You're getting a HISTORY degree? Seriously? Get a PhD AND something else

[RedPill]

Thought provoking essay from the Chronicle about popularizing a dual degree within history. I like this idea, although I'm not a history student, I love history. It makes me sad that history is fading from relevancy in society and in the academy.

 

It seems like an excellent idea for anyone wanting to go into history. For example, the essay notes of a history PhD student who is also getting a masters in public health. In my field(higher ed and higher ed policy), I can easily see how utilizing history would help address some of the questions in our field.

 

Thoughts?

 

http://chronicle.com/article/article-content/144245/?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=pulsenews

[BeakerBreaker]

"Dual-degree programs show other realms of the academy—and ultimately, the broader public—the importance and usefulness of history."

 

By the same token, dual-degree programs call into question the value of history as a pursuit of its own by deviating from the field.  It is clear in the article that the two examples that are used have their careers carried by their training outside of history.

 

Of course, I am not a history student, but it doesn't seem to be a good way to address any of the real problems by telling people to take jobs elsewhere using alternative training.

[RedPill]

"Dual-degree programs show other realms of the academy—and ultimately, the broader public—the importance and usefulness of history."

 

By the same token, dual-degree programs call into question the value of history as a pursuit of its own by deviating from the field.  It is clear in the article that the two examples that are used have their careers carried by their training outside of history.

 

Of course, I am not a history student, but it doesn't seem to be a good way to address any of the real problems by telling people to take jobs elsewhere using alternative training.

 

If it was my university, alma mater, community, state, nation - whatever - I would MUCH rather prefer to see history evolve rather than to see it fade with the ages.

 

No idea can be called a bad idea unless one can come up with an alternative. 

Edited January 29, 2014 by RedPill

[hdunlop]

I'm hoping for a PHD-JD and glad to see someone suggest it's a good idea. The feedback I got from POIs I visited with this fall was decidedly mixed -- some thought it was wise for my career prospects; others thought it suggested a lack of academic committment to history; a few thought both.

[bmarcus]

Ironically, one of the top business school professors in the world has a PhD in History. He has been applying the methodology used in History to business strategy with enlightening results.

 

http://www.ie.edu/school-international-relations/faculty/detail.php?id_academic=20

[C&C]

Having more degrees will always make you more marketable and well-rounded. (Not to mention that knowledge should be a life-long pursuit.) The parallels that can be drawn between fields to enrich studies of both is the strongest argument that this article has.  

 

However, I vehemently reject the statement that "history is fading from relevancy in society"--even if members of the AHA allegedly said that. It's not true and will never be true. If I thought my field was irrelevant I wouldn't have changed my major, moved across the country, wrote a thesis, and then applied to graduate school in that same field. 

 

Getting a Ph.D is incredibly challenging, and not for everyone. So what? That's the nature of the degree and students know that going into the program.

[HistThrift]

I agree that the field is in no particular danger of dying out, but I also think we'll see the nature of the field change dramatically over the next several decades.  As long as state educational curricula are in place history will be taught, and we will need history PhDs to teach our school teachers.  But I do think we're seeing a transition to online classes and the general commercialization of academia.  I'm not going to play up any doom-and-gloom narratives here, but I do think we all need to be keeping an eye on the way education is changing.  (With that being said, I think most everyone here already does this and nothing I've argued here is exactly "news".)

[tenguru]

I would be interested in a dual degree in Hist and Folklore. Come on, Berkeley!

[czesc]

I got a JD before starting my PhD. Let's get a few things straight:

 

1. I may have some more options on the academic job market, but I won't be as comprehensively employable as people might think. Going back to a legal career could be tough after demonstrating that I wanted to go off and do something most lawyers see as irrelevant and unrelated (academic history). Even more sympathetic lawyers might assume I wouldn't be committed to a legal career and would jump for a professorship if given the chance. Other practical/law related careers might also be barred because of the perceived "fluffiness" of a graduate degree in history and because of my seeming lack of dedication to a single field. And even on the history or law teaching job markets, the perception that I'm not fully on board with a given discipline could hurt. There are going to be similar structural problems for anyone starting a PhD in history and trying to combine it with knowledge from another graduate degree or profession. 

