconsin doesn’t actually want a military historian on its faculty. It hasn’t had one since 1992, when Edward M. Coffman retired. “His survey course on U.S. military history used to overflow with students,” says Richard Zeitlin, one of Coffman’s former graduate teaching assistants. “It was one of the most popular courses on campus.” Since Coffman left, however, it has been taught only a couple of times, and never by a member of the permanent faculty.
One of these years, perhaps Wisconsin really will get around to hiring a professor for the Ambrose-Heseltine chair — but right now, for all intents and purposes, military history in Madison is dead. It’s dead at many other top colleges and universities as well. Where it isn’t dead and buried, it’s either dying or under siege. Although military history remains incredibly popular among students who fill lecture halls to learn about Saratoga and Iwo Jima and among readers who buy piles of books on Gettysburg and D-Day, on campus it’s making a last stand against the shock troops of political correctness. “Pretty soon, it may become virtually impossible to find military-history professors who study war with the aim of understanding why one side won and the other side lost,” says Frederick Kagan, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who taught at West Point for ten years. That’s bad news not only for those with direct ties to this academic sub-discipline, but also for Americans generally, who may find that their collective understanding of past military operations falls short of what the war-torn present demands.
3 Comments
Strikes me that it flags up a couple of genuine concerns – but in a pretty sloppy, pretty unconvincing way. I look forward to your take on it.
Incidentally, it seems to me that although he bangs on about Wisconsin, he doesn’t actually come anywhere near to demonstrating that the reason they haven’t followed through is because they’re a bunch of conchies. It seems to me that the reason Wisconsin actually gives – that they want to use the money to get a real heavy-hitter and right now they just can’t afford that – is at least as plausible as the notion that they’re sitting on the money because they can’t stomach the notion of employing a military buff.
Greetings:
I am a long-time member of the History faculty at the University of Wisconsin — Madison and am well acquainted with the situation in military history here. I also served three years in the Army. Finally, although I am primarily a historian of immigration, I occasionally teach a seminar on the Korean War.
John J. Miller’s article shows some insight about Wisconsin’s failure to replace Edward “Mac” Coffman in military history. In choosing not to replace Mac in the almost fifteen years since his retirement, the department has made repeated judgments that military history is not as crucial to its undertaking as are several new fields in which it has hired and others in which it has made replacements. There is no getting away from that fact.
Did liberal or “p.c” politics color the decision not to replace Mac? Proponents of military history, including myself, suspected that a minority of department members opposed the field as a matter of principle. I, however, was not part of any meeting or discussion in which any faculty member explicitly made anti-military history arguments. My guess is that the loss of support military history, like similar losses suffered by political and diplomatic history, reflects a general movement in academic history away from the study of the “state” and other institutions.
Although not opposed to new fields, I am sorry that their growth has coincided with the decline of other important areas in which I am interested. I am also unhappy that history drawn back from its efforts to make greater use of quantitative techniques and that both graduate and undergraduate students show a remarkable lack of interest in knowing “factual information” as opposed to “interpretation” Nevertheless, I expect these changes, like all historical styles, are phases whose time will pass.
At Wisconsin, the military history field unfortunately got tied up with state politics. When Mac retired, the department heard rumors that affluent friends of the state administration then in power wanted to “impose” Stephen Ambrose, a local boy made good, on the department. The idea of outside political interference with a university appointment automatically created resistance within the department. Both Ambrose and, indirectly, military history suffered from those rumors and perceptions.
Steve Ambrose did come as a visitor to Wisconsin. He was a fine guest who took pains not to insert himself in the day-to-day politics of the department. His course was popular, although teaching assistants thought he focused too much on the western front and not enough on other theaters of the war. Supporters of military history thought his presence helped restore visibility to the field, although some sniping comments he made after his departure — mostly in protest to state rules against smoking in offices — took a little of the bloom off the rose.
The department appreciated Ambrose’s generous bequest to it as well as the substantial gifts given in his name by friends and supporters. Those of us in favor of hiring a military historian took heart that the fund would provide useful leverage in promoting the cause. Indeed, it has. I fear that, without the money, the chances of a hire would be much less.
John Miller’s remarks are off-target regarding some aspects of military history at Wisconsin. Mac Coffman knows guns and battles with the best of them, but he was and is one of the leaders in the movement to tie military history to other fields. Although the study of strategy, tactics, logistics, and other mission-oriented aspects of military history will remain an important component of the field, I doubt that it ever will return to complete domination of it. Military history studies both war and society.
A million bucks doesn’t buy what it used to buy. A fully endowed chair, paying the salary and fringes for a senior professor and carrying with it an annual research fund, requires an endowment of $2.5 to $3.0 million. That Wisconsin is ready to use a much smaller endowment to pursue a search for a military historian is a sign of good faith.
Members of the department interested in military history expected to carry out a search in that field this year. As late as May or June, the chair of the department was already attempting to determine the composition of the search committee. Then the university ran into budgetary problems that are preventing almost all departments, including History, from having ANY searches this year. When the crisis passes, we expect the search in military history to become a very high priority once more.
Tom – Thank you very much for such an informative, fair-minded comment. We’re all in your debt for taking time to write at such length about this issue.