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History

Strategic plan

The Department of History at Wayne State University has been in existence for nearly ninety years. Facing new challenges in the twenty-first century, the Department of History plans to build upon its past successes and consolidate its reputation as a center of scholarship and teaching excellence at Wayne State University, the premier research institution in the diverse global city of Detroit.

Mission

In an ever more diverse and globalizing world and in concert with the university’s mission, the mission of the Department of History is to:

  • Maintain and develop a national and international reputation for excellence in interdisciplinary historical research and scholarship.
  • Prepare graduate students to succeed in a variety of career paths for which historical knowledge is relevant.
  • Teach undergraduate students historical thinking and the fundamental research, analytical and writing skills necessary for a wide range of careers.
  • Engage in service that enables the department to fulfill its research, teaching and public missions to educate and communicate about the past.

Since 2015, the year of our last Academic Program Review, we revised the undergraduate major and minor requirements and added new graduate degree programs at the master’s level in response to a six-year decline in enrollments. We created a master’s program in public history and we have revitalized and created new dual degree programs with the School of Information Science. We expanded internships for undergraduate and graduate students, added specialized history minors and established history communication as a new area of study that a new communication lab to provide students with training and experience in different digital and social media platforms and access to equipment necessary to achieve those goals. These efforts are integrally linked with career diversity and public history initiatives.

In addition to restructuring the undergraduate and graduate programs, the department has focused on strengthening curriculum and our research and teaching clusters in three major areas, including

1) Social and economic history (urban history; labor and working-class history, the history of Detroit; the history of capitalism and of work).

2) Gender and women’s history and the history of the family (gender ideology and constructions of femininity and masculinity, women and men in the past, family patterns and ideology).

3) Political history (formal and social politics; state formation; foreign and domestic policy; law and legal culture; human rights).

Into each of these clusters is interwoven the history and historical construction of race and ethnicity. We also have a concentration of faculty in the history of science, medicine, environment and technology. These strengths are reflected in the courses and programs we offer and in the research and scholarship we publish.

Program analysis: Strengths, weaknesses and opportunities

At the time of our last program review in 2014-2015, the department faced several significant challenges. Reflecting national trends, the history department had experienced a six-year decline in enrollment in the major and had not explored the expansion of minors. We needed to respond to proposed general education reforms for the university that had the potential to reduce the enrollment base for history. In the graduate program, the number of master’s students in history had declined, which mirrored national statistics and reflected changes in the education labor market and in teacher certification, state core curriculum and continuing education requirements. At the same time, we had administrative staffing issues, with the loss of an academic services officer. Finally, we had a significant number of associate professors who had long been in rank.

In the summer of 2015, the history department had a change in leadership for the first time in twenty years, with the appointment of a new chair, the first woman to hold this position. In the past six years, the department has addressed most of the issues raised in the program review. In the Undergraduate program, we focused on the revision of the major and minor, which involved updating the history curriculum and adapting to WSU’s new general education requirements. In the graduate program, we introduced a new master’s in public history degree, new courses in history communication and digital history and won two new grants to improve doctoral education: a National Endowment for the Humanities Next Generation Humanities PhD Planning Grant and two American Historical Association Career Diversity Grants. At both graduate and undergraduate levels, we are developing internship opportunities and focusing on career diversity. We have taken on issues relating to faculty development, addressing an imbalance in the number of full professors by putting forward for promotion eight new associate professors to the rank of professor. We were successful in promoting three junior faculty to associate professors with tenure and in promoting the lecturer to the rank of senior lecturer. We have improved significantly our annual and endowed fundraising in the department and have been the beneficiaries of significant new endowments and annual gifts.

