Ron DeSantis’s Florida House Bill 999, if passed, would enact a legislative takeover of governance and curriculum at Florida’s public colleges and universities. While headlines have focused on clickbait like “ban gender studies majors,” the bill is deeply problematic for many other reasons as well. We won’t focus on those here, but instead present some data about the hypocrisy of governors like DeSantis who advocate for “prohibiting general education core courses from teaching certain topics or presenting information in specified ways” (HB 999, 3) even as they themselves have taken advantage of the liberal arts traditions of open-ended inquiry and exploration. 

DeSantis majored in history at Yale, although that particular piece of information seems to have been removed from his official biography (which states only that he “worked his way through Yale University”). This history major’s incongruous distrust of unrestricted academic inquiry, manifested throughout Florida HB 999, led us to wonder about the undergraduate major choices for the rest of the current cohort of United States governors. Among sitting United States governors, DeSantis is not unique as a History major: Indiana’s Eric Holcomb, South Carolina’s Henry McMaster, Alaska’s Mike Dunleavy, and Wyoming’s Mark Gordon also majored in History in their undergraduate programs. 

Political science is the most common major for our current set of governors, unsurprisingly: eleven political science majors now occupy the corner office. Education and Engineering tied for second, with six each, followed by History with five. Crucially, more governors majored in traditional liberal arts and sciences (29) than in more professionally-oriented majors (24); totals do not add up to 50 due to double majors and to Missouri governor Mike Parson, who does not have a college degree. 

The governors’ undergraduate majors data, then, echoes the 2020 findings for senators published by Oh, The Humanities – the majority of those in positions of great power are educated in traditional liberal arts, even as they advocate to eliminate or restrict access to those disciplines in contemporary postsecondary education. 

The current Yale History department notes that “Students of history learn to think about politics and government, sexuality, the economy, cultural and intellectual life, war and society, and other themes in broadly humanistic—rather than narrowly technocratic—ways.” If Florida HB 999 passes, history students in Florida will not benefit from the “broadly humanistic” explorations that the bill’s architect did.

DeSantis and his ilk, in their contempt for Florida’s students, don’t realize that these dictates regulating educational content will ultimately backfire. United States undergraduates aren’t stupid. They will recognize this propagandistic “education” as a bully’s attempt to present historical interpretation as unassailable historical truth, an attempt to present a “canon” as a fixed set of universally-agreed-upon items, an attempt to limit scrutiny of a worldview that perpetuates rather than interrogates existing hierarchies and inequities. 

DeSantis rightly fears Critical Race Theory, Gender Studies, and other “theories that [argue that] systemic racism, sexism, oppression, or privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States” (HB 999, p.6). Florida is among the most ethnically diverse states in the country, but its Governor seems determined that its higher education humanities curriculum will not reflect the lived experiences and narratives of the state’s multicultural demographic.

DeSantis may have been in class for discussion of the Party slogan in Orwell’s 1984:  “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past” (book one, chapter three). He seems to have read it, however, as an instruction rather than a warning.

