Session Abstract

How does our profession—its present situation and its future—look from behind the administrator’s desk?  This presidential session gathers together a group of historians who also serve, or have recently served, as high-level administrators in a variety of institutions of higher education.  The assumptions behind the session are threefold: these “historian- administrators” are keenly aware of budgetary constraints; they have personal reasons to be especially concerned about the trajectory of the discipline of history in their institutions; and they tend to think about problems like these in historical terms. The esteemed historian-administrators who make up the panel include one president of a four-year liberal arts college (Carol Quillen, Davidson College) and three deans of public and private research universities that have undergraduate colleges (John Boyer, University of Chicago; Jack Censer, George Mason University; and Carla Hesse, UC-Berkeley).  The chair, Joanna Waley-Cohen, is dean of NYU-Shanghai.