The chief challenge remaining to the department is to address the issue of enrollment both in student credit hours and in the number of majors and minors. While the latter has been somewhat balanced by the expansion of history minors under the new general education requirements, the number of history minors cannot make up for other losses. The 2014 Self-Study revealed that overall enrollments were down by about 50% since 2009. Analysis of the data reveals that nearly 80% of the enrollment decline occurred between 2009 and 2015, in a pattern that mirrored national trends and reflected shifts within the department. The loss of faculty positions (from 26 to 22 FTF) and the shift a majority of four-credit courses to a majority of three-credit courses (a trend hastened by the design of the new general education requirements) had a deep impact on course scheduling and enrollments. The demographic decline in southwest Michigan and the increased emphasis on labor market-ready degrees, factors that have shaped the university’s enrollment decline, are at the core of the history department as well. We have reduced the number of adjunct faculty in courses, which had an effect on enrollment, but it also has increased the proportion of undergraduate credits taught by full-time faculty. Finally, the COVID-19 pandemic has played a role in declining enrolled student credit hours and the drop in the number of history majors. Currently, we have 78 majors and 94 minors, reflecting a loss of 50 majors in the course of the pandemic.

Opportunities are available to strengthen the department. We remain strong in faculty research accomplishments and with individuals recognized by the university and in the profession for excellence in teaching, mentorship and service. In the past seven years (since 2014), department faculty have published nine sole-authored books, more than 75 peer-reviewed articles, more than 35 book chapters, nearly 90 book reviews and 12 encyclopedia and handbook entries as well as having edited an additional 6 essay collections and numerous regular and special issues of academic journals. Four faculty members have served as editors or co-editors of ranked academic journals, including two still currently serving. There have been 5 external residential fellowships, including fellowships at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard, Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute Schlesinger Library, the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, the Marie Curie Senior Fellowship of the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Study and the Leverhulme Visiting Faculty Fellowship and other external grants in support of research, including grants from the National Science Foundation and the Japan Foundation. The Department of History received a National Endowment for the Humanities Next Generation Humanities PhD Planning Grant and an American Historical Association’s Career Diversity Grant and a Faculty Institute Grant. The history department is, in conjunction with the English department, currently collaborating with the Graduate School on a project funded by the Council of Graduate Schools, to support the Humanities Clinic. Faculty have won several internal research awards, including the Office of Vice President for Research Arts and Humanities Research Enhancement grants (5), Graduate School’s Research Assistantship grants (4), Board of Governor’s Faculty Recognition Awards (at least 5), Humanities Center Fellowships (including the Williamson Distinguished Faculty Fellowship), the Distinguished Graduate Faculty Award and the Distinguished Faculty Fellowship.

With the addition of a Master of Arts in Public History (MAPH) degree program and a revitalized dual degree program with the School of Information Studies, our graduate program continues to mentor top-level graduate students at both the doctoral and master’s levels. While there has been some enrollment decline (exacerbated by the pandemic), time to degree and placement continues to improve. Our undergraduate program has been enhanced by the addition of a mid-level methodology course, the Historian’s Craft, opportunities for internships and new minor fields in H-STEM: History of Science, Technology, Environment and Medicine, in Society and the Environment (Soc-Env), in which we are a partner. Our undergraduate majors continue to participate in the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP), receiving grants that are then augmented by the history department’s Sterne-Lion award.

While the department is justifiably proud of its recent progress, it faces significant challenges as it moves forward. In response, the department has identified five main areas for continuing to strengthen its ongoing program and to improve our standing in the future:

  • Enhance and expand the undergraduate program, including recruitment of majors, minors and students in gen ed and elective history courses; offer more career development and research opportunities for undergraduates.
  • Expand the graduate program, at the M.A. level in particular and enhance funding for graduate students at both the master’s and doctoral levels, with greater professional development.
  • Build relationships and expand undergraduate and graduate internship opportunities as a path to professional development and career-diverse opportunities.
  • Foster diversity, equity and inclusion in student recruitment, curriculum and hiring with targeted replacement of faculty and main and extend diverse representation among faculty.
  • Support and encourage greater community engagement and create more public visibility.

