Doing Public Humanities

Susan Smulyan, Susan Smulyan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000098273
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Museum Administration
• Index: Business

Doing Public Humanities explores the cultural landscape from disruptive events to websites, from tours to exhibits, from after school arts programs to archives, giving readers a wide-ranging look at the interdisciplinary practice of public humanities.

Combining a practitioner's focus on case studies with the scholar's more abstract and theoretical approach, this collection of essays is useful for both teaching and appreciating public humanities. The contributors are committed to presenting a public humanities practice that encourages social justice and explores the intersectionalities of race, class, gender, and sexualities. Centering on the experiences of students with many of the case studies focused on course projects, the content will enable them to relate to and better understand this new field of study.

The text is essential reading for undergraduate and graduate classes in public history, historic preservation, history of art, engaged sociology, and public archaeology and anthropology, as well as public humanities.

1

The Rise of the Public Humanists

Robyn Schroeder

Introduction

Much of the “talking” component of my former job, as the Director of the Mellon-funded Humanities for the Public Good Initiative at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, lay in explaining to my collaborators what exactly we are talking about when we talk about “the public humanities.” Across the Public Humanities movement, it’s a common problem. It was over a decade ago, in 2008, that I became a member of one of the first classes of doctoral students to obtain an M.A., en route to my American Studies Ph.D., in a field newly offered at Brown: Public Humanities. When I returned to that program as its Director of Graduate Studies, it became clear to me that our program’s understandable preoccupation with the diverse intellectual and administrative issues raised by teaching and practicing public humanities in the university, had caused the historians among us to neglect production of something that seemed of clear, direct utility: namely, a competent history of the idea of “the public humanities.” I believed that such a history might be useful to everyone involved in the Public Humanities movement as it’s manifested in “fieldification” and academic labor practices; after all, a confusing array of ways of deploying “public humanities” had long since proliferated, and the movement itself is even now only growing, in terms of degree-granting and funding opportunities.

Below, I’ll endeavor to share, first, what my research—originally undertaken in collaboration with my colleagues Jim McGrath and Inge Zwart as part of the “Day of Public Humanities” project outlined in the case study at the end of this essay—told us about the reactionary origins of “the public humanities” as praxis or, as some would have it, a field of study. This history traces the idea of public humanities from its first usages in the 1980s, through the alternative ideas that were eschewed in its favor along the way, into its diverse institutionalizations into higher education in recent years. The history pays particular attention to the context of the formation of the Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage at Brown, the institution with which all of the writers in this volume are, or once were, affiliated, in order to provide covert, but steady, illumination to the project descriptions and case studies that follow. I’ll suggest some of the pressures and pushback that animate public humanities organizing in higher education. Finally, I’ll offer five key ways of understanding the Public Humanities at its present crossroads.

The Origins of the Public Humanities Movement in Higher Education

Public Humanities is the work of moving humanistic knowledges among individuals and groups of people. Some of the most common varieties of that work are translational scholarship; cultural organizing; production of programs, plays, performances, tours, festivals, exhibits, or other audience-oriented humanistic activities. Others include maker activities, particularly making art, music, writing, typically with an orientation toward an evidentiary basis and/or some form of expertise; and generally all ways of making meaning socially, or making personal meaning in public space. If that sounds all-encompassing, consider we are talking about “the public” and “the humanities” at once.

In this essay I am not, it must be said, asking the comprehensive question, “what is the public humanities?” I am, much more narrowly, interrogating the origin of the phrase “the public humanities” and considering what kinds of labor, relationships, and futures the phrase has endeavored to draw together as it’s crystallized into a movement in higher education.

Broadly, the history of the Public Humanities eo nomine arose in the last fifty years. It is, then, more recent in proliferation than its nested cousin “public history”; owes more to the public sector than its bosom friend “museology”; is more cultural and less political in orientation than “civic engagement”; and tends to refer to a different set of institutions than those of its associates which are oriented toward “community engagement” or “service learning”. However, it both overlaps in dizzying ways with all of those categories…and is used less frequently than any of them, as this Ngram suggests.

Ngram data is incomplete for the last decade; and when isolated, “public humanities” appears to be on a clear rise. Still, from the view of the whole cultural ecosystem, it exists in a niche suggested in contradistinction to the comparisons above with its cousin “civic engagement” and the highly related, discipline-specific areas of “museum studies” and “public history.” Considered as a cultural force, the rise of public humanities ought to be understood as concomitant with the much steeper and more general rise in both scholarly and public interest in civic and community engagement.

