It strikes me that historians are victims of our incredible success in the past generation. The contraction in tenure-track jobs has meant that pretty much anyone anywhere who lands a TT job is pretty darn good at everything. Places like directional unis now hire assistant proffies who have books out before tenure. The profession is more engaged in research than it ever was, and we’re rapidly professionalizing the practice of public history to boot. And this is the thanks we get: research is seen as a competitor with rather than instrumental to our teaching, and in any case is too expensive when they could hire two adjunct lecturers for the price of me.

Maybe we should all have just rolled over after tenure and gone to sleep.