Friends,
I have some news to share with you about the Geneseo Center for Local and Municipal History. I feel like I did some good work, but it is time for me to step away and focus on other things. Frankly, I give up. The Center, really, was my office. We did a lot, but we did not have any meaningful support from the upper administration at my college and at the SUNY HQ.
Last Super Sunday, I was scheduled to speak at a conference in Albany, sponsored by the SUNY system. It was called Public Good U: Strengthening the Case for Public Higher Education. If you read my blog, or have spoken with me for more than a few minutes, you know how strongly I feel about the importance of supporting public higher ed. Foul weather prevented me from making the trip. It snowed heavily the night before, and all along the route, and I would have had to leave Rochester at 4AM to pick up a student in Geneseo and make it to Albany in time. It was too risky. But the truth is that my heart was not in it. The storm was a relief. I have become demoralized, and I am ready for something else. I will continue to teach and write at Geneseo, a school that I love, but I am going to let go of my heavy local history commitments. Call it a strategic withdrawal in the name of preserving peace of mind. It has nothing to do with any of you.
I came up with the idea for a Geneseo Center for Local and Municipal History in the fall of 2018. I did so with the support of colleagues in my department at the college. It all began humbly—a small grant of about $850, and then a luncheon meeting in February of 2019 attended by about 75 people, to discuss the development of a program that would place students in the offices of government-appointed historians to work on local history projects. Some of you were there. We parted that afternoon enthusiastic about the possibilities, but daunted by the challenges.
I was excited. I was energized. I know that some of you were, too. I wanted this to work. The program began, entirely by coincidence, during the 100th anniversary of New York’s Government-Appointed Historians Law, enacted in 1919 to commemorate, in part, the state’s young men slaughtered in the First World War. Only Connecticut has a similar statute on the books. Under state law, New York requires every municipality to have an official historian. When you do the math, that comes out to one historian for each of the five boroughs of New York City, 12 Community Historians in Manhattan, 62 city historians, 932 town historians, and 544 village historians. Add to that the 62 county historians, the scores of small historical societies, and the dozens of small archives, collections, and history museums, and you have the foundation for a vibrant local history community.
Some of these local historians are more active than others. Some have more resources at their disposal. A huge percentage of them serve as volunteers. Many of them are retirees, doing work they love with great enthusiasm in the name of preserving their community’s past. To varying degrees, they coordinate their efforts, and meet together to discuss common interests and concerns, like the meeting of the Government Appointed Historians of Western New York (GAHWNY) or the Association of Public Historians in New York State (APHNYS). I attend occasionally. It is a hodge-podge, with a thousand moving parts, but the work they do is exciting and important.
I had never written a grant proposal before I began this work. Turns out, I had a knack for it. We received a small grant from the Rochester Area Community Foundation that allowed me to employ several Geneseo history majors in the construction of a website telling the Indigenous story of Geneseo. With the help of my friends and colleagues in the college’s grants office–Anne Baldwin, Sue Rubright, Sheila McCart, and Betsy Colon–I then brought in a nice chunk of money from the National Endowment for the Humanities that allowed me, for a time, to employ a director for the Center. Dr. Joel Helfrich did some amazing work with Geneseo students. Then I received a much larger grant from the Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation on Long Island. We established the Robert David Lion Gardiner Semiquincentennial Summer Fellowship Program, placing students in local historians’ offices to work on projects connected to the 250th Anniversary of American Independence. It was a truly unique program. We provided well-paying fellowships to students from Geneseo, to be sure, but also Canisius, Albany, Brooklyn College, Potsdam, New Paltz, Cornell, and Stony Brook University. Between these two programs we paid 71 students to return to their hometowns and perform work that was important to their communities and that was, for some of them, a life-changing experience. Two of the students wrote books! I worked with such great professors at my partner institutions: Ben Carp, Jon Parmenter, Sheila McIntyre, Tom Baker, Maeve Kane and Rich Bailey all stand out. I met some fantastic local historians doing such important work. In addition to these 71 students, I oversaw dozens of directed studies and internships where students examined the history of their hometowns, honed their research skills, and answered important questions about their community’s past. We worked through a global pandemic. I am immensely proud of the work these students did, and I got to see and learn so much.
Those of you who worked with us, I am sure, will get that. It was good work and it is vital, in my view, for the health of the republic. At a time when our nation is governed by a tyrant at war with the entire historical enterprise, an enemy of facts and tough questions, this work is more important than ever.
At the Albany conference, I wanted to show off the work of the Gardiner fellows. But I also intended to say that while I welcome SUNY’s recent embrace of the importance of civic education and creating colleges that serve the public good, it’s all eyewash without system support. If I am going to make the case for strengthening public higher education, the most significant obstacle I have to overcome is SUNY Central and the Chancellor’s office, which in its allocation of the money appropriated by the state legislature is making budgeting decisions that are strangling colleges like mine and literally killing the sorts of programs that enriched the education of scores of students.
The Gardiner Foundation Semiquincentennial Summer Fellowship, as a program operated at Geneseo, will be coming to an end this year because drastic budget cuts have left us unable to contribute the matching funds required by our funder. I will continue to work with Gardiner, as a consultant, on a new program. It will be headed by a Rochester non-profit that is interested in civic education. The lesson, I hope, is clear, and it truly pains me to write these words: It is easier for me to provide high impact and meaningful educational experiences to students in SUNY by working with a non-profit outside of SUNY than trying to do something on campus.
Indeed, we have another civic education program which we were in line to have funded by the Teagle Foundation—Students in Geneseo’s American Cornerstones Project would spend two semesters on campus during the freshman year reading significant works in the American civic tradition, examining themes of equality and inequality, freedom and unfreedom, community and individualism, and citizenship and exclusion. Then, over the summer, they would go home, work with local historians and write or otherwise produce a work that looks at one or more of these themes in their community. Our funder was enthusiastic. We were, she said, the only college in the United States doing this. Geneseo was truly unique. We have had to withdraw from a grant competition that would surely have provided us $300,000 to implement this program because budget cuts have left us with too few faculty to effectively operate it.
This is such important work. It is, I believe, so important. I hope that SUNY will someday put its money where its mouth is when it comes to civic education and creating colleges that serve the public good. It takes money to bring in money, and it is such a worthwhile investment. We literally changed students’ lives. I know those of you who participated understand that.
But I cannot continue to throw hours of work into an effort at a college where I could get no meaningful support or publicity from the President’s office, in a university system that seems committed to destroying colleges like mine. The institution, a wise friend once told me, will not love you back. Some of you, my friends and fellow historians, have been so supportive and so encouraging. Your enthusiasm and recognition of the importance of the work we do was exhilarating. It kept me going. And students, I learned so much from you. Really. The two weeks I spent each summer visiting you and the historians with whom you worked was a blast. I have never had as much fun doing history. You energized me. There is spot for you all in my heart, and I so wish the work could continue.
I am not stepping away from local history entirely. My next book will be a detailed history of the Sullivan-Clinton campaign against the Iroquois in 1779. Native American history, I long have argued, is local history. Furthermore, in my capacity as the vice-president of the Rochester Historical Society, I will work with my fabulous colleagues on the board to revive and revitalize an institution that has been allowed to slip into disrepair and irrelevance. I think we are going to make a difference. I will keep writing, and continue to visit local history sites. And, when and where I am able, I will continue to push SUNY’s leadership to support all its colleges, not just the big four universities. This work has been a lot of fun. I am sorry to see it come to an end, but I cannot continue. Local history is important. It matters. You matter, and your story matters.
Peace.
