The Scholar as Human

Research and Teaching for Public Impact

Anna Sims Bartel, Debra A. Castillo, Anna Sims Bartel, Debra A. Castillo, Anna S. Bartel

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781501750618
• eBook ISBN: 9781501750625
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Arts & Humanities

The Scholar as Human brings together faculty from a wide range of disciplines—history; art; Africana, American, and Latinx studies; literature, law, performance and media arts, development sociology, anthropology, and Science and Technology Studies—to focus on how scholarship is informed, enlivened, deepened, and made more meaningful by each scholar's sense of identity, purpose, and place in the world. Designed to help model new paths for publicly-engaged humanities, the contributions to this groundbreaking volume are guided by one overarching question: How can scholars practice a more human scholarship?

Recognizing that colleges and universities must be more responsive to the needs of both their students and surrounding communities, the essays in The Scholar as Human carve out new space for public scholars and practitioners whose rigor and passion are equally important forces in their work. Challenging the approach to research and teaching of earlier generations that valorized disinterestedness, each contributor here demonstrates how they have energized their own scholarship and its reception among their students and in the wider world through a deeper engagement with their own life stories and humanity.

Contributors: Anna Sims Bartel, Debra A. Castillo, Ella Diaz, Carolina Osorio Gil, Christine Henseler, Caitlin Kane, Shawn McDaniel, A. T. Miller, Scott J. Peters, Bobby J. Smith II, José Ragas, Riché Richardson, Gerald Torres, Matthew Velasco, Sara Warner

Thanks to generous funding from Cornell University, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.

PART I

Humanizing Scholars

As the epigraph to his important 2009 Kettering publication Civic Agency and the Cult of the Expert, Harry Boyte quotes Elizabeth Coleman, then president of Bennington College: “Over the past century the expert has dethroned the educated generalist to become the role model of intellectual accomplishment. While expertise has had its moments, the price of its dominance is enormous. . . . Questions such as ‘What kind of a world are we making?’ ‘What kind should we be making?’ and ‘What kind can we be making?’ move off the table.”

These questions are inherently human questions, concerned with the well-being of ourselves, our families, our society, our planet. They are questions of most extraordinary urgency today, questions that many of us are struggling to relegitimize in the scholarly contexts of academia.

This work of re-legitimation is complex: it involves shifting minds from entrenched positions; transforming institutional systems from historical traditions; transplanting networks of substance where we once grew hierarchies of prestige. In short, it is the work of humanizing the academy.

Whether or not we buy the arguments of nostalgia—which certainly have strong roots in the origins of US higher education—we can all agree that right now the conventional divorce of values, desire, and love from domains of rigorous scholarship is causing trouble. “Neutrality” now means complicity with the fall of democracy and the rise of the oceans. A form of scholarship in which, for example, the interests of users are not engaged in design of a public space, or in which arguments about racial history are divorced from their lived consequences for the bodies of living people, is newly visibly problematic. The dimensions of human experience are more essential than ever in this era of rampant inequality and risk, and if the engines of higher education can’t engage them, we consign ourselves to irrelevance.

Relevance, then, and usefulness and meaningful engagement with the world begin at the level of the individual scholar. We all know people whose research was turned by a sense of urgency or importance, and we all know people who were subject to reprimand because of it. The research on this topic is compelling. But what does it mean for us, humanists with public interests, at the only university that is both Ivy League and land grant?

We began by exploring these questions in unfamiliar languages: what does it mean to “live divided no more?”—to be a human scholar, a scholarly human, someone whose intellectual work is aligned with their civic and soul work? We had many answers, explored here: it means engaging our histories in open and public ways; claiming our histories and identities and values; using words like “love” and “care”; committing to integrity. But it also means network-weaving, relationship-cultivation, and tending to one another as humans as well as colleagues. For us, it meant sandwiches together. It meant, not infrequently, tears. It meant checking in on job searches, on family health, on disappointments and frustrations as well as joys. In these chapters, we explore these foundational questions and model some of our engagements with them.

CHAPTER 1

Humans as Scholars, Scholars as Humans

ANNA SIMS BARTEL

The thing being made in a university is humanity . . . Underlying the idea of a university—the bringing together, the combining into one, of all the disciplines—is the idea that good work and good citizenship are the inevitable by-products of the making of a good—that is, a fully developed—human being.

