Inside and Outside Academic Life
Inside and Outside Academic Life
Every day when I look at the
internet in general and at Twitter in particular I come across independent
scholars writing about their own research and writing and the problems they
face outside the academic environment in which they have been trained. Most of
them are very well qualified with doctorates or other advanced degrees but have
found themselves unable to gain jobs in universities or colleges. This is
partly the result of universities awarding more advanced degrees and thus
producing more candidates for a relatively restricted number of prospective
posts. It also has the effect from the point of view of employers of gaining a
wide degree of choice in appointments and of keeping salaries lower because of
the competition for posts. Having experienced this situation in the past
myself, I have every sympathy with the predicament of those with a vocation for
academic work but who must endure the frustration of being unable to secure
appropriate work.
For this reason, I was interested
to see Dr S.J.Ainsworth’s suggestion on Twitter in the middle of April asking
if anyone might be interested in forming a network of independent scholars.[1]
I have tried in the past to suggest a similar idea with the creation of a website
offering items of news on early modern subjects, details of jobs that have
become available, links to sites with academic articles (like CORE), to
repositories for theses (like the DART-etheses
portal), to databases (like the Internet Archive), and other facilities like
discussion forums, audio and video recordings, reviews of books, early modern
blogs, etc. Admittedly, such a project
would need in my view at least half a dozen people to be committed to contributing
and making it successful over a period of time. I have made an overture
detailing these suggestions to Dr Ainsworth and shall be interested to get a
response.
The news that Aston University
and the South Bank University of London will both be abandoning the teaching of
history courses in the autumn makes positive action to bridge the gaps between academics
teaching the subject and those outside their ranks more urgent. One of my
long-standing friends has, as I have mentioned before, expressed his
apprehension that history may not survive as a discipline in higher education
in the foreseeable future. I do understand why accountants, administrators and
politicians find business course, science and technology courses so appealing:
the demand for them is obvious in the interests of the development of modern
economies. Politicians often view higher education as a primary instrument for
feeding the growth of this and other countries’ economies. More growth means
more resources in tax revenues which they can then use to re-allocate to objectives
they approve of. The humanities, including history, serve no such obvious
purpose. But history is the major discipline for explaining how we in this
society have come to be where we are and the appetite for historical knowledge is
immense. Phasing it out of higher education institutions would be
self-defeating and highly damaging to a civilized society.
Joe Saunders’s account of the
British Association of Local History’s discussion of the Civil War in the
Localities held on 19th April[2]
makes this point very effectively since it attracted an audience of just over
180 people. Dr Charlotte Young and Tim Hasker made a presentation that clearly
engaged the interest of those attending and stimulated some intriguing
questions. The only puzzling feature was the local bibliography on county
histories that cited works by R.C.Richardson, Alan Everitt, Ann Hughes, Anthony
Fletcher, John Morrill, David Underdown and William Hunt, all of them by now
somewhat long in the tooth. But county histories, pace the recent work by
Richard Cust and Peter Lake on Cheshire, has been out of fashion for a
considerable period of time.
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