Historians Announce National Effort to Define Meaning of Degrees in the Field

February 13, 2012, 1:02 pm

The American Historical Association has announced that it will begin nationwide discussions, involving faculty members at more than 60 colleges, to devise a common, specific framework of expectations for what a history degree should signify about what its recipients know and can do. The three-year effort—which will seek input from employers, alumni, students, and others—is part of the Lumina Foundation for Education’s “Tuning” project, which has been facilitating faculty-led conversations about the meaning of degrees in various fields across several states since 2009. The history association’s announcement comes at a time when historians are facing new pressures to document their programs’ value and demonstrate how they contribute to civic life and the public good.

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petitemacaw

Faculty-led discussions? Why limit the participants to faculty? Why not include history PhDs who have been successful outside of the academy? Unless the scope is broadened, this study will be a total waste of time.
11167997

To “petitemacaw”: if you follow the way Tuning has proceeded in Europe and Latin America, you will see that alumni focus groups are always included. Whether AHA is doing that, I don’t know.
pchoffer

Folks: went to the Lumina website and found almost no information on it or the sources of its funds or how it makes its decisions about funding. Am I wrong to suspect an agenda? Best, Peter
petitemacaw

The question is: Who will select the alumni? The faculty?
bigtwin

Let’s hope we get some real facts and quantitative figures out of this - not some whitewash hype meant to boost enrolment.

I’ve found that history depts like to appropriate the success of a few select grads as justification to do a degree – while ignoring the majority of others who end up doing work totall unrelated to their field of study.
nyhist

As a historian, I always tell my students that precisely what they study historically is not crucial. It’s the method and the skills of historical study and analysis that matter. What do historians do? they read sources (of any sort), summarize and analyze them, and write reports. Those skills transfer to many fields, as my former students have repeatedly told me (especially lawyers and business people). So as far as I’m concerned there is no “work unrelated to their field of study.” The historical field is irrelevant.
missoularedhead

Also, the inclusion of non-tenure track folks (you know, us adjuncts) would be a good thing, as well.
bigtwin

Yeah, well that sounds like what I heard during my 12 years of studying history. However, It’s not what I , or most of my peers, experienced on the job market after graduation. Frankly, professors have no idea what most grads do and go through once they leave school. The odd anechdote doesn’t mean much, somthing anyone with “critical skills” should know.
tappat

As long as people who call themselves historians insist upon being allergic to the artificiality of historiography, each person will continue to feel passionately that his or her usual (or, alas, all too often only) historiography is natural and so right and reasonable, and all others are variously perverse, crazy, or perhaps even criminal.
squacky

What might that agenda be? (That’s a genuine question. Please don’t take it as a challenge to your conjecture. I’m really curious what you’re thinking here…)
wademg

It should be interesting, not to mention revealing, which 60 institutions will make the AHA’s grade. I do hope that we will also get a detailed rationale for the selections. Certainly, one factor should be institutions not nearly so late to the business of learning what history offers majors as the AHA.