Undergraduate Public History Training and Pie-in-the-Sky Ideas
Myself and the department’s seven other tenure-track and tenured faculty members have sprawled our laptops, notebooks, caffeinated beverages, smart phones, and other miscellany around the giant conference table. Our moods do not reflect the bright and cheery décor, as we have just received dismal news from our department chair once more. Despite our best efforts,* the number of history majors enrolled in our school has not increased. After many minutes of airing our frustrations, grievances, and concerns, someone forcefully states, “Parents want their kids to go to college and study something that will give them a job in that field right away. That’s not really how History has worked—at least in the past.” Then, faces turn toward me, the resident public historian, and another person chimes in, “We need to let them know that public history allows them to get a job right out of college. Right, Stella?” But, does public history coursework at the undergraduate level, or certification, or a minor in public history, or training in public history, really lead to a job after the BA?
This particular memory was made in the Fall of 2017, but it just as easily could have been in the Spring of 2017, the Fall of 2016, and so on and so forth. Indeed, my colleagues have been utilizing such rhetoric since I joined the faculty in the Fall of 2014; they are not alone. In fact, one of the reasons undergraduate public history programs have become so popular is because, according to authors Robert Weyenth and Daniel Vivian, they are “‘parent friendly’” offering history departments a way to assuage parental concerns about what their children can do with a history degree.1 Melissa Bingmann came to a similar conclusion in her essay on “Advising Undergraduates about Career Opportunities in Public History,” when she noted that it was “possible to secure employment as a public historian without earning an MA.”2 These statements are perhaps overly ambitious, however. In fact, just a few paragraphs later, Weyeneth contradicts his statement, writing that there is now an assumption that the “Master of Arts degree has replaced the Bachelor’s degree as the minimal ticket of admission into white-collar employment.”3 Moreover, Bingmann admits that a B.A. must start their “career” at an entry-level position or even volunteer as an “interpreter, administrative assistant, or in another front-line position,” before they could then, maybe, eventually, work their way up (I assume, to a position that would allow them to move out of their mom and dad’s house?).4
As you can see, this leaves me in a conundrum. Can I, in good faith, reply in the affirmative that public history training at the undergraduate level will lead to a career in the field after graduation? If not, is there a way to “come to yes,” i.e. what needs to transpire in order for B.A.s to get a decent job in the field? Finally, if jobs out of undergrad are not forthcoming, is there an ethical way to grow public history undergraduate education? These are some of the questions I want to further explore.
Can Undergraduate Public History Training Lead to a Job After Graduation?
Much has been written in the last few years about the so-called “crisis” in the public history job market. Academics and practitioners alike have publically raised their warnings, sent out their SOS’s, or called for the reframing of the issue to focus on opportunities and challenges, rather than on doom and gloom.5 Whether or not one sees the glass half-empty, or half-full, we can all agree that rapidly changing technologies, coupled with the ever-evolving public history landscape and shifting social and political trends means that accurately predicting job availability and/or growth is difficult. It’s telling, however, that the Joint AASLH-AHA-NCPH-OAH Task Force on Public History Education and Employment focused their report, “What do Public History Employers Want?” on M.A. programs and graduates, completely ignoring undergraduates.6 This does not bode well for me in my attempt to answer “Yes” to whether or not undergraduate public history training can lead to a job after graduation. Next question.
Can We Envision—and Create—a World in Which Public History B.A.s Get a Job?
In July of 2011, The New York Times reported that due to “degree inflation” in many sectors—and the social sciences and humanities were two of them, with history even being called out by name—the master’s degree was the new bachelor’s degree.7 Meanwhile, however, higher education costs continue to rise and debt continues to cripple graduates at all levels of education. Perhaps then more education provides more of a problem than a solution to this initial query. So then, what else is there? This question does not have a fast and easy answer, nor do I think I can answer it alone. Instead, I’ll posit one type of theoretical solution and look forward to the discussion both my question and my “answer” generate. Since one of the goals of this roundtable is to discuss potential “new” models of public history application, education, training, etc., I suggest (and, again, this is strictly a thought experiment at this point) a National Public History Practitioners’ Union.
Historically, unions have been “successful” in an assortment of ways across a variety of sectors. These include agitating for benefits, lobbying for increased wages, and utilizing collective bargaining to negotiate big contracts. These are all activities that could benefit a (relatively) small force of highly skilled/trained B.A.s and M.A.s (for I see no reason we couldn’t join forces) in a world that is practically void of organization and tricky to define. Perhaps it would also function much like the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), which was founded in 1933 to prevent the exploitation of entertainers; it also helps its members find work by, for example, preventing non-members from filling SAG-approved employment opportunities (an actor, for example, must belong to SAG before they could be cast in a commercial). This could provide a model for how the union would work.
