The Folly of Professionalism
Faculty Commencement Address 2003
Christopher Schlect
Fellow of History & Registrar
Sixth Commencment
New Saint Andrews College
May 14, 2003, Logos Field House, Moscow, Idaho
Trustees, faculty, graduates, friends and family,
This afternoon, we of New Saint Andrews College send out our 54th graduate. At the risk of sounding boastful, I should point out that, as each graduate crosses the stage this afternoon, I am extending my perfect record. You see, through the years NSA graduates have gone on to graduate study—in Literature, Philosophy, Classics, Divinity, Languages, and Music. Other graduates are called to business, teaching, and motherhood. But it is my peculiar boast—and please forgive me for pointing this out—that even after 54 graduates, no NSA grad has ever gone on to become…a professional historian. I have a perfect record.
II am here today to explain this. Some have wondered what it is that New Saint Andrews graduates go on to do with their degrees. They ask what it is that an NSA degree is good for. Today I can touch upon these questions, only by way of negation. I am here to tell you what a New Saint Andrews degree is not good for, what purpose it does not serve. The New Saint Andrews College program is designed not to create professional historians. And through 54 graduates, we have met our objective.
(But I have my doubts about some of you who are rising through the ranks.)
To explain this I need to dedicate some attention to an examination of the history profession itself. Now people have been looking back at history since an evening and a morning set apart the sixth day. But it was Leopold von Ranke who in the middle of the 19th century made history into a profession. The profession is only about 150 years old now.
Ranke was a product of modernism. He witnessed the craftsman be replaced by the manufacturer. A craftsman sees a project through from start to finish, but a manufacturer divides whole projects into component tasks, discrete little jobs that are simpler and easier to handle. For it requires far less skill to perform a little task than to carry out an entire project. It took Craftsmen years master their trades—years of experience that fetch a good wage. But any oaf can perform a task on an assembly line. And oafs are cheap.
Leopold von Ranke, father of Professional History, stands alongside other German intellectuals who approached the liberal arts the way Henry Ford would approach the manufacture of a Model A. First, divide knowledge into its component parts; then isolate the problems, objectives, and most importantly, the rules that arise within each part. We conquer knowledge by dividing it. This was, of course, the birth of academic specialization. A philosopher’s task was distinct from the philologist, whose specialized work in turn must not interfere with the specialist in political science, and of course, they all must acknowledge the peculiar expertise of Ranke’s students, the professional historians.
On our own continent, The American Historical Association was founded in 1884, a sure sign of our adoption of the new German approach to history, with its boast of being “modern” and “scientific.” AHA professionals set out to define their caste, distinguishing themselves from amateurs. They adopted new conventions for scholarly writing. They cast aside the Ciceronian style of literary, storied, anecdotal narrative, and in its place they set up new standards of austere, “objective”-sounding discourse. They wrote in the authoritative and highly technical voice of “science.” They standardized certain techniques, and for the first time wrote for one another than for the reading public. As this new cadre of professional historians defined their corporate identity, they had to set themselves apart from nonhistorians. Journalists, genealogists, and other nonhistorians might try to write history, but professional historians considered their attempts fatally flawed, for these amateurs lacked the training, the analytical skills, and grounding in theory to produce valuable work.
Which brings us to our own time. Professor Ronald C. Tobey of the University of California at Riverside explains what it means to be a professional historian. Listen how he separates history, airtight, from all other fields, and hear his arrogant rejection of the possibility that anyone who stands outside the carefully-guarded doors of oak that shut away the nonprofessionals could be capable of doing something worthwhile for history. “Historians are scholars with the Ph.D. in history,” he writes,
"trained to make independent contributions to the advancement of professional historical knowledge…History teachers in high school and colleges who have not earned the doctorate in history are referred to as history teachers, rather than historians. [Those] with advanced training, but without the Ph.D., in museums, archives, preservation, and public history, are known [not as historians, but] as…curator, archivist, preservationist, and public historian, respectively… The historian…contributes to a disciplinary paradigm and asks questions derived from the paradigm. The [others] apply historical knowledge or teach it as directed by an official policy, or mandate, and ask questions framed by policy. Museum curators work within a policy framework of the museum’s charter, the archivist within the archive’s mandate, … and the public historian within the contract terms of an employer, for instance, a private company whose history the historian has contracted to write. [The one who] performs a contract serves her employer, rather than the discipline…The professional Ph.D. historian serves the discipline."
In my own field, here we see the folly of professionalism. Professionalism calls for a scheme which defines and polices the boundaries of the profession. Insiders hold one another accountable to the standards they themselves come up with, and they deny entrance to those who do not meet their standards. To be initiated into the professional caste, the would-be historian presents himself for inspection to the gatekeepers. To prove himself, the initiate must show his distance from laymen through his fluent use of jargon, his bad syntax, and his incestuous journal-citing. In other words, he must approach his subject in a way that only professionals can understand. If a layman can follow it, his work is not distant enough; for it must not blur the fixed boundaries separating the profession from everything else. Acceptable work can be recognized only by true historians, thus the necessity of peer-reviewed or refereed publications. It is estimated that the most prominent professional historians today are read by an audience of about 500 people.