We have a clear vision of where we are headed as a department and are working to enhance the quality of our programs as well as enrich our curriculum for the future.

Pandemic Impact

Since early 2020, the ongoing public health crisis of the pandemic has stalled our progress in addressing the department’s chief challenges. The economic impact of COVID-19 has included specific losses in enrollments, majors, revenue and—most importantly—the impact on the character, content and quality of our work as teachers, scholars and members of the university community. Coincident with the state’s stay-at-home orders in March 2020, all our faculty and staff moved to remote work and online teaching. The transition to new methods of instructional delivery was made rapidly over two weeks and the faculty responded well, aided by the Office of Teaching and Learning and our staff. The overwhelmingly online class/teaching schedule was again in place in the fall 2020 and winter 2021 semesters, with almost all faculty teaching online.

Organizing classes from the beginning as online (synchronous or asynchronous) courses has meant new challenges in technology but also in pedagogy, reorganizing or creating new course content and new methods of delivery from Big Blue Button (winter and spring/summer 2020) to Zoom (since summer 2020). Faculty have responded by taking online workshops and attending seminars with new educational software, including, for some, more extensive use of Canvas, Teams, Zoom, Perusall and other online teaching tools. The transition has been time-consuming, but it also has strengthened the department’s offerings and allowed us to launch a pilot online dual degree master’s program.

Equally important, faculty research and scholarship has been affected by the pandemic. The ban on university-supported travel, instituted in March 2020, coincided with the closure of libraries and archival repositories nationally and internationally. Combined with the cancellation of national and international conferences, including the department’s own North American Labor History Conference in 2020 and our annual research symposia, the crisis has shaped how we communicate about the past and also limited our outreach. In response to these limits, the Otis-Reider Graduate Research Symposium (2020 and 2021) and the Sterne-Lion Undergraduate Research Colloquium (2021) were moved to online platforms, with virtual awards ceremonies in 2020 and 2021 and Twitter takeovers in 2020 and 2021.

For faculty, travel restrictions followed the cancellation of conference plans, transfers to online virtual talks and conferences and the closure of libraries and research repositories central to historical research. Those on leave from winter 2020 into fall 2021 have not been able to utilize funds to conduct research and/or could not fully use research time and sabbatical leaves for travel. While we have continued to research and publish in academic and public forums, the pandemic continues to place restrictions on the extent of research possible.

Diversity, equity and inclusion: Framing our progress

The Department of History is committed to diversity, equity and inclusion) and aims to weave it fully into the fabric of the department. As the American Historical Association recently stated, “history must inform our actions as we work to create a more just society.” The department already has made significant steps to support diversity, equity and inclusion, including hiring and retaining a diverse faculty, selecting the first female chair in the department’s history and seeking to recruit and support a more diverse body of students as majors.

Twenty percent of the faculty currently represents traditionally under-represented groups and half of the faculty are women, although these percentages will change with upcoming retirements. The commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion, however, is exemplified by the leadership of history faculty in the Center for Latino/a and Latin American Studies, the Center for the Study of Citizenship, the Cohn-Haddow Center for Judaic Studies and the Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies (GSW) Program. The department realizes that much more needs to be done in the department and in community-engaged scholarship.

Undergraduate program

The Department of History has a long history of mentoring future academic and public historians and engaged alumni. This makes sense. The department houses eleven winners of the President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching and eleven faculty who have received College of Liberal Arts and Sciences teaching awards. It offers history majors, minors and general education students a global education and the tools of historical analysis and communication to build careers.

Our number one challenge remaining from the last APR was and is enrollment and, as a central component, the recruitment of undergraduate majors and minors. Since the last strategic plan, the history department has revised the major and minor requirements, established in collaboration with other departments four interdisciplinary minors, in H-STEM (History of Science, Technology, Environment and Medicine), Society in the Environment, and Digital Humanities, added a strictly in-house Minor in Public History. We introduced an intermediate research and methods course required of majors and minors and we have revised, updated and added course offerings, including a number of online and intermediate courses. We continue to discuss how to best introduce history at the survey level and the possibility of common learning outcomes for introductory courses, in line with scaffolding the major.