Although in this current climate, “union” is almost a dirty word, it might truly create some opportunities for burgeoning public historians, and provide us with a foundation from which to discuss how to do ethical public history work from here on out, as members would be required to meet certain industry-generated and approved standards.
Can We Ethically Grow Undergraduate Public History Programs?
If all else fails, and jobs continue to elude B.A. graduates, can we continue to grow (or even maintain the current number of) undergraduate public history programs? I’ll be honest, I desperately want to be able to help not just my department, but all history departments out there. I want to see waiting lines of students eager to sign up for public history courses across the nation. And in a perfect world, promising them a good chance at finding a job with only a B.A. wouldn’t have any impact on the enrollment numbers. But, I don’t think you’ll find a rise in one without a corresponding rise in the other. How then, do we continue to grow our programs and our course offerings? Once again, I cannot provide the definitive solution (and I’m sure there isn’t just one in the first place), but I’ll suggest that in order to answer these questions, we’ll have to work on expectations on two fronts. First, we’ll have to taper our students’ expectations. Unless something drastic happens in the job market, we cannot continue to even suggest that a B.A. will be enough to get even an entry-level job. But whereas we’ll taper student expectations, I advance we blow the expectations off of potential employers through rigorous training and experience. If employers see a
B.A. with solid training in public history practices, with good experience through a variety of internships, and with tangible public history products (generated, for example, through coursework), then perhaps, over time, they’ll see the benefit in hiring a B.A. If enough do that, we might be able to turn the tide of “degree inflation” and even manage to save our country from its crushing student loan debt at the same time. Now that is a pie-in-the-sky goal worth trying for.
* This list includes, but is not limited to: presenting our program to interested students at every Open House for incoming students the University has hosted throughout the year, engaging with the larger community by coordinating and/or delivering numerous public lectures on a variety of topics, hosting the Indiana Southwest Region’s History Day Fair, earning stellar remarks on our course evaluations as a department, and participating in a number of fun activities for our students (which, btw, are barely attended).
1 Robert Weyenth and Daniel Vivian, “Charting the Course: Challenges in Public History Education, Guidance for Developing Strong Public History Programs,” The Public Historian 38, no. 3 (August 2016), 27.
2 Melissa Bingmann, “Advising Undergraduates about Career Opportunities in Public History,” AHA’s Perspectives on History (March 2009), https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives- on-history/march-2009/advising-undergraduates-about-career-opportunities-in-public-history.
3 Weyenth, “Charting the Course,” 28.
4 Bingmann, “Advising Undergraduates.”
5 See, for example: Robert Weyeneth, “A Perfect Storm?” NPCH Perspectives on the Field, accessed 18 January 2018, http://ncph.org/what-is-public-history/weyeneth-essay/; Anne Parsons, “Thoughts on the Recent Boom in Academic Public History Jobs,” History@Work: The NCPH Blog (blog), accessed 23 January 2018, http://ncph.org/history-at-work/help-wanted-thoughts-on-the-recent-boom-in-academic- public-history-jobs/; Nick Sacco, “The Future of Public History Employment in the Age of the ‘Gig Economy,’” Exploring the Past: Reading, Thinking, and Blogging about History (blog), 22 January 2018, https://pastexplore.wordpress.com/2016/05/27/the-future-of-public-history-employment-in-the-age-of-the- gig-economy/; Robert Townsend and Emily Swafford, “Conflicting Signals in the Academic Job Market in History,” AHA’s Perspectives on History (January 2017), https://www.historians.org/publications-and- directories/perspectives-on-history/january-2017/conflicting-signals-in-the-academic-job-market-for-history; and follow the Grafton/Grossman discussion Richard Anderson painstakingly documents in his essay, “Public History, Academic History, and the ‘Job Crisis,’” History@Work: The NCPH Blog (blog), 2 April 2012, http://ncph.org/history-at-work/public-history-academic-history-and-the-job-crisis/.
6 Philip Scarpino and Daniel Vivian, “What do Public History Employers Want?” Report of the Joint AASLH-AHA-NCPH-OAH Task Force on Public History Education and Employment,” accessed 17 January 2018, https://www.historians.org/about-aha-and-membership/affiliated-societies/national-council-on-public- history/public-history-employer-report-and-survey.
7 Laura Pappano, “The Master’s as the New Bachelor’s,” The New York Times, 22 July 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/education/edlife/edl-24masters-t.html.