Apr 05 2009
Once is a Data Point; Twice is a Trend
Over the last couple of years, there have been two jobs come open for endowed chairs in American military history at major research universities: the Mason Chair at Ohio State and the Ambrose-Hesseltine Chair at Wisconsin. Ohio State’s failed the first time around, and Wisconsin’s travails made the popular press; both went outside of traditional academia to draw on military officer-academics when they finally succeeded in making a hire. Ohio State brought in Peter Mansoor after a brief stint in Baghdad; Wisconsin has just hired John Hall, a major who’s taught at West Point.
Is there a pattern here? Given what we so often hear about academia’s supposed hostility to things military, why did these two plum jobs go to men with long military careers? After all, while Ohio State has been friendly to military history for many years, Wisconsin’s history department gave its name to, a certain brand of populist, anti-imperial critique of American policy.
For one, this suggests that the supposed hostility to the military might not be so intense, after all.
For two, military officers might indeed have an advantage on the academic job market. Measured in terms of scholarly output, Peter Mansoor is on par with an associate professor (one monograph and a memoir) and John Hall with a newly-minted Ph.D (one book in press). But they come with an entire previous career’s worth of gravitas that most nervous applicants could only wish to possess, and significant undergraduate teaching experience.
Military history in the Soviet Union was an exclusively military preserve for decades, with pernicious effects on the quality and independence of scholarship. The dialogue between military and civilian practitioners in the West is a much preferable state of affairs. Civilian Ph.Ds have long taken positions in military educational and research institutions; movement in the other direction is only natural.
But are young Ph.D candidates in American military history discouraged by this? I honestly don’t know, but would welcome enlightenment.