The number of enrolled history majors has declined over the course of the pandemic from an average of about 120-130 to 78 currently. Even at 94, the number of minors still has room to grow. Our revised curriculum has provided us with the basis for that growth. We continue to build and expand our strong undergraduate research program and, before the crisis, had an increasing number of students take advantage of opportunities to share their research at local, regional and national conferences. Crucial to sustaining that research program has been the Sterne-Lion Undergraduate Research Award, which has provided funding for history majors and minors – under the mentorship of a faculty member – to conduct research in archives domestically and as far away as Great Britain, Poland and China. These efforts were affected by the global pandemic, as travel restrictions and funding restrictions saw a pause in Sterne-Lion and Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program applications.

These efforts represent steps that the department has taken to address a decline in the university’s student enrollment and diminished interest nationwide in history as a major. History enrollments nationally have declined significantly in the past ten years. The department has taken important steps to mitigate these declines, but increasing enrollments is at the center of our strategic plan.

Focus on these changes began with the department’s thoughtful and proactive response to the new general education program, which demonstrated faculty willingness to adjust and adapt to new challenges. While all history courses previously approved for general education were rolled over into the new program, the department secured for the first time general education status for an additional eleven courses, including three survey courses in United States history (HIS 1060 (new), HIS 2040 and HIS 2050) for the civic inquiry (CI) requirement and classes on Detroit, ethnicity and race and African American history, which count toward the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) requirement. These courses have seen significantly improved enrollments. Faculty also have shifted their teaching to increase the number of full-time faculty teaching introductory courses, one of the primary conduits for recruiting new students and new majors. Two key determinants of the department’s enrollment decline, however, were the shift from four-credit to three-credit courses as the basis for general education and, second, the pandemic, which was reflected in CLAS enrollments across the board. Reversing enrollment declines must begin by recognizing continuing trends and adapting to them.

Among the improvements the history department has made to the quality of the curriculum, the introduction of the Historian’s Craft, the intermediate research and methods course, stands out as of particular importance. The department’s last program review highlighted the need for such a course to better prepare students for advanced coursework and the junior/senior research seminar. Like the seminar, each section of the Historian’s Craft focuses on a different topic, but the course is designed to help students develop the skills essential to the discipline. It is not simply an additional capstone class; rather, Historian’s Craft prepares majors and minors by teaching and improving their skills in historical research, analysis and communication. This course has in turn enabled the department to further fine-tune its assessment program. We continue as well to work on revamping, rebranding and rethinking our curriculum to incorporate courses that will engage students and recruit new majors.

The assessment program was initially adopted before the last strategic plan and involved the development of specific learning outcomes for each level of the major and for each individual class.  Those outcomes include rigorous training in historical inquiry and the analysis of evidence, the interpretation of historical arguments, the use of methodologies and theories, the application of research skills and the art of expository writing. Faculty now evaluate final projects in the Historian’s Craft and the junior/senior research seminar papers to determine the extent to which majors have acquired these skills. The evaluations and surveys of students in both classes serve as a guide for further honing major requirements and courses. Importantly, preliminary analysis of assessment data has shown improvement in student performance in the Junior-Senior Seminar (HIS 5996) for students who completed Historian’s Craft (HIS 3000). Once the majority of majors have completed the Historian’s Craft and the junior/senior research seminar, we will have a more complete picture of student development and outcomes. The department is undertaking a more systematic evaluation of required courses and instituting changes as deemed necessary to improve student achievement of learning outcomes. With these already implemented and impending changes, the department is striving to ensure that students hone the critical faculties they need to excel in their chosen careers.

