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Kathleen Woodward

The future of the humanities– in the present & in public

Since the mid-twentieth century, the ty and society,” as the historian Thomas professionalization of our disciplines Bender points out in his invaluable essay has been a hallmark of higher education on the American university from 1945 to in general and the research university 1995.2 If some twenty years ago it could in particular. Despite the repeated calls be asserted in the Report from the National over the past twenty-½ve years for a re- Task Force on Scholarship and the Public Hu- newal of the civic mission of higher edu- manities that the humanities “are valu- cation,1 professionalization continues able for their own sake and the nation to hold tenacious sway and is largely un- must support and sustain scholarship derstood to contradict the purposes and because that enriches the common fund practices of public scholarship, which, of knowledge,”3 today the notion of the in turn, is dismissed under the demoral- izing rubric of service or the paternalis- tic rubric of outreach. It is only too clear 1 See, for example, the important work of Campus Compact, founded in 1985 to press that “there has been a weakening of the for the intertwined values of service learning informal compact between the universi- and the responsibilities of citizenship; Ernest Boyer’s influential writing from the 1990s on the scholarship of engagement; and leap Kathleen Woodward is professor of English at the (Liberal Education and America’s Promise), the decade-long initiative, begun in 2005, of , where she has served the American Association of Colleges and Uni- as director of the Simpson Center for the Human- versities to underscore the importance of a ities since 2000. Her books include “Statistical liberal education, a primary value of which is Panic: Cultural Politics and Poetics of the Emo- civic knowledge and engagement. In 2006 the tions” (forthcoming) and “Aging and Its Discon- Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching announced a new classi½cation that tents: Freud and Other Fictions” (1991). From institutions of higher education could elect to 2000–2005 she was chair of the National Ad- adopt: community engagement. visory Board of Imagining America, and from 1995–2001 she was president of the Consortium 2 Thomas Bender, “Politics, Intellect, and the of Humanities Centers and Institutes. She serves American University, 1945–1995,” Dædalus 126 (1) (Winter 1997): 3. on the board of directors of the National Human- ities Alliance in Washington, D.C. 3 James Quay and James Veninga, “Making Connections: The Humanities, Culture and the © 2009 by Kathleen Woodward Community,” National Task Force on Scholarship

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intrinsic good of the humanities is de½- yields artifacts of public and intellectu- The future nitely not a part of what is generally re- al value.”5 As the report notes, public of the humanities ferred to as “making the case” for the scholarship exists on a continuum with –in the humanities. traditional scholarship and often takes present & What is public scholarship? In sug- the form of projects that combine re- in public gesting an answer to this question, I search, teaching, and creative activity turn to the influential work of Imagin- as well as publication. Recommended ing America: Artists and Scholars in is the use of a portfolio in the tenure Public Life, a national consortium es- dossier that might include writing for a tablished at the University of Michigan non-academic audience, policy reports, in 2001 that numbers over eighty insti- and oral histories. Not all work in the tutions across the United States repre- public humanities would be considered senting the full spectrum of higher edu- public humanities scholarship. cation, from community colleges and At a meeting held in June 2008 at Syr- colleges of arts and design to research acuse University’s Lubin House in New universities and liberal arts colleges.4 York City to consider the report, discus- Now based at Syracuse University, Imag- sion swirled around this de½nition of ining America is devoted to expanding public scholarship, with a focus on what the place of public scholarship in the hu- was understood by “scholarship” itself manities, arts, and design in higher edu- and with special pressure placed on the cation in the conviction that it serves a keywords community and public (about democratic purpose. Scholarship in Public, which more later). Discussion also cen- its groundbreaking report on the impor- tered on the questions that might guide tance of including public scholarship in the evaluation of public scholarship, considerations of promotion and tenure, with suggestions including: What con- was released in May 2008. Authored by stituencies are served? What new in- Julie Ellison and Timothy K. Eatman, terdisciplinary connections have been the report offers a de½nition–necessar- formed? Is the “translation” of scholar- ily abstract and general–of what is re- ship to larger audiences effective? Is the ferred to as publicly engaged academic project innovative? Signi½cantly, how- work. Public scholarship, the report ar- ever, the report begins not with a de½ni- gues, is integral to the academic area of tion of public scholarship in the human- a faculty member’s research or creative ities, arts, and design or with prescrip- activity. It includes “different forms of tions for evaluation, but rather with a making knowledge ‘about, for, and with’ multitude of compelling examples from diverse publics and communities,” and across the United States, most of which “it contributes to the public good and take the form of collaborative projects between faculty in higher education and community groups and institutions

and the Public Humanities (New York: Ameri- can Council of Learned Societies, 1990), 2. 5 Julie Ellison and Timothy K. Eatman, Schol- 4 Imagining America: Artists and Scholars arship in Public: Knowledge Creation and Tenure in Public Life, http://www.imaginingamerica Policy in the Engaged University, A Resource on .org/. Julie Ellison was the founding director Promotion and Tenure in the Arts, Humanities, of Imagining America; Jan Cohen-Cruz is cur- and Design (Syracuse, N.Y.: Imagining Ameri- rently the director. ca: Artists and Scholars in Public Life, 2008), 1.

