Academic Program Review Committee Report
On The
History Department M.A. Program
This Academic Program Review Committee (APRC) Report is based on the following Source
Material:
1. Department of History Self-Study Report to APRC, April 2008
2. External Reviewers Report and Summary of Recommendations to History Department –
April 14 – 15, 2008
3. History Department Response to Outside Evaluators Report, including sample syllabus
for History 785 College Teaching of History, and document labeled „Career Descriptions
of History Graduates‟ February 10, 2009.
4. APRC Interview with Department Chair Barbara Loomis and Dean Joel Kassiola
February 11, 2009.
5. Letter from Chair, Barbara Loomis to members of APRC responsible for writing draft of
report responding to questions asked at interview and including a copy of “The Guide to
Standards for Tenure and Promotion in the History Department” February 25, 2009.
6. AHA Report “Retrieving The Masters Degree From The Dustbin Of History”
(background).
7. Guidelines for the Sixth Cycle of Academic Program Review.
8. The APRC customary evaluation procedures.
These sources were employed to construct an integrated view of the History Graduate Program‟s
present strengths, aspirations, and possibilities for future development.
Introduction
The M.A. Program in History at San Francisco State University has been in existence since the
mid 1960‟s. Bill Issel, one of its first graduates who went off to do a Ph.D. at the University of
Pennsylvania, and then was hired to teach in the program where he got his M.A was still
teaching in the program last year. In that relatively short time the progress of the M.A. program
has been outstanding and its evolution and growth as it responds to changes in the field is one of
the reasons that its quality has not eroded but has continued to maintain a level of excellence that
is literally unparalleled. Its only competition at the level of the MA are major PhD granting
institutions like Columbia and the University of Chicago. In a study done by the American
Historical Association San Francisco State University‟s History Department was noted for
producing more MAs than any other stand-alone MA program in the nation and for having more
of its students go on to PhD programs than any university whose highest degree was the Masters.
In the fifth cycle of program review the Department of History was declared a “Center of
Excellence” and the External Reviewers who visited recently observed that the MA program
“has a well deserved national and international reputation for excellence.” They attribute this to
the “high quality of its research oriented faculty who are committed scholar-teachers in the best
sense of the word”. Students with MAs from San Francisco State University have been accepted
for PhD work at Harvard, Princeton, Berkeley, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, Penn,
University of Chicago, NYU , Duke, and many other institutions.
Previous Review Recommendations
The Department has put into practice almost all of the recommendations from the Fifth Cycle
MOU, the most important of which was to “develop curriculum in the area of world history”.
They maintained the size of their program (80 – 125 students); they hired in areas that included
South Asian and Islamic History but were not able to increase the total number of faculty as they
had been promised. The one area in which they have chosen not to implement a recommendation
in a systematic way was “to identify graduate courses in other departments which are appropriate
for History MA students.” We will come back to this shortly.
University Wide Standards
Doing a review of a program that is known to be excellent is a problem. First of all, we know
they are doing so many things right that it will be hard to find areas in which they have not
already anticipated what the reviewer might have recommended with self -generated strong
initiatives. In the areas of assessment and curriculum development this is clearly the case. But it
is also the case that when a program knows itself to be excellent, it can very easily believe
everything it does is a direct contributor to its excellence. This is not always the case. The selfstudy is 80 pages long and contains but 12 recommendations, only five of which are substantive.
The program has one of the most rigorous admissions standards in the university, and it is very
likely the case that students who qualify would perform excellently even in adverse conditions.
The History Department MA exceeds University standards in many areas. However, there is a
single area in which it deliberately has chosen to not observe one of the standards: the
distribution of graduate and undergraduate courses.
The program consists of 10 courses; five of them graduate courses and five of them
undergraduate courses. Two of the five graduate courses are not typical, excellent though they
might be. The 700 course is a meta-methodological study of the theoretical changes in the field
during the last 20 years and the 896 is the focused preparation for the students' culminating
experience--the comprehensive exam. It would have much helped the evaluators if a detailed
description and an example of the exam had been included in one of these documents. It wasn‟t.
The Department calls those courses the “bookends”--an interesting image since that implies they
are outside the text itself. What this means, then, is that a graduate degree is being awarded to
students who have taken only three content courses at the graduate level. The justification for
this division is that the M.A., though a professional degree, is supposed to turn out “educated
generalists”--not narrow specialists.
