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Article Excerpt
Since the mid-twentieth century, the professionalization of our disciplines has been a hallmark of higher education in general and the research university in particular. Despite the repeated calls over the past twenty-five years for a renewal of the civic mission of higher education, (1) professionalization continues to hold tenacious sway and is largely understood to contradict the purposes and practices of public scholarship, which, in turn, is dismissed under the demoralizing rubric of service or the paternalistic rubric of outreach. It is only too clear that "there has been a weakening of the informal compact between the university and society," as the historian Thomas Bender points out in his invaluable essay on the American university from 1945 to 1995. (2) If some twenty years ago it could be asserted in the Report from the National Task Force on Scholarship and the Public Humanities that the humanities "are valuable for their own sake and the nation must support and sustain scholarship because that enriches the common fund of knowledge," (3) today the notion of the intrinsic good of the humanities is definitely not a part of what is generally referred to as "making the case" for the humanities.
What is public scholarship? In suggesting an answer to this question, I turn to the influential work of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life, a national consortium established at the University of Michigan in 2001 that numbers over eighty institutions across the United States representing the full spectrum of higher education, from community colleges and colleges of arts and design to research universities and liberal arts colleges. (4) Now based at Syracuse University, Imagining America is devoted to expanding the place of public scholarship in the humanities, arts, and design in higher education in the conviction that it serves a democratic purpose. Scholarship in Public, its groundbreaking report on the importance of including public scholarship in considerations of promotion and tenure, was released in May 2008. Authored by Julie Ellison and Timothy K. Eatman, the report offers a definition--necessarily abstract and general--of what is referred to as publicly engaged academic work. Public scholarship, the report argues, is integral to the academic area of a faculty member's research or creative activity. It includes "different forms of making knowledge 'about, for, and with' diverse publics and communities," and "it contributes to the public good and yields artifacts of public and intellectual value." (5) As the report notes, public scholarship exists on a continuum with traditional scholarship and often takes the form of projects that combine research, teaching, and creative activity as well as publication. Recommended is the use of a portfolio in the tenure dossier that might include writing for a non-academic audience, policy reports, and oral histories. Not all work in the public humanities would be considered public humanities scholarship.
At a meeting held in June 2008 at Syracuse University's Lubin House in New York City to consider the report, discussion swirled around this definition of public scholarship, with a focus on what was understood by "scholarship" itself and with special pressure placed on the keywords community and public (about which more later). Discussion also centered on the questions that might guide the evaluation of public scholarship, with suggestions including: What constituencies are served? What new interdisciplinary connections have been formed? Is the "translation" of scholarship to larger audiences effective? Is the project innovative? Significantly, however, the report begins not with a definition of public scholarship in the humanities, arts, and design or with prescriptions for evaluation, but rather with a multitude of compelling examples from across the United States, most of which take the form of collaborative projects between faculty in higher education and community groups and institutions (among them, K--12 teachers, ethnic and race-based local groups, and museums). Among the examples are historian and architect Dolores Hayden's Power of Place" Urban Landscapes as Public History and the "Great Wall of Los Angeles" mural in the Tujunga Wash Flood Control Channel, a project of the Social and Public Art Resource Center founded by artist Judy Baca. (6)
Scholarship in Public is animated by a sense of vibrancy and possibility. "The report was inspires," we read, "by faculty members who want to do publicly engaged academic work and live to tell the tale." Few of our graduate students, however--the very people who will become our future faculty--arrive at graduate school with a sense that public scholarship in the humanities is a possible path for them. It is in research universities in particular where requirements for the publication of research in order to gain tenure have increased, and where "the words 'public' and 'scholarship' continue to live on different planets." (7)
This is one of the reasons why, in 2003, in tandem with the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation's Responsive Ph.D. initiative, the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington launched a weeklong Institute on the Public Humanities for Doctoral Students. To my knowledge the first of its kind in the country, the Institute included twenty-five doctoral students and featured presentations by national leaders who have done remarkable work in the public humanities, readings and discussion, project-based work, and site visits. That inaugural year speakers from across the country included Robert Weisbuch, then president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation; Julia Reinhard Lupton, founding director of Humanities Out There at the University of California, Irvine, a program that links university students with students in the largely Latino school district in nearby Santa Ana; and David Scobey, then director of the Arts of Citizenship program at the University of Michigan. We read and discussed work by Dolores Hayden, Edward Said, Robin Kelley, Harry Boyte and Nancy Kari, Michael Berube, Gail Dubrow, and Tony Bennett, among others. We also read and discussed reports (yes, reports; I have grown fond of reports over the past few years and think they should be read and discussed) from the American Council of Learned Societies and the American Association of Higher Education. We visited Bellevue Community College, the Seattle Art Museum, and downtown Seattle's historic Panama Hotel, built in 1910 in the International District to house Japanese laborers, which today is a tea house and modest hotel. (It possesses the only remaining Japanese bathhouse in the United States.) Leaders of community organizations participated as panelists, as did faculty members at the University of Washington whose projects included a collaboration between university faculty members and high school teachers called Texts and Teachers; an exhibit of drawings by children of war under the poignant title They...
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