In his recent essay published in National Affairs, our new provost, William Inboden, bemoans “the decline (and in some cases near extinction) of important subfields such as military . . . history,” and to that end states that UT has been recruiting faculty in military history to halt that decline.
AAS 325G, History of the Southeast Asian Diaspora in the US, is a course centered on the Vietnam War. It begins with the Philippine American War—our first ‘splendid little war’—and the etymology of ‘gook’ and ‘boondocks.’ The course then goes on to cover, among other subjects, the draft’s disproportionate impact on the American working class and the extensive bombing campaign that pushed Cambodia into the hands of the Khmer Rouge. It finally concludes with the aftermath of the Vietnam War, with a focus on the refugees fleeing Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos and the difficulties they faced as new immigrants. Given this content, one might expect AAS 325G to fit within our provost’s vision of what the University should look like.
So it came as a surprise that the Spring 2026 offering of the course had a total enrollment of four, leading to its cancellation. When I last taught the course, in the Spring of 2025, I had a full complement of 22 students enrolled. What accounts for that drop in enrollment? Since the Spring of 2025, the UT administration stripped the course of its U.S. History Core requirement, ensuring students are disincentivized from enrolling in it.
US History includes military history, and one might argue that it should be the history of American military success, and those wars where we failed should be absent from the curriculum. Thus, it might seem that Vietnam syndrome, or public aversion to foreign military intervention, has in fact never gone away, despite George H.W. Bush’s proclamation to the contrary. Alternatively, even if one does not object to the Vietnam War per se, perhaps one’s conception of military history is limited to orders of battle, troop maneuvers and the minutiae of military armaments. Given its focus on cultural history, these elements are mostly absent from the course.
Historians have attributed an overemphasis on strategy and tactics in the traditional sense, and a neglect of cultural and political factors, as key to America’s failure in Vietnam.
“The Army’s experience in war did not prepare it well for counterinsurgency,” argues Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr. in “The Army and Vietnam.” “Where the emphasis is on light infantry formations, not heavy divisions; on firepower restraint, not its widespread application; on the resolution of political and social problems within the nation targeted by insurgents, not closing with and destroying the insurgent’s field forces.”
As such, I would argue the subjects taught in AAS 325G, including its inclusion of American military failures, are crucial to understanding U.S. foreign policy.
I am not the only instructor of AAS 325G, and I cannot promise that every variation of the course takes a similar tack. But I can say with confidence that by smothering AAS 325G, UT has ensured fewer students will learn about the Vietnam War, its causes and its aftermath, and in doing so UT will contribute to our decades-long neglect of the relationship between culture and conflict, one that can be seen in our repeated attempts and continued failure to successfully prosecute wars of counterinsurgency in the Middle East.
Kevin M. Gibbs is a PhD candidate in the Department of English.