StateGovernorPartyDegreeMajorCollege
AL Kay IveyRB.A.Secondary EducationAuburn
AKMike DunleavyRB.A.HistoryMisericordia University
AZKatie HobbesDBSWSocial WorkNorthern AZ
ARSarah H. SandersRB.A.Political ScienceOuachita Baptist Uni
CA Gavin NewsomDB.A.Political ScienceSanta Clara Uni
COJared PolisDB.A.PoliticsPrinceton
CTNed LamontDB.A.SociologyHarvard
DEJohn CarneyDB.A.Public AdministrationDartmouth
FLRon DeSantisR B.A.HistoryYale
GABrian KempRB.S.AgricultureUni of Georgia
HIJosh GreenDB.A.AnthropologySwarthmore College
IDBrad LittleRB.S.Agricultural BuisnessUni of Idaho
ILJB. PritzkerDB.A.Poli Sci/Govt.Duke
INEric HolcombRB.A.US HistoryHanover College
IAKim ReynoldsRB.A.Liberal StudiesIowa State
KSLaura KellyDB.S.PsychologyBradley Uni
KYAndy BeshearDB.A.Poli Sci/AnthropologyVanderbilt Uni
LAJohn B. EdwardsDB.S.EngineeringU.S. Military Academy at West Point
MEJanet MillsDB.A.FrenchUMass Boston
MDWes MooreDB.A.International StudiesJohns Hopkins
MAMaura HealeyDB.A.GovernmentHarvard
MIGretchen WhitmerDB.A.CommunicationsMichigan State
MNTim WalzDB.S.Social Science EduChadron State
MSTate ReevesRB.S.EconomicsMillsaps College
MOMike ParsonRN/A
MTGreg GianforteRB.E.Electric Engineering/ Computer ScienceStevens Ins. Of Tech.
NEJim PillenRB.S.Animal SciencesUni of NE
NVJoe LombardoRB.S.Civil EngineeringUni of NV
NHChris SununuRB.S.Civil/Environmental EngineeringMIT
NJPhil MurphyDB.A.EconomicsHarvard
NMMichelle L. GrishamDB.A.University StudiesUni of NM
NYKathy HochulDB.A.Political ScienceSyracuse
NCRoy CooperDB.A.LawUni of NC at Chapel Hill
NDDoug BurgumRB.U.S.University StudiesND State
OHMike DeWineRB.S.EducationMiami Uni
OKKevin StittRBSBAAccountingOK State
ORTina KotekDB.S.Religious StudiesUni of OR
PAJosh ShapiroDB.A.Political ScienceUni of Rochester
RIDan McKeeD B.A.Education/ Political ScienceAssumption College
SCHenry McMasterRB.A.HistoryUni of SC
SDKristi NoemRB.A.Political ScienceSD State
TNBill LeeRBSMEMechanical EngineeringAuburn
TXGreg AbbottRBBABusiness AdministrationUni of TX at Austin
UTSpencer CoxRB.A.Political ScienceSnow College
VTPhil ScottRB.S.Industrial EducationUni of VT
VAGlenn YoungkinRB.A./B.S.Management Studies/ Mechanical EngineeringRice Uni
WAJay InsleeDB.A.EconomicsUni of WA
WVJim JusticeRBBusiness AdministrationMarshall Uni
WITony EversDB.S.Education AdministrationUni of WI
WYMark GordonRB.A.HistoryMiddlebury College

Google Spreadsheet

 

OVERALL (53) AREA
Political science/ politics/ government 11

Engineering (all types) 6

Education (all) 6

History/US history 5

Liberal studies / university studies 3

Economics 3

Business/management/ administration  3

Anthropology 2

Agriculture/ agribusiness 2

Social work 1

Sociology 1

Public administration 1

Psychology 1

French 1

International studies 1

Communications 1

Computer science 1

Animal science 1

Law 1

Accounting 1

Religious studies 1

Liberal arts: 29Professionally focused: 24

Contributors

Dr. Mary Dockray-Miller is a Professor at Lesley University where she teaches classes in the English major core, Medieval Studies, and the History of the English Language. Her most recent book is Public Medievalists, Racism, and Suffrage in the American Women’s College (Palgrave, 2017). 

Catherine Callanan is a Class of 2023 English major at Lesley University.

Below are the top stories from 2022 based off our reader responses and stats from the past years. Thank you to all who have contributed to OTH and we look forward to expanding our network of authors and readers in 2023.


Russia invades Ukraine — 5 essential reads from experts (via The Conversation)

The Conversation U.S. has spent the past couple of months digging into the history and politics of Ukraine and Russia. We’ve looked at their cultures, their religions, their military and technological capacities.

“Most Russians, it turns out, don’t want war. The return of body bags from the front could well prove damaging to Putin domestically.”

Microagression, Macro Issue

What makes microaggressions such a big deal? Aren’t they, by definition, micro in nature? Microaggressions are every day, routine, even unintentional, slights and exchanges that denigrate or single out individuals because of their group membership (Barthelemy et al 2016, Sue et al 2007). They are often ambiguous, subtle, and challenging to pinpoint (Jones et al 2017). Consequently, microaggressions end up as the quiet burden to bear of the people who are targeted (it’s just too much work to explain it to people who don’t get it), overlooked by others (who don’t get it), and left unchecked (because those in power can’t comprehend the problem). Yet this oversight directly contributes to the repeated incidence of microaggressions, a violence which is compounded by its invalidation as ‘no big deal’ by people who don’t have to experience it (a microaggression in itself!) (Sweet 2019).

