Academic specialization and contemporary university humanities centers

The rise of US humanities centers

Over 20 years ago, ‘Speaking for the humanities’, an Occasional Paper produced by the American Council of Learned Societies (No. 7, 1988), asserted that ‘Of all the recent developments in the humanities, the one that … most fully expresses the range and importance of the humanities is the proliferation of interdisciplinary humanities centers’ (Levine et al., 1989). In the years since, such centers have continued to flourish across the US and also internationally. By 2007 David Marshall could write that the ‘success of the humanities in reinvigorating itself has in some ways led to the creation of a shadow university in the programs and centers that lie in the interstices of the current structure’ (Marshall, 2007: 39).

Despite the prominence of these centers, there were various reasons for the relative paucity of general commentary on them that I had encountered. Basic information about such centers is scattered and fragmentary. The beginning of the history is well known: the first North American center for humanities research was founded at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1959, with another at Wesleyan University established the same year (Brontë, 1980; Woodward, 2009: 114). But the middle of the history is unclear, and the end nowhere in sight.

In 1980 the Rockefeller Foundation produced A Guide to Humanities Centers in the United States, which its editor, Program Officer D. Lydia Brontë (1980: 1), described as a ‘Working Paper, a directory of humanities centers and institutes’. The project originated from a visit to the Foundation in 1973 by a group of scholars interested in establishing a National Humanities Center. Rockefeller Foundation President John H. Knowles and two Humanities Program Officers sought more information; the result was, as Brontë explains, ‘the unexpected discovery that a category of research institutions existed in this country that had never been described collectively, although they exhibited many similarities in role and activities’. Expecting to find ‘perhaps as many as 10 centers, though probably fewer’, those working to assemble the data were shocked when their initial survey in 1973 yielded 37 centers. By 1979 their list had expanded to over 100 centers and institutes, and Brontë noted that others were being formed but were ‘not yet ready to be included’ (1980: 1–3, 6).

Over 30 years later, it remains unclear exactly how many centers are currently operating. The American Council of Learned Societies’ (ACLS) 1988 Occasional Paper ‘Speaking for the humanities’, while emphasizing ‘the proliferation of humanities centers on university campuses in recent years’, noted that no comprehensive directory of the various centers existed. The writers mention in passing a list of about 300 US centers compiled by the University of California at Irvine’s center (Levine et al., 1989). The September 1999 Directory published by PMLA contained a list of 73 ‘Humanities Research Centers’ in the US, which included non-campus-based units (Directory, 1999: 907–8). In a 2001 Chronicle of Higher Education article, Stanley N. Katz parenthetically referred to ‘more than 160 [campus humanities centers] in the country’ (Katz, 2001). Currently, the CHCI, founded in 1986, lists 154 member institutions on its website, which includes international as well as national listings (http://chcinetwork.org accessed 4 March 2011). No other directory of centers is available.

In addition to confusion about facts as basic as the numbers, the relative scarcity of commentary about humanities centers also results from the variety of forms they assume on different campuses and the wildly variable ranges of their operations. John Dryden’s comment about Chaucer’s pilgrims – the proverbial ‘here is God’s plenty’ (Dryden, 1962: 2.284) – certainly could be applied to humanities centers. Some centers include the performing arts along with the humanities; others cover the liberal arts or specific humanistic themes; still others are solely humanities. Digital humanities centers, sometimes free-standing and sometimes operating as programs within larger centers, are proliferating. Digital centers are currently a growth industry because, as Cathy N. Davidson and David Theo Goldberg point out, ‘the technology devoted to the humanities is much less developed than that supporting the social and natural sciences, despite the fact that, intrinsically, the amount of data that drives the humanities tends to be significantly larger and more complex than that which drives other fields’ (Davidson and Goldberg, 2005). Finally, Kathleen Woodward notes that ‘public humanities has been a key ingredient in the creation of many new centers’ (Woodward, 2009: 114), although Sylvia Gale and Evan Carton emphasize that centers with commitments to communities beyond the campus are most commonly located at large public universities (Gale and Carton, 2005: 39).

A similar multiplicity marks the missions of contemporary US humanities centers. Teaching and curriculum development are central to the missions of some, and beyond the mandates of others. At most centers interdisciplinarity rules, although others more strictly replicate traditional disciplinary divisions. Some centers offer residential fellowships, while others focus only on programming. Many centers initiate a wide range of programs; others provide support for programs originated elsewhere on as well as off campus. Among centers with fellowships, a number of them offer awards only to internal scholars, although others limit certain of their grants to scholars or others from outside the university. On some campuses centers lead in public humanities and in community involvement; other centers deal with few, if any, publics, whether humanities or other. Brontë divided the centers in her Guide into four categories (Brontë, 1980: 3); today many more would be required for accurate classification.

