The reason to put pain aside and proceed with the chairing of that session is that John D’Arms was one of the world’s finest advocates for causes I believe in (and it is also true that he was very thoughtful after my little orthopedic adventure, sending me an occasional note with the inquiry, "How’s the foot?"). While I very much appreciated his solicitude, I appreciated even more his public statements about the need for academic humanists to shed obscurity and jargon, and to engage themselves with wider audiences. To remind us all of his vision, I was going to quote from a speech John gave at the University of Michigan in September of 2000. But then Chancellor Cantor beat me to it, so I had to sneak out to my hotel room and get more quotations. But then I decided I should read this again, and propose a plan to the ACLS: print this quotation on spiffy paper and in handsome type; send us as many copies as we have humanities faculty on our campus, and assign us to sneak a copy into each faculty mailbox.

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? (D’Arms 2000)

In the same spirit, I quote from a speech John gave at Stanford in November of 1998: "We have a great opportunity to invigorate disciplines that have too often become marginalized, whether by the evolution of the university or by our own drifting toward the trivial, the pedantic, or the excessively abstract."

For the next few minutes, I want to report on some activities that I believe John would have liked. I think they are activities he would have found amusing, and my highest hope would be that he would have found these activities to be proof that he had this right; he had accurately diagnosed both the problems of the humanities, and prescribed the remedy for the problems. So my focus is more on the "our future course" part of this panel’s title.

I should acknowledge that I only had brief personal encounters with John. We did have an exchange of correspondence on a couple of occasions, as John gracefully pointed out that if I had put my name down as co-chair of the ACLS Development Committee, it would probably be a good move to get my own contribution in before the end of the year. But even if I did not know John well, I believe I know, thoroughly and completely, what he was talking about when he said, at Stanford, "The scholarly humanities have little or no influence, or special expertise, in public policy formulation; witness our lack of success with national funders—foundations and others—that are committed to agendas of broad societal change and improvement." Or, as he put it in one of the ACLS Conversations, "One of the things that has been on my mind is the efficacy of our scholarship toward creating the social change we actually wanted to make at one point in our lives." Remedies for this condition of inefficacy and impotence provide the punchline of these next stories.

For the last decade, I have had the good fortune to engage in an extended set of experiments, testing the propositions John put forward. I believe these experiments have entirely vindicated his faith in the potential of the humanities to play a role in the world beyond the university.

I am a Western American historian, and for a while I did the regular academic thing, working as hard as I could to advance the scholarly standing of the field of Western history. I found that line of activity very satisfying, and then, about a decade ago, I started getting more and more involved with public audiences. In 1995, I got a wonderful institutional opportunity to work with a moribund campus organization, the University of Colorado’s Center of the American West. Now I am faculty director and chair of the board of the Center. The Center today is no longer moribund. Our Chancellor has recently declared that Western American Studies is one of the three major areas of strength on our campus. Predictably, the two other areas are in the sciences: Space Sciences and Environmental Sciences. The American West initiative is the only one of the three based in the humanities.

In 10 to 15 minutes, I can only give the briefest sketch of the reasons why work with the Center has given me such faith in the power of the humanities to break out of old habits and become a valued player in seeking remedies for society’s dilemmas.

Here is the essence of what we do at the Center (with the much-appreciated support of the Hewlett Foundation): We seek out situations in which people are having a tough time coping with change, and then we try to help them think about why they are having such a tough time. History is very useful in this cause; a longer perspective can work as a kind of anti-anxiety drug, taking us out of this harried individual moment, and letting us look at the long haul. Or, rather than an analogy with psychopharmaceuticals, maybe a better approach would be to think of the command used at sheepdog trials: "Look back," a handler will say or whistle to the dog, and the dog will look back over his shoulder and receive, thereby, a better perspective on the challenges that await him.

The two key topics for us are the tensions over growth in the West and the operations of the federal resource management agencies. Our first big effort, with both topics, was a book called The Atlas of the New West, published in 1997. We are now close to finishing a follow-up book called The Handbook for the New West. In terms of campus relations, it was probably our cleverest move to choose not to compete with the scientists and engineers (many of their departments, on our campus, are highly ranked in the nation), but to collaborate with them, to study them, to coach them, to critique them, and, speaking of sheepdog trials, sometimes to shepherd them.

