Why place? Partly, of course, I am influenced by our contemporary obsession with place, signified through the public rhetoric of "homeland defense" and the scholarly analysis of human territoriality. Yet, I chose place as an organizing principle also precisely because I believe that John cared deeply about place in all of its senses (celebrating it, sharing it, solidifying it, finding it, recovering it, and imagining it). He sparkled when he celebrated and shared the Rackham Building at Michigan. He reveled in the evocation of place through the detailed analysis of classical rituals, texts, and objects—his scholarly imagination was in that regard distinctly "grounded." His dreams for graduate education and for the humanistic disciplines revolved around solidifying the infrastructure of support (graduate mentoring, fellowships for newly tenured faculty, records over time about trends in the field) with an eye towards a world in which we would (to borrow from the Academy’s essays) "make the humanities count" (D’Arms 2002). John cared about "place," and so do we.

Place and people. I should say, as a bit of an aside, that caring about place is not necessarily at the expense of caring about people or participants. (As a personality psychologist, I analyze people by understanding the contexts of their lives, and as a social psychologist, I study social structures via the form they are given by individuals. Thus, I firmly believe in the intertwining of people and places.) In fact, John D’Arms also understood people, be it in classical times or now, through their rituals of place and the places they inhabited, while he simultaneously worked to enhance the place of the humanities (and of graduate education in the humanities) by positioning their newly-minted or newly-tenured participants in the best position to create a new (and lively) place for humanistic knowing, both in the academy and in the public’s imagination.

What about place? Returning, then, to consideration of place, it is useful to focus both on how we "have place" (as in taking one’s place; having a rightful place; fitting in one’s place) and on how we "do place" (as in exploring place; resisting or rejecting place; transforming or reinventing place). These are complementary and compatible forms of place—that is, having place and doing place, and both John himself and his vision of the humanities embraced both. If we only have place, it tends to become insular, stagnant, and dull (we need the dynamic of reinventing our place on the basis of our explorations); conversely, if we are constantly reinventing, exploring, traveling, without a touchstone of having place, there is little to give meaning to our efforts. In this vein, John worked to give the humanities their rightful place, but he did it in part by supporting the transformative impulses of our fields.

When we think of John, we think of him assuming his "rightful" place (settling in, in his wood-paneled office in Rackham; wearing his tidy suits and personifying the classicist of old), yet we also remember his explorations of place as foreign territory (traversing the diag at Michigan, not to mention the world, and playing with his anything but tidy jazz group). In fact, the first time that I really got to know John was on a committee he chaired at Michigan with the dubious task of setting policy about the awarding of honorary degrees, especially to those who could not be there to receive the honor in person. The committee debated the value of connecting tradition to place, as compared with the power of imagining a connection, when one could not see it up close (with the immediacy of a decision about awarding Nelson Mandela an honorary degree). At the heart of our dialogue was this tension between our traditions that celebrate place and our willingness to explore. John was maddening in his willingness to champion the value of having place and doing place; and, indeed, we ended our task in a classic place of compromise.

John’s vision of the humanities, and their signal contributions to understanding human experience, embodied both a central, one might say classical core (that is, a rightful place) and a transformative mission (that is, of exploration and reinvention). He celebrated the fundamental role of original sources in humanism, but he also embraced what he called "the untidiness of the humanities, their closeness to the patterns and flux of lived experience, and their insusceptibility to anything resembling formal proof" (D’Arms 1999b). Thus, he grounded his vision in sources, often ancient, and yet let it fly in the dynamics and complexity of contemporary daily living.

As Chair of Classics, he supported esoteric classicism via boosting enrollments in the teaching of classical texts in translation. As one of his colleagues, Ludwig Koenen, suggested in describing John’s contributions as Chair at Michigan: "it was [he] who moved the department into the necessities of the twentieth century and toward teaching large undergraduate classes using translations (once an anathema) not only because they paid for such exotic and luxury people like me, but also because, even in translation, it is possible to transmit the literary and intellectual values that we owe to the ancients and cultivate in handling the ancient texts and material remnants in art and daily life." In other words, he used the transformative mission to celebrate the rightful place, and vice versa.

As Dean of Rackham, he focused on making training in the disciplines more orderly (using data on time-to-degree, attrition, and placement; and NRC rankings of programs) even as he greatly enhanced the position of interdisciplinary degree programs at Michigan (especially those that brought together different humanities disciplines—Classics and Classical Art and Archaeology; Anthro-pology and History). As a dean of graduate studies, his focus was as much on the structuring of our fields—that is, on the place in which students would live as scholars, during and after graduate school—as it was on the graduate students per se. That is, he cared about the life of the field (our place) as much as about the life of the participants.

