Month: November 2014

But even if our classrooms remain packed, that still leaves the population at large. And there a basic contention remains unanswered: the by now self-evident truth that the humanities is a “public relations failure” (Fish ventriloquizing Klinkenborg). Humanists are just no good at explaining why their work matters. No wonder, then, that the public has little use for their efforts.

The marketing problem is such a commonplace in the debate, it goes virtually unremarked these days. But to me it raises a very basic question: Why is it the job of humanists to be their own advertisers? Other creative types have managers, agents, and publicists for that task, to say nothing of film studios, theaters, galleries, and museums—infrastructures, in other words, that allow the creators to focus on what they do best.

What would such an institution look like for humanists? As it happens, I help lead one. The Chicago Humanities Festival (http://chicagohumanities.org/), for which I serve as artistic director, is the largest organization of its kind in the United States. In fact, we were cited as such in The Heart of the Matter, praised for our success in “[inviting] academics and artists to share their passions and expertise with new audiences” (51).

We’re in our twenty-fifth year of doing so. Our annual fall festival features about a hundred events, always organized around a theme. Attendance is around fifty thousand, with hundreds of thousands more consuming our content digitally. Not your average public relations failure, we like to think.

How do we do it? How do we get thousands of people to come out to hear humanities professors lecture? It’s really quite simple: we treat our presenters as stars and our events as performances.

It’s probably best to think about this kind of operation in contrast to your typical university programming. Sure, university lectures are free and open to the public. But how would the public even know? Dreary leaflets on campus bulletin boards aren’t likely to draw a general audience. Nor would a general crowd feel particularly engaged by often dry and specialized presentations. (I hasten to add that in my other life as a university professor, I can get quite excited about an earnest announcement circulating on an electronic discussion list—but then I’m already sold on the product.)

Everything we do at the Chicago Humanities Festival is designed to break this barrier. We write tantalizing copy for our events, place our ads in all the local media, and hustle for coverage in those same media. We make sure that our featured talent appears in the best light possible. We think about stage sets and backdrops and fuss endlessly with our sound systems. Even more important, we spend a huge amount of time thinking about the best way to showcase a speaker. Is the great Harvard historian we invited known to go on and on when lecturing? No problem, we feature him in conversation with that gentle yet firm journalist who has a deep passion for the subject. Is there worry about the density of a speech on Continental philosophy? We coach the presenter in the joys of multimedia.

When it all works out, we get big, expectant audiences who, after basking in the erudition of our speakers (and asking sometimes stunningly insightful questions), can’t wait to come back for more.

This isn’t so different from the way other cultural organizations operate. Let me take an example from the world of opera, another domain whose utility could seem suspect in the glare of neoliberal scrutiny. When Anna Netrebko, a soprano, was scheduled to make her Chicago debut in the 2012–13 season, it brought shivers of anticipation to local opera fanatics. But for a good chunk of Lyric Opera’s patrons, she was just a Russian-sounding name. It was the task of the company to create the appropriate excitement for her bow as Mimì, to say nothing of providing her with all the theatrical props needed for an optimal performance. The result: a sold-out run and something approaching collective hysteria (of the good kind).

Why should it be so different for humanists? Sure, in the academy we recognize folks like Julia Kristeva, Frans de Waal, and Maria Tatar as stars (to mention three of the speakers who joined us for last fall’s festival, Animal: What Makes Us Human). But the academic stars, just like your average opera diva, needed a bit of professional marketing and a decent production to find and captivate their audience. Which is our job as a performing organization in the humanities, and after twenty-five years we know how to do it.

Imitators wanted!

The summer institutes became one of the casualties of the draconian cuts suffered by the NEH over these past decades. The collapse of that program is one reason why such work is now being taken up in piecemeal fashion by local institutions, sometimes indeed with the help of humanities centers. The Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto, for example, recently launched a successful summer humanities program for high school teachers in Ontario. In the United States, the Yale–New Haven Teachers Institute, directed by Jim Vivian, has a robust agenda for addressing the problem, and high school teachers are part of the target audience for other private initiatives as well, such as Imagining America, represented in this forum by Julie Ellison.

These are all important initiatives. When we take in the larger picture, however, it is hard not to conclude that they have been inadequate. In my experience, high school teachers have a pressing need for this kind of professional development and, if you reach them soon enough, a large appetite for it. If you fail to reach them in time, they run a greater risk of burning out—I saw such burnout firsthand as a teacher of an inner-city school at Boston forty years ago, and I have often seen it secondhand in the years since. Just last week a former student sat at my kitchen table telling me about the overwhelming stress of teaching English at a high school in Brooklyn. She’d had this job for three years and wasn’t sure how much longer she could hold out. It is a problem that increasingly comes home to us as MLA members, as more and more of the degree holders from our literature graduate programs find themselves landing in positions as high school teachers.

Ramping up our public humanities programming directed at teachers like my former student will not, needless to say, solve all the problems of the school where she works; nor will it save all the children who attend that school. Those are vulnerabilities of another order. But the vulnerability of the teachers in these schools can surely be mitigated by such programs—especially programs of the summer institute variety—for many teachers emerge from them refreshed and ready for the coming year. Serving this sector of the public with humanities programming, moreover, involves an important knock-on effect, because the gain to teachers is also a gain for the students they teach. Teachers so rejuvenated and reengaged with their subjects are likely to teach better and to stay longer in this demanding line of work.

I pivot now to that second, rather different issue of vulnerability raised by the role of humanities centers in public humanities, and I examine it in the light of a longer historical perspective. The idea of public humanities is not new, not even if we set aside two very old and more capacious understandings of the term, both of which remain in current use: Michel Foucault’s universal intellectual, which originates in the Enlightenment, and the tradition of civic-minded reflection, which surely dates from antiquity. Even if narrowed in scope to a mediation between university and nonuniversity intellectual environments, the relevant sense of public humanities has been around as long as the modern research university itself and, on this continent, at least, is coeval with the founding of the university.

Consider the resonant example of the University of Chicago, which is often identified, for better or for worse, as the most self-conscious embodiment of that ideal—a point argued most recently in Jonathan Cole’s weighty The Great American University. A century and a quarter ago, in that decisive period when the modern research university assumed its current shape, Chicago’s first president, William Rainey Harper, made a plan to implement the founding gift from John D. Rockefeller. It called for the university to have three major divisions, and one might imagine that these divisions would correspond to the college, the graduate programs, and the professional schools. In fact, all these aspects of on-campus pedagogy and research constituted only one of Harper’s three divisions. The other two? One was the press (University Publications), the organ by which faculty members, and notably humanities faculty members, could make public their scholarship in print circulation. The third was the University Extension Division, which evolved into the Office of Continuing Education and later into today’s humanities-dominated Graham School for General Studies.