The department's past success in achieving a high student retention rate and in enriching the curriculum stemmed in large part from a strong culture of hands-on advising headed by the director of undergraduate studies. In 2014, the department welcomed Gayle McCreedy as our full-time advisor in the department. She has worked tirelessly to enhance retention and ensure timely completion of graduation requirements with close advising of incoming and continuing majors and through several outreach programs. This work has enabled the director of undergraduate studies to focus on developing programs to enrich the major experience outside as well as inside the classroom and thus further augment retention and the quality of the major. Beginning in 2020, the department advisor’s time was and is now shared with the Department of Anthropology and, at least temporarily, the Employment and Labor Relations Program. We have, however, benefited from the continuity of contact that a department advisor provides. The department continues to try to expand its internship and public history programs, develop materials and social media for recruitment and retention of students and advise students about diverse career opportunities.

In our efforts, the history department needs enhanced resources for marketing and recruitment, professional support in addition to the current, largely voluntary and unpaid work of faculty and staff.

Graduate program

The Department of History has a small, vibrant graduate program tailored to the needs of students from diverse backgrounds and with a wide range of career goals. We are presently ranked 92 by "U.S. News & World Report." In 2021, the history department broke into the top 100 programs for the first time. Our department awards a doctoral degree, a master’s degree in history (M.A.), a master’s degree in public history (MAPH) and a Graduate Bridge Certificate in World History. Master’s students may concurrently earn degrees in law (MA/JD) or library and information science (MA/MLIS and MAPH/MLIS). Our graduate students also complete graduate certificates offered by other programs and many master’s and doctoral students elect to earn archival administration or nonprofit management certificates to complement their history degrees and expand their career horizons. We currently have approximately twenty doctoral students and forty master’s students enrolled across our degree programs.

Over the past six years, we have modernized our doctoral program. We have thoroughly engaged with the American Historical Association’s career diversity initiative, receiving both a Career Diversity Workshop grant and a Career Diversity Fellowship implementation grant, one of only twenty universities nationwide to receive both. We instituted a new public history examination field for comprehensive exams; we replaced our foreign language and cognate requirements with a more flexible skills acquisition requirement; and we require a course focused pedagogy, professionalization and career exploration (HIS 7832) for all Ph.D. and M.A. students, to complement our existing required research methodology course (HIS 7830).

We created the MAPH program in 2015, which has become a significant component of our master’s cohort. We likewise created the MAPH/MLIS joint degree, in partnership with our colleagues in the School of Information Science (SIS), to appeal to students who want to combine public history training with their skills in library science. More recently, we revised our M.A. program to require 30, rather than 35, credit hours and changed our major fields from several regional and topical specializations to U.S., Europe and the world. These updates bring our M.A. degree in line with comparable programs, lower the cost of our master’s degree and reduce the time required to complete it.

In fall 2021, we will begin a two-year pilot program for an online MA/MLIS, which will allow us to meet a growing demand from SIS students (the MLIS is a fully online degree) and evaluate interest in an online master’s program. Finally, we revised our graduate bridge certificate in world history to reduce the required credit hours from 15 to 12 and expand the range of courses that can be counted toward the degree.

Our graduate program has a robust internship program, in partnership with museums, libraries and cultural institutions in the metropolitan Detroit area, both in service of the MAPH curriculum, for which an internship is required, but also in the doctoral program. History took the lead in creating and administering a successful interdisciplinary Humanities Clinic as the result of a National Endowment for the Humanities NextGen PhD grant and through it, several of our students have completed paid internships working for Detroit-area civic and nonprofit organizations. We also have introduced coursework in digital history and history communication.

