History Department

To the Editors of the Crimson:

The account of the tribulations of the Department of History at Harvard University which appeared in The Harvard Crimson and The Boston Globe seems to involve an assumption which may be worth some re-thinking. Be assured that I write this apologia for the elders among the Americanists in the Department out of no abiding affection for Harvard. Five years there as a graduate student in history in the 1930s left me with a deep distaste for that university as an institution, a distaste not wholly inconvenient since it enables me without scruple to toss the meeching appeals for further funding that I receive from Harvard's development office into the waste basket.

Nevertheless there is much to be said for the skittishness of Harvard's history elders about loading the department with tenured people professing current, up-to-date, up-to-the-minute subjects. Surely, above all others, history departments have vocational cause to hesitate to overstock themselves with professors on tenure providing instruction in subjects, chic and modish today, but of slender interest tomorrow, who, given the rules of tenure, alas! cannot be remaindered at half price. Historians require that the subject of a course pass the test of time, and if they do not, they should. There is something perhaps a bit off-putting, but not actually wrong, about a department which can plausibly be alleged to have said, "We're against the twentieth century."

I do recollect that the most impressive faculty member teaching outside the American area in the 1930s was C.H. McIlwain. His English Constitutional History never got past Edward I and his History of Political Theory from Plato to Rousseau stopped dead at Thomas Hobbes. It was from him that I learned what a scholar should be and what he should concern himself with. At the same time a class on the Soviet Union taught as the McIlwain history of political theory was, from the Department of Government, drew enormous crowds and enjoyed a marvellous reputation. I took McIlwain's course for credit, not the course on the Soviet Union, taught by Walsh and Sweeezy. I have a strong sense that the content of that latter course, if offered today, would look like a parody of scholarship and be just a laugher. I have an equally strong hunch that what McIlwain had to say in the 1930s would still be well worth listening to in the 1980s.

I do not in any sense believe that Professors Bailyn, Fleming and Handlin are infallible. I have known them much too long to believe such a thing. Nevertheless, their reservations about loading a department with specialists in flowers that bloom in the spring and fade in the summer seem to me to do them credit. The back offices of history departments which did not resist pressure to be up-to-date are now full of such worthless rubbish, which by law they must keep until death do them part. J.H. Hexter   Professor of History   Director Center for the History of Freedom   Washington Univeristy in St. Louis