The United States is rapidly shedding historians—and the national security implications are dire. Even as it grapples with challenges and conflicts rooted in complicated regional histories, the United States continues a decade-and-a-half-long path of defunding history departments and deprioritizing history education. This threatens to produce a generation of policymakers and advisors whose view of the world is increasingly, and dangerously, shallow.
The United States is rapidly shedding historians—and the national security implications are dire. Even as it grapples with challenges and conflicts rooted in complicated regional histories, the United States continues a decade-and-a-half-long path of defunding history departments and deprioritizing history education. This threatens to produce a generation of policymakers and advisors whose view of the world is increasingly, and dangerously, shallow.
History is in an unprecedented crisis. Battered by budget cuts and a refusal to replace retiring historians, university history departments are now rapidly shrinking; a 2022 study of Midwestern history departments found that the number of permanent departmental faculty had declined by nearly a third since 2010. That decline continues to accelerate as university hiring of historians remains stuck at levels well below what is necessary to replace retirements.
As a consequence, trained historians struggle to find jobs in the field: The rate at which people with history PhDs find tenure-track employment within four years of graduation has declined dramatically, from 54 percent for the 2013 PhD cohort to just 27 percent for the 2017 cohort. In 2022, only a miserable 10 percent of the 2019 and 2020 cohorts were employed as full-time faculty members. Departments have responded with drastic cuts to the number of historians they train; since 2010, the number of PhDs earned in history—which had tracked with jobs in the field since the 1970s—has dropped by 31.9 percent.
That might sound like a problem solely for academics, but as departments wither, the number of students they can teach in general education settings and the number of secondary school history teachers they can train declines too, along with the pace of historical research. Some schools, such as Wheeling Jesuit University, have gone so far as to cut history departments entirely, while other schools cut majors and graduate programs, as with the disappearance of the history graduate program at Tulsa University. Other schools, such as University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point and University of Evansville, threatened to cut the history major but were forced to back down.
At the same time as they face these budget pressures, history departments have also come under pressure as right-wing figures such as Christopher Rufo launch politically motivated assaults on the humanities, often with the backing of state legislators and governors. That said, cuts to the humanities in general and history departments in particular are a bipartisan disease, with red states loudly shuttering programs and blue states doing so quietly.
The field has been battered from two directions. A longstanding trend of universities dispensing with robust general education requirements in favor of greater degree specialization left student enrollment in history degrees vulnerable. Then, following the 2008 financial crisis, the share of history majors among college students declined sharply as students attempted to move away from degrees in the humanities, believing they offered poor economic prospects. And while that is not actually true (history majors do just fine in the broader economy), public perception still motivated student behavior. In turn, university administrators justified history department cuts, which frequently come in the form of simply not replacing retiring professors.
Yet even as enrollment in history courses seems to have largely stabilized after 2017, universities continued to cut back on history faculty in line with a broader disinvestment from the liberal arts. For many departments, current enrollment declines are primarily a consequence of insufficient staffing. The decline of history in U.S. higher education was a policy choice, not an inevitable consequence of market forces.
This policy-created collapse of the history discipline has direct impacts on national security. The Department of Defense is one of the largest employers of academic historians in the United States, in positions ranging from office training as part of the service academies or Professional Military Education to unit-level command historians responsible for chronicling and analyzing the operations of their units and fielding requests for historical data.
Department of Defense historians also curate the histories of entire branches (as with the Naval History and Heritage Command) and engage in publishing in support of the military’s mission (as with the Army University Press). Wayne Lee, vice president of the Society for Military History, estimates that the Department of Defense employs roughly 300 historians with PhDs at any given time. The Department of State does much the same with its Office of the Historian and broad reliance on historical expertise as a form of knowledge about other countries.