So despite—or precisely because of—the university’s early commitment to both advanced research and pedagogy, the university was also publicly and civically oriented from the start, and again not least in the humanities and related fields. Modern university research, it seems, was answerable across the board both to the scholarly communities and wider publics. With advanced study comes the study of broader advancement. Or, as Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben would have it, with great academic power comes great public responsibility.

But now the interesting question: Why should the modern humanities center prove to be the particular site in the contemporary university where public humanities is most evidently on offer? This question turns on a certain evolving asymmetry between public science and public humanities. These two enterprises have taken divergent paths since the nineteenth-century founding moment: public science stayed distinct from research, whereas public humanities assumed some intimacy with research. To give a concrete example: the Franke Institute sometimes mistakenly receives mail intended for the James Franck Institute in advanced physics just down the street, but neither the James Franck Institute nor the Enrico Fermi Institute next door to it would be identified as a site in the university for doing public science. This asymmetry is worth pausing over, both for the opportunities it offers us and the risks it exposes us to.

One opportunity is our being able to test the human reach of our arguments in a range of rhetorical situations, with differently constituted horizons of expectation. Humanities centers tend to generate a variety of audiences or publics for scholarly work, beginning with the often challenging interdisciplinary fellows seminar. Various audiences and publics for our work can indeed be indexed to correlate them with what we might call stakes parameters: the question of just what can be taken for granted in respect to what someone cares about. Moving in and out of these different horizons can often reveal something important about our work, which is not to say that the broadest level of the public should always be understood to define it. The inner circles matter too, and often they matter most. Specialized rhetoric can be appropriate for certain occasions: nothing is more absurd, in my view, than the annual send-up of an MLA session by some journalist who drops in expecting that everything said in it will be immediately intelligible to the nonexpert. When we talk to the public, of course, we need to do it well, to get the pitch and the stakes right, and we can learn something from the scholarship about that in a way that our colleagues doing public science cannot, despite some recent interest in the theory and practice of citizen science or volunteer science.

There are also risks to attend to in the way the public humanities is now linked with our research centers. As is now widely recognized, the humanities’ place in the modern German-influenced, American-styled research university, initially foundational, has become anomalous: the university ranked number 1 in the world right now by the Times Higher Education supplement is the California Institute of Technology. Although the distinction between scholarship and public discourse may thus be less distinct in the humanities than in the natural sciences, it would be a grave mistake to imagine that legitimate claims to scholarly authority could be maintained if that distinction were dissolved altogether. The question of public humanities raises the equally pressing question of what constitutes humanities research in our moment.

Two recent books give less than satisfactory answers to this question. If Cole asks the humanities to meet a scholarly standard too narrowly fitted to the natural sciences, Anthony Kronman would have the humanities withdraw from the university’s research mission altogether in order to teach, as he puts it, the meaning of life. There is a middle way between these (in my opinion) untenable positions: we should acknowledge differences between scientific and humanities research, both in their processes and outcomes, while nonetheless insisting that the humanities maintain a distinct set of scholarly standards. These standards are roughly those that presses, journals, and universities have developed and been refining over many decades of practice. Needless to say, our vetting and credentializing procedures are in need of some overhaul. But if we lose sight of the academic norms and standards that inform them, if we fail to articulate those norms and standards anew as we increasingly assimilate both creative work and digital work into what must pass muster professionally, both university intellectual environments and public ones will be the poorer for it.

Itineraries

A week before the MLA 2014 Presidential Forum on the public humanities in vulnerable times, I walked through the corridors of the University of Michigan Department of English Language and Literature, reading doors.

I had decided not to look at my most public projects but to undertake instead a reading of the departmental space on campus, a space to which I have had the longest association. Ours is a big-tent English department in a passionately interdisciplinary and historically decentralized public research university. Many members of the department (myself included) are jointly appointed in at least one other department. Our ways of being public are as varied as our multiple affiliations. I do not see us as representative of some typical way of being an English department, though no doubt we are. Rather, I see this forum as an opportunity to argue that every department, in its own fashion, should think about how it represents (in all senses of that word) the public humanities.

My first step toward a closer look, with collaborators, at more departments is impressionistic. It is a preliminary reading of a few visual signifiers, in the department, of the professional itineraries of faculty members and students outside the department. It is an effort to bring public practices to the forefront of departmental conversations, so that we can ponder collectively the public activities, purposes, and alliances that keep many of us moving along a continuous figure eight that loops between on- and off-campus spaces.

In advance of the forum, my fellow panelists and I were invited by Marianne Hirsch and Laura Wexler to speak to several questions, including the following:

• What is the public face of the humanities, and how can humanities scholarship be publicly shared in vulnerable times?
• Why do you do the work you do? How do you think about the public?
• What are the opportunities that living in vulnerable times provides for the future study and practice of public humanities?

The charge to the panelists tilted toward the public humanities imagined as scholars addressing audiences of nonacademic strangers through public lectures and nonspecialist media. I do not address here the question of the humanities’ public face manifest in acts of public explanation.

By way of contrast and supplementation, I look at a way of doing the humanities across sectors. By “across sectors,” I mean activities that involve relations between academic institutions and private, public, or not-for-profit organizations. The shorthand phrase is “campus-community partnerships,” through collaborative public engagement situated, on the academic end, in courses, projects, or programs. The kind of work I am referring to is not generally about the humanities. In other words, its primary goal is not appreciation of and involvement in the humanities per se.

For me, public humanities projects have been about the power of words: multiple uses of artist statements composed by printmakers in Johannesburg; the Harriet Wilson Project in Milford, New Hampshire; the poetry of everyday life in third-graders’ close encounters with our local watershed; the Detroit arrival stories narrated by high school poets and their parents in the intergenerational Boomtown project of the Inside/Out Literary Arts Project; and the exploration with Sekou Sundiata, a poet and theater artist, of “the soul of America” in post-9/11 arts-mediated gatherings and a touring performance work.

My connection to the public humanities is grounded more in the public work of humanists, therefore, than in the public explanation of the humanities. The most compelling artifacts that I found on the department’s doors presented themselves as vocational statements—”callings to careers” (Boyte) in which “personal flourishing and broad public purposes are intertwined” (Proposal).

There is a lot to like in Christopher Newfield’s approach, which values public explanation in the working contexts of organizations, institutions, and “individuals in groups” who are committed to “cultural development.” For Newfield, cultural development fosters “creative capabilities, including the capability to originate, to cooperate, to improvise, to problem-solve.” He glosses cultural development in a way that offers a starting point for reflection on the public humanities in literary and cultural studies departments. The “interpersonal and cross-cultural” literacies he values include “crucial abilities in conflict resolution and the refusal of scapegoating, projection, and other psychological habits that escalate difference into conflict” and “radical, indigenous, and experimental understandings of the way individuals in groups create value and new possibilities together.”

