Ripple effects: The US government shut down and public history training
15 October 2013 – Will Walker
Image: Flickr user Bryan Mills.
I was editing a student’s master’s thesis and came across a note stating that she could not access two key images because they were only available on the Websites of the United States Geological Survey and the United States Department of Agriculture. I was discussing another student’s research paper and tried to access a part of the Library of Congress’s Website that was unavailable. In conducting my own research, I tried to consult census.gov and got this message: “Due to the lapse in government funding, census.gov sites, services, and all online survey collection requests will be unavailable until further notice.” Minor annoyances, perhaps, but the cumulative effect of each dead end is to degrade the learning environment and restrict productive work for both students and faculty.
One of my colleagues and our first-year graduate students are preparing for a field trip to Washington, DC. The itinerary includes visits to the Smithsonian, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and National Mall. Can you imagine taking a group of museum studies graduate students to Washington and not getting to see any of these things?
Most troubling, however, is the potential damage the shut down has done to student morale and their optimism about the future of public history. Seeing the National Park Service face blatantly unfair attacks from lawmakers and seeing government workers furloughed from their jobs is bound to influence students’ perceptions of the career path they have chosen for themselves. Although many seem galvanized to fight to defend the Park Service, Smithsonian, and other government agencies that do historical work, surely some are quietly reconsidering their choice of public history as a field.
I’m sure many of this blog’s readers are experiencing similar frustrations from House Republicans’ decision to shut down the government. Partly as an opportunity to vent and partly as a means of documenting public historians’ perspectives on this moment, we invite you to share your stories in the comments. For public history faculty, what consequences of the shut down have you seen in teaching or research? For public historians directly affected by the shut down, what words of encouragement can you offer to students who may be discouraged by Congress’s actions?
~ Will Walker is assistant professor of history at the Cooperstown Graduate Program (State University of New York-Oneonta).
I live and work in Salem, MA, home of the nation’ first National Historical Park. Of course, this is October, which is Salem’s peak tourist month. Something like 75% of the city’s annual visitation happens in this single month (I may not be remembering that figure with exact accuracy, but it’s a lot). And one of the city’s central sites, and one of only a few which is noncommercial, free, and responsible to a discipline, is closed. The knock-on effects include: (a) local nonprofits and businesses have been sending volunteers to staff a tent where tourists can get information – a service the NPS normally performs when their daily visitors’ center is open. It’s great to see the volunteer spirit, but other organizations donating so much time only cannibalizes their staff energy at a busy time (b) the public, who are drawn here for spooky ghost tours and witch stories, now have very few places to weave the entertainment in with things of more substance – they can’t get a look at the other stories of Salem’s past. No Customs House tour, no African-American heritage tour, no tall ship Friendship, etc. (c) This would normally be the biggest month for those NPS attractions, as well, so their annual attendance figures will be hurt. (d) These sites need maintenance and staffing. A tall ship and old buildings with shadowy yards are an attractive nuisance when the streets are full of thousands of excited and/or drunk Halloween partyers. Apart from the regular maintenance old structures need, they just need someone to keep an eye on things, repair the broken windowpanes, pick up the empty bottles and plastic cups, and prevent daredevils from climbing rigging. The entire thing is a shame.
Thanks for kicking off this topic, Will. I am a Ph.D. candidate in Public History at Middle Tennessee State University. I am currently undertaking a special resource study with the National Park Service at Catoctin Mountain Park for my doctoral residency…or trying to at least. I don’t like complaining about my particular situation, because my colleagues and friends are entering week three without a paycheck, but this situation has probably set me back a month. My residency was already hard enough to pull together because of sequestration, but the shutdown has severely limited what I can do. I feel like I’m being benched on the sideline watching the clock run down when all I want to do is get in the game and make plays. I have been keeping my project moving by working in local archives and I found a great local agricultural history collection that is an absolute gem. In order to make plays, though, I need to get into the park archives, National Archives, and other federal repositories. The shutdown also means that I am cut off from my federal contacts and residency mentor. Once the government reopens again, it will take some time for everyone to get back to normal and get momentum rolling again. All the while, I’m missing out on my own professional development, which was one of the main reasons to do this residency in the first place.
Thanks to those who have already commented here. Below are some comments I received on Twitter:
Eric Nystrom @HistoryNystrom @willcooperstown @ncph Am teaching a course on National Parks; students’ paper sources (NPS websites) now offline
Anne Whisnant @amwhisnant .@willcooperstown My #publichistory students are doing project on Unbuilt Blue Ridge Parkway; cannot get sources from #nationalparkservice
Andrea Burns @HistoryAndrea @willcooperstown @ncph am looking forward to this post. We have grad student interns with the NPS and they aren’t allowed to do their jobs.
It can be tough to feel like we can complain about these effects of the shutdown when people are unable to feed their families, but it is important to keep a record of all of the impacts of a closed government. Thanks for opening this conversation!
That said, on the day the shutdown occurred, I was set to review HABS & HAER with my graduate historic preservation class. The Library of Congress sites were shutdown and I had to cancel class. The students were to do an assignment based on these databases, but thankfully the LoC sites are mostly back up. I only had to move a due date. It upsets the schedule a bit, but it isn’t a big deal in the grand scheme of things.
Thank you for this very important post, as a Public Historian here in Washington everything is in stereo. However, the largest cries that I am hearing is from my graduate student colleagues and young professionals. While the dissappointment over a depleted job market and sequestration might have put a damper on spirits, this shutdown I think marks a new wave of fear about jobs in Public History. This is not just about the lack of jobs but the true security of the jobs that are still out there in the federal government. What used to feel like hoops to jump through now feels like a permanentely locked door. It is and should be alarming that the war against humanities based institutions within the federal government has now stepped up to another level.
Ironically, I was lecturing on the national parks the day the shutdown began. And our guest speaker two days later, a park ranger, had to cancel. So it made quite a statement. She was able to re-schedule last week and talked about the experience. She was positive, but not sure she was selling them on job security. In another class, focused almost entirely on the National Register, we could not access any web resources. It was certainly frustrating and awkward. I guess it was a “teachable moment,” but I guess I’ll have to see come exam time what this did to student morale.
For political reasons the Administration’s goal was to make the partial shutdown as painful as possible to a many people as possible.