[You have] very painful debates, which run on a kind of rough
generational fault line...:Anoldergenerationwhodidpolitical,
economic, intellectual history. A younger generation who works
on identity, construction of the memory, who often uses race,
class, gender, those group identity questions, as analytical criteria,
but many of whom don’t. It’s most painful in American history,
where there’s a really sharp fault line. In European [history], my
generation has somewhat at least a partial sympathy for those
questions that were formed in part by some canonical authors of
the new younger generation, so it’s not as sharp a break as in
American. But there certainly is a lot of generational tension.Nevertheless, this scholar perceives strong consensus, at least when it
comes to the evaluation of graduate students:
When I grade graduate application folders with an American his-
torian with whom I have nothing in common generationally or in
training, our grades will hardly vary...Inhistory, certainly, we
have very good consensus. In history, I think in effect we do have
certain shared values about commitment to doing certain kinds of
work, [the] ability to write in an effective and interesting way...I
think English has much less consensus than we have, due to much
more serious generational splits—due in the end to the lack of the
method, since there are many methods competing. In history, for
all the debates, there’s a lot of consensus about how it ought to
be done.The intradisciplinary cleavages that these scholars acknowledge
do not prevent them or any other of the panelists from history I in-
terviewed from being strongly committed to excellence as a general
principle. Some express reservations—for example, one would re-
place the metaphor of “cream rising to the top” with “a metaphor of
On Disciplinary Cultures / 85