I recently argued that we could understand this organizational, relational, and constructive type of public humanities in terms of how it mediates “between one place and another and between one kind of practice and another” (294). I suggested that this area of the humanities should be defined positionally as well as in terms of theories, methodologies, and content. From the standpoint of the positional humanist, then, what do I see in my tour of departmental doors? What do they tell us about the presence and absence of the public humanities in departmental life?

Doors

Philologists for Peace: Individual Statements

Karla Taylor, a Chaucerian, posts this sign on her door: “Philologists for Peace: www.friendsforpiece.org: American Friends Service Committee.”

In response to my e-mail query, she explained the post-9/11 context of this sign, “a pop-up Quaker organization”:

“Friends for Peace” . . . created a template sign that people could adapt for peace marches during the Iraq war. . . . People would carry signs “Grandmothers for Peace” or “Dentists for Peace.” I originally made the “Philologists for Peace” for our front window at home, and everyone in the neighborhood asked for the link so they could make their own. We had “Schoolteachers for Peace,” “Anthropologists for Peace,” and several others I no longer remember. (“Re: ‘Philologists’” [17 May])

This sign traveled from her office (where her role as philologist would seem to be located) to her residence. The visible claim of a connection between one’s profession and one’s politics spread as neighbors publicized their work identities in their front windows. The signage then migrated back (as it were) from home to office, when it ended up on Taylor’s office door.

The smile this sign induces has to do with the universal accessibility of “peace” juxtaposed with a member of the quintessential academic insider group “philologist.” (In a follow-up e-mail, Taylor remarked of the sign, “More people asked me ‘What’s a philologist?’ than any time before or since!” [“Re: ‘Philologists’” (19 May). Its most interesting feature is the use of the plural—“Philologists for Peace”—pointing to a small network of academic humanists who see themselves as intermediaries among several publicly significant arenas: the department, the neighborhood, and the antiwar march.

This hallway statement does not refer to public intellectualism per se or to a publicly engaged teaching or research project. Rather it asserts the meaningfulness of a declared work identity as a position from which a person speaks in protest or dialogue. Clearly, one function of the office door is to enact the tricky relation among the personal, the professional, and the political.

Areas of Study

Through that virtual front door, the department’s Web site, faculty pages point to other kinds of signage. The world enters the department’s official online discourse as content, the subject matter of “texts in their infinite variety”:

Our mission as educators is to enable students to become the finest readers and writers of literary texts that they can be. Because those texts in their infinite variety take as their subjects our fellow humans, our histories, and our cultures, we aim in effect to equip our students both to read the world, and write the future, with subtlety, acumen and precision. (“U-M English Mission Statement”)

There is no institutional reference to the public humanities on the department’s home page. I suspect that there is none on the home pages of most English departments. Likewise, there is no departmental area of study on the public humanities. But other terms point to what public humanities might mean for us.

Megan Sweeney is one of several members of the department who use ethnographic methods. This approach is evident in her books Reading Is My Window: Books and the Art of Reading in Women’s Prisons and its companion edited volume, The Story within Us: Women Prisoners Reflect on Reading (“Profile: Megan Sweeney”). Ruby Tapia’s piece in the department’s newsletter points to her coedited Interrupted Life: Experiences of Incarcerated Women in the United States, a volume that covers advocacy on a number of human rights and policy issues, activist interventions, life writing, and research, including participatory action research (“Ruby Tapia”).

E. J. Westlake, a colleague in English and in theatre studies whose scholarship focuses on nationalist performance in Nicaragua, also uses ethnographic methods. Her stated interests include “public art, community-based theatre, pedagogy, and the interplay between public identity, political discourse, and performance narrative.” Previously, she worked in Portland, Oregon, as the cofounder and manager of Stark Raving Theatre. Like Sweeney, but in a different way, Westlake commutes between sites of cultural production as she “continues to write and adapt plays, including plays for young performers” (“E. J. Westlake”).

Following that keyword, performance, through these digital doorways takes us to Petra Kuppers’s faculty page and to a different set of methodologies and organizational relations. These too are shaped by the figure eight of cross-sectoral cultural production. Her most recent book is Disability Culture and Community Performance. Her list of area keywords includes the following terms: performance studies, disability studies, dance studies, community arts, ecology and performance/art practice, contemporary poetry, and indigenous studies or decolonizing methodologies (“Profile: Petra Kuppers”).

A colleague in the area of disability studies, Melanie Yergeau, concludes her contribution to the department’s newsletter by explaining her “double life as a disability rights activist” through the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network (“Melanie Yergeau”). Michael Awkward writes about race and cultural controversies. Sidonie Smith is coauthor, with Kay Schaffer, of Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition. I could go on.

These self-portraits offer rich evidence of public humanities practices that we habitually call something else: life writing, digital culture, exhibition, performance, advocacy, documentary, ethnography. Even a small sampling of the available stories reveals a strong methodological flow between literary and cultural studies, on the one hand, and social movements, the arts, public history, and museum and memory studies, on the other.

For Credit

Alisse Portnoy displays on her office door a course description for her winter 2014 class (English 303) Rhetorical Activism and U.S. Civil Rights Movements.1 The course description itself is a rhetorical act of inclusion: “We welcome non-English concentrators” as well as majors, “people with backgrounds in politics” as well those fulfilling the college’s race and ethnicity or humanities requirements or the department’s requirement for a course on new traditions:

Language matters. . . . [In] U.S. history, and right now, around the world, freedom of speech costs people their freedom, their livelihood, and sometimes their lives. Yet it remains the best path for sociopolitical change. Why is that the case, and how does that work? We’ll study key texts in U.S. black freedom, women’s liberation, and gay rights movements to figure it out. How do people accomplish extraordinary things by speaking up and speaking out? What does it mean to move people to act—discursively? How does language define, normalize, sustain, reform, and even revolutionize the worlds in which we live?

References to the 2012 presidential campaign and to “sociopolitical change” that is happening “right now” do more than demonstrate the applicability of past to present. Portnoy seeks to convey to students the possibility of confidence in their own public agency through discursive action. Even though this class is not community-based, it is public.

In 2008, Craig Calhoun, then president of the Social Science Research Council, saw a “change in the zeitgeist, revealed in the sense of making things, this excitement around making and building institutions, rather than only commenting on the institutions.” He concluded, “You have a lot of the smartest young people trying to build something, and . . . that carries over to academia, where people are saying, ‘I want to do that. I want to create’” (qtd. in Ellison and Eatman viii–ix).

What can students do with their rhetorical activism? My tour of the corridors did turn up evidence of the “excitement” that Calhoun noted. The department acknowledges student interest in socially consequential learning. Outside the door to the main office, a bin labeled “Internship Credit” contains copies of a memo on managing the administrative side of internships:

Occasionally a student will have an opportunity to work with a company or an institution (paid or unpaid) as an intern. . . . Many English majors have found positions applicable to the major at magazines, newspapers, radio/television stations, law and public service offices. . . . Please read the following requirements and stipulations.

