The State (Columbia, SC)
June 3, 2001
Section: METRO/REGION
Edition: FINAL
Page: B1
Column: JOHN MONK

    In the past few years, the University of South Carolina's history department has gone from good to excellent.
    It is "carving out a niche for itself as a leader in Southern and African-American history," the Chronicle of Higher Education said late last year.
    "It is one of the finest departments we have," said Jerry Odom, provost at USC, the state's largest public university.
    Two elements lie behind that success: extra money from private sources and savvy leadership, from professors to USC president John Palms.
    How the history department bettered itself offers lessons, especially to S.C. lawmakers who - though responsible for its state funding - believe a university should operate at bargain basement prices. One lawmaker recently jeered students seeking budget increases and a better education, yelling "Get a job!"
    In South Carolina, history runs in people's blood, whether the subject is Confederates or slaves.
    "You have all these local historical societies and museums that are flourishing," said USC historian Walter Edgar, whose book on S.C. history is in its fifth printing, with 27,000 copies sold.
    History improves the mind. A good professor - as opposed to one who makes students memorize dull lists of dates - brings the past alive, telling stories of people in other times, their disasters and triumphs.
    "History teaches you there is more than one side to a question," said USC history professor Clyde Wilson.
    At USC, history is one of about 80 departments. All USC's 3,400 liberal arts majors are required to take at least three history courses. Last year, 6,600 of USC's 15,300 undergraduate students took history courses.

THE WAY UP

    Here's how USC's history department got better.
    Palms knew that with lean budgets, USC couldn't improve all 80-odd departments at once.
    The best way to improve the university, he decided, would be to focus on four of USC's 16 colleges: Science and Math; Engineering and Information Technology; Business; and Liberal Arts.
    There wasn't enough money to improve the entire 330-professor, 17-department Liberal Arts College. So within Liberal Arts, officials decided to concentrate on history, which has about 35 professors and a $2.5 million annual budget.
    It made sense to upgrade history. It had a dozen professors ready to retire. It had a core of good professors. Also, good universities are known for good history departments.
    A search committee selected as new history chairman Pat Maney, a Tulane history professor, published author and administrator.
    Maney's charge: to bring diversity to the almost all-white male department, aim for Southern historians and try to hire at least one nationally-known star.
    Odom said, "You build your department's foundation from the bottom with young people. But you need to bring in one or two well-known stars at the top."
    A star, though expensive, gives a department credibility.
    Maney, 54, is a mild-mannered man who specializes in Franklin Roosevelt, a president known for his crafty ways. From Roosevelt, Maney had absorbed lessons on how to get things done.
    Since 1998, Maney has lured the kind of professors the department needed.
    Maney began an intense lobbying campaign to get Dan Carter, a nationally known historian making $160,000 or so at Emory University. It helped that Carter, a native of South Carolina and USC graduate, was an old friend of president Palms.
    Carter, a top-award winning historian, is known for trail-blazing books on Southern race and civil rights issues. He turned down offers from Yale and the University of North Carolina.
    Last year, Carter chose USC.
    His USC pay is about $140,000 a year, below what it was at Emory, with fewer benefits. (The average USC full professor earns $79,284. It usually takes a minimum of $150,000 to hire a star.)
    Maney also got permission to recruit one top African-American historian. But after he found three excellent ones were available, he persuaded USC officials they had a rare opportunity.
    These three were Dan Littlefield, a top scholar at the University of Illinois known for studies on slavery in colonial times; his wife, Valinda Littlefield, who studies African-American teachers in the South; and Bobby Donaldson, who focuses on black and Southern history.
    Racial diversity matters, said Maney. USC's student body is 18 percent black, the state is 30 percent black, and much of S.C. history involves race.
    Maney has also brought top female historians on board, including Page Miller, a specialist in museum and archive history, and Russian specialist Anna Krylova.
    Maney says diversity involves more than race and gender.
    USC's history department also has Clyde Wilson, a professor since 1971. Wilson, an expert on John Calhoun, is a member of the League of the South, a secessionist group.
    Last year, when almost 100 S.C. professors signed a petition saying slavery caused the Civil War, Wilson circulated a counter petition. Wilson calls the idea that slavery was the main cause of the Civil War a "misleading oversimplification" of a complicated historical issue.
    Maney said he is glad Wilson is in the department.
    Maney said, "When I talk about diversity, I'm also talking about ideas. If you can't have different ideas in a history department at a university, you can't have them any place."

MONEY MATTERS

    Without extra private money, Maney would not have been able to hire about half a dozen new top professors, or keep others who've had offers elsewhere.
    Of his $2.5 million budget, Maney estimates about $160,000 comes from Education Foundation, a private group that helps pay for some university programs, or other sources to beef up his professors' salaries.
    USC provost Odom got the extra salary money.
    "The Educational Foundation makes available to me $500,000 per year to recruit and retain the best faculty," Odom said. Of 1,100 USC professors, only about 20 get money from that fund.
    "To recruit somebody like a Dan Carter, we put together three different sources of funding," Odom said.
    New, young history professors say they like the department.
    Karl Gerth, 34, who received a doctorate from Harvard with a prize-winning dissertation, could be teaching at many universities. He chose USC for various reasons, including liking the Columbia community and the department's top stars.
    The department isn't perfect. It could use more professors; some survey courses have more than 250 students. It could use a top Civil War scholar-teacher.
    But these days, the department's main downside is lack of state support. Budget cuts have already forced a hiring freeze that caused the department to give up a search for a new professor.
    Officials fear deeper cuts.
    Odom said, "We could lose all this very quickly."

Illustration: PHOTO: BW
1-5. Wilson, Carter, Littlefield, Krylova, Gerth