Such heterogeneity has made commentators rightly hesitant to generalize about humanities centers. Nevertheless, some conversations beyond the CHCI meetings about these centers would be useful, particularly if they produce a range of analyses that can represent the many variables in current humanities center formations and functions. This discussion of centers and academic specialization derives primarily from my experiences in a research center focused on the humanities only (at my institution, other centers cover the performing arts and also teaching). Our center has both internal and external residential fellows from throughout the professorial ranks, along with graduate and undergraduate students; it originates some programs and coordinates others, including public humanities work. These experiences in one particular kind of center are supplemented in this article by the still relatively sparse published commentary available.

The discussion below is divided into three parts, each focusing on one of the characteristics of centers that enable their advancement of general concerns of the humanities as a whole: location, flexibility, and broadened perspective. These divisions are primarily for organizational convenience and ease of reading; in practice, the three overlap considerably with one another.

Location: the place of the humanities center

The location of many humanities centers situates them naturally among several constituencies, offering access to a number of diverse audiences who can be addressed with relative ease. At a time when property, ranging from patents to parking areas, has become a major concern for universities, most humanities centers are the property of no single discipline. Part of their power derives from this lack of attachment to any specific department. Indeed, if centers become primarily attached to any department or to a limited constellation of departments, their chances of becoming intellectual as well as administrative subsidiaries rise commensurately. Their independence leads naturally to their flexibility and to their ability to foster broad outlooks.

Humanities centers’ liminal position, firmly within the university (in contrast to those independent research institutes which function as ‘entrepreneurial enterprises’ (Zemsky et al., 2005: 55) but away from many routine academic activities such as grade reports, course and major requirements, and faculty promotions and tenure, ideally situates them to address public humanities concerns in ways that individual departments usually lack the time or resources to do. The activities included in ‘public humanities’ vary among centers, but dealing with non-academic audiences tends to encourage moves away from highly specialized topics. The growing importance of public humanities within the academic sphere reflects and is reflected by NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) decisions to raise the percentage of their budgetary support committed to public humanities programming while continuing grants to individual researchers and academic institutions at the same level. This pattern was first noted by John D’Arms in his review of humanities funding trends from 1970 to 1995 (cited by Zuckerman and Ehrenberg, 2009: 125). After that period, as Harriet Zuckerman and Ronald G. Ehrenberg point out, ‘while the overall amount the NEH has to spend has hardly varied since 1996, less and less of it has gone to the academic humanities and more and more to the public humanities’ (2009: 145). (On such funding, see Katz (2001), who describes some of the ‘tension over the perceived conflict between scholarship and public programming’ as ‘inevitable and productive’ and Glenn (2009)). Whatever the merits and problems of funding agencies’ driving intellectual agendas, in fact public humanities are of major concern today, when the humanities urgently need to make the case for their importance to multiple audiences outside universities.

That need for humanities scholars and teachers to explain themselves to a wider public arises at a time when many of those who should be making the case are ill-equipped to do so. Compared with expenditure on the sciences (and sometimes the social sciences) over the past half century, spending on the humanities has hardly been lavish. Nevertheless, many US universities and colleges are now well advanced into the second generation of humanities faculty who, beginning with NDEA (National Defense Education Act) funding for education in 1958, have more often than not managed to cobble together adequate support for their research. These faculty members were rarely required to justify – or even to explain – their research to constituencies beyond universities. In addition, they could largely take for granted wide public understanding of and support for the centrality of humanistic traditions in US culture and society. Under these circumstances, humanities faculty were seldom forced to think in terms larger than disciplinary ones – an intellectual limitation that ultimately spurred many to react by turning to interdisciplinary work, albeit usually in highly specialized forms.

Many faculty in this two-generation group were woefully ignorant of the meaning of the liberal arts tradition, much less its significance, because their research could be justified primarily in specialized terms. They therefore tended to render lip service, if anything, to what Carol G. Schneider describes as ‘the premier tradition in American higher education’ (2005: 64). As Eric Gould explains, looking at contemporary university mission statements,

You will probably not find a statement that liberal education is the integrating factor in higher education. But there is broad traditional consensus on the importance of the distinctively American liberal arts model for undergraduate education, one in which students are required to take a broad range of courses in the disciplines of the arts and sciences over four years, even if they are majoring in business or another professional field. (Gould, 2003: 3)

