No Respect

History now has the dubious distinction of being among the most poorly paid disciplines in academe, writes Stan Katz, director of the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School, on The Chronicle Review’s new blog, Brainstorm.

He points to an article in the latest issue of the American Historical Association’s monthly newsletter, Perspectives, by Robert B. Townsend, who observed that the historians are paid far less on average than academics in all other disciplines. Naturally the gap is greatest at the entry-level ranks, “where history salaries were 14.2 percent below the average,” Townsend wrote.

So what does Katz make of all of this? He opines that, for all intents and purposes, university administrators consider history a part of the humanities, as “historians are being paid at levels comparable to those of the other humanities disciplines.” As further evidence, he notes that “salaries in the social sciences are on average 7.5 percent higher than in history.”

Unfortunately, that makes historians second-class citizens in academe, as “universities are systematically discriminating against the humanities in setting compensation,” Katz concludes.