—Wendell Berry

How can higher education become a more multidimensional enterprise, one that draws on the full range of human capacities for knowing, teaching, and learning; that bridges the gaps between the disciplines; that forges stronger links between knowing the world and living creatively in it, in solitude and community?

—Parker J. Palmer, Arthur Zajonc, and Megan Scribner

Anna Sims Bartel’s dissertation advisor once said to her father-in-law, “Anna’s problem is that she is part activist, part administrator, and part academic.” He replied, as she would have: “Exactly. But why is that a problem?” As someone passionate about the work of story in the world, Anna earned her PhD in comparative literature at Cornell and has put it to work trying to make higher education ever more useful in the world. She does this through faculty roles, consulting, and public humanities initiatives as well the development of community-engagement centers at several institutions of higher education in cold, white places (upstate New York, Maine, and Iowa). Currently Anna serves as associate director for community-engaged curricula and practice in Cornell’s Office of Engagement Initiatives, where she works on advancing faculty growth and network development in engaged scholarship, teaching, and research. Her life’s work is to transform higher education toward greater public engagement and usefulness, through structural, systemic, cultural and relational change. Anna’s current research interests are broad and include social change and transformation; cli-fi; the US agrarian novel; and, of course, civic engagement. Her most accessible publication (“Why Public Policy Needs the Humanities, and How”) appeared in 2015 in the Maine Policy Review, and her recent work focuses on “democratically engaged assessment.” She works at and builds out the intersections of social innovation and civic engagement and networked models of faculty development. Anna enjoys the things that support chronic hope: the chaos of her young family; being in, on, or near moving water; the smell of dirt and the good things that grow in it.

Her chapter here aims to provide intellectual framing for this project as a whole: as a reflective practice, a faculty development opportunity, a community-building moment, an institutional transformation initiative. She lays out discrete ways of thinking about civic professionalism, civic agency, public happiness, and civic loneliness, weaving them together into an argument for transforming our institutions and practices of scholarship.

I used to do an exercise with my students, as an introduction to the role of universities in US culture. I asked them to close their eyes and picture a college professor, then, keeping their eyes closed, to describe the professor. I wrote on the board what they envisioned: an older man, white, wearing a cardigan with elbow patches or a bow tie or both, who has a drinking problem and may or may not be sleeping with students. He is probably lonely and divorced. His work is abstruse and of interest to few people besides himself. Then I asked them to open their eyes and describe the college professor in front of them: also white but female, just thirty, with purple cat’s-eye glasses and short, spiky, blondish hair. Also: with a husband, two dogs, and commitments to various local boards. The class was on concepts of work as service, and it involved each student partnering with a nonprofit for a semester-long internship to explore how they might connect the issues they were passionate about with paid work to sustain them more richly in life. And every Tuesday night we would gather to discuss the readings: theology, feminist theory, educational philosophy, sociology of work, poems, and stories. In short, we were using interdisciplinary humanities to learn reflection, deliberation, and ethical engagement with the world, understanding our work choices as a core component of our human being. That’s higher education too.

These questions of the relevance of higher education and its faculty have new urgency in the face of rising tuition costs and declining public support for higher education (fiscal and otherwise), even more urgency in light of the assorted catastrophes we are facing in the world. Higher education has produced faculty who live divided lives (Boyte and Fretz; O’Meara; Palmer; Snyder-Hall), and reconnecting the pieces—reason and emotion, theory and practice, public and private—seems essential if we are to move on productively. These are not new ideas. The 2007 Heart of Higher Education conference and its 2018 follow-up (both from Parker Palmer’s work) created important national forums for these discussions; the Democratic Engagement White Paper from Saltmarsh, Hartley, and Clayton laid out a case for the civic component of this; Sandmann and others have offered insights into how we can “create academic homes” for public and engaged scholars. The Fetzer Institute, the Kettering Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Association of American Colleges and Universities, Imagining America, Campus Compact, and a wide variety of other national organizations have supported inquiry into these same themes. All of us are asking questions: How can we make engaged scholarship, or in our case engaged humanities, more relevant and better understood? How can we imagine a new reality, one in which more faculty are engaged, curious, and connecting their public aspirations and professional work in productive ways? And, most importantly, how can we actually shift faculty and institutional cultures to invite and enable such healthy, whole engagement as norm rather than exception?