Consequently, the students get specialized knowledge in the bookends and the three graduate
seminars and breadth in the five undergraduate courses. Some very questionable pedagogical
assumptions arise. A teacher addressing a room with 20 graduate students uses a discourse that
presumes a certain level of knowledge and skill. The same teacher addressing a room with 70
students, 40 of whom might very easily be juniors, will use a very different level of discourse
than the one used in the graduate class. To the three or four graduate students in the room, this is
going to seem insufficiently complex. It‟s not a question of the degree of generality but rather a
question of the degree of “education.” If that student got their BA in History from San Francisco
State University they‟d already have accumulated enough “generalist education” to last a
lifetime. Graduate and undergraduate pedagogy are not and probably ought not to be the same,
and the M.A., being a post-undergraduate degree ought not to simply be more of the same.
According to the external consultants, grad students expressed frustration with the level of
discourse and the undergrads feel intimidated if the grads try to raise it.
Breadth is certainly desirable, especially for someone who might end up teaching in a
community college. But a number of programs offer graduate courses that are not seminars as the
place in which that breadth becomes a part of the students' educational life. Paired courses aren‟t
much better because the graduate half of the pair means more work for the professor and usually
involves more writing for the student as the primary means of marking him/her as a graduate.
What‟s missing is the classroom discourse and a differential level of analysis of the written work
and clarity of the differences in assessment. The 896 experiment, though more “graduate” in
structure, means even more work for the already overworked faculty. Though the APRC has no
doubt they would shoulder the load, there is only so much that can be expected. The APRC does
not have a specific answer because the underlying problem is a resource one--there aren‟t enough
faculty to teach graduate breadth courses and still mount the rest of their curriculum. If the new
hires happen, it would be the APRC‟s strong position that those new courses should be added so
that the program accomplishes both its goals, breadth and specialization at the graduate level.
Although the Department twice rejected the suggestion that grad courses in other departments
might be structurally helpful, their own assessment of the most recent version of History 700
reveals that almost every recent theoretical shift had its origins in another discipline. The
boundaries between disciplines are breaking down and history is no exception. The APRC
encourages the Department to review other departments‟ graduate courses. While many MA
programs allow a small number (6-9 units) of undergraduate courses to count towards the MA,
the History MA allows 50% of the credits to be undergraduate. The APRC is confident a better
balance is needed to legitimize the program as a graduate experience. Finally, if breadth is
lacking, why aren‟t individual students admitted conditionally until they have made up the
deficiency? Why build the program around such limitations?
Program Specific Goals
The rigorous admission requirements and the writing competency testing attract a group of
highly qualified students. The APRC commends the Department because the quality of the
applicants, the number who finish in a timely manner, and the number who are accepted to PhD
programs all indicate that the program is both excellent and sustainable.
Program Planning and Quality Improvement
The Department is always thinking about how to improve itself. In the last decade they have
added a new primary field (Modern World History) and solidified other areas (Gender and
History, and Europe before 1500). They now offer courses in Southeast Asia and the Islamic
World for the first time and have continued their commitment to the teaching of the history of
East Asia and Africa. They have created a website for the graduate program and completed a
major assessment of History 700, their introductory course. They are also in the process of
teaching a course in the “distinctive pedagogy of history,” training their students for likely jobs
in the future, and, hopefully, spinning off into internships in the community colleges.
Student Experience
They have been making major additions to an already rich graduate assessment program. The
rubrics for evaluating writing are excellent, and they are planning to extend this to the
comprehensive exam. The external reviewers are happy with Department's comparison of entry
and exit writing samples in order to establish a “value added” dimension to the program. The
APRC agrees. There is still a bit of confusion in the formulation the program‟s “learning
objectives” and “student outcomes” (Self-Study pp 41-45), but they are working on clarifying
not only the objectives but also the process by which they are introduced, practiced and finally,
mastered.
The Department recommends that the University keep more analytic data on student
demographics and make them available to departments. The Department recommends that age,
gender and mixed ethnicity, should all be added to the present database. The APRC thinks this is
a good idea and that it would enrich the notion of diversity now prevalent. The Department
ought to try to find ways to recruit more students and hire more faculty in underrepresented
areas.
The Culminating Experience
For a variety of reasons the Department tries to steer its students away from the thesis. Their high
PhD program admission rate shows that this is not having a negative effect, except on those
teachers of American History who have to prepare 10–12 students a year to take the
comprehensive exams. Since budgetary problems make release time problematic, the situation
seems likely to continue. Moreover, this also results in students being unable to meet with their
advisors. More faculty hires would help, but hiring prospects are dim at best. The external
reviewers suggest two-person committees instead of the present three. The Department responds
that such a change wouldn‟t lessen the workload. Since no copy of the exam was submitted, the
APRC is unable to determine its value as a culminating experience. The Department intends to
“address the issues and concerns surrounding the structure and content of the culminating
experience in the very near future” and the APRC strongly supports such an endeavor.
