History for Fun and Profit

A new institute helps scholars survive outside academia

Five years ago, Steven Hertzberg, 32, earned a Ph.D. in history at the University of Chicago. He soon learned that a degree in his field was almost worthless in the marketplace. History departments have not been flourishing of late, and the only job he could find was a part-time assistant professorship at Minnesota's Carleton College. Annual pay: $6,000. "I wanted to stay in teaching," he recalls, "but I had an antipathy toward starving." Today Hertzberg runs his own hardware store in Queens, N.Y., and makes almost three times as much as the average assistant professor.

Hardware may be his livelihood, but the software of history remains Hertzberg's passion. He has published a history of the Jewish community in Atlanta from 1845 to 1915, and he continues to write for scholarly journals. One reason he is able to pursue academic interests away from universities: Hertzberg is a member of the Institute for Research in History, a nonprofit group that helps historians continue scholarly work even though they lack teaching positions.

The institute is four years old. Among its 200 members are a travel agent with a Ph.D. in medieval Irish history from City University of New York; a public relations executive with a Ph.D. in European history from Bryn Mawr, who is compiling biographical materials for Yale's Sterling Memorial Library; and a Columbia University Ph.D. now employed at the New York Stock Exchange, who has just co-authored an article on philanthropic housing from 1870 to 1910 for the Journal of Urban History.

This summer, the Statue of Liberty national monument is displaying a photographic exhibit prepared by eight institute members with $36,000 in grants from the New York State Council on the Arts and the Council for the Humanities. Its theme: varied places of origin of U.S. immigrants in the 19th century.

"We are an independent community of scholars," explains Executive Director Marjorie Lightman, 39, who taught ancient history at New York City's Hunter College until 1976 and is one of the institute's founders. "To be a scholar, you need people around you who want to spend time in the intellectual process. You need criticism, argument, debate. We felt we could go on with these things, even though many of us are no longer making a living in the academic world."

All institute members participate in research-group meetings, which focus on such areas as intellectual history, the labor movement and women's history. Institute members also, put their skills to use in a number of projects, including Shop Talk, a documentary film about unionization at a New York lithography plant, and a guidebook to scholarly periodicals for historians.

The institute charges dues of up to $50 a year but has no endowment. However, it has helped raise about $450,000 from a variety of foundations to finance members' projects. "A good grant application takes nine months from raw idea to finished application," says Lightman. "An economist tells me that we need ten applications pending all the time in order for the institute to stay alive." I.R.H. also administers the grants, charging only a fraction of what universities charge for administrative overhead (14% vs. 45%).

Members also contribute to Trends in History, the institute's quarterly journal. They have organized a number of workshops and conferences, including one on the rural history of the U.S. and Europe, held at Vermont's Marlboro College. To popularize historical knowledge, the institute is working on a film for public television that presents a fictionalized drama about two sisters who migrated from farm to city in the 1830s.

Some members work part time as professors. The institute's membership is also open to full-time faculty members, and some 100 teachers in the New York City area have joined. They say the institute provides a chance to discuss their work with colleagues in a friendly way. One campus may have only one specialist in, say, medieval European history, but institute research seminars bring many diverse specialists together. James Jabob, 39, a tenured historian who teaches at John Jay College and the graduate school of the City University of New York, credits institute seminars with providing valuable criticism of portions of his work in progress, a book on 17th century political debate. Says he: "The institute is a way of opening up the profession to more people and to different points of view."

Adds one member, a medievalist who taught for 13 years but is now working on a book: "Institute research groups provide a professional atmosphere of interest and concern for my work. Nobody has anything to gain from them but the purely intellectual pleasure of doing a good job and helping the other person make his opus better." Agrees Beatrice Gottlieb, 55, who proposed the institute's "Places of Origin" exhibit: "I hate to criticize academia, but there is a lot of personal pressure there. Until you get tenure you constantly have to prove yourself to your colleagues. At the institute, you get moral support." Indeed, the institute's focus on doing history for the sheer intellectual pleasure of it might serve as a useful antidote to the pressures of publish or perish that ofttimes distort academic life and bloat academic journals. qed

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