Rebuilding the Academy of the 1970s

I’m as susceptible to nostalgia and the allure of the good old days as anyone. To Downton Abbey. To Mad Men. To nostalgia-laced advertising campaigns featuring Billie Jean King.

Nostalgia is an extraordinarily powerful force, exploited by politicians and marketers alike, driving foreign affairs and culture wars, and shaping popular entertainment. As we’ve learned recently, nostalgia can also be toxic.

A blessing and a curse, nostalgia can be benign, beneficial or pernicious, debilitating or energizing and restorative. It can inspire; it can also paralyze. Many of history’s most influential movements, whether religious or secular, revolutionary, reactionary or reformist, have been motivated by memories of a supposed golden age that has been besmirched, betrayed or bespoiled. But nostalgia can also be misplaced as memories of the past are inevitably selective and habitually distorted.

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In the pandemic’s wake, the desire to return to the way we were has rarely been stronger. I, for one, can only dream of a time when my departmental colleagues return nearly full-time to their offices and the mass of students re-engages.

Thus, it comes as a bit of a surprise to discover that the word “nostalgia” has a surprisingly brief history. This is a case where the Greeks did not have a word for it. That’s not to say that there weren’t references in literature, including The Odyssey or Old Testament allusions to the Babylonian captivity, that vaguely resemble nostalgia, with its connotations of homesickness, longing and wistful melancholy. But words or concepts that earlier people invoked, like exile or expulsion, differed decisively from today’s conception of nostalgia as an emotion, a mind-set and psychological state.

The word “nostalgia” was introduced in 1688 by Johannes Hofer, a Swiss medical student, who coined the term to describe the ills—including appetite loss and thoughts of suicide—experienced by those suffering from homesickness. Formed out of the Greek words for return (nostos) and pain (algos), “nostalgia” came to refer, in the Romantic era, to the wistful or sentimental yearning to return to one’s home, family, homeland, an earlier period in one’s life or an irrecoverable past.

Nostalgia can be both positive and negative. Recalling fond memories or past achievements or positive experiences can enhance people’s emotional well-being by boosting self-esteem, confidence and sense of competence; reinforce one’s identity and self-image; and strengthen social connections by creating a sense of camaraderie rooted in shared past experiences. It can also help individuals cope with stress, setbacks and challenges and serve as a source of inspiration and as a catalyst for self-reflection and personal growth.

Conversely, nostalgia can have profoundly negative consequences when it exacerbates feelings of loss or grief, becomes a form of escapism that leads individuals to overly fixate on the past and resist change, and produces a highly romanticized or overidealized perception of history that downplays or ignores more negative realities.

In the words of Carolyn G. Heilbrun, “Nostalgia is, however, a dangerous emotion, both because it is powerless to act in the real world and because it glides so easily into hatred and resentment against those who have taken our Eden from us.”

Nostalgia is, of course, among the most effective instruments in the political or marketing tool kits. By triggering positive memories and associations and evoking past experiences that resonate with people’s recollections, masters of manipulation can build the sense of trust and connection that can influence people’s attitudes and behavior. The art of populist political scheming often rests on pandering to a people’s longing for a supposed golden age combined with the promise of reasserting traditional values and restoring the nation to its former glory.

Nostalgia-laden marketing strategies include utilizing retro elements in design or ads, reviving an older ad campaign, relaunching an older product and showcasing a celebrity from the past.

Nostalgia occupies a particularly pivotal place in popular culture. Reboots, remakes, re-releases, prequels and sequels represent only part of the problem. Even worse is the romanticizing and sanitizing of the past.

Nostalgia frequently overwhelms anything approaching serious history. Nostalgia is a form of escapism and fantasy projection that blocks out more complex truth. Myths about the greatest generation or the good war, for example serve to obscure less cheering realities about segregated armed forces, white-led wartime race riots and Japanese American internment. Sitcoms from the 1950s created misleading images of family life that continue to distort thinking today.

We mustn’t simplify the past or strip our interpretations of nuance.

Nostalgia takes various contrasting forms. It can be restorative or reflective. That is, nostalgia can trap us in the past and discourage us from moving forward, or it can encourage us to reflect on the past and motivate and empower us to move ahead.

The title song of the Barbra Streisand–Robert Redford tear-jerker had it wrong. “Misty water-colored memories of the way we were” cloud our eyes. Nostalgia blinds us; it all too often fails to illuminate.

I myself look back with great nostalgia for the academy of the 1970s, when I received my B.A. and Ph.D. The humanities and social sciences were important to the culture in ways inconceivable today. Imagine a time when a book on the economics of slavery, brimming with statistics, appeared on the cover of Time magazine and The New York Times Book Review regularly featured reviews of academic history books, written by leading historians, on its front page. Or when nearly 12,000 scholars attended the MLA, compared to fewer than 4,400 in 2020, before the pandemic struck.

