History Department Offerings Parochial And Lack Breadth

To the editors:



Professor Laurel T. Ulrich’s op-ed (“The Revolution at Harvard,” Mar. 3) attempts to defend the pedagogy of her department against charges that basic areas of American history, such as the Revolutionary War, are neglected so that faculty members can teach the narrow and sometimes ideologically charged topics central to their own research but peripheral from the point of view of students looking for a broad and general perspective. Ulrich’s piece prompted me to go to the department’s online website to see what’s offered at Harvard in an area of American history perhaps even more central, the Civil War. I was stunned to learn that the only course offered (aside from a limited enrollment seminar that seems to be scheduled only sporadically) is not a course on the Civil War era, per se, but rather one that deals with how the war has been memorialized and represented in popular culture. This might be a useful enough supplementary course (though, judging only by the listed syllabus, this version seems a bit thin and intellectually lightweight), but it certainly can’t substitute for a thorough course in the political, diplomatic, social, economic, and, obviously, military history of the war.

The latter would seem to be indispensable to any student, history major or otherwise, wishing to gain some fundamental insight into the larger trajectory of American history. But, according to Professor Ulrich’s apologetics, such is not the way of the Harvard history department: “The Harvard history department doesn’t teach courses like that. We think our students deserve better.” One can only surmise that Ulrich’s criteria for “better” and “worse” took shape in the stew of postmodern clichés, identity politics, and disdain for the idea of history in the large that has inundated contemporary academic culture and to which Harvard has been as susceptible as any other institution.



NORMAN J. LEVITT ’63

New Brunswick, N.J.

March 3, 2006



The writer is Professor of Mathematics at Rutgers University.