Beyond the Academy: History Employment and Scholarly Professionalism

Do professional organizations such as the AHA truly assume that those engaged in the practice of history must take up a teaching career? If so, then proposed here is the affirmation of an alternate or supplementary model: the practice of history with other, history-related careers. Public historians, museum curators, full-time writers and the publishers of their works, and those in a host other professions must be regarded equal to those who labor in academic service. Indeed, many historians gave up aspiring to the academy or even left their academic posts for other venues. As they realized their capability and effectiveness, many historians chose not to be teachers.

Will the AHA and other such professional organizations affirm and promote these historians? If so, then these organizations can identify and engage in conversation with the many other professional organizations that lend support to these historians. By correcting the real or imagined ideas that an academic career is “traditional employment,” the AHA and other professional organizations can recognize these scholars employed in history but not in the academy to be full historians and no longer independent. This may constitute a paradigmatic shift in definition as well as emphasis. Can conversations among all parties ask if this can become so?

Working with the AHA and other professional organizations, the NCIS can help scholars to “keep current” by encouraging their employing institutions to make provision for their historians to have periods for study and writing beyond the daily occupational routine. This seems to be a growing problem that is equal to those who work both inside and outside the academy, for all institutions seem burden their employees with increased work duties. Here, the suggestion can be advanced that historians kept “current” will serve with greater effectiveness—even to the long-term fiscal benefit to the institution.