In order to facilitate mentoring of current students with recent graduates, the Department
recommends the establishment of a Web page that would enable students and alumni to remain
in contact. The APRC thinks this is a good idea.
Civic Engagement
The Department advocates Civic Engagement for its students and recommends finding more
internships for students, establishing a program to train students who wish to become
Community College teachers. They also recommend inviting local figures with non-academic
careers – Museum Administrators, Preservation Officers, Folks in the National Park Service etc.,
to speak to the students. The External Reviewers agree that these are good projects but say that
this is not the appropriate time to prioritize them with the faculty workload already so heavy.
Parenthetically, twice in the report the Department admits almost with regret to an inability to
establish a popular program in Public History. Though much is already on the platter, the APRC
believes it would be good for the Department to return to that project in the future.
Equity and Social Justice
The Department wants to help create a San Francisco Civil Rights and Labor History Project
modeled on the one started by the University of Washington in Seattle. Again, the External
Reviewers like the idea but worry about the drain on the faculty that such a project would entail.
Internationalization
The Department has been active in this area with the addition of the Modern World field to its
program. They still need and want positions in the Atlantic World, the Pacific Rim –
Japan/Korea, and the Mediterranean Islamic World (Turkey – Algeria). They also recommend
institutional support for visiting scholars, and the seeking donors to create a fund for students to
study abroad and for scholars to appear on campus.
The Faculty Experience
The performance of the faculty in the Department of History is outstanding: teacher evaluation
scores between 1.00 – 1.47, 170 books and articles since the last review, 247 presentations.
Faculty participate in service in the Department, campus and community. Such a level of
dedication to students and colleagues is rarely seen in the profession. They have a rigorous set of
RTP criteria, and still the morale of the junior faculty is incredibly high. Evidently, their hiring
committees know what they are looking for in a colleague. They seem to thrive on all the work.
That is positive, but can‟t go on forever. The program is probably the number one terminal
History MA in the entire United States. The “Center of Excellence” designation does them
justice. They have three different hiring plans in the documents we received, but the one in the
Response to the External Reviewers is the most recent. They ask for seven positions over the
next review cycle. This should be eight should Prof. D‟Agostino retire. Four of the eight would
be replacements. Another three of the eight are necessary if the World History concentration is to
rise to the same intellectual resource level as their other areas of specialization.
Under normal circumstances the Committee would be saying to the Department "we all want
more hires" but these are not normal circumstances, and as the Provost recently stated, when
things get really bad you don‟t just cut everything, you decide what is centrally important and
good, and you help it grow. The Committee believes that the History MA. is in that category and
therefore recommends the hires be granted. Should this happen, interestingly enough, the entire
paired course problem would disappear because they‟d have enough people to offer some
“educated generalist” graduate courses.
Interdisciplinarity
The Department intends to evaluate whether or not the methods of one of the other social
sciences should or could be substituted for the auxiliary skills requirement of mastering SPSS.
The APRC thinks this is a good idea.
Resource Support
INTERNAL SUPPORT
The Department would like a commitment that funds for ordinary expenses will be secure. In
their case, concurrent enrollment money would be enough to guarantee the day to day expenses .
Too often, however, these are not left to the department that earned them., The Department
would like to see these funds left with History. The APRC agrees, but recognizes that budget
problems could get so grave that such a guarantee simply couldn‟t be made. It should also be the
case that the Department should get sufficient and large enough rooms to house their students.
External Support
The last five years have been good ones for the Department from the point of view of alumni
donors. An endowed chair, technology funds, scholarships, travel money and assistance for
faculty research are examples. The Department intends to continue to cultivate its alumni.
Clearly its quality pays off upon occasion . The APRC wishes it continued luck.
Conclusion
The MA program in History is still a “Center of Excellence”. That they are able to perform so
outstandingly while so overworked is amazing. Curricular growth? Assessment? They are
already well on their way in these areas where we would have told them there was room left for
improvement. The Committee has one serious objection to the way the program operates, but it‟s
clear that even with that problem its success is its own best defense. Hopefully, they will get the
human resources to bring breadth to the graduate level and make a new kind of “educated
generalist.”