'It's an outrage,' said an eminent historian today. 'I studied for three years as an undergraduate, took a Masters - another three long years while working in a museum - then got my PhD. Took me bloody years and my student debt is through the roof. Now they're allowing medics with a GP qualification to fast-track as historians by taking a two-year post graduate qualification. Not only that, but they're paying these 'History Associates' two grades higher than me for half the work,' he said, anger brimming over.
A government spokesman for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport defended the HA route. 'HAs aren't there to replace historians, they're there to augment them. They can do the boring, repetitive work, freeing up the fully qualified historians to search for Dials of Destiny, Crystal Skulls and Lost Arks - to crack the whip, so to speak,' said the spokesman. He admitted that 'occasionally' HAs have been put on the History Consultant rota to fill gaps. In one such case a HA entered a Temple of Doom without authorisation and caused the death of several assistants by allowing large stone spheres to roll over them and failing to take suitable care with automatically fired knives from booby-trapped caves.
'It's a slippery-slope,' fumed the historian. 'Properly trained historians know how to deal with things like fighting Nazis on top of speeding locomotives, wrestling with snakes or sinking into quicksand. Museum directors are seeing this new grade as a way to replace properly trained historians with inadequately trained historian associates who happen to have a medical degree. That way they don't have to pay for first-aiders either,' he added.
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