March 19, 2024

American Historical Association Council 

400 A Street SE 

Washington, DC 20003 

Dear Professor Glymph, Professor Muir, President Vinson, Professor Hyde, Professor Thomas, Professor Hilliard,  Professor Frazier, Professor Hostetler, Dr O’Brassill-Kulfan, Professor Greene, Dr Greenwald, Professor Lipman,  Professor Marrero, Ms Baniewicz, Dean Zappia, Ms Kaul, Mr Weschsler, Dr Grossman, Professor Bradley, Ms  Dreizen, and Professor Ledford, 

We the undersigned historians write with respect to the recently advertised position of Executive Director of the American Historical Association. We write to emphasize to you how important and consequential it is to fill the role with someone with a profound understanding of the multiple crises that face American higher education – and within it the American historical profession – and to suggest a radically transformative vision of how to address them. Addressing these crises will require a complete reorientation of the AHA toward a singular focus on regenerating both the wider system of higher education and the research and teaching of history within that system. This approach can save the profession as a research and teaching discipline in America’s colleges and universities, and achieve our shared commitments to enhancing the power of historical thinking and research in American public life. 

Higher education, and the discipline of history, face multiple, interrelated crises that, if not aggressively and immediately addressed, will lead to the elimination of historians and of colleges and universities where they work. If we wish to continue to conduct research, teach students at every level, and serve our communities in the next decade, we must commit to protecting and building both the humanities and the wider system of higher education. The next Executive Director must be squarely focused on directing the entire organization – and the profession – toward addressing these crises, which include: 

The decimation of tenure-line employment in US colleges and universities.  

The academic job market in history has long been in decline. This is true for nearly every discipline, as figures show that nearly 75% of all faculty positions are now contingent. The shift to overwhelmingly underpaid and unsupported contingent labor is also creating a crisis in labor conditions and in the production and sharing of disciplinary knowledge. This is particularly acute in history.  The 2023 AHA Academic Jobs Report describes “academic job availability” as “insufficient” and points to “two troubling patterns”: first, the rapid collapse in jobs for premodern historians; and second, “a decrease in the number of jobs that come with the possibility of tenure.” The AHA lacks the coercive capacity to compel universities to hire more historians. But the crisis must nevertheless be at the forefront of the next Executive Director’s concerns: the AHA needs to focus its mission squarely on advocating nationally for fair and full employment for faculty members, and on helping historians in academic departments across the country make the case for expanding secure academic employment in the academy. Every one of our other shared goals – from public outreach to enhancing the teaching of history at secondary and primary school levels to training the next generation of historians working in museums, government, and other arenas – simply cannot be achieved if securely employed historians cannot educate undergraduates and graduate students in the discipline. If students’ opportunities to learn from faculty continue to be restricted through the decimation of academic hiring and the degradation of working conditions, democracy itself is at risk.  

The decimation of funding for historical research and inquiry.  

In an article for Inside Higher Ed published this past August, Asheesh Siddique laid out the contours of the current crisis surrounding the collapse of available research funding for historians and other humanities scholars, and proposed some solutions. The next AHA Executive Director must prioritize working with the entirety of the membership to develop a complement for the study of history to the “national strategy for  literary and cultural study” proposed by past Modern Language Association President Christopher Newfield. To borrow Newfield’s words, “only a small minority of us now have proper working conditions. We need them for the whole profession and not just for the privileged few.” These words are just as applicable to historians as they are to literary scholars. A discipline comprised of a tiny minority of well-resourced scholars in a select few R1 history departments who have the institution-provided means (such as sabbaticals, course releases, funds, access to databases, etc.) to conduct research and produce new historical knowledge, while the vast majority of historians lack access to  these resources and must do their scholarship in spite of their working conditions, makes a mockery of the organization’s own articulated commitments to democratizing the study of the past. 

The attacks on academic freedom by the American right and its corporate university partners. 

History teaching and scholarship, especially on racial, gender, and sexuality-based justice, has been subjected to a resurgent assault by Republican elected officials. These attacks are not new, but a reinvigoration of a long attack on the new knowledge and pedagogy of scholars of race, gender, and sexuality whose work has been enriching the field. Today, the attacks are marked by a ferocity and degree of organization and state backing not seen since the McCarthy-era attacks on academics. Moreover, they are part of a wider campaign to strip academic freedom broadly defined – governance – from those who research and teach in colleges and universities. The next Executive Director must work with the membership and allies to develop strategies to aggressively defend the freedom to teach and research history – and to govern the institutions in which they do so -- throughout American society, without political interference.  

The AHA membership will be rich with ideas and perspectives on how these three crises must be addressed. In directing the organization’s agenda toward their remediation, the next Executive Director should also commit to an open, democratic process of discussion, debate, and strategizing that both brings together the entire membership and prioritizes the voices, experiences, and perspectives of the vast majority of historians who do not, currently, have the working conditions requisite to produce the kind of historical knowledge that society  desperately needs. Nothing less than the future of the profession and the entire system of higher education is at stake.  

Thank you for considering these concerns. 

Sincerely,