At the business meeting of its recent annual convention, the American Historical Association went on record opposing torture. I’m sure that made the assembled scholars feel much better, and no doubt reassured concerned parents who wonder from time to time exactly what does go on in those lecture halls.
The resolution was introduced by Joyce Appleby, professor emerita of history at UCLA, last heard from here organizaing a historian’s petition against the then impending war in Iraq, which she argued (as quoted here) “would violate every principle this country has stood for.”
The historians also stood up to the forces of oppression and bravely passed a resolution defending academic freedom, which is under siege from …, well, David Horowitz and his proposed academic bill of rights.
A spirited debate ensued when some members, led by David T. Beito, an associate professor of history at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, proposed a substitute amendment that explicitly linked opposition to academic bills of rights with an equal opposition to campus speech codes. Eventually, that amendment was rejected and the original resolution passed intact.
It’s reassuring to know that historians are so assiduously protecting our present, but I wonder who’s watching the past.
In fairness to the AHA, Inside Higher Ed carries a more serious and troubling story. Specifically, Marc Stein presented research suggesting that political appointees at the National Endowment for the Humanities were undermining peer review by selectively making executive decisions to reject gay-themed research.
This may or may not be a problem. Reluctant as most academics are to admit it, appointees can legitimitely use their power to shape scholarly trends. That’s why we have appointees. So, for instance if gay-themed research disproportionately came from execrable intellectual movements like Critical Legal Studies or postmodernism, I would have no objection to appointees rejecting them. However Stein’s own proposal appears to have been theoretically and methodologically mainstream legal history, and given its strong peer review ought to have been funded.
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/01/09/neh
Torture would be listening to the nattering relics blather on about their ideology which has been discredited.
That’s how I feel and that’s the most important requirement, isn’t it?
A agree with everything anonymous says above. Blackballing research on gay topics is/would be as indefensible as blackballing all research that doesn’t mention the holy trinity of race/class/gender, if that ever happened.
Still, I don’t think that recognizing the power, or even persuasiveness, of Stein’s charges has anything to do with “fairness toward the AHA,” simply because his charges were presented in a paper at its convention.
john,
i’m sorry for implying that you were discounting everything that occurred at AHA just because of some silly referenda (in general I’m no fan of torture but there’s nothing the AHA can do about it, likewise I hate the Horowitz agenda but would like to see responsible self-government, such as rejecting speech codes and find the decoupling of the two issues arrogant). I’ve been to enough academic conferences to know that the session papers have almost nothing to do with the big agenda. i should have phrased my comment as “speaking of the AHA …” rather than “in fairness to …”
anon: No problem. I didn’t really think you were defending the AHA’s political resolutions. As for the academic bill of rights, I’m sympathetic to concerns about outside political oversight and supervision, but most of Horowitz’s reject not only his proposed solution (or rather, their fear of what his solution would entail) but also his statement of the problem. In other words, objections to outside policing would be more persuasive if the objectors recognized that the extreme political imbalance might represent a problem that needs, first, recognizing and second, addressing.