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Kathleen (among them, K–12 teachers, ethnic Center for the Humanities at the Univer- Woodward and race-based local groups, and muse- sity of Washington launched a weeklong on the humanities ums). Among the examples are histori- Institute on the Public Humanities for an and architect Dolores Hayden’s Pow- Doctoral Students. To my knowledge er of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public His- the ½rst of its kind in the country, the tory and the “Great Wall of Los Angeles” Institute included twenty-½ve doctoral mural in the Tujunga Wash Flood Con- students and featured presentations by trol Channel, a project of the Social and national leaders who have done remark- Public Art Resource Center founded by able work in the public humanities, artist Judy Baca.6 readings and discussion, project-based Scholarship in Public is animated by a work, and site visits. That inaugural year sense of vibrancy and possibility. “The speakers from across the country includ- report was inspired,” we read, “by fac- ed Robert Weisbuch, then president of ulty members who want to do publicly the Woodrow Wilson National Fellow- engaged academic work and live to tell ship Foundation; Julia Reinhard Lupton, the tale.” Few of our graduate students, founding director of Humanities Out however–the very people who will be- There at the University of California, Ir- come our future faculty–arrive at gradu- vine, a program that links university stu- ate school with a sense that public schol- dents with students in the largely Latino arship in the humanities is a possible school district in nearby Santa Ana; and path for them. It is in research univer- David Scobey, then director of the Arts sities in particular where requirements of Citizenship program at the Universi- for the publication of research in order ty of Michigan. We read and discussed to gain tenure have increased, and where work by Dolores Hayden, Edward Said, “the words ‘public’ and ‘scholarship’ Robin Kelley, Harry Boyte and Nancy continue to live on different planets.”7 Kari, Michael Bérubé, Gail Dubrow, This is one of the reasons why, in 2003, and Tony Bennett, among others. We in tandem with the Woodrow Wilson also read and discussed reports (yes, re- National Fellowship Foundation’s Re- ports; I have grown fond of reports over sponsive Ph.D. initiative, the Simpson the past few years and think they should be read and discussed) from the Ameri- can Council of Learned Societies and the 6 See Dolores Hayden, Power of Place: Ur- American Association of Higher Educa- ban Landscapes as Public History (Cambridge, tion. We visited Bellevue Community Mass.: mit Press, 1995). College, the Seattle Art Museum, and 7 Ellison and Eatman, Scholarship in Public, downtown Seattle’s historic Panama Ho- vii, xii. In “The Associate Professor Project tel, built in 1910 in the International Dis- Survey,” a presentation on a project of the trict to house Japanese laborers, which Modern Language Association, David Lau- today is a tea house and modest hotel. (It rence reports that the stress on publication as a criterion for tenure in the ½elds of mod- possesses the only remaining Japanese ern literature and language has basically dou- bathhouse in the United States.) Leaders bled over the past forty years across the spec- of community organizations participat- trum of Carnegie doctoral universities, mas- ed as panelists, as did faculty members ter’s universities, and baccalaureate colleges, at the University of Washington whose with master’s universities and baccalaureate colleges following the lead of Carnegie doc- projects included a collaboration be- toral universities; Modern Language Associ- tween university faculty members and ation Convention, December 28, 2007. high school teachers called Texts and

