“Why’d you go to grad school, then?”
That’s what many historians are asked when we lament the state of the profession—the overwork, the burnout, the harassment, the debt, above all the dwindling of stable, good-paying jobs.
Shouldn’t we have known what we were getting into? What did we expect?
We sometimes respond we didn’t quite know what we were getting into. The recession wasn’t going to last forever; the job market was going to bounce back; the Baby Boomers were all about to retire. But few of us really believed those stories.
So why did we get into this line of work? I frankly reject the framing of the question. A better question would be, what if we hadn’t? I ask this because I’m not sure that those who mock the decisions we made want to live in a world where we all made more “rational” ones: a world in which there would, eventually, be no professional historians left. History depends on us to make irrational decisions. Doing history is an act of trust, and that trust can be exploited precisely because the supply of those willing to take that leap of faith will not run out.
Why did we become historians? Because we didn’t have a choice. You can say it’s a calling, though such an explanation is unnecessary if you read the question differently. Why did we become historians? As in, not why did any individual person become a historian, but why did historians become historians? Because it could not be otherwise! If historians did not become historians, then they would not exist, and such a world seems unlikely, no matter how hard or irrational the choice to do history may become.
If our magazine does anything, it is to assure you of this: the historians will always be with you. We cannot stop this thing we have with the past. You are, for better or for worse, stuck with us.
Joe Clark, undated photograph, University of North Texas Libraries (Portal to Texas History).
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