That internships for students are a top priority of the department for the university’s current capital campaign is an indication of the growing emphasis on engaged learning campus-wide. But the language of the memo diminishes the emphasis. It suggests that “occasionally” the unusually enterprising student “will have an opportunity” for an internship. The assumption is that this position will be “found” by the student herself or himself without guidance or provision by the department. It is true that unpaid, credit-bearing internships are a problem for colleges.2 But I still want to register the contrast between the lively celebration of student agency in Portnoy’s course description and the regrettably neutral tone in which the memo characterizes internships—neutral at a time when English majors everywhere are hustling to find internships relevant to the major in organizations vital to public culture, public policy, and community development, including the “magazines, newspapers, radio/television stations, law and public service offices” referenced in the memo. In this memo, student choice, not departmental encouragement, drives internships. The department allows that choice but does not integrate it into the curriculum.

As I pass by other hallway postings, it becomes clear that the memo’s public service agencies are already connected to some courses. William (Buzz) Alexander’s door displays a flier for a fund-raising auction to benefit the Nineteenth Annual Exhibition of Art by Michigan Prisoners, run by the Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP), which Alexander founded in 1990 (see “Affiliated Courses”). Long based in the English department, PCAP is now a program of the Residential College, which is becoming the center for public engagement programs in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA). The annual exhibition is one of a suite of PCAP programs operating in corrections institutions throughout the state.

Faculty members in several units teach PCAP courses. In the English department, these courses reflect the program’s goal of sustaining a “creative hub” that connects and supports participants: Revision in Theory and Practice (with the Michigan Review of Prisoner Creative Writing), the Atonement Project (in which students create “artistic products…as a means for starting conversations about reconciliation and atonement”), and the Portfolio Project (in which students facilitate the creation of arts portfolios by incarcerated youth) (“Affiliated Courses”).

The poster for the benefit auction asserts the value of both course-based engagement and iterative programs like the annual juried exhibition and an annual cycle of workshops, readings, performances, and symposia. This yearly strategy resists the episodic one-off projects of many community service-learning courses (including a few of my own) while valuing improvisation. PCAP courses have provided generations of interested students with an unofficial course sequence—a developmental learning experience. For two decades, it was our first and, for a long time, our only model for connecting a set of regularly offered courses to specific external partners: corrections facilities. How will it inform our understanding of the public humanities going forward?

Departments

The system-wide Office of Public Engagement at the University of Minnesota supports an Engaged Department Grant Initiative designed to further “the integration of public engagement into the programmatic features of the department,” research and teaching (“Engaged Department Grant Program”). Other colleges and universities offer similar programs, some of which also sponsor an institute attended by teams from departments funded in a given cycle. This is an excellent model, not least because of the conversations that necessarily precede the collective decision to write and submit a proposal. Funding incentives stimulate deliberative occasions, times when the department becomes a commons.

But we can have these discussions without such incentives, in faculty meetings, annual retreats, or symposia. In these settings, we can explore how exactly the public humanities becomes visible and audible in our departments—how it enters into departmental life. For example, my department could reflect on the gap, discussed above, between the representation of administrative process on the internship credit form and the public practices evident on faculty doors. Or the difference between the emphasis on traditional forms of literary studies in parts of the department’s mission statement and the declarative doorways of colleagues who are working outside that framework. Are these new areas moving more to the foreground? Should the mission statement highlight public-political rhetoric or collaborative performance or participatory off-site learning? At every level of higher education, discussions of the public mission of the university are under way. So are debates about the humanities. What about the public mission of the humanities department? Is it reasonable to raise this question? Is it possible to answer it?

What other questions would arise at an annual meeting convened to consider, say, an English department as a commons? Here are a dozen possible ones: What are the growing tips of publicly engaged teaching and scholarship in our respective areas? How do we read the field right now? What vocabularies are available to us as we discuss these matters? How can our departmental commitments to diversity and inclusion enhance our capacity to learn from and partner effectively with communities, and vice versa? If we riff on public history, what would public literary history look like in our settings? Do our community-based courses form a sequence? Is it time for a minor in the public humanities, a minor in literature and society, a minor in digital culture and social change? Have we moved beyond the disempowering assumptions of community service construed as giving (Robinson)?3 Is there pressure for public humanities options in the graduate program? Are tenure policies adequate to the complex projects pursued by faculty members, that complexity including the mix of texts and artifacts that projects yield? If faculty members and students are pursuing publicly engaged research and learning outside the department, through centers and interdisciplinary academic units, is the department impoverished or enriched by this pursuit? Should concerted publicly engaged teaching, scholarship, and community development focus on a specific location—for us, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor?

The answers to these twelve questions matter. So, too, does the proposed occasion itself: a yearly intergenerational exchange, inclusive of many constituencies, that can alter the debate on the humanities in vulnerable times, one department at a time.

The Philadelphia of my childhood in the late 1960s and early 1970s was strongly influenced by the vibrancy and urgency of the black arts movement. The gatherings, meetings, readings, plays, discussions, and lectures were not only places where I heard poetry and music but also places of analysis, argument, information, where you learned to think critically, to understand, to debate. In these spaces of intellectual activity and intensity, speakers and audience members alike were invested, and the stakes seemed high because they involved the future not only of our people but also of the planet. Here was one practice of public humanities in a community for whom all times are vulnerable, a site that recognized the historic roots of that vulnerability but also called attention to people’s resilience, beauty, and ability to resist. Public humanities in this context was actually about movement building, about informing a people, encouraging them to see themselves as part of a tradition, and feeding and nourishing their intellects and their spirits so that they might be moved to act.

The events of the black arts movement always occurred in spaces that could be considered public because we had few private ones: parks, community centers, churches, public school auditoriums, bookstores, museums, occasionally buildings on the campuses of Temple University and the University of Pennsylvania. It is therefore not surprising that under neoliberalism these public structures and the activities they house would find themselves threatened.

What I later came to understand as public humanities includes the more formal programs produced by not-for-profit entities that encourage conversation, dialogue, and reflection about ideas. The even more formal, degree-granting entities at schools such as Portland State, Michigan State, Brown, and Yale institutionalize this kind of work and build bridges between the academy and the broader world. Academic units in black studies, ethnic studies, women’s studies, and gender studies have always privileged this kind of programming and collaboration. At Columbia, my work with the Center for Jazz Studies, the Institute for Research in African American Studies, and the Center for the Study of Social Difference resulted in projects and programming that all have a public humanities component.

Belonging to the Center for Jazz Studies, the Jazz Study Group is made up of literary critics, social historians, art historians, musicologists, archivists, film scholars, anthropologists, sociologists, journalists, poets, visual artists, composers, and improvisers. It has facilitated collaborative projects that are shared with the public as performances, exhibitions, conversations and talks among individual scholars; between scholars and journalists; and among visual artists, composers, and musicians. Slowly the work of this group is finding its way into popular jazz journalism, influencing the way critics frame stories and reviews. Many of the collaborations forged in the group result in public programming at Columbia but also at venues like the Harlem Stage and the Apollo. We helped develop a program featuring the virtuoso violinist Billy Bang and his Aftermath Band, the poet Yusef Komenyakaa, and my colleague Brent Edwards. At Harlem Stage, Bang and the Aftermath Band performed compositions based on Bang’s experience as a combat soldier in Vietnam; Komenyakaa read poetry that addressed his experiences in the Vietnam War; and Edwards moderated a postperformance conversation between them.

