John O. Harney: News and random thoughts from the region

“If Wishes Were Horses (For Dad)”, by Timothy Harney, a professor at the Montserrat College of Art, in Beverly, Mass. He’s the brother of John O. Harney.

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

FICE-y conditions. MIT recently alerted its staff that federal immigration officials would be checking the status of foreign postdoctoral students, researchers and visiting scholars in the sciences, and urged them to cooperate. … Meanwhile, an Iranian student, returning to study at Northeastern University, was detained at Boston’s Logan International Airport then deported, despite having a valid student visa and court order permitting him to stay in the U.S. The stories reminded me of Politico’s report on “5 ways universities can support students in a post-DACA world” by Jose Magaña-Salgado, of the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration. And of own NEJHE piece by Harvard attorney Jason Corral, whose job is advising undocumented students in the age of the Trump administration.

Caste away. Brandeis University announced it will include “castes” in its non-discrimination policy. Discrimination based on this system of inherited social class will now be expressly prohibited along with more familiar measures such as race, color, religion, gender identity and expression, national or ethnic origin, sex, sexual orientation, pregnancy, age, genetic information, disability, military or veteran status.

Institution news. Massachusetts approved new regulations on how to screen colleges and universities for financial risks and potential closures. … The University of Maine System Board of Trustees adopted a recommendation from Chancellor Dannel Malloy to transition the separate institutional accreditations of Maine’s public universities into a single “unified institutional accreditation” for the 30,000-student University of Maine System through the New England Commission on Higher Education (NECHE). One institution the UMaine System is likely to collaborate with according to Malloy’s office: Northeastern University’s planned Roux Institute for advanced graduate study and research to open in Portland, Maine. … In Connecticut, meanwhile, Goodwin College became Goodwin University. Such rebranding has been something of a trend in recent years. … In other institution news, monks at Saint Anselm College challenged the New Hampshire Catholic college’s board of trustees over a move the monks say could lead to increased secularization. The college’s charter dictated that the monks have the power to amend laws governing the school. Saint Anselm College President Joseph Favazza said in a letter that the board was not trying to change the mission of the college, but rather aiming to meet the standards set by NECHE, the accrediting body.

Cold War chills. Primary Research Group Inc. has published its 2020 edition of Export Controls Compliance Practices Benchmarks for Higher Education with this grim reminder: “Increasingly, U.S. universities and their corporate and government research partners are under pressure to demonstrate compliance with U.S. export control and other technology transfer restriction and control policies. The deterioration of U.S.-relations with China and Russia threatens the return of export control philosophies common during the Cold War. Major universities in the U.K., Australia and Canada, among other countries, are experiencing similar changes.”

Media is not the enemy, but … The free Metro Boston newspaper ended operation after 19 years, following the sale of the New York and Philadelphia Metro papers. One explanation offered by a columnist at The Boston Globe, which is a part-owner of the Boston Metro: more commuters using their phones to catch up on news.

Latest from LearnLaunch. Watch NEJHE for reports from the 2020 Learn Launch Across Boundaries Conference, including an exclusive Q&A with the new LearnLaunch president, former Massachusetts Gov. Jane Swift.

John O. Harney is executive editor of The New England Journal of Higher Education.

Beth Salerno: History: The public option

MANCHESTER, N.H. If you ask Americans what is studied in history classrooms, many will answer “facts and dates.” If you ask them what people can do with a history degree, they answer “teach.”

Yet those same Americans acknowledge the power and practical relevance of history as they flock to national parks, historic sites, museums and cultural heritage sites; buy nationally best-selling biographies; see history-infused films like Twelve Years a Slave or any of documentarian Ken Burns’s epics; or research their family history within a larger context of national trends.

Among the humanities disciplines, history has a broad and positive public profile, even as the number of majors rises and falls with economic indicators. History programs are increasingly taking advantage of that public enthusiasm for the past to strengthen the discipline’s academic reach and successfully compete for majors and funding when much of the federal and institutional attention is on STEM programs or career preparation.

Public history courses and programs encourage students to take the deep content knowledge provided by traditional history classes and apply it to public problems or in public locations. It takes advantage of the increased higher- education focus on experiential or applied learning and an emphasis on practical experience and outcomes. At the national graduate level, the American Historical Association (AHA) has recognized the need to expand even traditional history graduate experience to include exposure to public history theory, methodology and areas of practice.

With a $1.6 million grant from the Mellon Foundation, the AHA will partner with four universities to broaden both the career prospects for and the impact of history PhDs. According to the AHA, “Expanding the employment horizons and qualifications of history PhDs is not just a matter of finding jobs for our students. We are also interested in widening the presence and influence of humanistic thinking in business, government, and nonprofits. Implicit assumptions about historical context inform thousands of decisions made every day in nearly every institutional context, and we believe that a substantial proportion of those decisions are made without recognition of those historical assumptions, and certainly with very little actual historical knowledge.”

Programs that prepare history master’s students for active engagement in the public application of history are not new, particularly in New England. The University of Massachusetts at Amherst has had a thriving graduate public history program since 1986. Northeastern University’s public history master’s program claims to be one of the oldest in the United States. The National Council on Public History lists 15 public history programs in New England, with nine in Massachusetts, two in New Hampshire, two Rhode Island and one each in Vermont and Connecticut, but none in Maine.

The majority of these programs offer only graduate-level courses. However a half dozen have more recently developed public history minors or concentrations within the major. For Franklin Pierce University in Rindge, N.H., a new concentration in public history stresses that “planning and completing historical research projects are also part of the curriculum.”

Project management skills are one of the most valuable job skills public history programs can provide to students. Salem State University has a public history concentration that benefits from public history projects on campus including one that is mapping the area’s Franco-American heritage and linking older Franco-American immigrants with the Dominican immigrants that now dominate the previously Franco-American neighborhoods. Public history programs make clear the powerful impact historical knowledge can have when applied to public issues, discussions and needs. Studies by scholars also suggest that public history courses increase student engagement and can increase the number of students who declare history majors.

My course at Saint Anselm College is one such recent development. It was created in 2006 in response to requests for a course that “prepared students to explore history options other than teaching.” Of course, history, like many humanities disciplines, prepares students for the widest array of careers by teaching high-quality writing, respect for detail and causation, awareness of the impact of diverse viewpoints, and the ability to make logical and careful argument. However neither students nor parents always see that, particularly in periods of economic downturn as we have experienced for half a decade.

Therefore this course introduces students to specific career paths in public history such as museum curation, the national park service or archival work. Each student completes three “history labs” getting hands-on experience completing a nomination for the historic register, or designing a museum exhibit. These practical labs serve as the training ground for their final project, a tangible public product that serves an existing need—whether for an oral history, a museum education lesson plan to accompany an exhibit, or an archival inventory of an area cemetery with walking tour brochure available on the web.

Public history courses drive collaboration between history departments and community cultural heritage institutions. They give organizations an infusion of excited, apprentice labor to complete public projects made difficult by budget cuts, while the students gain real-world experience, workplace orientation, and a chance to produce a signature project that can anchor a budding professional portfolio. Institutions of higher education generally, and history programs in particular, will continue to face pressures to produce return on investment.

Public history programs enable a humanities discipline to capitalize on engaged learning, hands-on praxis, student research and community collaborations to produce students who have, and are perceived by employers to have, employable skills, without sacrificing the deep knowledge and clear thinking that mark the best history graduates.

Beth Salerno is an associate professor of U.S.  history at Saint Anselm College. This first ran on the New England Board of Higher Education's news and opinion Web site, nebhe.org.