The Mellon Diversity Seminar at Cornell University sought to do just that. We recognize that change is more than individual, that learning communities can support individual change even as they shift expectations and understandings for the group as a whole. We believe that the kinds of shifts necessary are cultural and institutional, professional and personal, perhaps even spiritual for some. Our interests are diverse and perform in many ways the kinds of connections we seek to lift up. In exploring our theme of “Scholars as Humans: Enacting the Liberal Arts in Public,” we addressed issues including identity (conceptually, but also literally, as one studies focuses on governmental ID processes); slavery and its living legacies; the role of theater in promoting social change; social movements and “demosprudence”; the radical pedagogies of a Brooklynite Latino goat farmer; local collaborations with Latino/a communities; the ethics and practices of trust in rural Peruvian archaeological digs; the experiential impacts of physically visiting Underground Railroad sites; youth-driven collaborative urban theater; naming and talking about the things we cannot talk about; and, of course, the larger questions of the role of the humanities in public life and in our lives. We talked and ate; we each designed and led at least one session; we shared and responded to one another’s writing.

Our project was designed as it was—a small, year-long weekly seminar, with lunch—partly because the format is comfortable for academic humanists and partly because the structure of a learning community, a community of practice, a community of transformation, is also comfortable. Our process stood in contrast to conventional methods of institutional change-promotion: counting on “aggregation of individual changes,” thinking “in terms of scale and speed,” and staying focused primarily on “top leaders” and “problem-solving.” Instead we chose to emphasize structure and process, relationship, and “getting the questions right” (Block, 74–75). We recognize the dialectical relationship between individual and communal transformation, and we understand that we seek both. We further understand the tension and interdependence between what Adrianna Kezar, in her book How Colleges Change, calls “first-order changes” (those dealing with relatively straightforward shifts, say in pedagogical technology or dissemination strategies) and “second-order changes” (deeper shifts in values, attitudes, or culture). The breadth of institutional change we imagine will require both, and there is much energy at Cornell already being put toward first-order changes, particularly through Engaged Cornell and the Center for Teaching Innovation. Our seminar, then, can be described as working toward second-order change, building networks and communities that we hope and believe will lead to lasting systemic shifts in our work as scholars and humans.

As a staff member with Cornell’s Office of Engagement Initiatives, which stewards Engaged Cornell (“advancing Cornell’s mission through community-engaged discovery and learning”), I work at the intersections of higher education and public life, supporting faculty who seek to engage with their communities in learning how to do that better. Some do it for enhanced student motivation and learning; some do it out of their own sense of identity and commitment to the world; some do it for a sense of professional contribution, as a way to live out the public purpose of their discipline (Saltmarsh). And while I can and do provide support and deliberative exploration across these arenas of pedagogical, civic, and vocational concern, individual or first-order change is rarely enough if it’s counter-cultural. Culture change, or deep second-order change, is what we’re after ultimately. Faculty learn best from their peers both in terms of technical or practice dimensions and in terms of courage and conviction, so the creation of peer learning communities is a vital component of what I do. We see these communities as networks of engagement and support, enablers and encouragers of the brave and curious work of building community across difference. In such communities, as we saw in our Mellon seminar, people come to trust one another and one another’s shared commitment to public purpose, and the community becomes a space of refuge, exploration, and transformation.

Peter Block says that “community . . . is about the experience of belonging . . . to belong is to be related to and a part of something.” But he also offers a second meaning: “to belong to a community is to act as a creator and co-owner of that community. What I consider mine I will build and nurture. The work, then, is to seek in our communities a wider and deeper sense of emotional ownership; it means fostering among all of a community’s citizens a sense of ownership and accountability” (Block, xii). In higher education, this means supporting a transformation from “the isolation and self-interest within our communities into connectedness and caring for the whole” (1). Even caring, as a concept, engaging heart and body as well as mind, flies in the face of our cognition-oriented, technocratic cultures of institution. Since Plato, academe has been relegated to provinces above the neck, when processes of knowing in fact depend he...

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Part I. Humanizing Scholars
• Part II. Engaging Artifacts
• Part III. Considering Resistance
• Part IV. Using Humanity/ies
• Afterword: The Prophetic Aspiration of the Scholar as Human