These two generations of professors were by no means alone. A 1997 survey found that less than one-third of university graduates, 32%, were familiar with the expression ‘liberal education’ (although, interestingly enough, over half of the business executives polled, 54%, indicated their familiarity with it) (Gould, 2003: 13). Schneider cites the results of another study commissioned in 2004 for the Association of American Colleges and Universities, which revealed that few college-bound high school seniors had ever encountered the expression ‘liberal education’. She adds that admissions officers ‘have quietly retired the term’, in part because of the prevailing political connotations of the word liberal, and also because in addressing an audience focused on the utilitarian values of education as a preparation for employment, they prefer to emphasize career training, along with extracurricular amenities (Schneider, 2005: 73). In a similar vein, for many both within the university and beyond it, Gould notes that ‘liberal learning lacks a certain panache in our age of corporate-styled entrepreneurialism’ (Gould, 2003: 9). That these attitudes are mainly US phenomena is suggested by a recent comment of President Richard H. Brodhead of Duke University. He remarked that although when travelling abroad he encounters widespread admiration for American higher education and especially for its ‘liberal-arts basis’, he was troubled by the lack of support for it at home (Howard, 2011). This lagging support of course correlates directly with the widespread lack of understanding of liberal arts values.

The wide public consensus that once supported the humanities and education in the liberal arts, whatever its actual extent at the time, no longer exists. A thoroughly professionalized faculty, accustomed to speak mainly to each other within their own disciplines and often within smaller disciplinary sub-groups, faces a public unsure of why their research and teaching deserve support. In this situation the liminal position of humanities centers allows them to make a public case for the humanities even as they simultaneously move to educate a highly professionalized faculty in broader liberal arts contexts. Unlike many departments, centers often have to engage in fund-raising, and in that arena successful appeals generally involve producing the widest possible claims for the impact and significance of the programs for which they seek support. In some cases alumni and members of the general public, who were educated in the liberal arts at a time when most faculty could and did make the case for the importance of that tradition, are more supportive of the humanities than contemporary administrators, who too often focus only on the new, the pragmatic, or the profitable.

In addition to speaking for the humanities beyond the university, centers are usually in a better position intramurally to make a case for the humanities as a whole than individual departments are. In an age of specialization, ‘the humanities’ have frequently tended to be viewed as a classificatory convenience rather than as the substantive representative of an intellectual area. But with funding for humanities research falling and the universities themselves increasingly assuming responsibility for these costs (Howard, 2009; Zuckerman and Ehrenberg, 2009: 125–6), it is crucial for the humanities not only to speak with many voices, as they currently do through departments, but also to make broader appeals in the unified voice that humanities centers can potentially help to develop.

Flexibility: the modi operandi of humanities centers

Much of the flexibility that has allowed centers to pursue larger general questions about the humanities while supporting specialized research is obviously derived from their extra-departmental locations. Unencumbered by many of the ongoing daily responsibilities as well as the disciplinary demands of departments, humanities centers have more latitude to experiment than traditionally structured academic units usually have had. For example, Mary Louise Pratt points out that in comparison to the predominantly western orientation of many Stanford humanities departments in the late 1980s, ‘a new humanities center … assert[ed] a broader range, successfully seeking out interdisciplinary scholars and grants to fund minority and third world fellows’ (Pratt, 1992: 21). Humanities centers are freer to explore new paradigms and alternative structures for knowledge because they can operate with substantially less red tape than departments; fewer formal rules or official procedures, and often less paperwork, make them more academically nimble. For similar reasons, their failures in programming have fewer institutional ramifications. Woodward, herself the director of a center long marked by successful innovation, sums up the results: ‘For the past thirty-five years, centers and institutes for the humanities on university and college campuses in the United States have served as sites for innovation, as laboratories for incubating emerging modes of knowledge and investigating new objects of study in cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary contexts’ (Woodward, 2009: 113).

Most educators recognize the shortcomings of traditional departmental structures, which in too many cases fail to reflect the shape, contexts, or even methodologies of contemporary humanities research in the US. Richard A. Lanham writes that ‘Education by discipline provides every discouragement possible, for both student and teacher, to any kind of systemic thinking … To try to take a large view of anything is automatically suspect’ (Lanham, 1992: 54). ACLS’s ‘Speaking for the humanities’ directly connects the growth and development of humanities centers to ‘a desire on the part of scholars to communicate with colleagues in other fields, to exchange results of thinking within particular disciplines, and to break down disciplinary boundaries in their research’ (Levine et al., 1989). Unfortunately, at this point the amount of commentary focused on the shortcomings of traditional departmental organization is still in inverse proportion to the commentary offering viable alternatives.