That the U.S. military establishment employs so many historians should be little surprise. Writers as far back as Thucydides and Polybius, both historians with military experience, have recognized that the best way to train future officers and leaders is through a careful study of history. No less a figure than Napoleon himself quipped that the best way to become a good commander was to “peruse again and again the campaigns of Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, Gustavus Adolphus, Turenne, Eugene, and Frederick the Great.”
For military branches that aim to be learning institutions and avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, the study of their own history and military history more broadly is essential. History may not always provide simple lessons, but it does provide the only time-tested route to strategic wisdom. U.S. military doctrine is heavily rooted in historical exemplars; the strategic thinking, for instance, that underlined the 2007 surge in Iraq was heavily influenced by historical readings of 20th-century British counterinsurgency operations in Malaya. Counterinsurgency theory in general relies heavily as well on theories produced in the failed French counterinsurgency in Algeria. Of course at the same time, reassessments of those historical examples—for instance, arguments that British success in Malaya depended on factors which could not be replicated in other wars—may in turn force reconsideration and greater sophistication of the doctrines.
That process is now endangered, as the programs that the federal government relies on to train the historians it needs exist primarily within public university systems where history, as a discipline, is collapsing. For the past few years, federal jobs have represented a lifeboat away from the sinking ship of academic history for qualified historians. But the rapid decline of new historians means that this supply of staff is drying up. And as the pace of historical research and publishing slows, the historical insights policymakers need to make wise decisions will be fewer and slower in coming.
But the national security implications of the decline of history extend beyond direct federal hiring. Democracies such as the United States rely on the public to set broad strategic priorities through elections and on civilian leaders to translate those priorities into executable policies. Fostering historical knowledge in the public at large is also an important aspect of U.S. competitiveness.
As far back as the 1947 Truman Commission on higher education, the United States recognized that broad liberal arts education was essential for preparing a student “for performing his duties as a man, a parent, and a citizen” and imparting “the values, attitudes, knowledge, and skills that will equip him to live rightly and well in a free society.”
That basic reality has not changed. The American public is now asked to use its votes to implicitly make decisions on U.S. strategic priorities in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and the Indo-Pacific. The officer corps is not immune to the decline of history in civilian universities either, given that ROTC graduates constitute a simple majority of all newly commissioned officers in every branch of the United States military.
For better and for worse, history informs how leaders make decisions as well, be it then-President John F. Kennedy considering the lessons of Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August during the Cuban Missile Crisis, or the more detrimental impact of the popularity of the works of Victor Davis Hanson in the George W. Bush administration during the early days of the Global War on Terrorism. Leaders will look to the past to inform their decisions. There is thus a strong national security interest in ensuring that the history available to policymakers speaks to current questions and is up-to-date and rigorous.
At a deeper level, of course, what happens in higher education also filters down to secondary education, which reaches functionally the entire voting population of the United States. As history programs continue to contract and thus teach fewer undergraduates and master’s-level students, the supply of properly trained history teachers available for U.S. high schools also dwindles. Indeed, this is already happening, with a majority of history teachers in grades 7-12 lacking a college degree in history. That the quality of the public’s understanding of its own history, and thus its ability to make wise political decisions, has declined as a result should hardly be a surprise.
Fortunately, this is not an insurmountable problem. For one, the public still broadly values history education, even if it is unaware of how badly the quality of such education has declined in the United States. In one poll, 84 percent of Americans agreed that history was at least as important to learn in school as business or engineering.
And precisely because the declines in the liberal arts in general and history in particular have been driven by political trends instead of market forces, they can be reversed by political action and at relatively little cost. The National Endowment for the Humanities, which funds humanities research, including history research, has a budget only 2 percent the size of the matching science agency, the National Science Foundation, which was funded to the tune of $9.88 billion in fiscal year 2023. Pushing even a tiny fraction of what the United States spends on scientific research or defense into revitalizing the discipline of history would serve to breathe new life into a field that makes a vital contribution to U.S. security.
Having policymakers, military leaders, and citizens who understand history broadly is a strategic priority. It is long past time for the U.S. political and defense establishments to treat it like one.
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