Our department has made great strides in modernizing our curriculum and providing career development, but we lag behind our peers at other institutions and in other WSU social science departments in terms of recruiting and retaining students from underrepresented groups. In the past decade, we have enrolled only three African American doctoral students. One was fully funded with a dean’s diversity fellowship but did not complete the degree and two did not receive funding packages. We currently have only one Ph.D. student of color. Our master’s students are more diverse than our doctoral students, yet approximately 86% of current master’s students identify as white. We actively recruit from a diverse applicant pool. Because we are able to offer funding to a few of our admitted students, we cannot compete with other institutions’ offers of full or partial funding packages for excellent applicants from underrepresented groups, even at the master’s level. Whenever possible, we pursue funding through the Graduate School’s diversity initiatives. At most, this provides one doctoral and one master’s scholarship a year.

The chief limitation of our ability to recruit graduate students and to guide our existing students to timely completion of their degrees is a lack of adequate funding. Our doctoral program is smaller and more selective than it was a decade ago, yet we are still unable to fully fund all of our students. In any given year, we can reliably offer funding packages that include tuition scholarships, stipends and health insurance to only seven doctoral students. In recent years, we have had as many as five of our six GTA lines already committed before admission decisions are made, leaving only one available to recruit new students or support students completing their degrees. We are allotted seven Graduate Professional Scholarships to support students in our three degree-granting programs; in an average year, demand for these tuition scholarships outpaces supply by a factor of three.

In terms of resources, the most pressing need for our graduate program is expanded financial support for our students. Two additional GTA lines and an additional Rumble fellowship would greatly enhance our efforts to recruit and retain the highest-caliber doctoral students and would allow our program to maintain its current size. At the master’s level, additional full and partial tuition scholarships would support our efforts to expand our enrollments and recruit exceptional students. Our master’s program experienced a contraction after the state government changed tuition benefits for secondary school teachers and began to accept a wider range of degrees for professional advancement.

Over the past two years, due to the popularity of the MAPH program and the MA/MLIS and MAPH/MLIS degrees, our master’s applications have increased and enrollments are beginning to recover. We welcomed twelve new master’s students in the 2020-21 academic year and we anticipate ten additional master’s students will matriculate in fall 2021. Each year we have a strong pool of applicants to all of our degree programs, only to see a number of the most promising admitted students matriculate elsewhere because we were unable to offer them any sort of funding package. In sum, the department requires additional support for graduate education commensurate with the caliber of the research faculty it has assembled to train students.

Faculty hires and support

The department has been extraordinarily successful in recruiting an excellent and diverse faculty. The department currently is comprised of eleven men and eleven women, including on Latina and two African Americans. Moreover, in the past, the department's hiring strategy has extended its offerings with the inclusion of scholars who have added new perspectives in African, African American, Native American, Asian and Eastern European history, while at the same time deepening its thematic strengths in urban, labor, gender and women’s history and political history. We have increased the role, visibility and course offerings from faculty in the history of science, technology, the environment and medicine. For the first time since 2000, however, the history department faces the prospect of a wave of upcoming retirements that will change our demographic profile, potentially weaken our curriculum and program and challenge us in rebuilding the department’s future.

In order to maintain its outstanding research and teaching profile, the department will need to replace retiring or departing faculty, about a third of whom are approaching or have reached the age at which many professors retire. While it is unknown when individual faculty will retire, we have already begun to see a demographic shift with retirement this past year and two faculty members in phased retirement in fall 2021. The department aims to fill these vacancies with colleagues who will add new dimensions to the three areas of strength we outlined at the beginning—in the history of women and gender; in social and economic history; and in the history of politics and policy. These targeted fields are and will continue to be important in maintaining the department’s core graduate and undergraduate programs in world and United States history. They are, moreover, replacement positions that have been adjusted to reflect scholarly trends, curricular needs and student interests.

The department would like to prioritize two replacement positions.

First, we will need to replace after retirement our current specialist in the field of labor and working-class history, who also is a scholar of gender and women’s history. Recognizing our historic strength in this field, especially in the graduate program and the strategic partnership we have had with the Reuther Library, it will be important for the department to hire a historian whose specialization is in the history of work and the labor movement, as they intersect with gender and race, subjects vital to understanding the history of Detroit, the State of Michigan and the nation. That field currently attracts the largest number of graduate applications and advisees. The annual labor history course (cross-listed in economics) is a required course for the employment and labor relations major and the M.A. in Employment and Labor Relations. Annually it has the largest upper-division enrollments in the department. A replacement hire, especially one at the associate level, makes sense for the department going forward.

