Katherine Epstein teaches history at Rutgers University-Camden and she has some very good thoughts about her (and my) discipline. Here is a taste of her piece at Liberties, “Historians Killing History“:
The indifference to scholarly standards should be evident to even casual observers of the academic culture wars. The late Harvard law professor Charles Fried justified his refusal to consider the accusations of plagiarism against Claudine Gay on the merits because of who was making them: they were part of an “extreme right-wing attack on elite institutions.” In strikingly similar language, the hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman refused to consider the accusations of plagiarism against his wife on the merits because they were part of “attacks on my family.” This is not the language of standards. This is the language of the bunker.Â
Likely less evident to the casual observer is the indifference to scholarly standards that has characterized the history wars in recent years, or the way in which shared silence about standards between ostensible opponents in the history wars anticipated the same shared silence in the academic culture wars more broadly. Too many historians, of varying ideological stripes, mimic the forms of scholarship without reproducing its substance. They make trips to archives, consult the secondary literature, and cite sources in footnotes, but their research lacks rigor and integrity. It is not scholarship, it is pseudo-scholarship. The intellectual incompetence — or dishonesty — of many critics of the historical profession simply mirrors that of a great deal of the profession itself. No wonder neither wants to look in the mirror: they would find their enemy, themselves, staring back out at them.
Reframing the problem in terms of standards rather than ideology is important for three reasons. First, it provides the basis for a vital center in academia, which is needed there just as much as in politics. This center, if it is to be real and not merely a band-aid over differences, cannot be defined by a priori ideological commitments; it must be defined by reinforcing commitments to process — be it scholarly or liberal-democratic — and to human dignity. A call for “process” may not sound like an inspiring blast from a trumpet, but (as I have argued previously in these pages) process secures moral substance, to which the heart should thrill. It channels historians towards humanizing and away from dehumanizing the people they study; it encourages them to treat those who lived in the past as subjects to be understood as fully as possible, not as mere objects to be over-simplified and manipulated according to historians’ whims. Thus standards, which distinguish between more and less rigorous process, also distinguish between more and less humanistic substance. Not coincidentally, liberal democracy requires the same humanism.
Read the entire piece here.