Queen’s University vice-chancellor Patrick Johnston wants to create leaders and the historical community has missed this point.
Johnston made an offhanded comment in an interview last week and he’s been paying the price since.
Society doesn’t need a 21-year-old who is a sixth century historian. It needs a 21-year-old who really understands how to analyse things, understands the tenets of leadership and contributing to society, who is a thinker and someone who has the potential to help society drive forward. I don’t talk about producing graduates, I talk about producing citizens that have the potential for leadership in society.
Professor Charles West of University of Sheffield immediately jumped at the comment, pointing out that historians are already critical thinkers and analyzers. West went so far as to suggest that it was Johnston’s “lamentable lack of knowledge” that prevented him from seeing the importance of the 6th-century. Historians across the social media landscape shared and retweeted the hell out of West’s article with a collective HARUMPH!
Queen’s University immediately issued a tweet to clarify Johnston’s interview. He wanted “to stress that a university education is more than the study of any one subject and that the aim is to produce graduates who have the potential to become leaders within our society.”
Johnston stressed the part of his statement completely ignored by West—leadership.
None of this stopped Oxford Associate Professor Jonathan Healey from dedicating his monthly blog post to tackling Johnston and a new straw man on why society needs historians. My Twitter feed has blown up again with my fellow historians yelling HARUMPH!
Again, nowhere in Healey’s more than 1,000 words does he address the notion that universities should produce leaders.
Can we talk about historians as leaders?
So let’s be clear. If Johnston was simply saying we don’t need 6th-century historians, then to hell with him. If that was his point, then he’s alienated me along with “pretty much the whole historical profession,” as Healey put it. But if Johnston was saying we need graduates who are leaders regardless of their academic focus, then Johnston has a point.
You know who I want leading me? A historian. I want someone who has gone through the pain of analyzing conflicting sources in archives to challenge the status quo. More importantly, I want a historian who can take those skills and use them in their workplace and especially in society. This is someone who knows how to cut through the bullshit and will continually question why things are the way they are.
The sad truth is that many historians lack the ability or desire to step into leadership roles outside of academia. Hell, there are historians still trying to figure out social media, arguably the largest platform they’ll ever have.
If someone asked me who is a 6th-century historian, the first name that comes to mind if Bernard S. Bachrach. But unless you’re into the post-Roman medieval period, you’ve unfortunately never heard of him. That is a shame, because he has written some of the best works on the Merovingians and Carolingians. He’s also opinionated on the writing of military history and some of his interviews has influenced me dramatically. He is a leader, no doubt about it. But his leadership remains confined to medieval academia.
This is the conversation the historical community should be having instead of thumping our chests about the need for historians. We get it. Historians are important. Let’s stop wasting our breath repudiating a statement that someone has already recanted and clarified. Let’s talk about being leaders.