Second, as a replacement for our current historian of medicine and the environment (already in phased retirement), an environmental historian or a historian of public and/or environmental health, ideally with a focus on Detroit, who would complement the department’s specializations in urban history and enhance the university’s urban mission. Given that three of our actual or potential retirements are historians in the field of gender and women’s history, we would like to add a historian of sexuality and gender to enhance our offerings and cross-listed courses in gender, women’s and sexuality studies. Both our two priority hires have the possibility of contributing to our public history program and we would benefit by bringing on board someone with training or experience in digital history and/or public history.

From a long-term perspective, the department would benefit, in the wake of likely future retirements, by hiring a historian of the Middle East and/or of Middle Eastern immigration, a position that might suggest a joint appointment in the Near Eastern studies program (CMLLC). The Detroit metropolitan area has the largest Arab population outside the Middle East and an historian of that region, housed in the department, would answer student demands for more courses in the field and add to the world history offerings. The graduate and undergraduate programs would be strengthened by the addition of a specialist in 19th-century American history to replace the faculty member scheduled to begin phased retirement in 2021-2022, with potential subfields in legal/constitutional history, political history and/or African American history. Finally, we would like to see the expansion of our Asian offerings with the addition of a historian of China or Southeast Asia.

In line with DEI standards, we need to note that among the first faculty to retire will be four faculty whose retirement will create greater imbalances in the department by reducing female representation by nearly a third and representation among Latino/Latina faculty by half. (That faculty line is currently held by and likely will be replaced within LLAS).

Development and goals

This year (2021), we received as a legacy gift a more than $2 million commitment to establish fellowships in history in the M.A. and Ph.D. programs. This gift, while it will only take effect in the future, will go a long way in addressing a long-term goal of finding greater support for our graduate programs. The fund, which will support our students in the future, complements earlier endowments and endowed funds received since our last program review.

Our endowed accounts currently support nearly than $40,000 in annual student tuition and research awards, more than double what the department was awarding in 2015. From a base of $3,000 in 2015 in annual giving, the department now receives more than $20,000 annually, which is used to supplement the general fund and provide additional student and faculty research support. While this is a significant increase from the past, it serves only to supplement our current general fund budget and does not replace university funds. Moreover, we still depend on graduate teaching assistantships and a single fellowship with stipend and benefits (the Rumble) to provide support for our graduate program.

Establishing, building, re-building and expanding our relationships with donors has been a team effort, including past gifts (among them some endowed funds), annual giving, newly endowed scholarships and trust or legacy gifts. The department chair, working with CLAS Philanthropy and Alumni Relations and in league with the social media team (including newsletter, Facebook and Twitter editors), individual faculty and staff, has strengthened communications with donors. The department has opened its doors and invited alumni and donors to an expanded range of annual events that now include distinguished alumni speaker events, the Sterne-Lion Undergraduate Colloquium, Otis-Reider Graduate Research Symposium and annual award ceremony. These latter have been held virtually since the pandemic, but they constitute the backbone of our department’s annual activities.

Goals for development in the future should align with the goals of the department. They might include funds for tuition grants and/or stipends for graduate and undergraduate interns; scholarships (tuition grants or stipends), especially at the master’s level, to support history M.A., MAPH and dual degree students and/or a dissertation fellowship; support for Faculty Research, perhaps a rotating endowed chair and/or research/travel support; grants in support of our public history and/or digital history and history communications initiative, including for faculty work and/or professional development in digital history/history communications skills

Staffing needs

No department of our size (with 22 full-time tenure-track or tenured faculty, a full-time lecturer, several PTFs, six GTAs and a variable number of graduate fellows and research assistants, about 100 majors and 80 minors (as of March 2021) and a growing alumni community) can do its work without the support of sufficient clerical and accounting staff. This is exacerbated by the history department having neither an academic service officer nor an associate chair. In fact, it has not had a full staff since 2013.