Our approach is: don’t waste time complaining about the success of the scientists; persuade them to love us! One current project focuses on energy development in the interior West. We are, with this project, trying to correct the amnesia in public understanding of what oil, coal, and natural gas production booms have meant to Western communities. We are also reading documents like the Bush/Cheney energy plan closely and thoughtfully; we read such documents the way we were trained to read Herman Melville novels or Puritan sermons or justifications of slavery, looking for underlying assumptions and taken-for-granted habits of mind, so that we can call them into consciousness.

To find faculty participants in the energy initiative, we sent out a broadcast e-mail to the University of Colorado faculty, telling them (in very expansive, wide-ranging terms) about our inquiry (including the ways in which "energy" can be a virtual synonym for "spirit" or "life-force"). The results of the e-mail were, I fear, diagnostic of the troubles the humanities face. A flood of engineers, geologists, and physicists responded to the message, took part in our planning sessions, and made presentations at a workshop. Out of 40 or so respondents to the e-mail, one was from the humanities, and that person declared that she had no particular expertise in issues of energy, but felt it was a topic of compelling political importance. The representatives from the sciences and engineering pled with us to find more humanities faculty: let us begin our workshop, they said, with a session on what human beings mean by energy. We did recruit a classicist, but otherwise our overtures were solidly turned down. And yet the engineers and scientists kept appealing for humanities participation. At one meeting, when I remarked that a landscape full of wind turbines was ugly, one of the engineers looked very hurt and said, "I think they’re beautiful!" The door was wide open for an expansive discussion of aesthetics and perspective, but there was no one on hand willing to go through that door.

Our method, in essence, is this: we read or listen to debates over contemporary issues, practices, activities, and we reflect on the unexamined assumptions, the larger cultural context, the positioning in time of those texts and practices. The good news is that public audiences are very receptive to humanities-based commentary. Thanks to this society’s habits of specialization, your audiences will often be astonished by the perceptiveness of what you tell them—because this will be, for many, one of the first times they have been invited to think about the larger context of their work. So we try to draw lessons that will, at a minimum, give people a framework for examining their own actions and assumptions, and, on days of higher ambition, we try to nudge them toward what we think would be better practices. At the very least, we seem to get somewhere in persuading people to listen, receptively and tolerantly, to ideas that in other forms of presentation, would just make them mad.

I’ll describe one last example. I had been invited to speak to the Agricultural Section of the Colorado Bar Association—not just farm lawyers, but also representatives of various agricultural groups and interests. The "Ag Section" is a pretty conservative group, and I worked hard to disarm them, reminiscing about the baby chicks that my farm-raised father got me when I was a kid, chicks that turned into chickens, and then (after acts of considerable violence by my father) into dinner. But I had a goal, and that goal was to get my audience to think critically about individualism and private property.

Ask advocates for Colorado agriculture to question individualism? Good luck getting out of town safely.

I asked them to join me in answering the question, "If we had to choose the top five reasons that agriculture has lost power and why the number of farms has declined so rapidly over the last century and a half, what features or events would make that list?" There are a number of items to put high on that list—international competition, manipulations by agricultural products corporations. But the list would be incomplete if it did not include the farmers’ own devotion to individualism and private property, which has made it difficult for farmers to form cooperatives, or agree on collaborative marketing strategies, or to present a united front against developers looking to purchase agricultural water rights or ranchlands for home sites.

The Ag folks took this remark in very tranquilly. Some of them talked about it at lunch, and then came up to me and said that they had never really thought about how this individualism thing posed problems for them, but now it was something they wanted to think about. So if you can use the humanities and history to get farmers and their attorneys to think critically about individualism, then the humanities have a lot of unexplored power and possibility. The question, alas, is whether you can get humanities professors to think critically about individualism, in order to unleash that power and possibility!

History has not made the statement "I have seen the future and it works" into a very auspicious phrase. But in terms of the humanities and the wider world, I have seen a possible future, and I have seen it work. But it is also true that the obstacles are enormous and very powerful. While some are obstacles external to universities, the obstacles on the inside are equally substantial. Resistance from within the humanities, and within the humanists themselves, may well control the outcome. It is true that academic resistance to public engagement is very substantial, but since I wanted to give a cheerful talk today, I am purposefully and intentionally running out of time before I can discuss this resistance in any depth. Instead I will end with one more quotation from John D’Arms (1998), expressing his desire that we would explore the usefulness of the humanities in social change: "The learned societies, and individual scholars, that view the act of reaching out as engaging in serious acts of scholarly translation, seem to me to be approaching the public in ways most likely to be productive."