The Review: Perils of the Public Humanities

On politicized grant-making, threats to speech, and more. ADVERTISEMENT [Advertisement]( [logo] Did someone forward you this newsletter? [Sign up]( free to receive your own copy. [Read this newsletter on the web](. How public is the future of the humanities? Last month, Feisal Mohamed [offered a cautious assessment]( the vogue for the so-called “public humanities,” a blanket term referring to a range of scholarly engagements with large, nonspecialist audiences — from Twitter threads to prison education. I spoke with Mohamed about some of his core concerns: the protection of professorial speech and the influence of large grant-making bodies. Some of that conversation follows. The most striking thing about this essay, to me, is its emphasis on the consequences for professorial free speech that could follow from the public-humanities turn. The status of extramural speech was already pretty tenuous, at private universities in particular, because faculty members at private universities can’t make a First Amendment claim against their institution. At public institutions, it was long at least a possibility that the public institution, as a government entity, could not impinge upon a faculty member’s rights as a citizen to engage in protected speech. Recent Supreme Court decisions have chipped away at that. The two that I mentioned in my piece specifically, Garcetti and Christian Legal Society, already made it a little bit more difficult for faculty to mount a successful First Amendment claim. And the nature of current communications blurs the line between extramural speech and academic speech. What’s a Twitter post? Is that extramural? So a category that was always a little bit shaky is shakier still. The public turn may be a final nail in the coffin, because it will make it a lot easier for an institution that’s engaged in a political dismissal to say, “Look, we advertised this position as having a public dimension. There was the possibility of recognition and reward for a person’s public profile over the course of this appointment. Now that we don’t really like the kind of profile that this person has, we can evaluate it as part of job performance.” So in effect, the category of extramural speech would disappear. That’s right. We’ll have to see how this unfolds. I think it will be very clear-cut in cases where the job advertisement and job evaluations mention a public profile. If that becomes the norm — if there’s always an implicit public dimension to faculty appointments — I wonder if any individual faculty member will be able to turn around and say, “No, I don’t consider this part of my appointment at all — I consider it completely extramural.” Paid for and Created by London Metropolitan University [Leading the way on inclusive learning]( According to Lynn Dobbs, Vice Chancellor of London Metropolitan University, LMU leads the way in fostering inclusion in British higher education because tackling inequality is central it its mission. Jeffrey J. Williams has complained about the “[promotional intellectual]( The basic worry is that scholars must become perpetual self-advertisers. This resonates with me, because a lot of people from my generation who had trouble finding jobs took to both Twitter and to general-audience writing in hopes of either raising their profile enough to beat the increasingly long odds or else pivoting into some other kind of work, in media or journalism. You can hardly blame them, but I’m not sure whether this semi-coerced publicness is a fair expectation, or that it’s always good for scholarship. And I don’t know if it’s always good for older or more established scholars either — sometimes I cringe at the public face I see even very prominent scholars assuming on Twitter. What if someone is a brilliant scholar whose work is quite esoteric and not readily translatable to public fora — do we just not value that anymore? When you see the current atmosphere that Jeff is referring to (though Jeff is partly motivated by the fact that he’s just terrible at social media) part of me thinks, “What would Gershom Scholem have done if he was graduating now? What would his Twitter account look like?” More seriously, what Jeff Williams and also Chris Newfield have done very well is point to this transition to perceiving education at all levels as a kind of private good, a commodity for which people compete on the open market. Public-facing work can get swept into that kind of atmosphere, where what matters now is having star-power behind your institution that will draw students in, make parents feel as though they’ve got the best of the best — they’ve got the luxury good. I hasten to add that the vast majority of people doing actual public humanities, graduate students and faculty doing things like prison education, aren’t invested in all that. There you’re seeing really smart, creative investment in what a broad-based humanities of the future should look like. The danger is that the smart, creative energy of graduate students and faculty who are doing that kind of work will get derailed by the corporate values of the university. I was involved a little bit in the Bard Prison Initiative as an undergrad, and I’ve been glad to see that