It is vital for historians to reckon with the flaws of their profession as an institution, not only for their own sake but for the sake of the nation that supports their institution, and to reflect on the ways that they have fed and been fed by the most inhumane and dehuamizing impulses in American life today. It is true that there are forces outside the historical profession that want to destroy it, for reasons that I vigorously disageee with–for instance, for the reason that studying the past is not “useful,” with “usefulness” defined in a narrow market-based sense. In reality, there is not much that is more “useful” when it comes to educating free citizens in a liberal democracy than studying the past. Its “utility” is overwhelming. Yet it is also the case that the historical profession has not cared for this “utility” and has not been doing the job properly, and so it has sacrificed the moral high ground to resist the misguided and sometimes malicious calls to defund it.
Katherine Epstein, “Scholarship and the Future of Society,” Liberties 3:4 (Summer 2023), 19-20