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Teachers; an exhibit of drawings by chil- education.10 We want these future fac- The future dren of war under the poignant title They ulty members to arrive at their colleges of the humanities Still Draw Pictures; and a worldwide net- and universities ready to take up schol- –in the work of public forums on matters of ur- arship in the public humanities and live present & gent public concern held annually in li- to tell the tale, and not to wait until they in public braries in September, aptly called The have been promoted to the rank of pro- September Project.8 Tellingly, most of fessor. Since 2003 one hundred and ½f- the faculty members were at the rank ty graduate students have participated of professor. (The one who was an assis- in the Institute. Many have fanned out tant professor left the university in the across the country as they take up posi- conviction that his work in the public tions in higher education, and many humanities would not be honored here have gone on to positions with non- as scholarship and research.) I remem- pro½t organizations. ber that Institute as a heady experience One of my hopes has been that the In- that opened many doors. stitute on the Public Humanities will in- spire other centers to create similar pro- We have continued to hold the Insti- grams for their graduate students as well tute every fall. Readings, site visits, and as other programs in the public humani- speakers have changed, of course.9 But ties. For the past thirty-½ve years, cen- one of the initial guiding purposes re- ters and institutes for the humanities on mains: to put public scholarship in the university and college campuses in the portfolios carried by our doctoral stu- United States have served as sites for in- dents into their future and thus to help novation, as laboratories for incubating bring about structural change in higher emerging modes of knowledge and in- vestigating new objects of study in cross- disciplinary and interdisciplinary con- texts. Continental theory, British cultur- 8 For information on Texts and Teachers, di- al studies, feminist studies, mass cultural rected by Gary Handwerk, see http://depts .washington.edu/uwch/programs_texts_ studies, television studies, performance teachers_0809.htm. See Anthony Geist and studies, animal studies, theories of evi- Peter N. Carroll, They Still Draw Pictures: Chil- dence, critical race studies, theories and dren’s Art in Wartime from the Spanish Civil War to Kosovo (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), a catalog of the exhibition. For infor- 10 For a discussion of the Institute within mation on The September Project, directed the local context of other institutional pro- by David Silver and Sarah Washburn, see grams and projects at the University of Wash- http://theseptemberproject.wordpress.com ington, Bothell, and issues of community- /connecting-the-world-one-library-at-a-time/. based participatory research, transdisciplin- ary research, American studies, and cultural 9 Readings added to the Simpson Center for studies, see Bruce Burgett, “Mixed Genealo- the Humanities Institute on the Public Human- gies: Between Cultural Studies and Ameri- ities for Doctoral Students over the past few can Studies,” in Recon½gurations of American years include work by Ien Ang, Lance Bennett, Studies, ed. Donald Pease and Elizabeth Dil- George Sanchez, Debra DeRuyver, and Jenni- lon (Durham: Duke University Press, forth- fer Evans, among many others. Regarding the coming). See also Miriam Bartha and Bruce 2008 Institute, see http://depts.washington Burgett, “Specifying the Scholarship of En- .edu/uwch/Institute_on_the_Public_Human- gagement: Using the ia Document to Teach ities_for_Doctoral_Students.htm. For more Collaboration Practice and Institutional De- information, contact Miriam Bartha, codirec- velopment,” Imagining America Newsletter, tor (with Bruce Burgett) of the Institute. May 2007, 10–11.

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Kathleen discourses of the emotions, biotechnolo- pilot project in 2004–2005, called Hu- Woodward gy and culture: these are just a few of the manities Exposed, which fosters collab- on the humanities broad areas and subjects taken up by hu- orative projects between University of manities centers and institutes around Wisconsin graduate students and area the country. schools, museums, and neighborhood We speak of technology transfer. Sim- centers. In 2000 the University of Flor- ilarly, we can speak of project and pro- ida established the Center for the Hu- gram, model and mission transfer in manities and the Public Sphere, with the humanities. Humanities centers are one of its primary missions being cul- highly adept at circulating new ways tural work in the public interest. The of undertaking research and of learning. tagline for the Humanities Institute And indeed in recent years what has at the University of Texas at Austin, been on the radar screen of centers is which was founded in 2001, is “think- precisely the public humanities; in fact ing in community,” and programs in- the public humanities has been a key in- clude sabbaticals for members of the gredient in the creation of many new community at the Humanities Insti- centers. In 2007 the University of Iowa’s tute, thus supporting scholars from the Obermann Center for Advanced Stud- community in the academy. In spring ies launched a weeklong annual Grad- 2007 Michigan State University estab- uate Institute on Engagement and the lished a Public Humanities Collabora- Academy; it is also planning a confer- tory. I could cite many more examples ence on models of public humanities from around the country.11 for fall 2009. The center at Ohio State In announcing a virtual forum on University was established in 1997 under “Democracy and Higher Education: the explicit rubric of the public human- The Future of Engagement” in early ities; it is called the Institute for Collab- 2008, the New England Resource Cen- orative Research and Public Humani- ter for Higher Education and the Ket- ties, and one of its key missions is to en- able the humanities to act as a bridge be- tween the university, the city of Colum- 11 In “Toward the Practice of the Humanities,” bus, and the broader public culture. The Sylvia Gale, founder of Publicly Active Grad- University of Wisconsin at Madison has uate Education (page) for Imagining Ameri- long had a humanities center devoted ca, and Evan Carton, director of the Humani- ties Institute at the University of Texas at Aus- to research. Founded in 1959 as the In- tin, offer an impassioned account of how their stitute for Research in the Humanities, work in the public humanities evolved; they it was the ½rst in the country (and in estimate that of the some thirty-½ve humani- North America) to be dedicated to the ties centers at research universities that belong to the Consortium of Humanities Centers and support of research in the humanities chci with resident and visiting fellows, with Institutes ( ), two-thirds of them identify the public humanities as part of their mission. the originating model being that of in- See The Good Society 14 (3) (2005): 38–44. For dividual academic research. Forty years information on humanities centers both in the later, in 1999, a new Center for the Hu- United States and around the world, see the manities was created alongside the In- website of the Consortium of Humanities Cen- stitute for Research as the pivot point ters and Institutes, http://www.chcinetwork .org/. The Consortium was established in 1986 of contact between the humanities on and is now based at Duke University under the the Madison campus and the public. It leadership of Srinivas Aravamudan, director of sponsors a special program, begun as a the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute.