Thus institutional structure in terms of departments is today more of a bureaucratic convenience than an accurate indicator of the current contours of knowledge. But within the bureaucratic mazes that characterize the modern US university, change comes slowly – if at all. Forms of intellectual sclerosis seem almost inevitably to accompany departmentalization, in part because organizationally one of the primary aims of special interest groups, which today’s departments in essence are, is to perpetuate themselves. Interdisciplinary programs characterized by intellectual inclusiveness and flexibility frequently lose both when they assume departmental status.

Nor are recourses to interdisciplinarity per se necessarily the best option to avoid the disciplinary rigidity of departments. Gerald Graff notes that, in many cases, ‘interdisciplinary programs tend to be disconnected from each other as well as from the disciplines themselves’ (Graff, 2010: 28). Graff offers a cogent analysis of how post-1960s expansions within universities exacerbated widespread balkanization of the humanities. He points out that universities were able to create new programmatic structures ‘without bothering to think about how to integrate and connect what was added’. The resulting ‘culture of separate spaces’, Graff argues, is no longer economically or educationally viable: ‘now that higher education no longer has the financial luxury to continue proliferating separate units, it needs to learn how to put its disconnected components into dialogue’ (Graff, 2010: 27–8).

Significantly, that kind of dialogue has for many years now been sustained by numerous US humanities centers. A miscellaneous collection of fellows from across the humanities needs to find common discursive ground quickly, if they are not to endure a solipsistic year of lecturing each other. Since among the few intellectual orientations that fellows may share are of course the larger general concerns of the humanities, conversations naturally tend towards such topics.

In many cases the intellectual flexibility of humanities centers is enhanced by the range of academic positions represented there. Such centers have the potential for functioning more democratically than departments do, as fellows mingle with one another over the periods of their residencies. The range of knowledge, opinion, and viewpoint is salutary. Universities and colleges have traditionally been characterized by age segregation; functionally, they exclude the very young (at least, as measured in terms of chronological age) and, until legal abolition of mandatory academic retirement ages, the very old. This general segregation was enhanced in departments that were highly stratified by rank.

Equally important, during residencies at humanities centers, fellows have the time, which busy academic life usually does not provide, for mutual exploration of topics not directly tied to their own specialized research. The flexibility of humanities centers allows work at a different pace than in departments, which in heavily bureaucratized universities frequently find themselves staggering madly from deadline to deadline. In a fast-paced consumer society, adequate time for serious reflection is rare, even for those who work in what Gale and Carton describe as the ‘kind of deliberative space’ represented by universities (Gale and Carton, 2005: 43). Today’s mass universities provide few spaces in which the traditional ideals of the contemplative life can thrive. As universities increasingly adopt business models of operations, even the summer months are no longer safe from bureaucratic intrusions. Administrators on year-long contracts tend to forget that most faculty contracts run for nine months, and meetings continue all summer long. The result, as Edward Shils writes in another context, is that within universities ‘the vision of a way of life faded away nearly completely’ (Shils, 1997b: 308).

Broadened perspectives: the outlook of humanities centers

The liminal locations and the various kinds of flexibility of many humanities centers can produce environments in which the broadened perspectives useful in overcoming the intellectual divisions created by the organizational structure of the contemporary university can flourish. Ironically, as centers provide one of the few places in contemporary universities where representatives from across the humanities can assemble with the time and resources to think together, their interactions are eerily reminiscent of earlier university forms. As Shils explains, ‘universities became what they were in their great days because they helped to bring intellectual traditions into focus and concentrated them on individuals by bringing persons of intellectual talent and disposition into contact … to benefit from each other’s stimulating and disciplining presence’. But in what Shils terms ‘the mass university’, such intellectual fellowship is curtailed: ‘Mutual isolation reduces the pressure generated by the presence of other lively, curious and actually and potentially productive minds. The present-day mass university makes this process of the mutual discovery of talented and interested intellectuals more difficult and it thereby hampers … the intensification of intellectual exertion’ (Shils, 1997a: 18).

