Letter: History department's focus on Europe is appropriate
Feb. 25, 2014Mr. Farmer’s fixation on the supposed inequities of the history department belies a fundamental misunderstanding of academia and of the larger pursuit of knowledge. A crude equalization of the number of faculty in each field by arbitrary quotas would not bring us any closer to the truth, but it would assuage the egos of the guilty, who confuse their own conception of ethics for the perceived sins of others. The columnist decries the fact that a global perspective does not equate with “an egalitarian representation of history.” On this account he is right, but his prescription is wrong. History itself is not egalitarian; it necessarily “privileges” the study of those peoples, societies, and topics that people in later eras feel compelled to study, for a myriad of reasons. Those reasons range from wanting to study those who succeeded at statecraft and empire-building, to wanting to know why certain societies failed in the way they did, to trying to figure out why people acted in the way they did in the face of competing alternatives.
