Walkabout

In 1992 I got the biggest single break of my life. I got the job I now hold—a tenured faculty member in what is arguably the best military history program in the country. (My use of “arguably” is completely insincere, by the way.) As I would discover, however, it came with a cost. A pretty heavy cost, actually.

I’ll get to that in a bit, but first let me sketch what made it was such a big break.

The military history program here at THE Ohio State University was the creation (circa 1977) of Allan R. Millett and Williamson “Wick” Murray, both of whom are now among the top military historians in the world. (I’m not kidding. Look it up.) Allan specialized in modern US military history; Wick in modern European military history. In 1988 they were joined by another first-rate historian (and world class raconteur), John F. “Joe” Guilmartin, Jr., who specialized in early modern European military history. In each case, I wince at using “specialized” as a qualifier. All three produced scholarship that ventured far beyond their nominal areas of specialization.

In 1992 the department ran a search to hire yet a fourth military historian—an almost unheard-of embarrassment of riches—a tenure-track assistant professor who would specialize in early US military history. Such positions are rare: most military historians are hired to do American or European history, etc., and have to squeeze in military history among their other responsibilities.

A lot of recently minted PhD’s wanted that position. A comparative few had a shot at it. Initially I was not among that comparative few, more or less by definition: I was a doctoral candidate (soon to complete my PhD) in the OSU military history program. That was a seemingly insurmountable obstacle.

Why? Because academic departments normally do not hire their own students. It smacks of intellectual incest. But the search committee did something unprecedented: it recommended to the full faculty that I should be one of the three finalists for the position. In the past, OSU products had gone to other institutions and returned to OSU, but none had been hired straight out of the graduate program. It was as much a testimony to the strength of the program as to my abilities, because if OSU did indeed have the best military history program, it seemed foolish not to rule out a product of that program.

I got the job. I could tell you stories about that, good and bad. And in various quarters it was bruited about for years that the fix had been in. But let that go. Here’s the point: I was now teaching in the same department as my two mentors, Millett and Murray. We didn’t need yet another Millett or Murray. I realized, if no one else did, that I had to find my own intellectual place in the world.

That was hard from the beginning and it got harder as the years rolled on. My first book won a prize, I got tenure a year early, and by my seventh year on the faculty I had won three teaching awards. But along the way I also got a world class education in academic politics, and anyway the stubborn fact remained that I was in the same department with Allan and Wick.

As far as I was concerned, that forced me into an extended search among other fields, hoping to find something I could integrate into my own graduate training in military history. I came to think of this experience as a walkabout. It was difficult. And although it also had rewarding aspects, I could never quite figure out which predominated, the difficulties or the rewards.

But my pain is your gain. Because along the way I learned, among other things, a good deal about the vexed question of racism, with which you, the reader, and I collided with the “Barack the Magic Negro” imbroglio a few posts back. (See "The Wicked Wit of Rush.") In my next post—actually my next several posts, because I already have them written--I’ll tell you about it.