Shared Authority and the Ethical Challenge.
When the National Council on public history was founded in 1980 the issue of ethics was seen by the larger historical profession as more salient for public historians than for the traditional academic researcher. To some extent this reflected the limited ethical training of traditional historians and a certain naive lack of self-awareness within the broader profession. The original NCPH code of ethics was born out of a defensive need to establish public history as legitimate and responsible application of scholarship. It envisioned a situation in which most public historians would be working either in institutional settings or as independent consultants working for established institutions. Ethics were largely focused on protecting the individual historian’s responsibility to faithfully present to those institutions the facts she/he discovered. The principle ethical interaction that was feared was that between the historian and their employer.
The concept of “shared authority” which in the 1990s morphed from oral history into a defining concept of public practice significantly complicated the career paths and ethical concerns of public historians.
Today the ideal of working with people and communities in a shared process of history making is a concept that is wholly integrated into the way university programs train the rising generation of public historians. Yet the ideal of a historian entering into an open-end process of history making with a community does not in most cases relate to the institutional model of public history employment in which public history professors spend much of their time teaching standard survey classes, museum collection managers are back in the stacks working away at PastPerfect, and archivists struggle to organize or scan their records. In these all too common settings shared authority is too often an unrealized and unrealistic ideal.
It can also be a dangerous ideal in an era of “alternative facts, “fake news,” and the current administration’s war on science. Sharing authority can compromise the hard won right public history professionals have earned to opine on what is fact and what is not. The deep ethical challenges wrought by shared authority revolve around with whom do you share authority and to what extent are non- professionals allowed to influence the creative process.
Older concepts of professional ethics are of limited value in making such decisions, rather it will be either the public historian’s institution that will decide or more frequently it will be the historian’s personal values that will be brought to bear. True ethical challenges arise when we must choose between conflicting “good” outcomes, often choosing who will have a “good” outcome and for whom it will be bad. Dealing with these dilemmas is never easy because there is no single right course of action. Our best guide is experience, often won by the best teacher: the bitter mistakes of our past, and by consulting with the community of our fellow public historians.