History has a bad reputation — not necessarily as a field, but certainly as a major. And yet, as a history major, my biggest gripe with that isn’t personal, it’s political. The undervaluing of history education at the collegiate level has political consequences: it guides students away from the classes that have the most to teach them about understanding the information they are so constantly bombarded with. Quite frankly, by underfunding the history department, UTD has limited students’ potential to critically engage with politically motivated messaging, thereby undermining our capacity for activism and political awareness.
Most survivors of the public school system remember the history classes of their youth, usually taking the form of broad historical surveys of either “American” or “World” history. This divide in and of itself demonstrates the power that history has to shape our worldview, used as a tool of the state encouraging students to view the U.S. and its history as separate from everyone and everything else on the planet. During the typical K-12 education, we study the Oregon Trail through projects that frame frontier expansion as an expression of American identity rather than as settler-colonialism; we are encouraged to “remember the Alamo” without discussing what exactly those men were fighting for — the right to keep slaves in Texas; we point to figures like Susan B. Anthony or Harriet Tubman as exemplars of the American fighting spirit without truly contending with the deeply rooted systems of inequality they were fighting against. These are just a few examples of the way history is used to solidify narratives and shift public opinion, but the larger point is that history is not just “facts,” it’s a question of which facts are presented and which ones are avoided.
Grade school doesn’t ask us to contend with the concepts of narrative formation, framing and the propagandistic power of “history.” Rather, these are topics we only dissect within the walls of a university classroom. Upper-level history classes seek to provide truth, but that by definition includes educating students on how that truth is found and subsequently presented. The most important takeaways from history have little to do with dates and names and more to do with questioning why exactly we learn what we learn. I might not remember the date of every important battle in the Revolutionary War, but I certainly remember our in-class discussions about how the way the U.S. understands the Revolutionary era has changed, especially coming up on the 250th anniversary of American independence. History students are supposed to ask why some events are more closely studied than others, are encouraged to be pedantically obsessed with asking for sources at every turn, and are meant to question the implications of each and every one of those sources, never taking anything at face value — skills which we can and should take with us outside the classroom. The ability to be a historical thinker, asking questions about everything in front of us, is a powerful tool, and it poses potent dangers to a regime that wants to ensure we know a specially curated set of facts and nothing else.
The threat posed by a generation of historically-savvy citizens has the potential to be a death knell to authoritarian regimes. But the possibility of creating such a group is crippled by unfairly skewed funding formulas across U.S. universities, and unfortunately, that includes UTD. The funding formula for our history department is not based on class enrollment. Rather, it is bounded by the number of declared history majors. UTD does not release class enrollment data, but from personal experience, in almost every history class I’ve taken, more than half the students have been non-majors. This should be a great thing and a credit to our department, but because these students are invisible to the funding model, we don’t get any of the benefits that should come with that success.
If funding is based on how many students major in the field, then the department has an incentive to try and make the program more attractive to prospective majors. This isn’t so much of a problem in fields like computer science or business — programs that can rely more consistently on outside grants, industry connections and a solid reputation — but with a program as small as our history department, it doesn’t work. Our department is made up of eight historians focusing on America, four focusing on Europe, one Middle East specialist, two historians of East Asia and one focusing on Latin America. These are amazing professors, but they’re carrying whole fields of studies entirely on their own, and to that end, they are unable to consistently offer all the classes that students may want to take. Even the classes they can offer quite often only have one section, repeated based on “Instructor Availability.” As a student, this means I’m constantly worried that if I don’t sign up for a class the very first semester I see it, I could be out of college well before it ever pops up again.
Altogether, this means UTD isn’t a very attractive choice for potential history majors, especially if they want to learn about areas that UTD doesn’t cover, like South Asian or African history. Changing that would require expanding the budget, allowing the department to hire more professors who specialize in these overlooked areas or could support the research areas we do offer. This would allow the department to offer a greater variety of classes on a more consistent academic schedule, yet because the number of majors has remained consistent, our funding hasn’t increased to support any such expansion, meaning there’s very little that can be done to make studying history at UTD a more attractive proposition.
This isn’t to say I think UTD should pivot to become a bastion of the liberal arts — we’re a STEM school and we seem quite good at that — but as it stands, the history department is relegated to being the forgotten middle child of our university. We have amazing faculty, fascinating classes and important skills to offer, yet we are consistently overlooked, unable to expand in any meaningful way that would allow our department to shine. Our classes are rarely advertised outside of our own department, even those that could be understood to have cross-departmental appeal such as HIST 3369, surveying the history of U.S. foreign relations — a class that was last offered in the fall of 2016. For history students it’s a tale as old as time, scouring the course catalog to find classes that sound fascinating, only to find that those very classes have disappeared from the schedule with no indication when or if they will ever return. It’s unfair to our faculty, our students and our reputation as a school, but even more than that, it kneecaps UTD’s ability to churn out informed and analytical civic participants by making it less and less likely that non-history majors will continue to venture into our classes. One wonders if that was even the goal or if it was just an unwanted byproduct of a department the school seems all too willing to overlook.
The chronic underfunding history isn’t just an educational problem. It is a disease that slowly but surely weakens our ability to question the narratives in front of us. At its worst, it primes us to shrug our shoulders in defeat as history itself is twisted to lend legitimacy to authoritarian regimes. The act of creating history is a living, breathing process that is occurring right in front of your eyes. Movements live and die based on the narrative they’re saddled with and even though their perception can change in hindsight, the stories told about them affect their future viability and determine what, if anything, future generations can learn from them.
Even if you can’t fit a history class into your schedule for next semester, look at the media around you with a more skeptical and historically-informed eye and ask yourself who benefits from the narrative being spread. In a time when misinformation is rampant and higher education itself is under threat, we are now more than ever reliant upon our universities to defend truth and the quest for knowledge in the face of an administration that would like us to know very little and fight even less. It is imperative that history is not sacrificed to appease that looming threat when it has the potential to teach students how to engage with competing representations of the world around them and come away with something true.