Another such program occurred at the Apollo in the spring of 2013. I worked with Geri Allen, a composer, arranger, and bandleader, and our director, S. Epatha Merkenson, to write a program that would both entertain and educate the audience about the history of women jazz artists who performed on the Apollo stage. We wanted to place these women in the context of a broader social and cultural history. The Apollo audience members were very appreciative but, as one might expect, had a few things to teach us as well. “Why did you select Sarah Vaughan’s version of that song? Gloria Lynne sang it here at the Apollo. That’s Gloria Lynne’s song,” a group of elderly women chastised. They were right. Public humanities, when done right, is always about a back-and-forth, a give-and-take, an openness and willingness to be vulnerable about the work you put in the world.

These were performance-based programs, but others, such as the project Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women, sponsored by the Center for the Study of Social Difference, concluded with a conference and series of workshops for public school teachers. There are also plans to incorporate work with women in prison into our structure.

Most often, my involvement in public humanities programming involves giving lectures or appearing on panels that accompany exhibitions or performances. I am often asked to provide a critical or historical context or to share some part of my work in a way that is accessible to a general audience. These appearances provide me another space to do what I do best, teach. To engage a gathered group of curious individuals, to share what I’ve learned about a subject and hopefully share my passion for it; to invite people to participate in the journey of discovery and the exercise of critical thinking; and to listen to and learn from them. I can think of no greater work for a humanities scholar. It is our responsibility as citizens of a democracy in progress to engage in this kind of public forum: to educate and be educated by our fellow citizens. We must be actively engaged in the struggle to maintain that forum.

Much of the current talk about both the public and the humanities speaks in terms of crisis and assault, and rightly so. It is not surprising that vulnerable times would produce a sense of crisis. Public humanities helps produce an informed, critically thinking populace, which is a necessary condition for the practice of democracy. It also helps produce scholars (and scholarship) that address, engage, and are engaged by a broader public, by people. The assault on the public is an assault on democracy. Those who want to maintain conditions of ignorance and inequality strive for a world where the arts are something we collect and consume for purposes of status and mobility, not something we learn how to read in ways that inform our concepts of the past, present, and future and give us the ability to change the world we live in. That is why it is our job to insist on the importance and the necessity of both the public and the humanities and the work that brings them together.

These are troubling times indeed, but I remain hopeful and committed. I end where I began, with Baraka. In a 1990 interview, he said that while he remained angry and fired up, “I’d say I’m a revolutionary optimist. . . . I believe that the good guys—the people—are going to win” (“Amiri Baraka”).

Embarrassments lurk in these occasions, which is why sometimes lecturing seems a safer or easier course. I’ve given thought to where the embarrassment creeps in. Partly it’s my embarrassment for audience members who don’t know that their special knowledge is common knowledge or who are having responses my students have been educated out of having—responses that ignore historical context and difference or conflate lived experience with the stylized representations of canonical texts. I can also be embarrassed for myself when I feel trapped between correcting people who never entered a contract to be corrected or feigning agreement with uncomfortably naive responses. But I have decided to accept my embarrassment—after all, I can’t unlearn my academic training, nor do audiences begin anywhere but where they begin—and consider how better to structure these occasions so that they are productive.

What do we want from such events? Should the performing arts simply speak for themselves, and is any attempt to frame or extend a performance a diminishment of its power? Or can talkbacks initiate conversations among people who temporarily constitute a public body whose interactions can deepen the meaning of what has just been experienced? Because anyone can leave once a show is over, I view the voluntary coming together of a postplay audience as an opportunity. It can create exchanges that reveal things at once simple and important. For example, people talking together discover more than people locked in their own heads. Often, plays fully reveal their complexities and challenges only when one dwells with them—converses with and through them—extending their lives beyond the fall of the curtain.

My most vivid memory of a successful talkback occurred during a brilliant evening at Theater for a New Audience in New York, when Caryl Churchill’s highly controversial fifteen-minute play, Seven Jewish Children, was given a staged reading. The play is constructed of seven vignettes in which Jewish parents discuss what to tell their young daughter about events in Jewish history and in their lives, from the Holocaust to their journey to Palestine to the creation of the new state of Israel to the Israeli bombing of Gaza in December 2008. This staged reading was followed by an hour of talkback facilitated by Alisa Solomon and Tony Kushner, and then the play was staged again. The most striking part of this event, which was attended by people of widely different political views, was that stridently partisan tirades gradually gave way to something much more thoughtful. A certain community formed that was collectively discovering things, though not necessarily agreeing.

So how did this change happen? Solomon and Kushner moderated the conversation but did not lecture about the play or anything else. They set clear ground rules: no one could be interrupted or speak for more than two minutes; they invited responses to controversial points before letting the conversation move to a new speaker or topic. In this way, the event gained momentum as ideas were developed and modified. Solomon and Kushner used the play to triangulate disagreements by getting participants to think with and through the play, asking them how the play spoke to the issue at hand and asking for counterinterpretations. By repeatedly pointing back to the text and the staged reading, the facilitators helped the audience collectively make discoveries about the language and form of the play, the complexity of its political engagement, and the difference that performance choices made to its meaning. This attention to the performance interrupted people’s tendency simply to repeat their deeply held feelings about Israel and Palestine and to take account of a complex event that challenged those feelings in unexpected ways.

It was widely agreed that this talkback worked. People learned from one another. When they saw the play a second time after all the talk, they saw it differently. They felt they had experienced something together, not just the work of art but also the conversation, the way of conversing, which the work of art had stimulated. People felt that they were part of a group; they still differed in their opinions, but the differences were opened to revision by engagement with the play and with other audience members. Maybe, after all is said and done, what had been created was the conditions that obtain in a really good humanities classroom.

The public humanities is not only about making humanistic texts and performances widely available in communities large and small, in prisons, town halls, school auditoriums, and the off-off-Broadway stage, but also about finding ways to engage with art by engaging with one another in public conversation.

You will recognize this problematic as fundamental. But the invitation here is to a somewhat different discussion. It is to shift the attention away from crisis per se and see what it might mean to face the public with the rich and much-needed resources of our institutions and organizations.

My own analysis suggests that there now is an equal if not greater crisis than that of the humanities, that of the public itself. If so, it is not advisable to do public humanities unless we have some idea of what we mean by the public and of how the humanities plays an important role in its formation.