Professionalism feeds on a denial that knowledge is one. The esteemed Doctorate in Philosophy no longer represents what it used to. It is not enough to have a Ph.D.; you must be a Ph.D. in something—in some discrete bit of knowledge that is supposedly complete unto itself. This compartmentalization of knowledge has begotten the departmentalization of our campuses, campuses that we now inappropriately refer to as universities. For in the world of professionalism there is no one universe of knowledge under one universal Lord. Instead there is a multitude of special knowledges that exist under the lordship of separated communities of professionals, communities whose campus site plan is a wild arrangement of departmental cul de sacs with no Main Street connecting them.
There is a place for distinguishing academic fields, but only for the purpose of organizational efficiency, a sort of shorthand that helps our finite minds understand a complex world. Though you read Thucydides in the history colloquium, you recognize that you were doing not only history, but political philosophy and literary criticism as well. And a little Greek, too.
But professionalism wages a war against knowledge. But it is a losing war, for all knowledge is one: all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden in our One Lord Jesus Christ.
But professionalism keeps on fighting. Not only does it attack knowledge; it wages war against the person of the knower, the scholar himself. Corollary to the nineteenth-century compartmentalization of knowledge was the compartmentalization of man himself. In preindustrial society, the home was the workplace. Home was not the woman’s place that feminists gripe about, nor was it a man’s place. Home was home; it was the very definition of place. It was a center of child rearing, work, lovemaking, prayer, work, celebration, and more work. But for the first time in history, men in the 19th-century went off to work on a grand scale. They went to cities, where the factories were. Factory work not only divided projects into tasks, but it divided the lives of the workers. On a farm there is no clocking in and clocking out, no separation between “on the job” and “off duty.” And so it once was, before Ranke, in the world of academics. But today, the professional life of the historian is separated from the rest of his life. This is the only way to explain Professor Tobey’s claim that a true historian frames his questions… not out of his experiences, loyalties, and interests, but out of “the framework of the discipline.” But is this true? Is a historian’s work really unaffected by his domestic life, his marital status, upbringing, allegiances, preferences and passions? A professional is supposed to rise above these petty factors. Most importantly, he must keep his professional life separated from his religious life, he must ask only those questions that arise out of the framework of his profession, and not from his creed or his communion. The biblical term for this kind of professional is “hireling.”
Of course we know better than this. People are people, ideas cannot be sundered from the bodies in which they incarnate. You cannot separate a scholar’s academic life from the rest of him. An historian who, in his non-professional life, steals someone else’s wallet, is very much liable to steal someone else’s idea and call it his own. And the professional who keeps faith with his wife and his Lord tends also to be faithful about his footnotes.
What’s ironic about this is that even professionals know better. Like most isms, professionalism is workable only in theory, it is the product of ivory tower daydreams. “Professional historians,” at least in the sense that I have been speaking of, are the stuff of chalkboard diagrams that have little bearing in the real world. It is a plain fact that there are many professional historians who respect the historical scholarship of some who would fall outside the academy. I have read articles in peer-reviewed journals that are exciting, lucid, and worthwhile for a general readership—they deserve to be read by far more than 500 people. (Not many of them, but at least there are a few out there.) I also know professional historians who freely admit that their personal and professional lives cannot be separated in any sharp way.
My own work in history has been shaped by my respect for my parents and my love for my wife. I read peer-reviewed journals and baseball books and I listen to the Beatles, and you, my history students, see the influence of all of them. You know that John Schwandt is the type of guy who owns a Buzz Lightyear video with voiceovers in Greek. But none of this reality can be explained by the professionalist paradigm.
The folly of academic professionalism is that it pressures scholars to play by theoretical rules that operate in a theoretical world of their own devising.
Graduates of 2003, our prayer is that New Saint Andrews College has prepared you to steer clear of professionalism. You know that theology at our college has almost as much to do with Smith Leithart as it does Peter Leithart. You have learned that our final exam weeks are as much about wedding dresses and tuxedoes as they are about last-minute essays. You remember how important it is to the academic community that you avoid parking in front of the purple house across from the Schlects, or that you must take the back seats in church on History conference weekends.
Graduates, today a degree is conferred upon you. It is not a professional degree. You don’t want that, and we don’t want that for you. Today you become Bachelors of Arts in Liberal Arts and Culture. Wherever you go from here—to teaching, graduate studies (even to a Ph.D.), marriage, the ministry—remember what you have learned from this College. Be not professionals.
We love you all dearly. Visit often.
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