 

2. That said, academic historians who see people combining history degrees with knowledge of other fields are living in the past, and not in the way historians should be. Enrollments in history courses are dropping right now, and their own budgets, positions, and salaries are threatened if they can't figure out how to make history courses more appealing to kids who think the only jobs are going with those who have degrees in engineering, business, and computer science. Some of the most popular undergraduate courses in my department (or in related departments) have to do with legal history or the history of science. Giving kids who know they're going to have to go down another career path and/or have interests they want to combine with history the chance to learn about them from someone who's more of an expert than a "pure" historian who's dilletantishly dabbled in a complex subject like, say, physics only strengthens the discipline, it doesn't hurt it.

 

3. I don't think the nature of the discipline suffers because of any of this. I mean, there's really no such thing as "pure history" that couldn't conceivably involve another discipline. History is always about the past of some other thing, about which it can't possibly hurt to have some expertise, and even the study of historiography has traces of philosophy and other disciplines in it. 

 

As for online courses? It's really a separate problem altogether from interdisciplinarity, but what's so hilarious about the hoopla they caused recently (until it was proven that they couldn't retain enrollments and the enthusiasm died down) is that -- for all the yelps about history's increasing irrelevance -- a little history would have shown that the same hype developed around radio and television courses at different periods over the course of the 20th century. Those didn't exactly undermine the academy, and there are good reasons to believe that MOOCs and other online course formats won't, either. 

Edited January 30, 2014 by czesc

[New England Nat]

I'll put in that in history of science and history of medicine the people who hold history PhDs and science degrees often produce different work than historians of science trained as historians of science.  Not always worse, but not always better either.  It carries a taint of an age when scientists when they became older and less productive in the lab would go off to write about the history of their field.  Disagreements over the taint of amateurism is one reason there are two history of medicine societies, one for PhD historians and one for MD historians.  The MD/PhDs usually align themselves with the PhD historians, but there is always a question of what point of view you take. 

[Riotbeard]

I'll put in that in history of science and history of medicine the people who hold history PhDs and science degrees often produce different work than historians of science trained as historians of science.  Not always worse, but not always better either.  It carries a taint of an age when scientists when they became older and less productive in the lab would go off to write about the history of their field.  Disagreements over the taint of amateurism is one reason there are two history of medicine societies, one for PhD historians and one for MD historians.  The MD/PhDs usually align themselves with the PhD historians, but there is always a question of what point of view you take. 

 

Although AAHM is a big tent organization, but yes there is some division.  There those like myself, who are scientifically challenged history of med people, and there are the MD and MD/PhD's who are much more influenced by their knowledge of disease in more pragmatic, life-and-death ways compared to discursively oriented work like my dissertation.  I would say there is room for all, but that having a professional/dual degree says something about you on the job market that has potential to help or hurt you depending on the hiring committee.

[CommPhD20]

History, in my opinion, is one of the most important disciplines in the academy. It is going to be difficult to find another discipline who doesn't build on the comprehensive work done by historians that nobody else would do. How often are extremely compelling arguments made that really catch on...only to be proved utterly ridiculous by the first person with an understanding of the historical context of the claims made?

 

I'm in a discipline that is very much dependent on history, but we can't do history. Not most of us. Communication is very much a historical process and one that is influenced by many historical developments. There are just a few communications researchers that dedicate themselves to substantive work on history like a historian does.

 

I wonder if the trouble in convincing people of the relevancy of history is the often indirect benefits of having history done well. The products of well-studied history benefit all kinds of disciplines, but those benefits aren't apparent in the end-product of my research. It just looks like I'm clever. 

[czesc]

JLRC, I think this is one of the most important reasons why joint-degree people help the field. They make it possible to demonstrate, in the span of a single career, how historical work can be put to use to benefit professions people often consider more "practical" -- well, if they write for trade journals and otherwise stay active in their other field, at least.

 

They're also probably importing way more "pure" historical scholarship into their fields than people interested in history in those fields would. Many legal historians, for example, either try to reinvent the wheel in terms of their historical claims or only cite big name books or articles by really well-known history scholars (i.e. those you might hear about whether or not you had ever set foot in a history department).

 

Of course that still doesn't necessarily solve the problem of how to tell people what you're doing for the world when you're working on a historical text that could be used for a multitude of purposes. Maybe it would help to just pick and choose one possibility. I had a biochemist friend whose work was esoteric but could have had endless applications. She was frustrated that her family couldn't understand what she was doing, but one day just started telling them she was doing research that could lead to the cure of cancer, and they've deeply respected her work ever since.

[Nikos Evangelos]

If the study of history is really fading from relevance, then that's a problem in the society and its culture, and not in the study of history per se. Or of the other humanities and social sciences being declared irrelevant under the neoliberal regime of market value ueber alles.

That being said, who wouldn't want another degree?