#69, October 22, 2005

 

The First Annual Gatekeeping Award

 

 

Every year the discipline of History will be awarding its Gatekeeping Award.  This will go out to the official who has served the discipline most fully by helping to turn back the tide of theory, discourse and literary analysis, and other kinds of unsound thinking that threaten our discipline on every shore.

 

The first award has been given to Archibald Emeritass, chair of the Department of History at Plumpstead University, for services rendered in reviewing departments around the country that may have strayed from the path of Righteousness.

 

We know that this can be a very difficult undertaking.  It sometimes requires that the official put aside personal feeling in order “to tell it like it is.”  Such officials need to be reminded that there is no room for human decency and common courtesies when the professoriat needs protecting from the arrival at our graduate schools of students who may have been trained to think critically, and who may imagine (and imagination is something we eschew) that history is about more than fact and content.

 

So thank you to Archibald.  In spite of some of the most difficult circumstances (whereby you even chastised people who felt they had been friends of yours, but who had clearly gone astray), you came through with flying colors.  Recommending that a Gatekeeping Official (GO) be appointed on site to ensure that the viruses be stamped out at source was also a stroke of genius (one that other officials may want to take note of).  In the face of comments like that common refrain, “Have you no shame?” – remember what Joe McCarthy had to put up with at the Army-McCarthy hearings! – you remained steadfast. 

 

We congratulate Professor Emeritass. Keep up the good work!

 

 

N.B. Histrionics hastens to note that this professor and the college alluded to are neither real nor fictitious, neither inside Idaho not outside that worthy state, neither a burrower nor a lender bee! Any resemblance to fictitious or real characters is merely fortuitous, and should anyone feel that they either resemble the aforesaid Emeritass, or wish that they did, that is entirely their business and we would like it to remain that way!