Advocacy
MHA Resolution Opposing Cuts at Iowa State
March 30, 2022
Dr. Wendy Wintersteen, President
Dr. Jonathan Wicker, Senior Vice President and Provost
Dr. Beate Schmittmann, Dean, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Dr. William Graves, Dean, Graduate College
Iowa State University
Ames, IA 50011
Dear Dr. Wintersteen, Dr. Wickert, Dr. Schmittmann, and Dr. Graves,
The Midwestern History Association writes with deep concern about Iowa State University’s efforts to “reimagine” the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. The 34 percent cut to the Department of History is a severe blow, one that threatens not only the work of history faculty to educate Iowa’s next generation of leaders but also the development of the field of Midwestern history after decades of scholarly inattention. Since about 2014, faculty, alumni, and current graduate students at Iowa State University have produced scholarship of exceptional quality, joining colleagues across the country in a rejuvenation of the field. This revitalization has captured national attention, with significant coverage in major media outlets.
The ”reimagining” of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences threatens to do irreparable harm to a vital department that contributes in powerful ways not only to the mission of ISU but also to the field of Midwestern history. History faculty members teach a stunning array of courses for majors while also contributing courses central to the general education curriculum, which serves all of ISU’s undergraduate students. The department also runs a crucial social studies and history secondary licensure program, graduating teachers whose pedagogies promise a bright future for K-12 students across Iowa. The proposed cuts go beyond mere recalibrations to these existing programs; they threaten their very existence.
In addition to these disruptions to undergraduate education at ISU, the efforts to “reimagine” the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences hold dire consequences for its faculty. The plan requires the history department to reduce its tenure-eligible faculty members from 21 to 8 to 10, relying instead on part-time adjunct labor. Replacing tenure-track faculty with adjuncts cheapens the historical profession by denying these instructors the resources and institutional support given to tenure-track faculty to pursue scholarly opportunities. Using part-time instructors also threatens the high-quality education which sets apart ISU. The MHA mourns the potential loss of these high-caliber history faculty members at ISU, whose award-winning and innovative scholarship is renown across fields and disciplines. Their leadership in organizations such as the MHA, American Historical Association, Medieval Academy of America, Society for Military History, Society for the History of Technology, Agricultural History Society, and others brings prestige to the department and upholds ISU’s strong scholarly reputation among institutions of higher education. Recent awards and grants from the Fulbright Commission, National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation testify further to the department’s high standards of academic achievement.
The magnitude of these cuts also threatens to end the history graduate program at ISU, which has sent shock waves across the field of Midwestern history. Students who graduated from or are currently enrolled in the Rural, Agricultural, Technological, and Environmental [RATE] program are key contributors to ongoing efforts to build the field, presenting at the annual MHA conference, producing scholarship on Iowa and the region, and serving the MHA in key leadership positions. The MHA fears the repercussions of losing this history graduate program, especially as the MHA approaches its ten-year anniversary and is planning for a future of even greater scholarly output and engagement.
Iowa’s history is Midwestern history, and the history department at ISU is a key contributor to the development of this field. The MHA implores leaders at ISU to reconsider its proposed cuts to a department that contributes in profound ways to the academic mission of ISU and scholarly growth of the MHA. It is an asset, one that must have a secure budgetary foundation.
Sincerely,
Sara Egge
President
Midwestern History Association
PhD, Iowa State University 2012
Joint Statement on Legislative Efforts to Restrict Education about Racism in American History
The Midwestern History Association has endorsed the following joint statement from the American Association of University Professors, the American Historical Association, the Association of American Colleges & Universities, and PEN America:
June 16, 2021
We, the undersigned associations and organizations, state our firm opposition to a spate of legislative proposals being introduced across the country that target academic lessons, presentations, and discussions of racism and related issues in American history in schools, colleges and universities. These efforts have taken varied shape in at least 20 states; but often the legislation aims to prohibit or impede the teaching and education of students concerning what are termed “divisive concepts.” These divisive concepts as defined in numerous bills are a litany of vague and indefinite buzzwords and phrases including, for example, “that any individual should feel or be made to feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological or emotional distress on account of that individual’s race or sex.” These legislative efforts are deeply troubling for numerous reasons.
