Last week Jeffrey Young reported in The Chronicle that conference attendance is down due to cutbacks on travel funds by hard-pressed colleges and universities. Rosemary Feal is quoted as saying that the MLA last December saw a 6-percent decline in attendance, and I am sure that is not the worst case. The cuts are supposed to affect senior scholars disproportionately, since some institutions are protecting younger faculty, and there is concern that fewer graybeards will show up. I can’t be sure if that is true, but I attended the Organization of American Historians’ annual meeting in Seattle last week, and it seemed to me that my doddering age group was well represented. Rick Shenkman reported for the History News Network that 1,800 registered for the OAH meeting. This was, I think, just a bit lower than expected, but the event took place in the cavernous Washington State Convention Center, and it seemed smaller than usual. Shenkman reports that the book exhibit, while fairly well attended, did not sell many books and that is what I was told by publishers’ reps. The paper sessions I went to were lively, and some reported on new knowledge, but they seemed sparsely attended, since the Convention Center rooms were disproportionately large.
But I am a dedicated academic conventiongoer, I love Seattle, and I had a thoroughly good time. One of the highlights of the trip for me was the chance to have dinner with two of my favorite former students. One, whom I taught at the University of Chicago Law School, has now left the practice of law to become the person in charge of King County’s programs for the homeless. The other, a former Woodrow Wilson School undergraduate, is now a local judge in Seattle, and married to a man who works with refugees for a social agency. These are my kinds of students, and it gave me enormous pleasure to see what they are doing with their wonderful mix of talent and social dedication. It’s great to be a teacher, isn’t it?
It is gratifying to see how much good work is done by younger scholars these days, and to have a sense of how new scholarly networks are developing. I was whisked away the first evening to watch the NCAA in a brew pub with a wonderful group of young urban historians whom (with one exception) I had never met before. Great fun. I have also just finished judging a competition for the best book on U.S. history published in 2008 — 233 submissions, many of them superb. The American history profession, at any rate, is alive and well.
