Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University (CT), has a piece at the Huffington Post discussing the relationship of scholarship to public life. (HT).
Roth begins the piece by showing how an increasing number of colleges and universities are establishing centers designed to bring faculty scholarship to a wider audience. He mentions programs at Duke, Washington, and Macalester.
He could also have mentioned the NEH-funded Center for Public Humanities at Messiah College. (Just this past week the Center hosted a visit from NEH chairman, James Leach). Messiah’s Center for Public Humanities brings humanities-based learning to inner-city Harrisburg through a Clemente-course style program called the “Hoverter Course in the Humanities.” It also sponsors “Teachers as Scholars” seminars that provide local school teachers with content-based workshops in their fields.
But I digress.
After noting this new trend in public humanities, Roth asks a few questions that I have been wresting with as well:
Many universities with a focus on undergraduate education demand that their faculty excel at a variety of tasks. Faculty are often encouraged to connect their intellectual work to issues that matter to the world off campus — to Public Life with a capital P and a capital L. But do we want ALL the research of the university to be responding to issues of Public Life? How about basic research in the sciences? Does our faculty have to justify this kind of specialization by looping the work back to some political or social issue? Does detailed research in literature and languages have to be public (read “popular”) in order to be considered responsible? In other words, is there an emerging dispensation considering a connection to “Public Life” the litmus test for research?
I thought about this recently when I heard about a faculty member who left his teaching post at a Christian college because, as a mathematician, he wanted to do traditional research in his field, but such work was frowned upon by the members of his department and school because it did not have any direct benefit to the needs of the world or the programs within this school that tried to meet such needs. This faculty member, who is a very fine scholar and who by all indicators would be a very valued member of any faculty, did not feel comfortable in an academic environment so driven by public engagement. Needless to say, another university quickly snatched him up.
Part of the problem is that Christian colleges have yet to see the worth of traditional scholarship, especially traditional scholarship that may, at first glance, have no direct practical value. We are good at the “public” (as in public engagement) part of “public humanities” or “public scholarship,” but we are lacking in the “humanities” or “scholarship” part. But that may be a topic for another post. In the meantime, go read Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.
I also realize that many of my readers who work at research universities may have the opposite problem–colleagues who are so engaged with scholarship for the guild that they have never really thought about how their work might have some public benefit. These are the academics to whom Roth is writing.
Much of Roth’s article, which I agree with, relies on the work of Anthony Grafton, the current president of the American Historical Association. Here is a taste:
I’ve been led to ask this question by some recent discussions concerning historians and the public stimulated by Anthony Grafton, a wonderfully gifted scholar who is now president of the American Historical Association. Grafton has rightly defended the importance of basic research in the humanities and social sciences, but he has also called on historians to fight back against those who manipulate the past without concern for fundamental notions of evidence, argument or honesty. In other words, he wants to ensure that scholars can continue to work on topics that might not appear to be immediately useful, but he also wants to see some scholars engage in questions in the public sphere on the basis of their academic work. Not all the scholarship has to be about civic engagement, but we need some scholars to engage in the public sphere to protect the right to do that basic research.
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