S ESSION
II:
THE
CORE CURRICULUM
AS INTELLECTUAL MOT IVAT ION
Igor Webb: I'm going to chair this afternoon's panel, which is on the core
curriculum as intellectual motivation. The names of the speakers, I'm sure,
are familiar to all of you: C. Vann Woodward, the greatest historian of the
American South; Steven Marcus, a distinguished literary scholar and most
recently editor of
Medicine in Western Civilization;
Jerry Martin, formerly
head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, who incidentally
asked me to say that he has changed the title of his paper to "All Worth
Preserving," a quotation from Eudora Welty; and the associate provost and
chief of staff of Boston University, Peter Wood. So without further ado,
Professor Woodward.
C. Vann Woodward: This afternoon I will talk largely about history in
the universities of America, and what's happened to it as a discipline. To
describe the current standing of the discipline of history in American
higher education toward the end of the present century requires some
comparisons with other periods in the past. Some thirty years ago, in an
address to the American Historical Association (it was published in 1969,
delivered in 1968), I attempted an assessment of the status of his tory in the
academy at the end of the 1960s. My purpose here is to find what hap–
pened to the study of history in America during the last three decades. In
doing so, I realize that some of the things I say are applicable to other dis–
ciplines in the humani ties, and not entirely excl usive to this country.
Back in 1969 I suggested that the profession of history had enjoyed
decades of remarkable prosperity-it might be called a boom period–
since the Second World War. While pointing out that booms do not last
forever, I admitted that
in
terms of student enrollment, faculty salaries, and
royalty checks, the ancient craft seemed to be thriving. More important,
historians appeared to have recovered from the disdain that the relativists
and social scientists expressed for their claims on objectivity. Among
philosophers, theorists, and logicians, history in those years had won out–
spoken defenders and champions in quarrels with its critics. The
membership of the American Historical Association tripled between 1950
and 1965, and so did the number of history titles published in the United
States. Most significant for the strength of history was student patronage,
most measurable at least. From 1953 to 1968 the percentage of degrees
granted in history in the colleges of the country nearly doubled, gaining
more than any other of the humanities disciplines.
In spite of that recent boom, I nevertheless felt obliged in 1969 to
report evidence of a coming crisis and decline. The evidence came from
three sources. From the academy came news of heavy losses during the last
two years in history course enrollment in prominent universities, for
example ranging from 27 percent to 34 percent at Harvard, Yale, Stanford,
