Much of the debate about universities these days seems to focus on speech codes, “micro aggressions,” and the like—essentially, a continuation of the “political correctness” debate launched by Allan Bloom in 1987 with his surprise best-seller The Closing of the American Mind. It is a shame that Bloom did not live long enough to see his longtime employer, the University of Chicago, issue a thunderous defense of free speech against those who would seek to impose censorship on campus.

But while the debate over speech codes is important, so, too, is the content of what is taught–and in this regard, as well, there is considerable room for improvement. I will not comment on every academic subject, most of which I know little about. But in the field that I know best–history–there has been a long-standing move away from old-fashioned political, diplomatic, and military history toward “history from below,” designed to tell the stories of the “oppressed,” particularly those of women and “people of color.”

This is not a bad thing, in and of itself. It can be fascinating to read about the lives of ordinary people, not just of kings, presidents, and generals, as long as their story is fairly told and not twisted for didactic political purposes. Alas, too often the raw materials of history are twisted out of recognition by scholars bent on imposing on the past an ideological framework complete with a pseudo-scientific vocabulary that is impenetrable to outsiders (and possibly even to insiders). The larger problem is that the embrace of history “from below” has all but killed traditional history “from above.”

In this New York Times op-ed, historians Frederik Logevall of Harvard (author of Embers of War, a superb history of the French Indochina War) and Kenneth Osgood of the Colorado School of Mines complain that the academy is neglecting political history just when it is needed most.

American political history, it would seem, is everywhere. Hardly a day passes without some columnist comparing Donald J. Trump to Huey Long, Father Coughlin or George Wallace. “All the Way,” a play about Lyndon B. Johnson, won a slew of awards and was turned into an HBO film.

But the public’s love for political stories belies a crisis in the profession. American political history as a field of study has cratered. Fewer scholars build careers on studying the political process, in part because few universities make space for them. Fewer courses are available, and fewer students are exposed to it. What was once a central part of the historical profession, a vital part of this country’s continuing democratic discussion, is disappearing.

The failure is even more serious in the field of military history which has been all but drummed out of the prestigious universities. Yale, where I attended graduate school, actually has a chair in military history, but it is presently filled by a diplomatic historian, John Lewis Gaddis (author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of George Kennan), who is nearing retirement age. Yale also has on its faculty Paul Kennedy, a first-rate military and naval historian (best known for his 1987 bestseller The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers), but, like Gaddis, he is hitting retirement age.

The odds are that if either one is succeeded by a true military historian (doubtful), it will be someone who uses the same bottom-up approach that is popular elsewhere in the academy, essentially turning military history into a branch of sociology and entirely neglecting the study of battles that used to be considered the very essence of the subject.

Other prestigious universities are even more resistant to military history than Yale, which helps to explain why the best schools in this area are institutions like Ohio State University, Texas A&M, and the University of North Texas. I have the utmost respect for the scholars who work at these schools. The problem is that their insights are not shared with the graduates of the universities that are ranked the highest in public esteem, beginning with the Ivy League.

The present state or the academy shows the long reach of the Sixties-Seventies generation, which transformed America largely for the better but also, in some areas, for the worse. The recognition that ordinary people—and, in particular, those who happen to be racial or ethnic minorities–have stories worth telling is all to the good. But it should not result in the near-total neglect of other areas of history that are also important and that potentially can make an even bigger impact on the biggest issues facing this country.