This panel addresses the relationship between the academic fields of history and public policy. The panel will examine practicalities of how academic units focused on public policy incorporate historians (or don’t) as well as address more theoretical discussions about opportunities to expand the teaching of public policy to include more rigorous historical analysis.

Some of the notable early public policy programs featured historians and historical analysis. At Harvard’s Kennedy School, historian Ernest R. May and his political scientist colleague, Richard E. Neustadt, taught courses on the “uses of history,” out of which grew their notable contribution to public policy, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers (1986). Historians in sub-fields of political history, policy history, and economic history have occasionally engaged with the field of policy analysis. Some public policy programs include history faculty or courses; Duke University’s undergraduate program in public policy, for example, includes a requirement to take a history elective.

Yet in general, historians have a scattered and peripheral role in public policy schools and departments. Other social scientists dominate, particularly economists and political scientists, and training for students at any level (BA/MPP/PhD) centers quantitative and qualitative methods of policy analysis that rarely take deliberate consideration of the past and change over time. Even in programs that include history faculty, the study of history serves as an afterthought. Because of the longstanding distance between the two academic fields of history and policy analysis, in public policy programs at both undergraduate and graduate levels, students’ training in historical thinking suffers.

This lack of training in historical thinking matters. To name a few reasons, astute policy analysts must be able to analyze historical narratives when they are invoked to build political support for policy positions. They must be able to spot misuses of history and succinctly explain the flaws in order to prevent policy based on erroneous assumptions. Good historical thinking skills also allow policymakers to understand why things are the way they are today and to spot opportunities for change, as well as to understand what’s unlikely to budge.

This panel will be structured as a roundtable that takes stock of the current situation and explores opportunities for bringing history back in to policy analysis. Faculty members with history PhDs who work in public policy schools and departments will speak to how they and their subject are currently incorporated into the undergraduate and graduate-level curricula of their institutions. Each panelist will also share how they envision ways that public policy training could more intentionally prepare students through historical analysis.