Something has happened to the Department of History at Harvard. The former chairman of Harvard’s history department is boasting that he helped transform the faculty from a “white male affinity group” into a more globally diverse operation. In an opinion piece for the Harvard Crimson, the professor, Sidney Chalhoub, characterized the department of the early 1990s as insular and exclusionary and lauded its evolution into a faculty that’s now drawn from more than 15 countries. Chalhoub’s essay prompts Ira Stoll to recall his own education in a golden era of the department.
I was a history major as an undergraduate at Harvard in the early 1990s and let me tell you that while Sidney Chalhoub, who did not arrive at Harvard until 2015, may prefer to disparage the department as it was in that era, it was crackling with intellectual vitality and academic rigor. For one thing, at least some of the professors were not “white”—they were Jewish, including Richard Pipes, Charles Maier, Bernard Bailyn, and Oscar Handlin. Pipes, who served on the National Security Council staff in the Reagan administration, was an immigrant to America from Poland. Bailyn’s father was a dentist, born in Russia. The notion that the Harvard History Department in the early 1990s was some sort of yacht club presided over by Samuel Eliot Morison, who died in 1976, is just preposterous. The chair of the department from 1985 through at least 1988 was Angeliki E. Laiou, who was born in Athens. Akira Iriye (who, sadly, died this week) was born in Japan and arrived in 1989. The scholars had names and reputations. David Herbert Donald and William Gienapp taught the Civil War. John King Fairbank taught the history of China and U.S.-China relations. Drew Faust was offered tenure (as a trailing spouse) in 1989.
Bringing the story up to date in the context of Chalhoub’s essay, we may borrow from the ghost of Hamlet’s father to obsreve “what a falling off was there!” Stoll’s Free Beacon story is “Former Harvard History Chairman Boasts of Transforming It From ‘White Male Affinity Group’” (“Sidney Chalhoub pushes for Palestinian Studies, but department has no time for Western Civilization”).