A brief story. I am proud that I, along with my colleague Matthew Jacobson, have created a thriving new graduate program at Yale University, Public Humanities. Four or five years ago, when we first began, I had a disturbing conversation with one of the graduate students in my seminar. When asked to cite a practice of the public humanities, this student said that he practiced the public humanities because he blogged about United States literary and cultural productions. As clarification, he patiently described what he put on the blog. When I pushed further about why this was public engagement, the answer was abrupt: because the blog was on the Internet. Something was public because it reached a lot of people by means of social media.

This reasoning is false. The Internet is not a public utility; it is a wholly owned, quite material, and closely managed corporate and governmental entity. If the public sphere is the digital sphere, but the digital sphere is not owned or controlled by the public, what makes it a public sphere? What makes digital humanities projects public humanities projects under such conditions?

It is certainly true that new forms of sociality have appeared and that many of us spend increasing amounts of time together communicating and acting in virtual space. The potent possibilities of user-generated content, the stimulating correlations of big data, the affective adhesion of Facebook, and the activism of citizen journalism on Twitter are well known to us and have been amply theorized, from the utopian-sharing economy of Yochai Benkler to the dystopia of Jodi Dean’s communicative capitalism. However, as the Edward Snowden revelations have suggested, our accumulating loss of private information to the corporations that own these channels and the government that regulates them will not necessarily secure for us a public good if we do not first know how to define either the public or its worth.

When my conversation with the graduate student occurred, I had just returned from teaching for a semester at Peking University. This question of a public Internet was very sharp to me because I had just directly experienced a government’s periodic shutdown of Web sites, like turning a faucet off and on. The ability to divert or interrupt the flow of information was evidently less apparent at that time in the United States, but since then the Mubarak government in Egypt experimented in this way and sealed its demise, and cell phone service in the United States has also been turned off—for instance, in BART stations in 2011. Currently a controversy is brewing about data encryption on new cell phones. We are beginning to focus.

Other struggles and contradictions are more apparent now. Consider the question of public access to knowledge. It was highlighted by the death of Aaron Swartz, who was reeling from the force of prosecution for downloading JSTOR files placed behind a pay wall that prevented public access. Consider the question of net neutrality, which we could lose. This loss would profoundly exacerbate the digital divide.

Consider the huge, racially disproportionate prison population that exists in the United States and the enormous number of African American ex-offenders who, even after paying their debt to society, lose many of the privileges of citizenship. In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander has written eloquently about the constriction of voting, access to employment, public housing, loans for education, and the ability to join in peaceful political protest. If you are out of prison and on parole and take part in a public demonstration and the police come to break up the demonstration and arrest you, you go back to prison. The exercise of free speech is thereby rendered unsafe for exactly the population that has a great deal to tell us about how our public sphere is constituted. Moreover, consider the simultaneous constriction of free speech that is burgeoning on the Web as people lose employment because of non-job-related political protest on social media. The social fissures of the real public sphere are migrating rapidly to the virtual one, necessitating a closer review of each.

It is my very strong belief that the humanities has enormous power to critique and ameliorate these current inequities. But if we have not produced a robust definition of the public, we will not know what cultural work the public humanities can do. The terms and definitions inherited from the European Enlightenment are insufficient. As a historian of photography and visual culture, I know that the digital revolution has broadened public access to the archives and images of cultural memory and has broadened personal expression. Digitally mediated images can deepen people’s grasp of the past as well as enrich art and understanding in the present. At the same time, digital images have atomized, reshaped, and reconstituted traditional modes and shared locations of viewing. As with photography, so with the humanities in general: the pixel and the bit have left no foundational identity or location, including that of the public, unturned. The problem is that we have to face this fact about the public before we can face the public.

Is the public something that is always present? Or is it constituted only under certain conditions? What are the requirements for the—or a—public to appear? to thrive? to survive?

What shape does the public take? Is the public a sphere? a commons? a multitude? a neighborhood? a nation? the globe? What determines the relations between the communal and the commercial?

Who composes this public? Citizens? What about those many among us who are undocumented, who have no citizenship papers? Does the term the public include or exclude them? What is different and what has remained the same about the power of the public since the founding of our (re)public? What role does a counterpublic play? When the public is empowered or powerless, cui bono?

Today we have a distinguished and accomplished group of panelists, each of whom has a long engagement with the humanities and with the question of facing the public. As chair, I have asked them to share not only their experience with the public humanities but also the concepts of the public with which they are working. I hope that this panel will stimulate discussion in the Q&A and afterward. The opportunity here is for “attunement,” as Marianne Hirsch emphasized in her presidential address last night, the opportunity to listen closely and then to respond.

Reforming Doctoral Programs: Recent Trends

In 1990, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation launched the Graduate Education Initiative (GEI) and distributed about $80 million to fifty-four doctoral departments in a variety of humanities fields over a period of ten years (Zuckerman and Meisel). Departments were selected from ten leading universities and charged to allocate funding for graduate support and curriculum development in order to improve the following factors: time to degree, attrition, and completion rate. A systematic assessment of the GEI’s impact became available only in 2010. Ronald G. Ehrenberg et al. concluded that strategic funding decisions gave some positive results, but the money had less effect than expected (250–52).

In the 1990s, when budgetary pressures were not as threatening as they are today, departments had already begun to question time to degree in graduate programs. Yet departments that managed to guide doctoral students quickly to the PhD were not universally acknowledged as having more desirable programs, either by PhD students or their professors. For example, in 1998 Robert Scholes advocated a ten-year model for PhD programs in the humanities that would produce better doctoral results (175–77). Given the difference of opinions about the ideal length of a PhD program, it is not surprising that the GEI’s progress indicators showed most success where individual faculty members had a greater commitment to improving their doctoral programs (Ehrenberg et al. 258).

From today’s vantage point, both Mellon’s $80 million GEI and Scholes’s ten-year PhD seem unrealistic, because they stood for a more-of-the-same mind-set: either more money (GEI) or more time (Scholes) would produce better academic offspring. Initiatives today are more radical, aimed at changing the fundamental nature of PhD study—to shorten time to degree, open up alternative career paths, and better prepare PhDs for known professional contexts. Two recent MLA presidents questioned the form of the dissertation and traditional scholarship. They urged the profession to reconsider curricular goals and content to transform humanities graduate programs into learning environments that prepare PhDs for careers beyond academia.

In 2010, in two editorials in the MLA Newsletter, Sidonie Smith challenged prevalent standards for the dissertation. She criticized the notion of the dissertation as monograph (“Beyond the Dissertation Monograph”) and argued for a new dissertation (“An Agenda for the New Dissertation”). Specifically, she suggested that “digital project[s] . . . valuable to other scholars, teachers, and students” as well as “public scholarship . . . undertaken in a community outside academia” must be regarded as alternatives to the dissertation monograph (“Agenda” 2). She also asked for a redefinition of scholarship in the humanities. These views are consistent with the recommendations of the MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship and Promotions issued in 2007 (“Report”).