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tering Foundation noted “a sense of drift tended but concentrated period in con- The future and fragmentation in the movement to trast to the habitual practice of the sab- of the humanities promote community engagement and batical, which is no sooner begun than –in the the formation of democratic citizenship is over.) Many public goods emerged present & as key institutional priorities for Amer- over the course of this three-year proj- in public ican colleges and universities.” On the ect under the rubric of “Reclaiming contrary, and by all indications, I see the Childhood,” among them editorials by humanities flourishing in public across Mitchell in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the United States.12 a town hall meeting with kids from Se- attle schools speaking on how they use How do people who practice public digital technologies, an ongoing research scholarship describe their role and re- cluster composed of University of Wash- fer to themselves? In 2004 the Simpson ington faculty and Seattle-area writers Center received a welcome gift to estab- and educators, and an inventive and ex- lish the Simpson Professorship in the uberant multimedia installation in our Public Humanities. It was awarded to University Libraries exhibiting work geographer Katharyne Mitchell, whose by young people reflecting on their ex- research up until that point had been lo- perience of childhood. And there will cated ½rmly in the academic world. Two be more, including a trade book on how of the primary goals of this three-year childhood is being stolen from children professorship (it carried signi½cant re- in America, coauthored by Mitchell, the sources as well as a 50 percent release poet Frances McCue, and Laura Kastner, from teaching) were to model public a clinical associate professor of psychia- scholarship to the academic communi- try at the University of Washington. ty at the University of Washington (and But I want to single out the book beyond) and to establish meaningful Mitchell edited under the title Practis- connections with communities in the ing Public Scholarship: Experiences and Pos- greater Seattle area involved in Mitch- sibilities beyond the Academy. She asked ell’s multiyear project, which dealt with academics–among them, literary and childhood, education, and schooling. cultural studies scholar Terry Eagleton (Another goal of the professorship was (University of Manchester), historian to underscore the necessity of providing Patricia Limerick (University of Col- time for a research project over an ex- orado), sociologist Katherine Beckett (University of Washington), public pol- icy biologist Paul Ehrlich (Stanford Uni- 12 “Democracy and Higher Education: The versity), geographer Doreen Massey Future of Engagement,” sponsored by the (Open University), and historian How- New England Resource Center and the Ket- ard Zinn (Boston University)–to reflect tering Foundation, 2008; http://nerche.org on their experiences of becoming public /kettering_colloquium/vforum.html. To this we must add the rich variety of programs spon- scholars while remaining within a uni- sored by the ½fty-six humanities councils that versity system. What different terms are located in every state and U.S. territory do they deploy to describe themselves? and are funded, in part, by the National En- Public scholar. Activist scholar. Scholar- dowment for the Humanities. See www.neh activist. Scholarly producer. Scholar-cit- .gov/whoweare/statecouncils.html. See also the State Federation of Humanities Councils, izen. Scholar-advocate. Academic-activ- whose president is Esther Mackintosh, at ist. Public activist-scholar. Public intel- www.statehumanities.org/. lectual. The term “applied humanities”

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Kathleen also appears. It is clear that many of the ment with its contemporary–and, in Woodward contributors to the volume are searching my view, flat–rhetoric of “civic engage- on the 15 humanities for a vocabulary (tellingly, it is often hy- ment.” (Is not a “vision statement” brid) to capture the range of their com- from a university a contradiction in mitments and the work they have done terms?) The volume communicates a that was virtually unprecedented in the sense of openness and possibility, cu- postwar U.S. research university.13 riosity and drive. It champions experi- The essays in Practising Public Scholar- mentation and innovation, commitment ship have many things to recommend and passion, and it speaks to the impor- them, not least of which is the forth- tant relationship between scholarship rightness of their voices, grounded in and advocacy for social justice–of move- experience and offering advice. Some, ment in higher education. Indeed Julie like scientist Paul Ehrlich, author of Ellison has often called the public hu- The Population Bomb (so titled by the manities just that: a movement. publisher; Ehrlich preferred the more academic Population, Resources, and the At the same time, I cannot help but Environment), have had long careers as remark that some of the conversations public scholars. Ehrlich underscores about civic engagement, public scholar- the importance of making it clear when ship, and the public humanities in the one is speaking as a scientist and when United States betray a distinctly anti- as a scholar. Ignore interdisciplinary intellectual strain. In the two recent re- boundaries, he counsels. Others, like ports under the title of New Times De- Julia Lupton, have only relatively recent- mand New Scholarship, from conferences ly adopted the role of public scholar about civic engagement in research uni- (“scholar-citizen” is her preferred term). versities, the focus is on collaborative She writes about how her experience partnerships between the university and with uc Irvine’s Humanities Out There the private and public sectors, and the changed her professional life in literal- word intellectual is strikingly absent. We ly every aspect–“from my writing and ½nd references to the importance of so- teaching styles (clearer, more direct, cial development, community develop- more grounded), to my vision of the ment, and economic development, but university’s relationship to the com- not intellectual development.16 The munity (it should be reciprocal, serious, and sustained).”14 All of the contribu- tors give life to the distressingly bland genre of the university mission state- 15 It is notable that a participant at the Feb- ruary 2007 conference held at the University of California, Los Angeles, on the engaged re- search university remarked that in over twen- 13 Katharyne Mitchell, ed., Practising Pub- ty years of university work he had never heard lic Scholarship: Experiences and Possibilities a student ask about or use the term “civic en- Beyond the Academy (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley- gagement.” See Tim K. Stanton, ed., New Times Blackwell, 2008). Demand New Scholarship II: Research Universities and Civic Engagement: Opportunities and Chal- 14 Julia Reinhard Lupton, “Philadelphia lenges (Los Angeles: University of California, Dreaming: Discovering Citizenship Be- Los Angeles, and Campus Compact, 2007), 17. tween the University and the Schools,” in Practising Public Scholarship, ed. Mitchell, 16 See Cynthia M. Gibson, New Times Demand 49–50. New Scholarship: Research Universities and Civic

