May I be permitted to add a few things to your Monday article about my department, "Problems Plague History" in the April 7 edition of the IC?
First, to set the historical record straight, I did agree to go on the record about the current situation in my department, but I am not the only one to do so because two other colleagues are also quoted in your published article. In addition, Timothy Messer-Kruse did not resign; he was removed as chairman by an 8-4 vote of confidence against his leadership of the department.
The Department of History held its annual awards banquet last Friday evening, at which time we celebrated student excellence in our department, something we have tried to continue in spite of the lack of support from the central administration for history at the University of Toledo. The featured guest speaker for this wonderful evening was Norman J. W. Goda, a well-known scholar of Nazi Germany and WWII. As it happens, Professor Goda also chairs the Department of History at Ohio University, which currently has 24 tenure track faculty at a state university with about the same student enrollment as UT. Other state universities comparable to UT have history departments of about 20 tenure track faculty, including our neighbor to the south Bowling Green State University. The point which your article should have underscored is that the Department of History at the University of Toledo currently has only eight tenure-track faculty, which is only about one-third of the size of comparable institutions in the state of Ohio. Is history really that much less important in Toledo than it is in other parts of Ohio?
As your article indicates, we have had two failed searches in an attempt to hire an outside chairperson for the Department of History at UT. My own perspective is that the remaining faculty members in my department have done their job in a very professional fashion, giving the administration our recommendations from the pool of candidates who applied for our advertised position. If these searches failed, it is because the central administration found the candidates we recommended unsatisfactory for reasons still unknown to the members of our search committee.
This brings me to the key point of this letter supplementing your article. I have questioned from the beginning the need to hire an outside chairperson for the Department of History at UT, even though I am well aware of the advantages of doing so in some situations. However, I believe very strongly that in our situation at this time the amount of money required to hire a chairperson from outside the university could be much better spent hiring regular tenure-track faculty to teach classes for students. We do not need another high-paid administrator to respond to the problems that you say "plague" our department. We need more regular tenure-track faculty in the classroom to teach history courses for our students. Our students deserve nothing less than dedicated, committed faculty in the classroom.
If the leaders of our university are really committed to providing the highest quality academic programs in history, they should begin replacing the ten history faculty we have lost in the last five years, most through retirements, without any replacements, including in all areas of non-Western world history so important in this global era. If we (administrators and faculty) are really committed to making the University of Toledo a more student-centered institution of higher education and one with higher quality academic programs, we need more tenure-track faculty in the classroom, not more administrators.
Larry Wilcox
Professor
History
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