The distortions of history by professors promoting a progressive viewpoint are so bad that even students are beginning to complain.
American History courses seem to be the biggest target of this treatment. Minding the Campus contributor KC Johnson underscores why this transformation matters.
Why should anyone outside the academy care about this transformation? Beyond the obvious–that the colleges and universities of any nation should provide instruction from specialists in that nation’s past governmental actions–let me offer three reasons.
The first involves lower-level history instruction, an area in which there’s much greater public interest (and involvement) than regarding the college curriculum…
.. state standards have, reasonably, sought to ensure that students have a basic familiarity with such “traditional” topics as the Presidents, the Constitution, important military conflicts in U.S. history, and key pieces of legislation and public policy developments. The assumption of state education boards, of course, is that colleges and universities will adequately train future teachers to teach such subjects. Yet given the staffing trend within history departments nationwide, there’s no longer any reason to believe this is so.
In fact, we’re increasingly likely to see situations in which social studies teachers are required to teach topics (the United States in World War I? the Constitutional Convention?) that as college students they never encountered–or even could encounter–through the race/class/gender prism that dominates the contemporary academy….
Promotion of a more open intellectual environment on campus provides a second reason for the importance of ensuring a more pedagogically diverse approach to the American past. ..[As] the University of Iowa History Department debacle demonstrated–all other things being equal, a department whose U.S. historians are more pedagogically diverse is likely to be more ideologically diverse as well. In our era of campus groupthink, we should do everything possible to encourage a greater range of voices among the professoriate.
A final rationale is transparency…
If, in fact, there’s nothing to be ashamed of in purging “traditional” approaches to the American past, why don’t we see departments and colleges boasting of the fact? Departmental websites could explain about how the study of U.S. history must occur through the prism of race, class, and gender; or how the university eschews such old-fashioned topics as political, diplomatic, or military history. But with rare exceptions (UCLA seems to be one) colleges have followed the opposite approach, doing everything they can to obscure just how one-sided their approach to U.S. history has become. For those parents, students, or alumni who don’t have the time to drill down and comprehensively examine curriculum (as the NAS recently did for Texas schools), the assumption remains that all elements of the American past continue to be taught.
Why the Skewing of U.S. History Matters - Short Takes (Minding the Campus)