First, these bills risk infringing on the right of faculty to teach and of students to learn. The clear goal of these efforts is to suppress teaching and learning about the role of racism in the history of the United States. Purportedly, any examination of racism in this country’s classrooms might cause some students “discomfort” because it is an uncomfortable and complicated subject. But the ideal of informed citizenship necessitates an educated public. Educators must provide an accurate view of the past in order to better prepare students for community participation and robust civic engagement. Suppressing or watering down discussion of “divisive concepts” in educational institutions deprives students of opportunities to discuss and foster solutions to social division and injustice. Legislation cannot erase “concepts” or history; it can, however, diminish educators’ ability to help students address facts in an honest and open environment capable of nourishing intellectual exploration. Educators owe students a clear-eyed, nuanced, and frank delivery of history, so that they can learn, grow, and confront the issues of the day, not hew to some state-ordered ideology.
Second, these legislative efforts seek to substitute political mandates for the considered judgment of professional educators, hindering students’ ability to learn and engage in critical thinking across differences and disagreements. These regulations constitute an inappropriate attempt to transfer responsibility for the evaluation of a curriculum and subject matter from educators to elected officials. The purpose of education is to serve the common good by promoting open inquiry and advancing human knowledge. Politicians in a democratic society should not manipulate public school curricula to advance partisan or ideological aims. In higher education, under principles of academic freedom that have been widely endorsed, professors are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject. Educators, not politicians, should make decisions about teaching and learning.
Knowledge of the past exists to serve the needs of the living. In the current context, this includes an honest reckoning with all aspects of that past. Americans of all ages deserve nothing less than a free and open exchange about history and the forces that shape our world today, an exchange that should take place inside the classroom as well as in the public realm generally. To ban the tools that enable those discussions is to deprive us all of the tools necessary for citizenship in the twenty-first century. A white-washed view of history cannot change what happened in the past. A free and open society depends on the unrestricted pursuit and dissemination of knowledge.
Signed,
American Association of University Professors
American Historical Association
Association of American Colleges & Universities
PEN America
Letter About University Press of Kansas
The Midwestern History Association’s leadership sent a signed copy of the following letter to the Board of Trustees of the University Press of Kansas on February 11, 2021:
To the Members of the Board of Trustees of the University Press of Kansas:
We, undersigned members of the Midwestern History Association, write to provide our encouragement that, following the review being conducted by the external consultant, the six provosts representing the Board of Trustees for the University Press of Kansas vote to continue the life of this valued publishing outlet.
Given our focus as scholars of the Midwest, we note in particular these words in the statement issued regarding the assessment of the future of the Press: “the University Press of Kansas publishes a world-class list of books in US history, military history, law, political science, and other fields, as well as regional books that contribute to the understanding of Kansas, the Great Plains, and the Midwest.”
We also note the many volumes published by the Press that have contributed significantly to scholarly and public understanding of the Midwest, such as Nicole Etcheson’s Generation at War, which won the Organization of American Historians’ Avery O. Craven Award; Dan Flores’s American Serengeti which won the Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Award; James R. Shortridge’s The Middle West: Its Meaning in American Culture, a foundational text in the field; Elliott West, The Contested Plains which won the Organization of American Historians’ Ray Allen Billington Prize and numerous other prizes. Two measures of the significance of the University Press of Kansas is quickly apparent: its books have received an average of a dozen awards annually over the last decade, and its authors have won a wide variety of major awards from their academic associations. UPK books have received awards in states from Alaska to New England, but especially from Midwestern scholarly associations. Four UPK authors have received lifetime awards for writing in military history: David M. Glantz, Allan R. Millett, and John H. Morrow, Jr. have received the Pritzker Military Museum & Library Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing for their publications and Conrad C. Crane won the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the Society for Military History. UPK authors have received other prestigious awards including the Bancroft Prize from Columbia University and the Lincoln Prize, one of the highest honors in writing about the Civil War. Nicole Etcheson and John E. Miller have each received the Frederick Jackson Turner Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Midwestern History Association for books published with University Press of Kansas.