model adopted to some extent by bigger, richer places — and to see the Mellon Foundation support prison education. So I don’t want to gainsay that kind of work at all. At the same time, I think it would be unfortunate if the only money available for public-humanities work is attached to social justice and engagé scholarship. I think it’s great for Mellon. As a granting body, it’s an excellent turn to take. But we have to bear in mind a very clear distinction between what it means for a granting body to advance social justice and what it means for a university to advance social justice. I think the problem arises when the grant-chasing mentality on campus loses sight of that distinction. A university advances social justice by making the broadest possible array of intellectual pathways available to the broadest possible audience of people. So a socially engaged university will be fully committed to supporting noninstrumental learning of all kinds, and to making that noninstrumental learning broadly accessible. A granting body is fundamentally different from a university, and universities need to see that before they set themselves the task of duplicating or mirroring back Mellon’s values in order to chase Mellon’s dollars. If a first-generation college student comes to college and discovers she wants to learn Sanskrit, and the university makes that path open to her, that’s an important social-justice outcome, too. In a lot of the things I’ve said, I point the blame at administrators and administrative culture. But I also think there are people on the faculty who adopt an all-too engagé rhetoric as well — that is, if you’re not performing work explicitly invested in some kind of social-justice mission, then you are advancing the cause of settler-colonialism. Here I have in mind my friends in American studies especially — anyone who is not doing work that is directly connected to present-day American minority studies is a settler-colonialist, and American studies people are quite willing to burn all that down in the heat of their zeal. They are, ironically, the biggest Puritan settlers on campus, and I sometimes fear they are unwittingly contributing to a narrowing of humanistic learning. ADVERTISEMENT [Advertisement]( Subscribe to The Chronicle The Chronicle’s award-winning journalism challenges conventional wisdom, holds academic leaders accountable, and empowers you to do your job better — and it’s your support that makes our work possible. [Subscribe Today]( The Latest THE REVIEW [I Love the Public Humanities, But ...]( By Feisal G. Mohamed [image] Instituted incautiously, they can threaten faculty speech and encourage cash-chasing. ADVERTISEMENT [Advertisement]( THE REVIEW [Let’s Not Return to Normal When the ‘New Normal’ Finally Arrives]( By Morton O. Schapiro [image] The pandemic has revealed higher education’s shortcomings. THE REVIEW [When Disciplines Hit Dead Ends]( By Noah Smith [image] The academic incentive structure leads fields astray. Recommended: - “Milton’s Hell is less like the liberatory queer space offered by ‘Montero’ and more like our own hell, by which I mean “the hellsite,” by which I mean Twitter.” At n+1, [Katie Kadue on Milton and Lil Nas X, and hell.]( Kadue’s essay, like Twitter itself but better, is endlessly quotable: “What makes Twitter so axiomatically hellish? It’s a place where even the most well-intentioned attempts at intellectually honest conversation inevitably devolve into misunderstanding and mutual contempt, like the fruit that crumbles into ash in the devils’ mouths in book 10 of Paradise Lost.” - “A keen (though not infallible) observer of ascendant authoritarianism in Europe, Keynes was prescient in seeing that in complex and wealthy modern societies, stability may well matter more to the left than to the right. His risk-averse radicalism resonates in our era, when the political left is concerned with guaranteeing stability (food, housing, health care, steady jobs, protection from environmental dangers), whereas the right has become the party of disruption and insurrection.” At the Hedgehog Review, [Charlie Tyson on a new biography of John Maynard Keynes](. - “Perhaps the most notorious (and beloved) example of the dead-friend book is Katherine Paterson’s 1977 novel Bridge to Terabithia.” At Lapham’s Quarterly,[B.D. McClay on the “friendship plot.”]( Write to me at opinion@chronicle.com or len.gutkin@chronicle.com. Yours, Len Gutkin Paid for and Created by University of Washington [Here, There and Everywhere]( University of Washington’s Population Health Initiative focuses on the three key areas of human health, environmental resilience, and social and economic equity. They strive to address the challenges of the future that arise when these ideas intersect. Today's Global Campus Strategies for Reviving International Enrollments and Study Abroad Pandemic travel restrictions cut both ways, causing international enrollments to plummet and limiting study-abroad opportunities. This Chronicle report provides an in-depth look at how the global education experience has changed and offers strategies for assessing and adapting programs to ensure students' exposure to cultural and global diversity. 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