Figure 1.1 Google Ngram search from 20 July 2019.

Still, the notion was and in some sense still is a novelty; the idea of something called “the public humanities” was not an obvious one even in the early 1980s. In roughly the first two decades following the passage of the National Foundation for the Arts and Humanities Act of 1965, the idea of “public humanities” was purely adjectival. That is, as our data-mining project revealed, at first and through the 1970s, there were “public humanities programs” and “public humanities grants” and most of these were part of initiatives of the National Endowment for the Humanities and eventually the Institute for Museum and Library Services.

The impetuses for formulating the category of “the public humanities” as a noun phrase, suggesting as it did a sort of field or set of practices, was instrumental in several regards. First, by the late 1970s, academic humanists, cultural practitioners in contact with the NEH, and politicians concerned with the moral timbre of American life, increasingly bemoaned a divide between the academy and the public. The core finding of our research was that the key feature of the rise of “the public humanities” was this: certain academicians’ aspirations to democratize humanistic knowledge by transforming the capacities of scholars in and outside of the university were, at least sometimes, strategically consistent with conservative critiques of the obscurantism and leftism of the academy. The tensions, particularly around ideologies of race and racist rhetoric, that emerged in this partnership, were sometimes pragmatically and sometimes unwittingly ignored in order to make the Public Humanities, with its various utopianisms around active inclusion and humanities praxis, possible.

So, for example, we hear echoes of contemporary justifications for the public humanities in the critiques of leading conservative figures such as Reagan-era NEH chairs William Bennett and Lynne Cheney who railed, in Cheney’s words, against “hollow multiculturalism” as a form of liberal indoctrination, which, in her view, had eroded the possibility of universal appreciation of the “timeless values” and core truths embedded in arts and literature.¹

Their simultaneous fights to “save” the moral basis of a “good” education (which would have the purpose of assimilating students into a public with Western values) and to tamp down on the theoretical and identity-conscious practices of actual university educators, famously became the tempestuous wind in the sails of the culture wars.

At the same time, this quest to use the arts and humanities for democratic purposes that would make collective meanings possible, knowingly or unknowingly echoed a common frustration of the then-still-new class of professionals in the state humanities councils with academic humanists whom they also saw as too often removed from non-academic communities around them. A 1980 volume by James P. Smith and Steven Weiland called The Extracurricular Curriculum: Academic Disciplines and Public Humanities Programs represented what was, at that time, a culmination of state humanities councils’ multifarious efforts to devise strategies for investing university-based scholars in a “public pedagogy”—preparing them to leave campus and engage diverse publics with humanistic concerns. They sought to “improve the scholar’s readiness to present and exchange ideas with the public as one knowledgeable about history, literature, philosophy, and the other disciplines.”² This attempt was the significant organizing work of the early years of the Federation of State Humanities Council, of which Weiland was the first long-serving president, at a time when the tensions between the NEH and the state humanities councils were deepening. In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, a handful of highly active state councils pushed back against central control out of Washington, but also were moving to distribute local interest in and ownership of the humanities more broadly in communities in their home states, and the above volume represented the published papers of a handful of council leaders who were experimenting with public humanities in literature, philosophy, and adult education, as ways of changing the humanities ecosystem rather than reifying it.³

Those “public humanities programs”—in literature festivals, library poetry clubs, and after-school arts enrichment grants, that Weiland saw as pathways for reinvigorating public culture were the already-proliferating buildings from which new and improved blueprints could begin to be drawn. And a certain defensiveness permeated the work of the early architects, who were in a reactionary mode of defending a democratically-engaged arts and humanities against a leadership in Washington who were its nominal stewards, and whose assimilationisms and overweaning nationalism sometimes threatened the work at hand. Still, this work spawned interpretation and analysis of itself, in the academy; and it was quite hesitantly that a group of researchers at the Hastings Center, an independent interdisciplinary research center in upstate New York, apparently coined the phrase “the public humanities” in 1984. In their On the Uses of the Humanities: Vision and Application (1984), medical ethicists Daniel Callahan, Arthur Caplan, and Bruce Jennings suggested that “One could also speak of a ‘public humanities’, that is, a humanities dedicated to a public rather than an academic audience.” This intuition that “public humanities” meant the reception of humanities by anyone but academics, was by no means unique to this volume, but bespoke the intentions of most public humanities programs at the time. And the idea that these writers were among first to evince—that there was ‘a’ public humanities, a field in itself—was not the report’s crucial point. Its major concern, rather, was that Bill Bennet’s chairmanship of the National Endowment for the Humanities had highlighted for them that “public” and “academic” were intuitively understood by most people as binarily opposite phrases. Hence, they positioned public humanities here again as the end result of a translational, all but Gramscian process through which academic knowledge became public, through every possible means of education besides conventional seminars and the academic monograph.⁴ For the humanists in the academy—or, for the professionals at the state and territorial humanities councils, who were seldom more than half outside of it—the idea of a “public humanities” gave words and vision to the hope of making humanistic knowledge more accessible, of bridging divides between the academy’s supposed surfeit of humanities and the public’s supposed wont of it. It seldom referred to the academy’s many internal publics, including the biomedically-oriented researchers who had, oddly enough, coined the phrase.

