“Radical” Public History and the Ethics of Training?
In the last several years, NCPH has placed a higher premium on utilizing public history as a tool of social-empowerment and truth-telling. Conferences have included symposiums on the “roots of radical public history” as well as a the NPS centennial – largely focused on making the agency more inclusive and decolonizing its narratives. With conference themes like “Power Lines,” “History on the Edge,” and “Challenging the Exclusive Past” (not so much “History in the Middle”), there have been a surge of panels and conversations about ways in which public historians can help overturn the apple-cart of hegemony, through challenging histories that “naturalize” power with inclusive counter-methods and interpretations that feature a gender, racial, social, or environmental focus. This emphasis on vaguely-defined “radical practice” has energized our membership with a sense of righteous purpose in ways that are both constructive and therapeutic -particularly in the wake of the 2016 election.
While understanding history’s operation as a flexible technology of power is crucial to good public history training, our profession’s prioritization of “radical” practice might be doing a disservice to younger professionals and pubic history graduate students. In the context of the NCPH conference or the classroom, practitioners and public-historians-in-training have the benefit of “intellectual freedom” as a shared value. This protection, however, does not exist in the world beyond the conference hall or the seminar room. As recent Master’s graduates look for jobs as practicing public historians in institutional or private-practice settings, an emphasis on radical narratives is just as likely to be a liability as an asset. With a few trend-setting exceptions, public history employers are not looking for new employees that are going to reframe institutional narratives in an inclusive or radical light. Rather, they are searching for professionals who are able operators willing to execute existing institutional programs. In this light, we are not providing our Master’s students and new professionals with the appropriate outlook to professionally succeed.
This clear tension between academic ideals and professional realities sets up a variety of ethical questions. Many of these are older – like, what is our obligation to history and marginalized communities in light of contradictory employer priorities? But they are further complicated by newer circumstances and questions about our obligations to students who pay our salaries in hopes of getting jobs – particularly at the graduate level. The ethics of offering public history graduate education has only become more fraught as there are both an increasing number of graduate programs in public history and decreasing public history positions as funding has become scarcer for these institutions. Faced with such austere and uncertain economic realities, what are we really offering graduate public history students?[1] What benefits do they receive by focusing on radical practice? On the other side of the coin, abandoning radical practice in the University setting suggests indifference to hegemonic historical narratives and our professional commitment to truth.
Answers resolving this complex set of conflicting duties to students, history, the public, and employers are unclear. They remain important, however, and worthy of a search for solutions within our working group.
Possible solutions for consideration:
- Culturally moving as a professional organization towards a more careful discussion of “radicalism,” preparing students and young professionals to better understand the realities of the job search and workplace. This does not mean sacrificing engaged social-justice oriented practice, but placing a higher-degree of emphasis on being diplomatic and nuanced in our approaches beyond the University.
- Creating more professional space for sharing hard lessons of actual practice among our membership may help shed light on this topic for new professionals.
- Changing models for academic education in public history. Placing greater emphasis on public history training for undergraduates and retooling our focus on towards public history methods and theory as good liberal education, alongside career preparation. Public history has transferrable skills that students are learning that go beyond public history settings – project management, writing for public audiences, research, stakeholder/client and community interaction, and so on. Graduate education is a difficult nut to crack, because we are frequently getting students who are coming into the program, specifically to get a job.
- New models for public history funding and employment? (See Rachel Boyle’s case statement).
Dan Ott, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire
[1] Undoubtedly, these ethical dilemmas are linked to larger problems in higher-education more generally, as tuition and student debt increase thanks to the administrative mushrooming in recent years without a clear connection to student career and salary prospects after graduation.