Sherman Criner, "Duke is Abandoning American History: Broad Historical Instruction Has Given Way to Boutique Narratives"

link

   I assume here that Criner is right about the courses and orientation of Duke History, but I didn't check out all his claims.

   My point: what he tells us about the facts on the ground at Duke History is consistent with what I know about the rest of academia, and the conclusions he draws are, IMO, right on target.

   Definitely read his short, excellent piece, sez me.

   These graphs capture his most important conclusions:

What does all of this mean for incoming Duke students interested in American history? Most obviously, it means their options are severely limited. Unless one’s interests align closely with themes of race, gender, identity, or popular culture, the department offers little in the way of intellectual variety. And even the handful of broader courses available, such as “Statecraft and Strategy,” are taught not by Duke history faculty but by professors housed in the Sanford School of Public Policy. In short, the very faculty responsible for training the next generation of historians are absent from the courses that might cultivate a deeper, more comprehensive understanding of the American past.
For undergraduates such as myself, who are deeply interested in American history but not solely through the prisms of slavery or identity politics, the options are startlingly dry. If you, like me, are interested in American legal or political history from the Founding to the end of Reconstruction, tough luck. But, hey, at least you can learn about gardening. A discipline that once sought to give students a panoramic view of the past, from the Federalist Papers to the Fire-Eaters, now seems content to orbit the same trite themes: identity, resistance, and marginalization. Complex historical figures are flattened, intellectual traditions are sidelined, and national turning points are jammed into neat, racially essentialist boxes.
...
This is not a critique of courses on race or social justice as such. These are legitimate fields of inquiry and, when taught with care, can illuminate important dimensions of the American past. The concern, rather, lies in the near-total absence of curricular balance, or, to be frank, of sustained interest in the animating ideas, institutions, and conflicts that have defined the American experiment. And what’s missing, a sustained encounter with the messy, contradictory, and often inspiring ideas that have driven American history, is not merely an oversight. It is a failure of historical imagination.
This disproportionate emphasis has come at the expense of more traditional approaches—chronological surveys, political and constitutional development, military and diplomatic history, and economic transformation—that once anchored a well-rounded historical education. To be clear, this is not a veiled call for some sort of “white history” curriculum. Rather, the concern is that these racialized lenses signal to students, especially those who do not see themselves primarily through an identity category, that their cultural inheritance, political traditions, and historical contributions are of secondary importance or, worse, only worth studying insofar as they oppress others.

   My own view is that such "identitarian" courses are of pretty limited value. Criner is right that it's possible to study race, sex, class (and perhaps even "gender" as distinguished from sex...though I doubt it), etc. in a respectable, informative, scholarly manner...

   However, that's not generally how it's done. Scholars get worked into nutty positions largely by having adopted a nutty method (and often: methodology). And the methods that tend to come packaged with these far-left views are themselves nutty--and are largely responsible, unsurprisingly, for the nutty conclusions. These methods--and I've complained about this hundreds of times--tend to be sloppy, impressionistic, literary (even poetic), sophistical, rhetorical, unscientific, and highly politicized. This has been true since at least the '80s, and this is one of the lessons of Alan Sokal's famed white-hat hoax "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", as well as the many "Sokal II" hoax papers by Lindsay, Pluckrose and Boghossian.

   So, there are really at least four problems here:

[1] Such courses, topics and methods are commonly of little value (in fact, given the crap methods students learn in them, they may do more harm than good)

Aside from that point:

[2] These courses are radically overrepresented. Maybe they'd be worth devoting 5% of the curriculum to. Or, heck, let's double it and say they might be worth 10%. There is no even vaguely plausible way they're worth half the curriculum--no way at all.

[3] Such courses relentlessly advance far left politics--in fact, that's their main goal;

[4] Students generally never hear any of the copious and devastating criticisms of such leftist views.

Students aren't just being taught particular crazy ideas--like e.g. all whites are racist by definition--they are being taught a way of thinking about the world: a loony way. As leftists themselves often admit: they are being taught a "lens" through which to see...well...everything. Oddly, they seem to think this is a defense of their irresponsible teaching--or, better: indoctrination. But indoctrinating students with a crackpot way of seeing the world is much worse than merely teaching them a lot of crackpot conclusions--if they buy it, their thinking has been distorted, perhaps for life.