One of the many historical projects I am working on is a report to the Teagle Foundation (one of the few genuinely interested in undergraduate education) on the role of the History major in undergraduate liberal education. I co-chair (with Jim Grossman of the Newberry Library) a task force sponsored by the National History Center (an affiliate of the AHA) to think through this problem through a series of meetings and a survey of a sample of the range of national History departments. At a time when many of us are concerned about the effectiveness of liberal education in an atmosphere of pre-professionalism and school-to-work pressure, this seems like an urgent task. And it is in any case a problem that has long fascinated me as a person primarily concerned with undergraduate education.

Yesterday morning at the AHA we had an excellent panel sponsored by the NHC and chaired by Jim Grossman. He was joined by my old friend and former Princeton colleague, Bob Connor, now the Teagle president and the leader of its pioneering concerns for undergraduate education. The other panelists were task force members: Carol Geary Schneider, the president of the AAC&U (herself a PhD historian), Tom Bender of the NYU History Department, and Ray Solomon, the dean of the Rutgers-Camden Law School (and one of my former History PhD students). Each gave his/her take on the role of history, and we were joined by a nice audience (perhaps thirty individuals) representing an incredibly diverse range of educational (and other) institutions.

One of the issues the task force has been struggling with is whether/how to justify the choice of a History major. In 2008 can we recommend that History is obviously a liberal art, and that all that matters is for a student to study one of the liberal arts? I confess that, deep down, I believe that, but it is not enough of an answer. It should matter which field a student selects, and it undoubtedly does. The task force feeling is that History in fact does a remarkably good job, better than most fields, of meeting the goals of liberal education (we have adopted the AAC&U definition), a case Tom Bender made quite persuasively. But Bob Connor is pushing us to create a notion of the sorts of data we would need actually to assess the effectiveness of History, and this is no small challenge. We are, as Carol Schneider argued, not talking about acquiring a body of discrete knowledge, but rather that set of capacities that define liberal knowledge.

Jim and I will have to redraft the task force report we sketched about six months ago, reacting what we have learned since, and incorporating the survey date we are currently analyzing. But what came clearest to me yesterday morning at the AHA session was that we have to work harder to reflect the diversity of History education. There were audience members from community colleges, liberal arts colleges, small general universities and so forth – I know intellectually that most people do not teach at places like Princeton, but it was moving to be in contact with so many thoughtful and committed historians whose challenges are quite different (and I think more considerable) than mine. Yet another virtue of attending the annual meeting of the AHA.

Now off to a conference on American Studies in the Middle East – in Beirut!