As President of ACLS, he not only strengthened learned societies by linking them firmly to universities, he also solidified their constituent disciplines by enhancing the place of the newly tenured faculty in these fields. John’s "GI Bill" for these "youngest veterans of the cultural wars" combined signification and transformation in equal parts. That is, he wanted to give them time to go to the "places" that most celebrate and signify the importance of the humanities—the national centers and libraries—at the same time as he placed his hope for the future of the humanities in the transformative thinking that they would do, particularly in exploring foreign intellectual territories and in making common cause with other ways of knowing (D’Arms 1999b).

A place for the humanities. In an opinion piece published in The Chronicle of Higher Education in 1999, John argued for a special place for the humanities as a public good, though one as yet underappreciated both within and outside of the academy. He wrote: "Exploring and seeking to deepen the meaning of life, across civilizations and cultures, is no negligible social good." Indeed. And as puzzling as is the legacy of inattention to and sometimes disdain for the humanities (as signified by waxing and waning university enrollments or federal support), we can now take some hope, oddly enough, in a renewed public focus on language, culture, and geography (even as it emerges from defensive and potentially divisive motivations); we can also take even greater hope from the renewal of the humanities (post-culture wars) and their positioning both as a voice of insight into the meaning of life across the globe, and in their interconnections with other disciplines. Of course, this hope comes in large part with thanks to the work of ACLS under John’s leadership, as its efforts to bolster a cadre of newly-tenured leaders (with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation), to build a data infrastructure (as part of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences project and with the National Endowment for the Humanities), and to solidify connections between the humanities disciplines, professional organizations, and centers and institutes (in alliances with university leadership) have so well positioned humanistic endeavors front and center inside and outside of our campuses. In pondering this new-found hope, I want to end with a few thoughts on what forms this special place for the humanities in their reflection on human experience might take.

A place apart. Ironically, just as humanistic endeavors become more and more needed in the interpretation and betterment of the human condition, so does it become ever more important to their authenticity and ultimate utility that they reside in "a place apart," and thus are able, as my colleague Dick Wheeler wrote of the emergence into prominence of Elizabethan theater, to celebrate or to criticize, or both, the institutions of normal society. For example, humanists have an enormous contribution to make to the education of future leaders of business, science, and government, by showing them how to be "playful" in their imaginings about the human condition. John pondered this same question in a speech he gave at Emory (2001): "But just how comprehensive, corporate, and commercial can universities afford to become without losing their valuably critical stance, at what Cavafy has called ‘a slight angle to the universe’?" Just as our places can become insular and stagnant if we don’t open them to reimaginings, so too can we lose the playfulness of our reflections on humanity if we are too responsible, too anchored in what others often call "the real world."

A place connected. As playful as we might be, there is responsibility to be reckoned with as well, and so the humanities must stay connected—within their own sphere to other disciplines; across diverse ways of knowing; and, most especially, to that real world of lived problems. There is a need to be connected in these ways, partly to address the vexing problems of the human condition, but also to refresh our own understandings. John spoke about just these sources of generational renewal in the humanities several years ago, when he returned for a visit to Michigan to speak at the ceremony recognizing the awardees of the John H. D’Arms Faculty Awards for Distinguished Graduate Mentoring in the Humanities (2000). He said:

First-rate scholars, positioned at all points in the academic career cycle, need to shift the contemporary humanities dialogue beyond the self-referential to deeper understanding across departments and disciplines; more, we hope, will express impatience with the excessively specialized vocabularies and overly rigid disciplinary structures that have held the humanities back. Will we probe the interconnections and interdependencies with other fields that are needed in order to address increasingly urgent social problems?—for neither science nor the humanities, operating alone, can possibly deepen understanding in the many places where our natural and social worlds converge. Can we be more successful in connecting the findings of scholarship to a wider educated public?

Enhancing the place of the humanities in John’s honor. I think that the answer is more clearly affirmative than it has ever been—in fact, the humanities can find a place connected and still preserve their playful and rightful place apart, in part by strengthening the national infrastructure for the humanities and in part by positioning key players as change agents and spokespersons within those habitats. John tried to do precisely this by using his perch at ACLS to broker alliances between foundations, learned societies, university leaders, and national centers and libraries; he also did it by putting his faith in the generational change agents of our fields—that is, in graduate students first, and then later in newly-tenured faculty. In other words, he worked both on places and with people; or, more specifically, on the relationship between the structuring of places in which to think and the supporting of the right participants to think boldly about those places—our fields. And, here is why he was hopeful and we should be too—here is what he reports from a participant in one of ACLS’s Conversations with newly-tenured faculty in the humanities:

I feel that my generation of scholars has benefited from the best of the old and new—in-depth canonical instruction, historical and archival research, and interdisciplinary training. . . . It meant a great deal to all of us when you referred to us as "scholars in the prime of [our] intellectual lives." I know that I will continue to face challenges—fighting for time and finding time in which to get work done—but I feel more entitled, somehow, to my expectations and my hopes. (D’Arms 2000)

We too feel more entitled to our expectations and our hopes, and John had a great deal to do with our optimism—it is only so sad that he could not have had more time to see the rightful place of the humanities both celebrated and transformed by his efforts on their behalf.