“The concept of death by a thousand cuts comes to mind, particularly if the doctor you went to see told you that you weren’t *really* bleeding.”

Interview: Dana Cuff, cityLAB

“The people that we hire at cityLAB are always urban humanities graduates because they’re the ones who understand the full spectrum of concerns and issues. And our most successful graduates from urban humanities really are–well, one form of successful graduate are the 50 or so PhDs who went through the program, who got jobs based on, in part, their urban humanities graduate certificates and experiences, which really distinguishes them from other candidates, from art history or literature or education.”

So education, workforce housing, came out of cityLAB, but it’s really completely colored by everything that has happened in urban humanities. We basically realized there was land that–a lot of land in California, at least. It’s an interesting history. Again, looking at the history made us understand why this was available and what would be some of the boundaries for it.”

The FCA Ghana – a place for critical thinking, conversation, and community engagement

The FCA offers its space to artists of all varieties for exhibitions, workshops, book talks, educational presentations, Critlabs, and networking that center development, presentation, and critical thinking of contemporary art in Ghana. Their space is also complete with an extensive library that is open to the public with books on African and world art, history, architecture, and culture. The FCA not only works on projects in their space, but they also bring art out into the community through building play spaces, murals, sculptures, and renovations that clean up run-down public areas.

“Through their creative brilliance and dedication, the FCA has established itself as a powerful, influential force in Ghana, West Africa, and the world that brings the critical reflection of contemporary art to African society.”

 

by Jamie Saxon, Office of Communications

This article was originally published by the Office of Communications at Princeton University. OTH received permission to republish this article and the original story can be viewed here.

Since 2014, this interdisciplinary program housed in the School of Architecture has brought together students and faculty with an interest in cities and the built environment through public programming and a series of undergraduate and graduate courses.

A critical component of the initiative is a fellowship program that brings a small select cohort of scholars to campus annually.                              

In addition to their own research, the Princeton Mellon Fellows teach courses and contribute to programming related to the initiative’s continuing theme, “Cities on the Edge: Hemispheric Comparisons and Connections.” This theme explores the ways in which cities exist on the edge of sustainability and climate change, are sites for the connective and comparative study of migration, and allow for scholarship that foregrounds hemispheric comparisons and connections. The program also creates opportunities for social justice-oriented scholarship and civic engagement within urban studies.

Fellows also present and discuss their research as part of the Mellon Forum on the Urban Environmentwhich serves as the intellectual core of the program.

Principal investigators Mario Gandelsonas, the Class of 1913 Lecturer in Architecture, professor of the School of Architecture and director of the Program in Urban Studies, and Alison Isenberg, professor of history, lead the cohort.

Gandelsonas said the fellows contribute in important ways to the School of Architecture (SoA), where their impact in the classroom inspires and informs the work of undergraduate and graduate students.

“The Mellon Initiative Fellows have been teaching courses at the SoA that expand the range of offerings and subjects with a focus on urbanism, urban architecture and planning,” he said. “The influence of these very well-attended courses is visible particularly in the graduate program, where an increasing number of students have been proposing themes for their master’s theses related to urban and environmental issues.”

Each year, one of the fellows also co-teaches with Gandelsonas the undergraduate interdisciplinary urban studio (ARC205) at the School of Architecture. “The role of the Mellon fellow has been, on one hand to develop a seminar that is an integral part of this unique studio, and on the other hand to bring an interdisciplinary voice that expands and enriches the development of the student projects,” Gandelsonas said.

‘A truly interdisciplinary cohort’

From initial partnerships with the School of Architecture, the Humanities Council and the Program in Latin America Studies, the Mellon Initiative now works with most academic units across campus. The initiative collaborates closely with High Meadows Environmental Institute, PIIRS, SPIA, the Lewis Center for the Arts, and the Metropolis Project of the School of Engineering and Applied Science, as well as many humanities departments to bring in each year’s Mellon Fellows. These connections, Isenberg said, “creates a truly interdisciplinary cohort.”