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stress is on the solving of social prob- ing done in the public humanities can The future lems and responding to community give life to the uninspiring generalities of the humanities needs; the language is, well, lifeless re- in New Times Demand New Scholarship. –in the port-language, dull and listless for the In fact, I wonder to what extent the very present & most part. (I am intimately familiar phrase “civic engagement” is a stum- in public with this genre, having written my bling block for the idea–and ideal–of share of reports.)17 But in the human- the commitment of scholars to larger ities, communities of inquiry often social purposes and intellectual goods. come into being through the articulat- The report from Imagining America ing of questions, which are often in- on public scholarship, tenure, and pro- choate in the beginning and can never motion identi½es two basic models of be de½nitively answered. Communi- public scholarship: community-based ties are formed around questions; they projects and the public presentation of are communities of the question. In the knowledge in books, magazines, and humanities, inquiry adds context that forums for non-academic projects. The ever widens and deepens; this is what former are privileged as collaborative has been famously called thick descrip- and engaged (some identi½ed as com- tion, and to this I would add thick theo- munity-based participatory research), ry. In short, I believe that the work be- as eschewing a hierarchy of knowledge and exemplifying the co-creation of knowledge. Unless I have misread the Engagement: A Leadership Agenda (Medford, report, the term “public intellectual” Mass.: Tufts University and Campus Com- never appears in it, and intellectual as an pact, 2006) and Stanton, ed., New Times De- adjective is seldom used. Granted, in the mand New Scholarship II; available at http:// www.compact.org. At a third conference, United States the term “public intellec- held in 2008 at the University of North Car- tual” is often identi½ed with the speci½c olina, Chapel Hill, it was decided to establish historical cohort of the New York intel- a network of research universities under the lectuals–Lionel Trilling, Irving Howe, rubric of The Research University Civic En- trucen Mary McCarthy, Clement Greenberg, gagement Network ( ). In New Times 18 Demand New Scholarship II, intellectual appears and Susan Sontag, among them. But only twice as an adjective, one of which is in I suspect that to some degree this lack a quote from Richard Brodhead, president of mirrors the age-old American tradition Duke University and a scholar of nineteenth- of antiintellectualism. (The omission century American literature. may also be traced to decades of identi- ty politics, with the cautionary lesson 17 I am struck by the world of difference in tone and texture between the genre of the of not speaking on behalf of others.) To university report from the ½rst decade of the ½nd such an attitude lodged in the acad- twenty-½rst century and the contributions emy itself, particularly within the hu- that appear in an issue of Dædalus from for- manities, is an index, I think, of the in- ty years ago devoted to “The Future of the stitutional intellectual insecurity of Humanities.” If today we write about parti- cipatory action-based research, in 1969 Her- bert Blau, in an essay that bursts with blood- 18 The late Edward Said, in his essay “The ed thought, wrote about participatory democ- Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals,” in racy in the wake of the student revolution. The Public Intellectual, ed. Helen Small (Lon- We need to reclaim that sense of intellectual don: Blackwell, 2002), observes that the Unit- urgency. See “Relevance: The Shadow of a ed States is less hospitable to the use of the Magnitude,” Dædalus 98 (3) (Summer 1969): word intellectual than are France, Britain, and 654–676. the Islamic world.