There was also a sense of intellectual ferment unmatched today, as new fields of study and modes of interpretation in the humanities and social sciences opened up:

• In anthropology, cultural materialism and its obverse, Geertzian symbolic anthropology.
• In economics, cliometrics, the monetarist and supply side challenges to Keynesian economics and the emergence of radical economics, with its emphasis on the quality of work, its attempts to address income and wealth disparities and its stress on the efficacy of Keynesianism when no longer beholden to corporate interests.
• In history, the new social history, world systems analysis and then the cultural turn.
• In literature, deconstruction, postmodernism and poststructuralism, followed by the new historicism.
• In sociology, symbolic interactionism and dramaturgy and historical sociology.
• In law, critical race theory and feminist legal theory.

In part, this ferment was driven by the rise of Black power and feminism, the wake of the ’60s counterculture and a reaction to the Vietnam War and urban unrest, which threw old verities and intellectual traditions into question and sparked a series of paradigm shifts.

New fields opened up and old fields were transformed. Within my branch of U.S. history, rapidly expanding areas of interest included community studies, family history, the history of sports, immigration history, medical history, slavery studies, social science history, urban history and, of course, women’s history. Fresh approaches involved cliometrics, historical demography, family reconstitution and quantitative history.

No one would before the late 1960s would have imagined a generation of historians writing about the history of children or the cultural and intellectual history of the American working class.

You might well say the intellectual dynamism of that decade was a product of circumstances unlikely to re-emerge:

• The social movements of the era—the antiwar movement, the civil rights movement, Black power, the feminist movement, gay liberation, red and bronze power and the environmental movement—which challenged dominant cultural narratives and power structures and sparked a re-evaluation of traditional academic disciplines and their underlying assumptions.
• The growing awareness of the limitations of modernist thought, with its emphasis on rationality and objectivity and the growing recognition of the role of power, language, ideology, emotions and subjectivity in shaping people’s behavior.
• The heightened emphasis on the study of culture and of the importance of cultural practices, symbols and meanings in shaping social life.

Without a doubt, the climate of the times led many young women and men, who might otherwise have entered the professions, to instead enter the academy as a place where they could challenge entrenched orthodoxies and the conventional wisdom.

The past can’t be recovered and restored. I doubt that doctoral programs in the humanities and social sciences will ever match the size of those of half a century ago. I also suspect that professional meetings like the MLA’s or the AHA’s will never approach the number who attended half a century ago.

Still, ask yourself: What would it take to restore the intellectual dynamism of the 1970s? Here are some suggestions.

1. Foster a rich exchange of ideas. Campuses need to bring together scholars who offer a broad range of intellectual, methodological and theoretical perspectives. These institutions must also take steps to foster a culture of intellectual engagement and exchange.
2. Embrace interdisciplinarity. Let’s not silo knowledge and expertise. The major intellectual challenges of our time ought not to be studied from fractured, fragmentary perspectives. To that end, encourage cross-disciplinary training, foster collaborative research and create more interdisciplinary courses.
3. Break down barriers between institutions. Intellectual firepower isn’t confined to a small number of eminent institutions. Campuses need to do more to connect faculty across institutions to address issues of common interest.
4. Work closely with foundations, the national endowments and the NSF and other government research funding agencies to identify and address a series of grand challenges and moonshots. The goal must be to not only study these challenges, but to devise actionable strategies for addressing these pressing problems.
5. Reimagine the humanities disciplines in more cross-disciplinary ways. If the humanities disciplines are not to be reduced to mere service departments, they need to:
   • Better connect to the professions. The digital humanities, the global humanities, the innovation humanities, the legal humanities, the medical humanities and the public humanities, offer models for emulation.
   • Engage with contemporary issues in collaboration with other disciplines. That will require the humanities to bring to bear their strengths in interpretation, contextualization and critical analysis to major challenges involving the environment, equity, social justice and other timely topics.

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30, which contains the famous phrase “remembrance of things past,” is among English literature’s most profound and enduring meditations on memory, sorrow and regret. Time’s passage, the speaker observes, does not diminish the pain of injury, the sting of disappointment, grief’s anguish or the pain of squandered opportunity. Yet in the poem’s concluding couplet, the speaker finds solace and relief in thinking about a dear friend. With those thoughts, “All losses are restor’d and sorrows end.”

I don’t know whether memory has the power to erase past pain or restore a sense of hope. Memory can also reinvigorate feelings of anger, hurt and indignation and entrap us in the past. It’s therefore best to look forward, to reflect on what we can do to make the academy a bit more what it was like in the 1970s.

I’ve offered my suggestions. What are yours?