Every fellow teaches at least one course, which in some cases helps campus partners fill shifting demands in methods or topics.

“We bring to campus top scholars in disciplines with large student interest but no Princeton department, for example, in fields like urban planning and geography,” said Isenberg, who has worked with the Mellon Initiative since its launch. She added that these courses also serve the University by “bridging humanities and the arts to engineering, policy and environmental studies.” Fellows also have helped campus partners expand scholarship in fields such as trans and queer studies, and gender and sexuality studies.

“Having a call for interdisciplinary fellows each year enables us to hire a dynamic group of scholars who are at the leading edge of their fields,” said Aaron Shkuda, program manager of the Princeton Mellon Initiative and a lecturer in architecture. Often the fellows have combined advanced degrees from several fields such as landscape architecture and geography, urban planning and international development, or engineering and anthropology.

“This interdisciplinarity helps illuminate the research and teaching opportunities of the fellows program,” Isenberg said. 

New areas of research and scholarship

Shkuda added that the fellows have an important impact on the future direction of teaching and research on cities and the built environment at the University.

“Our fellows design programming and classes that draw broad interest from students, faculty and the public at large,” he said. “They are often among the first Princeton scholars to focus on topics that have come to define discourse across the disciplines, such as the way climate change has changed our view of urban planning and architecture; the intersection between race, gender and the urban environment; the study of camps, prisons and borders; and the way that architecture was critical to nation-building in postcolonial societies.”

Isenberg said that the biggest development since the Mellon Initiative’s inception in 2014 has been the University’s decision to continue the program beyond 2025, the final year of support from the Mellon Foundation.

In many ways that was the Mellon Foundation’s goal, Isenberg noted. Princeton is one of more than a dozen research universities and institutes in the U.S., Canada, U.K., and South Africa that the Mellon Foundation engages and connects through its Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities initiative.

“The Foundation helped spark new research and teaching collaborations that maximized the unique departmental and programmatic configuration of each university or institution,” she said. “At Princeton, the initiative demonstrated the intellectual vitality of this field at the intersection of architecture, urbanism and the humanities, while simultaneously joining forces with existing programs on campus to strengthen their respective priorities.”

Below, meet this year’s fellows and learn about the focus of their research and teaching in the classroom.

Chandana Anusha

Chandana Anusha is a scholar of social and environmental dynamics in India, with a special interest in coastal regions. Her research focuses on how ecological and infrastructural processes intersect in an era defined by climate change and global trade.

This spring, she is teaching the course “Coastal Justice: Ecologies, Societies, Infrastructures in South Asia.”

Anusha’s fellowship is made possible by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the M.S. Chadha Center for Global India and the Princeton Institute for International & Regional Studies.

Devanne Brookins

Devanne Brookins’research explores comparative urban studies, urban transformation and the production of inequality, with a focus on African cities. This agenda is driven by a desire to understand how urban transformations in Sub-Saharan Africa reflect and differ from those in regions that have bridged the urban transition in earlier periods.

With urbanization and transformation proliferating across Africa, many urban development interventions are taking place amid questions regarding the governance of urban land: how it is assembled, how the value is captured and distributed, and who has access. These contemporary processes of urbanization, expansion and restructuring are producing concerning patterns of inequality. Brookins examines how urban inequality is manufactured through governance processes as socio-political compromises that become spatially embedded in land and the built environment.

This spring, she is teaching two graduate courses in Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs: “Urbanization and Development” and, with Keith Wailoo, the Henry Putnam University Professor of History and Public Affairs, “Identity, Power and Policy.”

Dean Chahim

Dean Chahim’s research examines the relationship between engineering, political power and the production of urban environments. His current project is an ethnography and history of flood control engineering and urbanization in Mexico City. It examines how engineers, under political pressure to enable urban growth, have transformed flooding into a routinized and spatially diffuse form of environmental suffering that disproportionately affects the urban poor.

This spring, he is teaching the undergraduate course “Engineering Justice and the City: Technologies, Environments, and Power.”

His fellowship is made possible through the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Humanities Council, the University Center for Human Values, the Metropolis Project, and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Chukwuemeka V. Chukwuemeka

Chukwuemeka V. Chukwuemeka is an architect and urbanist with international experience in project development, project management and systems design. His research is on emergent dynamics and self-organization processes of spatial productions in rapidly urbanizing sub-Saharan African cities, with a focus on Onitsha Markets in Nigeria.