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Kathleen people in the humanities in the United ucation itself: a counterintuitive and Woodward States today even as many of us are try- disabling shift in our rhetoric about the on the humanities ing, with con½dence, to reinvent the hu- public and the private has taken place manities within the university. over the last twenty years. Institutions In addition, the very term public has of higher education have conceptual- been put under decades of pressure, in- ized the “public” as being outside of terrogated for its ideological biases (and the institution, as the very rhetoric of there are many) by intellectuals (the civic engagement and the engaged uni- word is apt) ranging from Nancy Fraser versity reveals. At the same time, mem- to Michael Warner.19 (The term commu- bers of the public, as historian of educa- nity has also been subject to critique, but tion William Zumeta has pointed out, that is another story.20) One of the very have come to understand public univer- virtues of the idea of the public–as op- sities (or what we now call state-assisted posed to a community which is usual- institutions) as providing private rather ly understood as local–is that it is un- than public goods–that is, offering indi- bounded and general. Michael Warner viduals degrees for success.22 Concomi- has called it a “practical ½ction.”21 I con- tantly, as James Duderstadt and Farris sider it an ideal. But in certain contexts Wommack observe in The Future of the the word public has been stigmatized. Public University in America, “Federal pol- Consider public housing, for example. icy has shifted away from the view that More to the point, consider higher ed- higher education is a public good and toward the view that education bene½ts primarily the individual.”23 Thus add- 19 See Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public ing the word public to intellectual might Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Ac- tually Existing Democracy,” in Habermas and be considered too hot to handle. the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cam- Indeed the ½gure of an intellectual, bridge, Mass.: mit Press, 1992) and Michael calling up an individual, can seem to Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: resist an association with public. In the Zone, 2002). Warner’s reflections in Publics academy today the work of the individ- and Counterpublics are brilliant and polemical. I take particular issue with his jeremiad against ual, cast as solitary, has become some- what he caricatures as journalistic simplemind- what suspect as the model of cross-disci- edness. He opposes the functions of intellectu- plinarity and collaboration, bequeathed als and journalists, indicting intellectuals who by the sciences and adopted by adminis- embrace clarity of expression with a desire for trative leaders, has assumed rhetorical fame and unfairly ridiculing the discipline of ascendancy.24 In embracing the public history in particular for “the fascination with journalistic authority,” 139–140. 22 William Zumeta, “The New Finance of 20 Miranda Joseph, for example, in Against Public Higher Education,” The nea 2006 Alma- the Romance of Community (Minneapolis: Uni- nac of Higher Education, ed. Harold Wechsler versity of Minnesota Press, 2002), trenchantly (Washington, D.C.: National Education Asso- shows how the romance of community–the ciation, 2006). celebratory discourse about community–ap- pears virtually everywhere. See also Miranda 23 James J. Duderstadt and Farris W. Womack, Joseph, “Community,” in Keywords for Amer- The Future of the Public University in America: Be- ican Cultural Studies, ed. Bruce Burgett and yond the Crossroads (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Glen Hendler (New York: New York Univer- University Press, 2003), 40. sity Press, 2007). 24 The humanities and arts have their own 21 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 8. traditions of collective and collaborative work,

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humanities we must take care not to in- pared for “the risks and uncertain results The future advertently set to the side the tradition of the public sphere–a lecture or a book of the humanities of reflective and interpretive inquiry on or article in wide and unrestricted circu- –in the the part of individuals as a practice that lation–over the insider space controlled present & is seen by some as suddenly out-of-date. by experts and professionals.”26 Patricia in public But others use the terms intellectual Limerick insists that the receptivity of and public intellectual without dif½culty. the public “to scholars who speak clear- A few years ago literary and cultural ly, pragmatically, and originally is de- studies scholar Michael Bérubé, one of monstrably unbounded.”27 Terry Eagle- our most animated public intellectuals, ton, referring to himself as a public intel- pointed to the emergence in the United lectual, tells a small story that illustrates States of an African American intelli- this wonderfully: gentsia whose prominent intellectuals Some years ago, I was associated with –among them, Gerald Early, Cornel a worker writers’ movement in Britain, West, Michael Denning, Lani Guinier, and went down to Bristol to speak at a Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and bell hooks– workshop of working-class men and write and speak for large audiences.25 women who were trying to write their The title of Howard Zinn’s contribu- life histories. I was speaking to them tion to Practising Public Scholarship is about the idea of autobiography, trying “The Making of a Public Intellectual.” to keep my remarks as lucid as possible, The late Edward Said, in my view one of when an almost-blind woman in her our great public intellectuals, embraced eighties interrupted me in her rich West the idea of the intellectual with impunity Country burr to ask rather brusquely: and the life of the intellectual with vitali- “What kind of language is that you’re ty, writing in Representations of the Intellec- talking?” I was just on the point of apol- tual that the intellectual must be pre- ogizing for any unintentional obscuran- tism, and for being so remote from my ranging from theater productions and con- audience, when she added: “Because I’d ferences to the creation of dictionaries, but like to learn it.” She went on to publish these traditions are rarely invoked. I should a magni½cent history of her life, to which also note that, in contradistinction to “pro- I added a brief introduction.28 fessional science” or “conventional science,” there is an emerging tradition of “civic sci- 26 Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectu- ence” in community-based participatory re- al (New York: Vintage, 1996), 87. search. Tenets include a commitment to re- spect the knowledge-making practices of 27 Patricia Limerick, “Tales of Western Adven- community groups and to consider knowl- ture,” in Practising Public Scholarship, ed. Mitch- edge-making practices that are intended to ell, 15. produce better accounts of the world, may be experiential, may (only may) be general- 28 Terry Eagleton, “Comrades and Colons,” in ized, and may not translate into solutions Practising Public Scholarship, ed. Mitchell, 10. In to problems. Louise Fortmann, an environ- that same essay (at 7), Eagleton draws a distinc- mental scientist at the University of Califor- tion between an intellectual and a public intel- nia, Berkeley, explored this at the Confer- lectual; he makes a further distinction between ence on Expanding Interdisciplinarity from speaking as a citizen and as an academic: Campus to Community, held on June 5, 2008, at the University of Washington. Intellectuals need to be fluent in more than one academic discourse if they are to be public intellec- 25 Michael Bérubé, “Public Academy,” tuals–which is to say, if they want to bring ideas The New Yorker, June 30, 2003. to bear on the political culture as a whole. The in-