Smith’s ideas are vital in an age where knowledge and information in most domains are far more likely to be produced and distributed in electronic form than in print. But in her discussion of the dissertation form, Smith describes a desired outcome without offering concrete suggestions regarding the structure and content of a curriculum that can prepare PhD students to achieve it.

Russell Berman, who succeeded Smith as MLA president, outlined in 2011 changes to doctoral programs that related not only to the form of the dissertation but also to the entire curriculum and the overall goals for PhD programs. While charging his profession with developing doctoral programs that significantly reduced the time to degree and remained economically self-sustainable, he envisioned the PhD as preprofessional and having relevance beyond the academic workplace.

Berman, like Smith, underscored digital and public scholarship as forms of intellectual engagement for the twenty-first century, but he also argued that this focus would provide “a gateway to many different careers” if the graduate curriculum was recalibrated to relate directly to them. He saw the profession’s future in equipping PhDs with “skills that, while central to an academic career, can also be transferred to other paths” (2).1 His remarks were made in the light of curricular innovations that had already taken place: Stanford’s BiblioTech program, established in 2011, served as one of his models for a humanities curriculum with a reach beyond academia. Besides envisioning technology-centered opportunities that supplement training for graduate students in language, writing, and critical thinking skills, the program educates both students and potential employers through networking events and advocacy for the value that humanities PhDs can bring to a variety of organizations.

These voices are not alone in urging that graduate curricula be redefined. While not the only options, the ideas initially articulated in the alt-ac community are now shaping policy in the mainstream of the profession.2 Still missing from the discussion, however, are concrete descriptions of what should happen in the classroom to integrate training in public scholarship and technology into a graduate program.

Project-Based Graduate Education: Public Scholarship through Technology

The context for such curricular innovation at the University of Texas was a graduate-level seminar on curriculum development in foreign language disciplines that included the design of an educational outreach project in collaboration with a theater company. Motivated by the theater’s need to increase the community impact of a production of “A Man Is a Man,” a new translation of Bertolt Brecht’s 1924 comedy Mann ist Mann, students developed a strategy for educational outreach and then created teaching materials to fulfill the educational goals they had identified. The project resulted in a Web site that had to serve the needs of the theater group. In the process, students gained and refined a number of competencies that are usually not associated with PhD programs in the humanities but that are common in the activities of public intellectuals and thus transferable to nonacademic careers.

Unlike typical graduate instructor training, which is limited to teaching duties in lower-division language classes, the seminar Course Design and Curriculum Development in Foreign Language Disciplines, taught to a group of five graduate students from the Department of Germanic Studies and the Department of French and Italian, addressed a broader set of curricular scenarios for postsecondary foreign language departments: literature instruction, general education programs, study-abroad programs, area studies, translation, and language training for specific purposes. Although the main purpose of the seminar was to prepare doctoral students for faculty roles in foreign language departments at colleges and universities, its collaborative engagement with professional contexts outside academia also offered a different set of opportunities.

Each of the seminar’s three main objectives was tied to a course module in the fifteen-week semester.3 The first objective was to familiarize students with scholarly and professional debates about curricular innovation in higher education, with a focus on the humanities and foreign language disciplines. In the second module, students discussed and critiqued both general and discipline-specific frameworks used in the curriculum development process. Finally, students were given the opportunity to apply what they had learned from the first two modules in the New Brecht for LA project.

During this third module, students worked with Andrew Utter, the artistic director of the Uranium Madhouse Theater. They read and discussed ideas on education outreach initiatives in the arts by Jarvis Ulbricht and by Stephani Woodson to get a better understanding of reasons and approaches for engaging with the nonacademic public. They analyzed and critiqued the Web-based educational outreach initiatives of the San Francisco Opera and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. These Web sites provided models for their project and also helped them expand their vision of arts education, fund-raising, and public scholarship. Students read both the German original and Utter’s new translation of Brecht’s comedy. They interviewed Utter by e-mail and Skype about what the director planned to emphasize in his production and about his new translation. These exchanges allowed them to focus on the specific production’s choices while also situating these choices within Brecht studies by recovering implications of the play in its original context and language that would have to be explained to a United States audience.

Students then discussed the target audiences for both the play and their educational outreach materials and decided what scope and form their research and cultural materials should take. Most important, they generated a set of educational objectives that served as overall guiding principles for the project and agreed to focus on these topics: the relation between posttraumatic stress disorder and reenlistment, artistic representations of war, Brechtian stage aesthetics, and gender and sexuality issues.

Students chose to design the teaching materials in English, so that the Web site would be accessible to more than the relatively small audience of learners and teachers of German. They made this decision after they discovered that the play would be relevant not only to people with an interest in German culture: the director was going to stress political issues that related to the United States military presence in the Middle East and Afghanistan, so the play would be of interest to people or organizations involved in antiwar activism and peace education.

Students further decided that the materials should not be limited to educators and students who saw the play during its short run; they wanted to include learners who could not see the play because of the theater’s location and because the performances took place during the summer, which made it unlikely that teachers would attend with their classes. This decision was consistent with the educational programs offered by the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art and the San Francisco Opera. Although their materials encourage immediate interaction between the learner and a featured exhibition or production, they also serve as educational resources to a worldwide audience of learners and teachers who access them through the Internet.

Students were charged with managing the project themselves by creating a list of tasks, for their group and for the Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services at the University of Texas, Austin. In subgroups, they worked on components for the project, developed all necessary materials, and regrouped to discuss drafts. An editorial meeting after the end of the semester resulted in the creation of the Web site, in collaboration with a Web designer.

Within the three weeks at the end of the academic year, the graduate students moved from their planning into creating the Web site that articulated their outreach strategy. As most such projects do, the site includes general information about Brecht, the play, the translation, and the theater company. Most important, it serves as a distribution channel for teaching materials aimed at specific educational goals and audiences.

Contributions to Graduate Education

By providing students with theoretical insights into and hands-on experience with the curriculum development process, the seminar’s capstone project gave them the chance to refine professional competencies required for careers inside and outside academia. The seminar enabled them to develop and assess curricula and programs by equipping them with a cognitive framework and the vocabulary to articulate their actions and evaluations. In today’s climate of increased accountability, professors will operate more effectively if trained early in curriculum development and the assessment of institutional innovation. A New Brecht for LA offered students the experience of being accountable for their own professional environment. It was the first time for many to design and execute a plan for research and writing that was collective. Hard deadlines and product goals forced them to think and act beyond familiar class boundaries. By giving students the opportunity to shape a hitherto unstructured space, the project resembled many public arts education scenarios. It stressed collaborative, goal-oriented productivity rather than the individual creativity asked for in traditional humanities graduate education.