In fall 2021, he and Gandelsonas co-taught the undergraduate course “Interdisciplinary Design Studio” for certificate students in the Program in Urban Studies.

Chukwuemeka’s fellowship is made possible by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Program in African Studies, and the Princeton Institute for International & Regional Studies.

Seth Denizen

Seth Denizen is a researcher and design practitioner trained in landscape architecture and human geography. His published work is multidisciplinary, addressing art and design, microbial ecology, soil science, urban geography and the politics of climate change. He is currently a member of the editorial board of Scapegoat Journal: Architecture/Landscape/Political Economy.

In fall 2021, he taught the undergraduate course “Thinking Through Soil.”

Denizen’s fellowship is sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the High Meadows Environmental Institute.

Shoshana Goldstein

Shoshana Goldstein’s research explores the impacts of India’s economic liberalization on urban planning, governance, and placemaking for migrant and formerly agrarian communities in peri-urban New Delhi. Her current project charts the complex planning history of Delhi’s satellite city, Gurgaon.

In fall 2021, she taught the undergraduate course “South Asian Migrations.” This spring, she is teaching an undergraduate policy research seminar.

Goldstein’s fellowship is sponsored by the the M.S. Chadha Center for Global India, the Princeton Institute for International & Regional Studies, and the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.

Davy Knittle

Davy Knittle’s research considers how normative ideas of race, sexuality and gender have shaped the redevelopment of the built and non-built environments of U.S. cities from the 1950s to the present. His current book project, “Designs on the Future: Gender, Race, and Environment in the Transitional City,” uses a multidisciplinary archive of literary and cultural texts to trace resistance to dominant narratives of urban progress.

“Designs on the Future” engages a queer and trans method of reading urban and environmental change that identifies the entanglement of urban, environmental, and queer and trans experiences of loss in U.S. cities in the wake of urban renewal.

This spring, he is teaching the undergraduate course “Race, Gender and the Urban Environment.”

Knittle’s fellowship is sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Effron Center for the Study of America and the High Meadows Environmental Institute. The fellowship will span the spring and fall 2022 semesters.

by Alissa Simon

Two of my favorite travel destinations are on the critically endangered list: the Amazon and the Great Barrier Reef. Both places left a profound effect on me and yet, I have never written much about them. This thought astonishes me and, in hindsight, is rather appalling. At first, I guess I thought that it would be elitist to write about places that I have been fortunate enough to visit. Yet, in The Meaning of Travel, Emily Thomas questions this notion. She suggests that not writing about my experience among disappearing landscapes might actually place them more at risk. 

In a chapter titled “The Ethics of Doom Tourism”, Thomas explains that tourists might be drawn to vanishing destinations simply because of the label. In other words, people want to see glaciers, or the Great Barrier Reef, or the Amazon solely because of the endangered label. There is a school of thought which believes that this type of tourism will lend itself to tourist ambassadors, or people who return to speak of their experiences with the intent of changing humanity’s destructive patterns. Unfortunately, Thomas notes, it does not seem to be working (183). Instead, after a grand experience, people return to a regular life of consumption (for many reasons). This pattern, then, actually buys into and reinforces the doom narrative, rather than focusing on proactive measures toward change. Furthermore, many travelers have not been educated on the complex issues that affect such places, and likely do not understand the philosophy behind their actions. This is certainly true of myself. 

So, one struggle with the idea of travel ambassadors is that tourists go, experience, and then return home to regular lives. Along with that, rather than actually learning about the region, travelers often look but do not understand. Therefore, tourism is founded upon superficial experiences at best. Thomas mentions Antarctic travelers who return from the region without having learned anything about arctic animals (184). Tourists want a “glimpse” of the life, but not an understanding of it. And to be honest, understanding comes at the expense of time, energy, effort, and education, which may not be accessible to everyone. In my case, I understood only a portion of the problem, and I did not view myself as an active participant in any sort of discussion. However, I also brought a somewhat fixed notion of place home with me, as if what I witnessed and experienced is the way it always is. Now, however, I understand fluidity more keenly than I did at the time of my travels. 