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Kathleen I read this small story as a cautionary ferent kind of question: What would Woodward parable. As intellectuals we must em- public literary scholarship mean?30 on the humanities brace our knowledge and not dilute it; If there is a latent insecurity in this translate it, yes, but not water it down essay, it is my concern about the future completely. I would like to see more em- of literary criticism. I am a reader both phasis in the conversations about the by profession and temperament, a pro- public humanities on the importance fessional and an amateur. I understand of intellectuals writing for publics larger what Grace Paley means in her poem than our professional circles. Consider, “Fidelity” when she says she can’t aban- for example, the influential and imagi- don a book she has begun because the native work of philosopher Judith But- characters have become her “troubled ler, historian Mike Davis, legal scholar companions” and “life had pages or de- Patricia Williams, and art historian T. J. cades to go / so much was about to hap- Clark. pen to people.”31 Reading has not disap- peared. Book clubs abound. But it is a The growth and development of pub- fact that literary criticism is read virtual- lic scholarship in the humanities across ly only by other literary critics (and per- disciplines and institutions of higher ed- haps not that many). That this is not the ucation (from research universities to case with the practice of history prompts community colleges) is exceedingly un- me to confess I may be guilty of disci- even. I would hazard that faculty mem- pline envy.32 What would public liter- bers in doctoral institutions in literary ary criticism look like? Would a public studies and language training in partic- broader than the readership of the New ular are on the whole less familiar with the national conversation about public scholarship (ongoing now for some New American Scholar: Scholarship and the twenty years, with a long history of the Purposes of the University.” reciprocal relationships between the academy and society before that) than 30 The Modern Language Association has tak- en important steps in the direction of public are, say, historians, who can point to the scholarship. Under the aegis of Michael Hol- ½eld of public history, or sociologists quist, the Presidential Forum at the annual to public . How many literary convention of the Modern Language Associ- studies and language faculty members ation in 2007 was “The Humanities at Work could refer to the discussion about met- in the World.” Standing Still: The Associate Pro- 29 fessor Survey, a report forthcoming from the ropolitan universities? Or to ask a dif- Modern Language Association, recommends a more expansive conception of scholarship, research, and publication, one that reconsid- tellectual range, in other words, is determined by ers the dominance of the monograph and in- the social function–for the word “intellectual” cludes work produced and disseminated in denotes a social function rather than a personal new media. It also recommends public schol- characteristic. arship as an important mode of research.

29 See Daniel M. Johnson and David A. Bell, 31 Grace Paley, Fidelity: Poems (New York: eds., Metropolitan Universities: An Emerging Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 41. Model in Higher Education (Denton: Univer- sity of North Texas Press, 1995). The respon- 32 See Marjorie Garber, Academic Instincts sibility of metropolitan universities to their (Princeton: Press, 2001) communities is a key theme in these essays. for characteristically witty observations on See especially R. Eugene Rice’s essay on “The discipline envy.

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York Review of Books, American Book Re- and digital media, knowledge that circu- The future view, Bookforum, and the American Poetry lates widely. And here it is that the digi- of the humanities Review care? In any case, the question tal humanities and the public humani- –in the may well be moot. It is indisputable that ties forcefully intersect. present & we are moving–have moved–from a “Seattle Civil Rights and Labor Histo- in public print culture to a screen culture (indeed, ry” provides an inspiring example. Di- now often a hand-held screen) and that rected by James Gregory (history) with this tectonic shift has been in the mak- the assistance of doctoral candidate ing for well over a century with the cas- Trevor Griffey (history), this project at cading accumulation of the inventions the University of Washington began as of photography, ½lm, television, video, an undergraduate teaching experiment, the computer, and the Internet. What with Gregory hoping to motivate his does this mean for public scholarship senior history majors by promising to in the humanities? publish on the Web the best of their re- Over the past few years the explora- search on the intertwined histories of tion of the digital humanities at human- racial justice and labor justice in Seattle. ities centers has accelerated at an expo- The students did original research on nential pace.33 It is abundantly clear that racially restrictive real estate covenants. the advent of the new digital technolo- They collected rare photographs and gies is transforming how scholars in the videotaped oral history interviews with humanities undertake their research in people who had been central to these unprecedented ways. New methods– movements for justice. And this is what among them, text mining, visualization, happened: the course not only turned virtual environments, and collabora- them into practicing historians, many tive digital research spaces–are being of them became published historians on invented and tested. New ways of repre- an innovative website now archived at senting our scholarship–integrating the University of Washington Libraries. text, image, sound, and video–are It provides abundant material about emerging, as are new ways of dissemi- this forgotten chapter in Seattle’s histo- nating it to ever broader publics. One ry, including historical overviews and of our main challenges today is to inte- timelines, streaming video of the inter- grate new forms of digital publication views, activist flyers from the period, with the wealth of traditional forms of and an interactive map of “Segregated printed knowledge, creating powerful Seattle.” Among its many distinctions hybrid forms, a synthesis of printed is the collection of materials devoted to the Seattle Chapter of the Black Pan- ther Party, the most comprehensive col- 33 This is not the place to detail the initiatives lection of interviews, publications, and in the digital humanities that have converged other materials about any of the Black in recent years to produce the quantum leap we are witnessing. But I do want to mention Panther Chapters. The website thus at- the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technolo- tests to the project’s success in building gy Advanced Collaboratory (hastac), the na- trust among the many people involved tional consortium cofounded by Cathy David- from the university and Seattle’s com- son (Duke University) and David Theo Gold- munities. Indeed the creation of strong berg (University of California, Irvine) that, with the digital humanities as its focus, has bonds of trust–all-important and intan- inspired so much creativity in the humanities; gible–is one of the precious precipitants http://www.hastac.org. of the project.

