Murray-Blessing-Skleder-You surveys.
In 1981, Robert K. Murray, Professor of History at the Pennsylvania State University and Tim H. Blessing, a graduate student in History, created a nineteen-page, 180-question survey that, besides asking historians to rate the presidents, also asked them to evaluate different aspects of the presidents' backgrounds and appearances, their personalities and characters, and their relationships as presidents (i.e., do you agree that in important matters of dispute between president and Congress, the Congress should defer to the president). The survey was mailed to 1997 Ph.D.-holding historians working full-time at four-year schools or better. Eight hundred and forty-six historians responded with completed surveys. In a few instances, differences in ratings of individual presidents were related to differences in the geographic backgrounds, subject specialties, aggressiveness of foreign policy views, liberal vs. conservative leanings, age, and sex of historians. (The ratings from this survey are found below.) When the Reagan presidency ended in 1989, Murray and Blessing used the methodology of the first survey to evaluate Reagan using a 164-question, nineteen-page survey. The survey was sent to 750 historians chosen at random from the American Historical Association's Guide to Departments of History 1986-1987. This survey evaluated Reagan's social and domestic policies, foreign policy and its implementation, military affairs, and intangibles. The historians who returned their surveys found, on average, Reagan to be a below average president. In 2001, with Robert Murray retired, Blessing joined with a social psychologist, Anne Skleder, to compose and execute another survey evaluating Reagan. This survey, published in Richard Conley's Reassessing the Reagan Presidency (2003) found that historians and pundits were deeply divided over Reagan and his presidency. Given the findings of their 2001 survey, in 2005 Blessing and Skleder put together a survey to evaluate how historians judged Carter, Reagan, G.H.W. Bush, and Clinton. Some questions regarding George W. Bush were also included. Blessing and Skleder purposely included questions which would allow them to more accurately judge whether respondents were "liberal" or "conservative". As the survey progressed, Di You, another psychologist and methodological specialist, was added in order to increase the methodological reach of the 2005 survey. Based on 256 returned surveys, Blessing, Skleder, and You found marked divisions between liberals and conservatives on eighty-three percent of all questions asked. The three concluded that, at least in terms of the presidents, the historical profession had become deeply divided in ways which went far beyond the original Murray-Blessing survey.