Next, the most obvious problem: tourists leave remains and footprints. Though the National Park message “Leave No Trace” has been popular for at least twenty years, many people may not fully understand the concept. At the Great Barrier Reef, for instance, our guide discussed ethical sunscreen brands because sunscreen can actually damage the reef and its inhabitants. I enjoy the knowledge provided by experts which includes (but is not limited to) authors, philosophers, historians, local artisans, and travel guides. These people guide us into their intimate spaces and we should pay attention to their teachings.

My trip to Ecuador offered a much more intense experience. Through the Iyarina Andes and Amazon Field School, I learned about the land, people, language, history and environment. In living with the community as student-tourists, we glimpsed a portion of the world very different from our own. Part of the school’s mission explains the school’s name: “The name of the station, ‘Iyarina,’ (ee-yah-ree-nah), is a Kichwa word that means to think by looking out at the land and remembering what has happened there; and from this remembering to envision the emerging future.” We traveled through the land with experienced guides. We learned elements of the language. We interacted with community members in order to understand their work, crafts, food and culture. This lifestyle definitely challenged my sense of the world in ways that have allowed me to ask more informed questions about land and community. I am grateful for the extensive education that this experience provided and continues to nourish. 


After reading Thomas’s chapter on “Doom Tourism,” I began to question the way we write about travel in general. There are books about the experience of a summit, or the glacier’s edge, or man versus nature on some pristine and untouched wilderness. What about, however, a narration from the land’s historical perspective? What is the effect of man on the land? What does ethical travel look like? Or, what about understanding the land that we live on in a more intimate way? 

In Landmarks, Robert Macfarlane writes about mountains. More specifically, he embodies the poet Nan Shepherd’s experience with the Cairngorms. Unlike explorers who sought peaks, Shepherd wandered aimlessly and without agenda. She looked for new bits and pieces of the land that raised her. This intimacy with the land was something she actively sought. It nourished her in a different way than those who fought summits and returned to city life. Macfarlane writes, “Knowledge is never figured in The Living Mountain as finite: a goal to be reached or a state to be attained” (71). Shepherd’s view of knowledge came with intimacy and observation, not perseverance and heights (though at times it arrives there as well). Macfarlane continues, “What Shepherd learns – and what her book taught me – is that the true mark of long acquaintance with a single place is a readiness to accept uncertainty: a contentment with the knowledge that you must not seek complete knowledge” (71). In other words, Shepherd’s book and her journey inspire a long-term curiosity which rises with knowledge of a place, rather than a goal-driven experience. This piece of advice seems instructive for our lives in general.

It may be that endangered lands should be reserved for knowledgeable visitors. Emily Thomas explains that exploration of disappearing spaces might be better cared for through educated views. Like the philosophy behind Iyarina, maybe one will see more if one understands the past, present and future of a space. Furthermore, one who knows what to look for can look more deeply and this deeper vision allows for a more meaningful connection. Thomas writes:   

“The Earth has undergone cycles of warming and cooling throughout its history but there is scientific consensus that its recent, accelerated period of warming is our doing. Burning fossil fuels like oil and coal has released carbon dioxide and other gases into the atmosphere. Think of the atmosphere as a kind of blanket around the planet, trapping the sun’s heat. When the blanket gets thicker, less heat escapes, leading to a warmer Earth. Scientists estimate the planet is warming ten times faster than on its usual cooling-warming cycle (179) . … 

“Just as the art critic and art historian are ‘well equipped’ to appreciate the beauty of art, the naturalist and ecologist are well equipped to appreciate the beauty of nature. 

“If this argument is right, then learning about the geology or wildlife of Antarctica isn’t just worthwhile for Antarctica. Turning tourists into ambassadors is a benefit but not the only one. It’s also worthwhile for the tourists, because that knowledge will allow us to appreciate the continent’s beauty in new and enriched ways.” (186)

Thomas’s philosophy aligns very closely to my own ever-evolving ideas. More than making us fall in love with or seek the landscape of a particular region, we can fall in love with landscapes in general, with the idea of land. Furthermore, the philosophy that asks us to look at land simultaneously asks us to look at ourselves and our own preconceived notions. Travel literature too often remains in an overly superficial realm. I would much rather enter each day by questioning my own philosophy and have it be informed by a variety of landscapes (which includes my own backyard). But most crucially, we must question who we are, whether our actions are ethical, and what is our place on the Earth and beyond? As space travel becomes more than a topic of science fiction, we must seek to better understand ourselves on individual bases. On Earth, we are one species among many. What will we become in space?