Collaboration, a necessity in project-oriented settings, extended beyond student-student and student-faculty interactions: students had to establish and foster partnerships with stakeholders and professionals outside the ivory tower as well as with staff members whom they did not normally encounter as graduate students (e.g., instructional design and tech specialists on campus). The success of the project depended to a large degree on their willingness and ability to respond to the needs of these new partners. They needed to understand the director’s vision of the play as well as their own contributions to the larger context of the production, its promotion, and the fund-raising efforts. They needed to work with a Web designer while considering technological feasibility, budgetary limitations, and user constraints. These involve competencies that are critical to many outreach situations—public scholarship, arts advocacy, museum or collection education, fund-raising—and that are becoming indispensable to academic institutions as well. Note that the project’s deadline was nonnegotiable: the finished product had to be delivered on time because of the partnership with the theater company, because of the fund-raising and promotion connected with the staging of the play. A work-in-progress fragment, perfectly acceptable for end-of-semester projects in many academic contexts, was not an option.

Admittedly, it is not likely that the students who participated will immediately rethink their professional goals. Rather, the project provided a learning environment that called for new or refocused competencies. These competencies grew out of the skill set students developed in graduate school but required them to retool themselves in response to a public that needs support in its interaction with the arts.

Recommendations

The project taught me much: this was the first time that I, an experienced instructor of a compulsory foreign language teaching methods course for graduate students, had tried to structure project-based work into a seminar. The experience gave me insights into graduate student professionalization for careers inside and outside academia and led me to make recommendations for methods teachers who would train future professionals, not only teachers. It also made me reflect more on the integration of technology training and public scholarship into the graduate curriculum in the humanities.

Professionalizing beyond the Methods Course

At many institutions, pedagogical training of graduate students is insufficient because it is too narrow.4 It is frequently limited to a single seminar on foreign language teaching or to a series of workshops on various topics (e.g., teaching literature) that offer sample lessons that can be fed into an existing syllabus on a single day. Rarely, if ever, does this training deal with articulation, course design research, or the pragmatics of designing and modifying courses for use by particular groups.

The graduate seminar on curriculum and instruction described in this essay is more integrative, providing professional preparation for future faculty roles through scholarship, collaboration, assessment, and planning. This combining of pedagogical and professional activities can help graduate students develop transferable competencies in leadership, project management, decision making, and supervision as well as the ability to present complex matter convincingly to different audiences. Thus I recommend that the obligatory foreign language teaching methods seminar be supplemented with a second course that fosters broader professional competencies useful both inside and outside the college classroom.

Collaborating beyond Academia

Collaborative work often results in a better product, but it also helps students develop interpersonal skills as they connect with professionals and stakeholders outside academia. Students will benefit from encountering different work cultures and interactional patterns in the corporate or not-for-profit sectors, and they may build professional networks in those sectors that lead to future opportunities. When integrating collaborative work into their curricula, I recommend that humanities programs help their students build partnerships with stakeholders outside academia.

Digitizing for Multiple Audiences

Digital technologies offer a variety of roles for academics and public intellectuals in the twenty-first century. When these technologies are integrated into collaborative work, they improve communication and increase the public dimension of an enterprise.

Granted, today’s graduate students may have been exposed to digital archives, publications, and editions as well as to some kinds of computational textual analysis procedures. But these are often highly specialized applications that appeal only to a narrow circle of colleagues. In contrast, designing a Web site aimed at public outreach considerably broadens the role of digital technologies in the humanities. Such a project exposes students to the elegance of hypertext, the social-interactive capabilities of Web 2.0 technologies, and the Internet’s ability to deliver knowledge not only to the students they will someday have but also to a global audience. I therefore recommend that the integration of digital technology into the graduate curriculum not be reduced to using technologies to further knowledge in a small expert community. Let humanities PhDs learn to instrumentalize the Internet to reach people beyond subfield, discipline, academia.

Dissertating beyond the Monograph

Projects like A New Brecht for LA expand the vision of scholarship and professional activity. At least one of the students involved in our seminar entertained the possibility of an alternative dissertation topic. Graduate seminars must open to alternative forms of scholarship and to the inclusion of digital materials in dissertations, which has been an option at the University of Texas, Austin, for twenty years but is still rarely used.5 The quality of alternative projects, however, depends on the training offered to graduate students by their departments. I therefore recommend that programs promoting alternative dissertation projects provide students with technology training and public scholarship opportunities in the context of graduate seminars.

Implementation and Outlook

In an ideal PhD program, every faculty member is willing and able to implement in existing graduate seminars the innovations I have recommended here. Unfortunately, too few colleagues are actively engaged in public scholarship and technology. Programs should address this lack by changing their hiring priorities in the near future, but it is not likely that many departments will recruit tenure-track faculty members with alternative profiles to replace retiring colleagues in core areas of their discipline.

Instead, programs might choose to hire experts from outside the ivory tower to complement their own institutional strengths. These experts, having backgrounds in technology and arts advocacy, could be hired on an adjunct basis to offer workshops and seminars that give students the skills they need to create alternative dissertations and work on projects that bridge academia and the outside world. An adjunct position comes with disadvantages, of course, since it is difficult to build curricular initiatives on the shoulders of colleagues with short-term contracts, minimal compensation, and stripped-down benefits packages.

In the absence of departmental involvement, there can be interdisciplinary and cross-institutional collaboration. Beginning in 2014, the University of Washington’s Simpson Center of the Humanities offers summer support and research funding for graduate students and faculty members who form work groups that explore technology-based research in the humanities.6 Using the summer term for project-based work in the digital humanities and public scholarship has the advantage that adding this dimension to the graduate curriculum will have little adverse effect on a student’s time to degree.

Summer schools that introduce new tools or emerging paradigms and methods to graduate students and faculty members are more common in the sciences, but in the history of our field there have been summer programs that transformed scholarship and teaching. In the 1970s, when critical theory emerged as a significant factor in humanities and the interpretative social sciences, many departments were not sufficiently staffed to train graduate students in this area. The School of Criticism and Theory, now housed at Cornell University, was established in 1976 to fill this vacuum. Similarly, just after the millennium, the Digital Humanities Summer Institute was established (see www.dhsi.org). Today, the profession needs an equivalent summer school, a School of Public Scholarship in the Humanities. It would not only improve the training of current graduate students and faculty members but also help advance public scholarship. In an era of diminishing interest in the arts and humanities, public scholarship initiatives represent a survival strategy for otherwise marginalized fields.

Questioning the traditional form of the dissertation and thus promoting alternative forms for scholarship in the humanities are necessary, but it takes the kind of experience provided by A New Brecht for LA to spur students to envision alternative dissertation projects that are scholarly robust and professionally relevant. Therefore, parallel to advocacy for alternative forms of dissertation and public scholarship, the profession must develop graduate curricula that give students the skills to produce these kinds of scholarship, to consider alternatives to the monograph, and to acquire a professional profile for careers outside academia. If existing graduate seminars cannot innovate in this way, the innovation must take place through alternative curricular constructs as well as workshops and summer schools on the regional and national levels.