May 25, 2012, 12:53 pm
By Eric Rauchway
“A Crisis of Competence,” which bills itself as “A Report Prepared for the Regents of the University of California by the California Association of Scholars, A Division of the National Association of Scholars,” (hereafter CAS, for short) has garnered a great deal of attention. It was, apparently, the basis for Rick Santorum’s laughably false claims that California’s universities do not teach US history – though to be fair to the report, Santorum evidently misunderstood what was in it. It was the subject of an April 1 news story (no, not an April Fool’s) in the Los Angeles Times. And it was the basis for a May 20 op-ed in the LA Times. To be fair to the LA Times, its own editorial, on April 7, was skeptical of the report, describing it as “a mélange of anecdotes.”
This is correct: the paper’s methodology is highly suspect, depending as it does on self-selected students’ complaints that the UC tilts leftward. One could with the same level of credibility cite the complaints of the self-selected students sitting in tents as evidence that the UC tilts rightward.
But the paper does worse than depend on anecdotes. At least in the case of history, it relies on tendentious readings of course titles and descriptions to dismiss a serious scholarly discipline.
The section on “History at the University of California” begins on page 43. Beginning by asking why “graduates of prestigious campuses … are so ignorant of the history of their country, and thus so ill prepared for citizenship in their society,” it continues:
A clue as to why this is happening emerges when we look at the courses in U.S. history that are offered on UC campuses. For example, at UC San Diego in the fall of 2010 nine upper division courses in American History were offered, but one looks in vain for any course that provides a connected view of the sweep of American history, and of how it came to develop so rapidly from an insignificant cluster of colonies to the nation which is economically, militarily, and culturally the most powerful and influential in the world.
Hang on, let’s stop there: do you think you just read that UCSD doesn’t offer “any course that provides a connected view of the sweep of American history”? Because you didn’t – though a hasty reader – perhaps Senator Santorum – might think he did. The complaint here is that in one particular quarter, such a course was not laid on. For after all, UCSD offers History 2ABC, “A year-long lower-division course that will provide students with a background in United States history from colonial times to the present, concentrating on social, economic, and political developments.”
So this is how the indictment of UC history starts – with the strangely inconsequential complaint that in the benighted fall quarter of 2010, one campus of the UC did not happen to be offering its US survey course.
Let’s continue:
The titles of the nine courses seem to go in a very different direction.
Wait, we have to stop again. “The titles” of the nine courses? We’re in Naomi Schaefer Riley territory, here dismissing an entire discipline by snarking at the titles of the courses. Which is to say, the CAS discussion of history is at a level that could get you fired as a blogger.
But let’s continue.
No wait, let’s not. Let’s look at that sentence again:
.The titles of the nine courses seem to go in a very different direction
They “seem” to? I know not “seems”. If you’re going to condemn an entire discipline, let’s talk about what is.
Let’s try again.
For example, History 146 has the title “Race, Riots, and Violence in the U.S.”; 139 is “African American History in the 20th century”; 156 is “American Women/American Womanhood”; 180 is “Immigration and Ethnicity in American Society”; 154 is “Western Environmental History.” When we take these offerings together, a certain negativity is hard to miss; they dwell on the nation’s faults and failures, on victimology and oppression.
They do? The first one does, for sure. Do the others? Is it the contention of the CAS that African American History in the 20th century necessarily “dwell[s] on the nation’s faults and failures, on victimology and oppression”? One might have thought that the century that saw the nation move from Jim Crow to voting rights would be the least beset by “negativity” in the long history of African Americans. Likewise “American Women/American Womanhood” – the rise of woman suffrage, women’s access to higher education, and at least the principle of equal pay for equal work. And “Immigration and Ethnicity” – again, is this dwelling on the nation’s faults and failures? Oscar Handlin would be spinning in his grave. There was a time when it was a point of pride to describe the US as a nation of immigrants.
The paper then delves a little deeper into the issue, looking at the one-sentence course descriptions. The paper notes that the Africcan American history course
describes the transformation of African America by “imperialism, migration, urbanization, desegregation, and deindustrialization.”
This sounds about right to me. I wonder how many summaries of twentieth-century African American history wouldn’t include these as major topics? In fact, the report doesn’t offer any objection to this description, it simply cites it as if by its very self it represents “the nation’s faults and failures.”
Then there’s the list of topics for American Women/American Womanhood:
a dominant ideology of womanhood…witchcraft, evangelicalism, cult of domesticity, sexuality, rise of industrial capitalism
Again, no comment in the paper, just listing. Is it really the CAS’s contention that evangelicalism, sexuality, and industrial capitalism are all among “the nation’s faults and failures”?
continued...