What about, however, a narration from the land’s historical perspective? What is the effect of man on the land? What does ethical travel look like? Or, what about understanding the land that we live on in a more intimate way?

Emily Thomas’s book The Meaning of Travel masterfully blends many humanities fields together. Her research includes philosophy, history, fiction, geography, personal experience and more. In fact, her book provides a map for inclusive humanities. When combined with other disciplines and areas of research, the humanities provides necessary enrichment. Thomas gives the reader much to think about while also reminding us how minute and precious our presence on Earth really is.  

Works Cited

Iyarina Field School. https://www.andes-fieldschool.org/about 

Macfarlane, Robert. Landmarks. Penguin. 2016.

Thomas, Emily. The Meaning of Travel. Oxford University Press. 2020.

About the Author

Alissa Simon is a Tutor at Harrison Middleton University. Though she is interested in (and studies) all sorts of literature, she typically focuses on poetry and translation. When not reading and writing, she spends her time in the outdoors, rain or shine. Ms. Simon has previously contributed to Oh, the Humanities!, read her past story here: https://oth.thirdchapter.org/features/humanities-the-space-for-big-questions/

 

This holiday reading list is courtesy of the Stanford Humanities Center. You can read the original post here: https://shc.stanford.edu/news/stories/stanford-humanities-centers-holiday-reading-list.


Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter

Edited by Jordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton

This is a somewhat unusual and vitally important collection, as it brings together essays by scholars, artists, and activists around a topic that is more relevant than ever in the wake of the killing of George Floyd and the resurgence of resistance to police brutality and systemic racism. The contributions by figures at the heart of the Black Lives Matter movement and the critical and creative perspectives on policing and incarceration provide a thorough, highly compelling overview. It is enriched by bringing into play international perspectives, and sharpened by the chilling descriptions of poet Martín Espada. It is also a great read to prepare for the much-awaited publication by Ruth Wilson Gilmore—one of the volume’s contributors—in 2022, Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation.

—Patricia Alessandrini
Internal Faculty Fellow
Department of Music, Stanford University


The Railway Journey

By Wolfgang Schivelbusch​ 

“In The Railway Journey, Schivelbusch examines the origins of this industrialized consciousness by exploring the reaction in the nineteenth century to the first dramatic avatar of technological change, the railroad.” (Amazon) I’m not sure this qualifies as a “holiday read,” but I have been pretty impressed by the book.

Anubha Anushree
Career Launch Fellow
Department of History, Stanford University


The Ministry of the Future

By Kim Stanley Robinson

It’s the most non-fiction science fiction book I’ve ever read about what the near future might look like due to rapid climate change. Harrowing and all too believable, but also hopeful.
 

—Eli Cook
External Faculty Fellow

Department of History, University of Haifa


Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration

By Nicole Fleetwood
 

MacArthur Fellow and NYU Professor Nicole Fleetwood shows how the brutal U.S. mass incarceration system is, nonetheless, filled with art made by the incarcerated, who assert their humanity in the face of a system that dehumanizes them. The book has sparked a series of projects foregrounding the artists Fleetwood chronicles, and it also generated a powerful exhibit in New York, covered here by NPR.

David Kazanjian
Marta Sutton Weeks External Fellow
Department of English, University of Pennsylviania


Lincoln in the Bardo

By George Saunders

Are you really alive? Or do you just think you’re alive? Do you have any regrets? Things you’ve always wanted to do but never found the time or courage to do them? Regardless of whether you’ve ever asked yourself these questions or not, and if you suspect that there is life after death and that Abraham Lincoln has something to do with it, then this book is for you. Brace yourselves for a polyphonic tour de force on life, death, mourning, and that tricky business of unfinished business.