The research of educational theorists as well as cognitive scientists supports many of Shils’s contentions, which are in essence arguments for intellectual community. Much of what these researchers have found directly reflects conditions in many humanities centers. For example, George E. Walker and his co-authors in The Formation of Scholars, in their report on graduate education for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, point out that ‘the overarching characteristic of intellectual community … is that it is knowledge-centered’, explaining that ‘the process of knowledge building, as we know from cognitive science, is a “fundamentally social” enterprise’ (see Wenger, 1996, as cited by Walker et al., 2008: 127). Research on the structure of organizations also emphasizes the ‘value of informal interaction’, sometimes referred to as ‘incidental learning’ (see Brown and Duguid, 2000, as cited by Walker et al., 2008: 130). Walker’s group claims that while centers cultivate individual scholars and their projects, because of the daily scholarly exchanges there ‘intellectual communities are … more efficient engines of knowledge production than their dysfunctional, antisocial, or apathetic counterparts’ (Walker et al., 2008: 14, 123–4). These kinds of insight suggest that some of the research on ‘learning communities’, which has tended to be primarily student-oriented, should be applied to faculty members as well.

The strong centrifugal forces that characterize the contemporary university work against community formations, intellectual or otherwise. Prevailing business models encourage faculty entrepreneurship, with top professors thriving as quasi-independent contractors. Institutional ties tend to weaken along with traditional ideas of faculty citizenship and service obligations. The two generations of humanists who did not have to justify their research were shaped professionally by these forces; Cary Nelson describes many of them as careerists oriented ‘toward isolation and individual gain’ (Nelson, 2010: 29). Walker and his colleagues trace these developments back to the doctoral training that students receive, with its ‘emphasis on specialization and individual effort (originality and independence)’. They write that when combined with later ‘rewards for individual success in academic careers’, the result has been ‘a culture of competitive individualism in the academy’. Their response is to call for more graduate training in collaborative work (Walker et al., 2008: 81). However, more access to campus environments similar to those that many humanities centers foster could have similar effects for faculty and students.

We need spaces in the contemporary US university in which to explore the kinds of larger questions about human beings and their lives that the humanities have traditionally sought to answer. The problem is not limited to the humanities; everywhere in the disaggregated modern university, general intellectual perspectives are in short supply. At the graduate level, Walker and his co-authors call for doctoral education to move all students ‘toward the capacity for broad thinking’ (Walker et al., 2008: 153). From a scientific perspective, Wilson claims that ‘our most productive scientists, installed in million dollar laboratories, have no time to think about the big picture, and see little profit in it’ (Wilson, 1998, as cited by Walker et al., 2008: 153). At this point, general perspectives within universities have become by default the province mainly of administrators, via discussions of initiatives such as strategic plans, conducted in the language of commerce and the marketplace. Gould writes: ‘Increasingly the way we explain ourselves to ourselves in universities – in administrative edicts and annual reports, for example – uses a vocabulary that emphasizes our corporate culture’ (Gould, 2003: 86). Different discourses about the university need to be created and circulated. Gould adds that, although most faculty object to the perspectives and language currently bandied about by administrators, ‘the humanities, especially, have yet to offer a powerful alternative discourse’ (Gould, 2003: 95).

Obviously, the liminal location and various kinds of intellectual and other flexibility that many humanities centers offer do not always result in the kind of broader perspectives that are helpful in bridging the intellectual divisions encouraged by contemporary university organizational structures. But, at their best, humanities centers provide compelling models of intellectual community that directly address a number of the academic shortcomings of contemporary universities that many commentators have emphasized. In Shils’s commentary on the ‘mass university’, he emphasizes the need for ‘collective self-consciousness’ in universities. He calls for ‘institutions and individuals who are emblems of the whole and who can speak and act in ways which bring forward the image of the whole so that it overshadows its parts’ (Shils, 1997b: 317). Within the university, humanities centers have the capacity to assume that kind of role. In fact, many centers are doing exactly that across the US today.

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To end where I began, at that first CHCI conference, when I walked into the New Directors’ Session that I had been anticipating, I was surprised to see that the room was almost full. Surely, that many new directors could not have been appointed in a single year? As the mass slowly sorted itself into individuals, I recognized the long-time director of one of the most prestigious humanities centers in the country, a place that I often used to set benchmarks for our humble start-up. ‘What are you doing here?’, I asked in surprise. He smiled and replied: ‘Oh, this is the one session I never miss.’ As the group settled in and discussion began, it was easy to see why he was a recidivist; the enthusiastic exchanges produced a wealth of information about everything from maintaining academic excellence to dealing with leaky roofs, dwindling budgets, and obdurate fellows. My experience – approaching the job expecting to focus on specialized research and then, while still maintaining a strong emphasis on research support, moving to work on keeping the large questions that the humanities as a whole can address in play for the university – turned out to be a standard trajectory for directors. For all of us, humanities centers were a means of providing the intellectual community that so many commentators find lacking in academia today. As these centers work to create and sustain this kind of intellectual commons in the contemporary university in an age of academic specialization, one of their greatest strengths remains their potential to allow scholars the space to become humanists as well as specialists.