SYNERGY - History in the Making

ntroducing the new UMass/Five College Graduate Program in History

Knowledgeable observers will tell you that one of the great success stories of the Five-College Consortium since its founding in 1965 has been the coming together of historians.

Over the years, and with modest financial support from the Consortium, UMass history faculty have gathered at regular intervals with fellow historians from four neighboring undergraduate colleges: Amherst,Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, and Smith Colleges. They have met at one another's faculty clubs and dining commons to break bread together and, during long uninterrupted evenings, to delve into lively discussion of issues and ideas of mutual concern.

UMass's Bruce Laurie, a specialist in 19th-century American labor and political history, has been a member of the Five-College History Seminar (originally known as the Social History Seminar) since he was a rookie assistant professor. He joined about a quarter-century ago, shortly after the group began meeting. In Laurie's view, the Seminar is nothing less than a model of what professional collaboration among historians should be.

"They're bursting with intellectual energy!" says Prof. Joe Ellis of these new grad students.

Not only has it provided a forum for the exchange of fresh ideas within the discipline; it has also been a place where members's works-in-progress ? journal articles and books ? receive careful, expert critiques. "In fact," Laurie says, "I can't think of a single important scholarly book by a Five College historian that did not have its trial run at the Seminar." Occasionally eminent historians visiting one of the five sister institutions, such as Lawrence Stone, David Montgomery, and William H. Sewell, have been guests at the Seminar. Many an engrossing discussion has kept participants, who very often include UMass history graduate students, up until long past normal bedtimes.

Through the Seminar, historians who daily labor in the very distinctive, idiosyncratic, some might even say quirky academic cultures of the five institutions ? one major public research university, four prestigious private liberal arts colleges ? have discovered much common ground. One of their mutual concerns has been the desire to enrich the available curricular offerings at a time of what is euphemistically called, even at the better heeled of the private colleges, fiscal constraint.

Thus, for many years, in order to broaden educational opportunities for students and to enliven scholarly life at each institution, Seminar members have brokered teaching exchanges and collaborative professional projects. It has worked like this: A faculty member from one institution swaps classes with a colleague at another. Or agrees to serve on a Ph.D. committee. Or volunteers to teach ? or persuades a colleague to teach ? a subject that is not, for
whatever reason, being taught at a sister institution ? Modern Middle Eastern history, say, or Colonialism and Slavery, or Witchcraft in New England.

Simplicity itself. And very cost-effective.

In the 1997-98 academic year, with the inauguration of the UMass/Five College Graduate Program in History, the scholarly and pedagogical promise represented by this fruitful collaboration has at last been formalized by agreement of the five participating institutions. Thanks largely to the hard work of UMass History Department Chair Mary C. Wilson, all the relevant deans, committees, governing bodies, provosts, presidents, and chancellors have enthusiastically signed on. From now on, in addition to the 35 full-time faculty in the UMass history department, UMass graduate students may now choose to study with about 25 participating historians from the four colleges in the Consortium, representing six fields of concentration. The special strengths of the consortial program are the social, cultural, political, and intellectual history of the United States, Europe, and Latin America. Supporting fields include East Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Science and Technology, Public History, and Global History. At a time when scholarly methodologies are changing, when new fields of study are emerging, and when time frames and geographical boundaries are being rethought, UMass students have for the asking an astonishing range of choices.