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well-documented article based on sound historical scholarship in terms of
archival research and footnotes. But the last three paragraphs were not
about Atlanta in the 1920s or about the Jews: they were about Reagan
and Bush and about how we have to increase our struggle against their
policies. You would never have seen a conclusion like this twenty years
ago in a scholarly journal. And this is typical now.
Celeste Colgan:
For some reason - maybe it's endemic to the very na–
ture of scholastic organizations where officers are elected through dele–
gates - the people who go through the chairs of those organizations get
onto the executive board whose president can say,
" 1
speak for thirty
thousand members." Thus these organizations are a powerful force. I can
predict that as we go into spring and the President announces the next
nominees for the National Council on the Humanities, the fact that a
good number of them belong to the National Association of Scholars -
an affinity organization, not relying on delegate assembly - is going to
be an issue.
Irving Louis Horowitz:
Ron, I am not in the area of history, but I
would like to say that every single field is marching to its own drummer.
But in the last twenty years, right off the top of my head, three fine
journals -
History and Theory, History and Social Science,
and
American
Ethllic History
-
have been established, and you could publish in them any
day of the week. Now I am not saying that the proliferation has gone as
deep as it has in political science, but that is because of the attrition
within history per se, and is not necessarily a function of political cor–
rectness or political ideology.
William Phillips:
Do you agree, Ron?
Ronald Radosh:
I don't know what the attrition is. But speaking only
for American history, for some unique reason many of the people who
got doctorates in it, who have now come into the university as profes–
sors and have moved up the ladder, are former new left activists. They
have come to dominate the field.
Irving Louis Horowitz:
It is true, but an editor like Ron Bayer will
always welcome you. We must avoid excessive pessimism as if somehow
we are attending a wake.
Heather MacDonald:
It seems that you can encourage individual pro–
fessors, as Mr. Woodward suggests, to speak their minds. And yet when
they do, they get ostracized. I want to ask Abigail Thernstrom what her