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Kathleen Another of the gratifying results of In June 2005 The Seattle Times featured Woodward this project is its very reach. The re- on its front page the students’ research on the humanities search has a large virtual audience, on segregated housing, con½rming the both in the Puget Sound region and fluid circulation of information between across the country. The website has media (in this case, the web and print) an average of ten thousand visits a and thrilling the students in the process. month, and the project is frequently Three years later Jim Gregory, speaking cited as a source and hyperlinked to at a meeting of leaders involved in the other websites. Many area middle Carnegie Foundation’s Teachers for a schools and high schools use the site New Era at the University of Washing- as a teaching tool, and the project has ton, declared that he had been trans- been included in instruction modules formed by the project into a teacher for for police of½cers and other city em- our new era. More than that, his very ployees. It has also brought people to- idea of what it can mean to be a scholar gether in dialogue in public forums at and an intellectual today has changed city schools. “Seattle Civil Rights and dramatically. Labor History” thus demonstrates the It is doubtful that in the past the trans- important point that online scholarly formative project that is “Seattle Civil publication can generate face-to-face Rights and Labor History” would have communication. Another measure of ½gured prominently in a ½le for promo- the project’s success is that it is generat- tion at a research university. Today, with ing sister projects. Other universities– Imagining America’s Scholarship in Public San Francisco State University, to name in our hands, it is my hope that will no one–are contemplating undertaking longer be the case. But of course promo- such research in their communities.34 tion and tenure policies are not the real And similar projects–digital public hu- point. For many people in the humani- manities projects–are in the making. ties, the very idea of the possibility of One of them is the ambitious “Redlin- public scholarship has created a larger ing California,” a collaboration between sense of meaning where before there the San Diego Supercomputing Center’s had been only a profession, not a calling. Sustainable Archives and Library Tech- As the sociologist C. Wright Mills insist- nologies Lab and the University of Cali- ed, “Scholarship is a choice of how to fornia Humanities Research Institute at live, as well as a choice of a career.”36 the University of California, Irvine.35 Among other things, the public goods offered by many public humanities proj- 34 “Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History”; http://www.civilrights.washington.edu. For more information about the project, see James Center, 2007); http://www.sdsc.edu/news N. Gregory and Trevor Griffey, “Teaching a /researchadvances.html. The project direc- City about Its Civil Rights History: A Public tors are Richard Marciano, director of the History Success Story,” Perspectives on History, San Diego Supercomputing Center’s Sustain- April 2007; available at http://www.historians able Archives and Library Technologies Lab, .org/perspectives/issues/2007/0704/0704tea1 and David Theo Goldberg, director of the .cfm. University of California Humanities Research Institute. 35 See Paul Tooby, “Preserving History on a Humanities Grid for the University of Califor- 36 C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagina- nia,” Envisioning the Future: Research Advances tion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007 (San Diego: San Diego Supercomputing 1959), 196.

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ects stretch our affective understand- The future ing of the experience of other people of the humanities and draw us together in a common pur- –in the pose. In “Seattle Civil Rights” there is present & outrage at social injustice and hope for in public a different future to be found. In the “Great Wall of Los Angeles” there is joy captured in collective artistic expres- sion. There is a long historical tradition of the democratic impulse in higher educa- tion in the United States, and we need to reinvigorate that founding vision–it is both noble and pragmatic–of service to the public and work with the public. What is ultimately at stake in the public humanities is a form of scholarship and research, of teaching and learning, that honors commitment and concrete pur- pose, has a clear and present substance, reduces the distance between the univer- sity and life, and offers civic education for all involved, revealing the expansive future of the humanities–in the present and in public.

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