American Council of Learned Societies
Occasional Paper No. 6



The Humanities in the University:
Strategies for the 1990s

Introduction

THE UNIVERSITY AND THE LARGER COMMUNITY
RODERICK S. FRENCH
Merrill D. Peterson

Teaching the Humanities in the University
Susan Resneck Parr
Margaret B. Wilkerson

Humanistic Research
W. R. Connor
J. Hillis Miller



The University and the Larger Community

Roderick S. French
Vice President for Academic Affairs
George Washington University

My particular assignment this morning is, I believe, to concentrate on strategies for exploiting opportunities for the academic humanities in non-academic settings, outside universities and colleges. Professor Peterson will do more to develop the conceptual framework for the involvement of the humanities in public life.

In this connection, I heard a very interesting session at the Conferences of Secretaries yesterday. It was a panel on the evolution of our disciplines. The question was asked, but not answered, as to where one finds, or how one defines, a public for the humanities, for our disciplines. What I have to say this morning can be taken as one line of answer to that question. There are, I think, two important contemporary developments in our society. One we might call organizational or institutional, and the other is more broadly cultural. Both are ambivalent or at least have some paradoxical qualities, and I will try to describe each briefly.

First the institutional, or organizational, that is the easier one to describe. I have in mind the phenomenal formation over the last 17 years of the state humanities councils. I assume most of us are familiar with them to some extent, but let me refresh our memories by just doing the main outlines on these organizations.

The starting point of course is the law that authorizes NEH which mandates that 20 percent of the program funds allocated for the Endowment each year must pass directly through the Endowment to the state councils for regranting at the local level. The councils are voluntary bodies with very small staffs and low overheads. There also is a kind of multiplying factor in that all the regrants have to be fully matched, at least in kind if not in dollars. There is also a new trend that some of you may not be aware of and that is for state legislatures to vote additional allocations from state funds to the state humanities councils. The last, but perhaps the most critical point for our purposes, is that the one inflexible requirement is that every program that receives support from a state humanities council must have one humanities scholar involved in a central way.

The collective impact of this is rather astounding. The last time someone tried to count, I believe it was estimated that there are some 4,000 programs a year receiving some degree of support from state councils and that the audiences for these exhibits, lectures, books, films, and conferences total some 25 million adult Americans. One way of looking at all of this would be to say that the state council movement represents the largest public works program for academic humanists since the Depression or, if you prefer, the greatest patronage system since the Renaissance.

Important as this welfare aspect may be, I want to relate this tidal wave of public programs to the more central concerns of our colleagues who do history or philosophy or literary studies. Let me first acknowledge parenthetically that no doubt many academic humanists have had very disappointing experiences in state council programs just as we sometimes do, alas, in the classroom. Sometimes state council programs are trivial; sometimes audiences lack the sophistication necessary to the topic. All of that is just normal frailty in any enterprise. But I know from personal experience that there are literally hundreds of our colleagues in the academic humanities who if they could be here this morning would testify with enthusiasm that state programs have provided them with settings in which they could experiment with new interpretations of familiar materials, in which they could improve their pedagogical skills, from which they have received stimulation for new lines of scholarly inquiry, and through which they have established valuable partnerships with their colleagues in elementary and secondary schools. So to see state programs simply as a way of providing honoraria for faculty delivering recycled classroom lectures is to miss the main point. The state humanities programs represent nothing less than opportunities for creative extensions of our scholarship and pedagogy.

Let me acknowledge in passing that I know by heart the various disincentives for this kind of participation, including the reward system for members of the academic professions. As one who signs all the promotion and tenure letters for a faculty of 1,200, I have no illusions as to how much involvement in these kinds of programs counts when it comes time for peer review in the departments. But that is simply a fact of academic life against which we have to try to do something.

What I most want to emphasize is that the state council movement, and it does have the quality of a movement, is rapidly expanding our external constituencies. At least two things are happening. First, state councils are retrieving our lost alumni. What I mean to designate by that term are those tens of thousands of men and women who are graduates of liberal arts colleges who can remember very well being entranced by the reading of Dostoyevsky or George Eliot or who remember one semester in which they absolutely lost themselves in the study of the Italian Renaissance. But their initiation was not deep enough to enable them to sustain this engagement with our fields in the environments of their post-college lives, often unsupportive or even inimical environments. Now those people are coming back to the humanities, as it were, through state council programs. The other new recruits are a more inchoate lot. They are coming in as a kind of by-product of various movements or movements variously described in our society—the back to basics people. Those who wish to reclaim a legacy or to rediscover traditional values or to restore civic virtue in public life. I think we are all familiar with this strand of thinking and the many voices which articulate that thinking.

Now to come to the second point, I realize that all of this renewed public interest makes some of our colleagues rather nervous because they feel that the humanities are in no condition to respond to this avalanche of new interest. They fear that our wars of critical theories and our conflicting ideological interpretive stances will quickly diminish or even extinguish this new public romance with the humanities.

I want to take my last minute to say that I very much do not share that anxiety. I do not see these lively intellectual movements in our fields as exercises in self-destruction. I was thinking about this yesterday in terms of two specimen texts representing the arguments and counterarguments about relativism or the contingency of everything. One is a line from the most celebrated of the fundamentalists, Allan Bloom, and the other passage is by my favorite iconoclast, Richard Rorty, both having to do with this topic.

The passage in The Closing of the American Mind is one known to all of us now from the many reviews, if not by direct reading of the book, wherein Professor Bloom asserts that anyone who approaches the study of Aristotle merely to discover what the Greeks thought about a given topic is not really serious about life. Some of us in this room would like to say a lot about the logical incoherence of that assertion I suppose, but I just put it forward as one example. The other passage that came to mind was from Rorty’s notorious manifesto on post-modernist bourgeois liberalism in which, you may remember, he uses the illustration of the young girl who comes out of the forest. She is the sole survivor of a civilization that has been obliterated, including all of its artifacts and literary products, and the question is asked whether or not she possesses human dignity in the traditional, Kantian sense. Rorty blithely says no, that this is a culturally contingent notion ascribed to other human beings by people who hold a certain common set of beliefs. Some of the rest of us in this room would like to jump out of the window when we hear Rorty talking like that—or perhaps throw Rorty out of the window.

In all seriousness, my reason for making these citations is to say that I cannot imagine any self-respecting humanist who would not be delighted to be paid $50 or $500 to spend an evening or a Saturday exploring the grounds of, and the ramifications of, these highly accessible texts with a group of our “ordinary fellow citizens.” We should of course recognize the prospect of a kind of disjunction between the so-called naive reader and esoteric theories, but that is a very different way of stating the problem. I think the ferment and indeed the conflict in our disciplines is an important manifestation of what the humanities have to offer our fellow citizens, namely, an invitation to join in that unceasing discussion of rival interpretations of the human experience that has animated the humanities from the outset.

In sum, I think that the operation of these now well-established state councils combined with the surge of popular interest in our themes and in our questions, present us with the opportunity to restore a vitality to the humanities that they could never have so long as they remain merely academic subjects. In short, I think the public is ready for the humanities. The question is whether or not the humanities are ready for the new public. I think it is the task of those of us in university administrations to assist our colleagues in taking up this opportunity. Thank you.