While understaffing in the department dates to 2011 when we lost two secretarial positions, we were able to retain an academic service officer until December 2013, when the academic service officer transferred to an academic advisor II position and the department faced the possibility of having no support staff at all. In January 2014, we were assigned a single front-office clerical worker (Office Clerk II), which reduced the front-office by half with a lower rank and fewer skills. One aspect is that we have had no access (since July 2015) to a ProCard (with the loss of specialized purchasing capacity) due to the shortcomings in the training of the person who held the position.

In July 2015, the college hired a part-time financial staff person (40% time) to reconcile books, manage purchases and invoices and do some forensic accounting, much needed since the books had not been fully reconciled since at least 2011. While the department saw significant improvement in maintaining accounts and in payment and recording of expenses, there remained much undone work and work that was done was frequently beyond the job description and/or pay grade of the person doing the work.

In July 2019, we lost our front-office staff person, who was not replaced until November 2019. Our current front office staff (hired as Office Clerk II) has an expanded skill set. She has performed at a high level of competence in the job, even under the less-than-optimal conditions of the pandemic. Her hire leaves us with sufficient staff to keep up with most paperwork, but we continued to feel the effects of the loss of the academic service officer in 2013. Moreover, our part-time accounting staff person is currently a part-time worker who likely will retire within a few years. Planning for her replacement, with a full-time staff person at academic service officer rank, would benefit the department by finally providing adequate staff coverage.

In 2020, the Department of History had a significant change in advising staff. Our nearly full-time academic advisor (shared with the GSW program) was assigned a second major department (Anthropology) and has since taken on several other short-term advising work as a substitute including Economics and Public Health (temporary) and Employment and Labor Relations (ongoing). She further has probation duties. This has meant we have gone from having an academic advisor (90%) who could take on some administrative and department communication and website tasks to having an advisor 40-45% time, leaving us little flexibility in longer-term projects on curriculum, recruitment and marketing.

The lack of sufficient staff has had a significant impact on the history department:

  • The loss of the academic service officer in 2013 and a higher-level secretarial position before that has meant that the department chair has no direct support for planning and implementing necessary curricular revisions and department career emphases and much less support for the standard day-to-day operations of the department.
  • Recruitment and marketing and the coordination of social media that might well fall within the purview of an experienced academic service officer are simply beyond the workload capacity of current faculty and staff.
  • The lack of staff experienced in event planning has meant that the faculty involved must plan all events the department holds, with the office clerk providing support only for room scheduling, catering and travel expense reimbursement.
  • While the department, particularly the department chair, has been quite successful in soliciting individual donors, the lack of staff has created substantial barriers to launching other potential development events.
  • The Graduate and Undergraduate programs have lacked necessary staff support, at a time when the tasks associated with assessment were escalated. The Graduate and Undergraduate Directors have no staff support for basic data entry and the lack of staff in particular has affected student recruitment and record-keeping.

While we continue to operate despite these deficits, the long-term well-being of the Department of History requires that we be allowed to fill the academic services officer position left empty since December 2013, especially in the likely event that our part-time financial staff person leaves her position and retires.

Conclusion

The Department of History looks forward to another decade of excellence, robust development and wise deployment of the university’s resources. In strategically planning for the future, the department believes that modest investments in graduate funding and the ongoing replacement and shaping of its faculty will allow it to achieve its mission, thereby nurturing a true center of excellence at this university and advancing Wayne State University's reputation as a premier, visionary urban research institution.

Revised by Elizabeth Faue, Elizabeth Lublin, Tracy Neumann, Aaron Retish and Marsha Richmond and reviewed by the Executive Committee of the Department of History, 2019-2021.