THE CORE CURRICULUM AS INTELLECTUAL MOTIVATION
403
and Amherst, and substantial decline in many universities of high quality
throughout the country. In student parlance of that generation the word
"relevance" was a key word, and history seemed to rank high in
"irrele~
vance." More disturbing was the anti-history animus that was voiced in the
intellectual community. Long a source of friendly support for the disci–
pline, philosophers, critics, and men of letters of the 1960s were saying that
history as currently written and practiced was bland, banal, and intellectu–
ally insipid. Even among professional historians, a few of whom kept up
with intellectual controversy of the time, there were some who conceded
that change in a "post-industrial" era was so rapid and extensive as to give
the past and history less and less meaning for the present.
Those historians who rejected my pessimistic outlook and predic–
tions in 1969 delighted in pointing out that the number of history
degrees awarded in this country in the following year, in 1970-71, ins tead
of declining actually increased to "the highest" number ever: some
44,663 degrees were awarded, and this on top of unprecedented increas–
es in the previous eighteen years. But the decline of history I predicted
began to be registered in crude terms by the number of degrees award–
ed in the very next year, 1971-72, and that decline continued wi th
preci pi tant annual drops for the next fifteen years-down, down, and
down year after year. In fact beginning in 1971 with 44,000, it declined
to 16,049 in 1984-1985, the lowest number since 1961-1962-a loss of
28,614 from the record high of 1970-71. Yet these were years of great
national increase in total college enrollment and in degrees awarded, so
that as a percentage of those degrees the decline in absolute numbers I
have is much less impressive than the decline of the percentage of
degrees, which fell from 5.3 percent in 1970-71 to 1.7 percent of the
total fifteen years later.
Undergraduate enrollment and degrees in the discipline began a
remarkable recovery in a few outstanding American universities in the
1980s. That gave the American Historical Association newsletter of 1988
"reason for optimism," but it nevertheless admitted that " the discipline is
far from recovering its losses," and that "full recovery remains a distant
goal." The discipline is in trouble elsewhere as well. In France, for instance,
according
to
Professor Christophe Prochasson of Paris, history is now
"losing the prestige it acquired, for good or ill, in the 1970s" and "no
longer retains its former splendor."
The number of doctoral degrees awarded in American universities
declined sharply also, by more than 50 percent, but not fast enough to avoid
serious unemployment of the recipients. Another official report of the
American Historical Association in the fall of 1997 reports, "The propor–
tion of Ph.Ds employed in four-year colleges and universities fell to its