The combination of a longing for relevance, for social cohesion, and for access to grant funding produced strange bedfellows in the early manifestations of calls for a “public humanities” which ensued. With logic that, again, mirrored certain conservative critiques of the academy, no less a figure than Robert Bellah, the Berkeley sociologist whose pioneering thinking on “civil religion” had made him an academic celebrity, began to advocate for what he still mainly called “applied humanities,” analogous to the applied sciences in distinction to the theoretical sciences. Within his own writing on the topic, Bellah ultimately came to prefer “public humanities” to applied humanities. His reason was a common one; he was frustrated by the disconnect between university-based humanists and wider public conversations and believed that a “public humanities” might resupply the moral purpose which over-technical thinking had drained out of the academy.

Moreover, in Bellah’s view, the public humanities would enlarge the other historical purposes of the humanities, democratically extending the moral benefits of paideia, the moral bent of education which notionally produces ideal citizens:

It is essentially because we see the humanities as a collection of ‘academic disciplines,’ technical and professional, that we think it requires some special effort to apply them, that wisdom and vision do not seem to flow very intrinsically from them…If the humanities are to help us with social vision it will not be, I believe, through the application of technical humanistic disciplines to specific problems of social policy. It will be through a reappropriation of the right relation between the humanities and the practice of life.⁵

The contemporaneous interest—shared, too, by the Hasting Center’s report—in “applying” the humanities through bringing the technical expertise of academic humanists to bear in formal policy and laboratory settings—was also cautiously rejected by other writers in the conference volume. David Little, for example, agreed with Lynne Cheney’s basic critique of the hegemony of critical theory, and wrote in favor of a new public humanities precisely against the “aristocracy of culture” that theoretical approaches represented. That is, he echoed Cheney’s partially racially-motivated critique of over-specialization as a source of distraction and fragmentation, but did it in race- and ethnicity-neutral terms: “Uncontested and unchecked, humanistic learning can become disabling and diverting in respect to the crying moral issues of our time,” he concluded. Or might “applying” the humanities be a trap that would constrain their social and political potential by tying them to various officialisms in the form of corporate and government funding? After all, “The great humanists have always been advocates of alternatives: alternative methods of inquiry, alternative life styles, alternative forms of social order,” wrote G.W. French, who was not optimistic, as a result, that the Public Humanities could be sufficiently “bias-free” to evade future government crackdowns.⁶

Still, despite certain intellectual skepticisms about the encroachment of funding politics and the threat represented by marrying critical theory to public practice—as most readers of this essay would suspect—the key spaces of eagerness for practical social action in humanities disciplines arose in the late 1980s from the various practitioners of ethnic, gender, technology, and pop culture studies. Academic interest in music, TV, film, electronics, popular novels, and street and folk life, had already surged by the ‘70s amidst the various crests of the “new social” waves. But those waves met bulwarks not only in the form of old guards in the academy, but also in the National Endowment. In fact, the founder of the Popular Culture Association and Journal of Popular Culture, Ray Browne, recalled in 1989 that the long-standing litany of rejections and resistances of pop culture proposals actually “hardened” under Bill Bennett’s NEH. Interestingly, he found in Lynne Cheney’s positive orientation to folk culture a source of hope for change, representing the quixotic tensions and alliances that Cheney’s mixed populism, dismissal of critical theory, and Westernization orientations made possible. At the time of his 1989 writing, Browne concluded, “the jury is still out. We hope that popular culture will be recognized as the New Humanities and its practical and pragmatic value accepted as real and tangible.”⁷ Hence this was one moment, not the last, in which the value of pragmatism in higher education provided the possibility of common ground between left and right variants of humanities populism.

These “practical,” “applied,” and “public” humanities approaches ...