If the life of the nation is to be measured by its support for educational institutions and the various outlets through which the fruits of education are disseminated, then the maintenance and continuation of the University Press of Kansas, with its seventy-five-year history of publishing vital works in many areas, including Midwestern history, is of signal importance.
Confronting a Sordid History of Racist Violence in the United States
The Midwestern History Association has endorsed the following statement from the American Historical Association:
Everything has a history, including our nation’s deplorable record of violence against African Americans, committed either outside the law or in the name of law enforcement itself. George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police officers cannot be understood in isolation, as a tragic moment detached from a familiar narrative of “who we as Americans really are.” What happened to George Floyd stands well within our national tradition.
This sordid history stretches back centuries, from before Virginia’s first slavery legislation in 1662 through emancipation and beyond. Enslavers acted with impunity to punish and “discipline” enslaved people. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 extended the extreme violence of slave-owning by legitimating the hunt for human beings into states where slavery had been outlawed so they might be returned to their former owners. Reconstruction—the experiment that came after the violence of a Civil War—could not withstand the lethal combination of terrorism and voter fraud. Well into the mid-20th century, white supremacy was enforced by lynch mobs that murdered black men, women, and children on the flimsiest of pretexts or no pretext at all. In the late 19th century and beyond, convict laborers and peons, subject to whippings and other forms of physical abuse unchecked by either formal or informal codes of civilized conduct, had little recourse to the law and remained at the mercy of white sheriffs and landowners.
Deeply embedded cultural practices are difficult to change. Despite insistent calls for reform over generations, police departments and civilian review boards have largely sided with law-enforcement officers who violated norms not only of good policing but of human decency. What has changed is less the story itself than our ability to document and interpret stories with cell phones that generate immediate, previously unavailable historical records. Video footage of police brutality constitutes a new form of historical documentation and legal evidence with the potential to hold violent perpetrators accountable for their crimes.
As Congresswoman (and former police officer) Val Demings recently noted, law enforcement officers “are placed in complicated and dangerous situations” every day: “They respond to calls from people with their own biases and motives.” Over the past half-century, some police departments have made substantial improvements in their policies, training, and practices.
Still, reckless police actions have also triggered some of the most destructive episodes of civil unrest in recent history—from the raiding of an after-hours club in downtown Detroit in 1967 to the 1992 acquittal of the police officers who beat black motorist Rodney King in Los Angeles to the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. Then, as now, “outside agitators” were accused of infiltrating a community and inciting violence, an old canard familiar to historians of the anti-slavery movement, the Civil Rights struggle, and protests against the Vietnam War.
Even more evocative is the threat from the White House that protesters of all backgrounds, gathering on behalf of African American victims of violence, will be “greeted with the most vicious dogs.” This too has a long history, going back to the use of dogs to track down escaped enslaved people. In the 1960s, the nation watched on television as marchers protesting racial injustice were set upon by snarling dogs and baton-wielding police officers.
Police brutality in urban areas derives from well-known historical causes: generations-long patterns of residential racial hyper-segregation, a product of bank redlining and predatory lending; toxic forms of everyday policing tacitly approved by mayors, city councils, and state officials; and the practice by some towns and municipalities of relying on revenue generated by fines and court fees extracted from people arrested on minor offenses—arrests that often turn violent. Over the years, segregated black neighborhoods have suffered from white-supremacist cultures embedded in local police forces. The recent series of cases marked by severe, even murderous overreach on the part of police officers are part and parcel of historic trends. The killing of George Floyd stems from a constellation of structural injustices that are immune to the platitudes of anguish and concern that routinely follow instances of police-initiated violence against African Americans.
As a nation, we’ve shown a reluctance not only to learn our own history but to learn from it, which helps to explain why we continue to witness—and set aside as exceptional—egregious forms of human-rights abuses in case after case. Throughout our history, those trusted to enforce the law have too often acted lawlessly, while too many civilians have acted with the tacit approval of law enforcement in targeting African Americans just going about their daily lives. We are killing our own people. Even as we mourn the death of George Floyd, we must confront this nation’s past; history must inform our actions as we work to create a more just society.
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