—Ana Ilievska
Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in the Humanities
Department of French and Italian, Stanford University


Writers and Lovers

By Lily King

This was my holiday book of the year. About what it’s like to write, and why, and the lives of writers and the foibles of love. And if you get hooked on her style, try the one she wrote on Margaret Mead, Euphoria.

Tanya Luhrmann
Violet Andrews Whittier Internal Fellow
Department of Anthropology, Stanford University


Intimacies

By Katie Kitamura

An unnamed woman leaves New York City, where her father recently died, and moves to The Hague, Netherlands to work as an interpreter at the International Criminal Court. The woman is assigned to interpret for the former president of a West African country on trial for war crimes. It is a great read.

Shu-mei Shih
Marta Sutton Weeks External Fellow

Department of Comparative Literature & East Asian Languages and Cultures, UCLA


Making Darkness Light: A Life of John Milton

By Joe Moshenska

“In Making Darkness Light, Oxford professor Joe Moshenska rediscovers a poet whose rich contradictions confound his monumental image. Immersing ourselves in the rhythms and textures of Milton’s world, we move from the music of his childhood home to his encounter with Galileo in Florence into his idiosyncratic belief system and his strange, electrifying imagination.” (Amazon) Moshenska does this by showing Milton’s relevance to his fascinating personal and family history: from his rich Jewish heritage, through taking his children to Liverpool on a Beatles pilgrimage, to learning the piano as an adult. He shows how great literature resonates through our intimate experiences, greatly and delightfully enriches them.

Nigel Smith
Marta Sutton Weeks External Fellow
Department of English, Princeton University


The Transit of Venus

By Shirley Hazzard

Add my voice to the chorus of rapturous applause that greeted the new edition of Shirley Hazzard’s 1980 masterpiece brought out by Penguin Classics in March of this year. The story of two orphaned sisters from Australia who immigrate to England in the 1950s is a profound, lyrical meditation on love’s and life’s transience. Nearly every sentence is a stand-alone miracle of composition, to be read and reread again. (Hazzard reportedly revised each page more than 20 times.) No book in recent memory better captures—paradoxically—the ephemeral: what it means to live and love in an unreliable and impermanent world.

—John Tennant
Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in the Humanities
Department of Classics, Stanford University


The Conjuror’s Bird

By Martin Davies

This light, gripping novel follows a modern-day quest for a historic taxidermied bird in alternating timelines of the 18th-century past and the present. The tale is a love story, both in the traditional sense and in the protagonist’s desire for the bird itself.

Anna Toledano
SHC Dissertation Prize Fellow
Department of History, Stanford University

by David D. Esselstrom

In 1961, my eldest brother, Keith, was discharged from the Army’s 101st Airborne division. From his last duty station in Okinawa, he returned to La Crescenta, California, with a third-degree black belt in Karate, a Samurai sword with three-foot blade, and the conviction that Gautama Buddha, not Jesus Christ, had had it right. I remember watching him unpack his duffel bag. He pulled out a bright red carton of Pall Mall cigarettes, a bayonet, and a packet of books, among them Alan Watts’ The Way of Zen and Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums

My eldest brother, eight and a half years older than I, had it right, in my eyes. He held my bike when I learned to ride and laughed as I kept yelling for him to “let go, let go, I can do it, let go.” He was laughing because he had let go quite some time before. He took me fishing in the streams of the San Gabriel Mountains, taught me how to work a salmon egg onto a hook. He showed me how to step through and string a bow, how to rest my eyes on the target, let slip the arrow and feel the arc of its flight out from the bow, up through air, and into the cardboard box stuffed with newspapers. 

We had our first discussion about religion when I was twelve. I more or less argued Pascal’s Wager—risking delusion is a better bet than risking damnation. Keith ridiculed the position as being beneath his dignity. I felt embarrassed that it was not beneath my own. Looking at it through Keith’s eyes, Christianity seemed a religion for wimps and cowards, a refuge of the weak and afraid. Mostly because of Keith, I began, at thirteen, working my way through The Way of Zen. I remember reaching what I thought at the time was a state of satori early one morning as I tossed copies of the Los Angeles Examiner to the second-floor apartments of a building in Montrose.

I discovered later that Keith and I were typical members of a restless generation, young people coming of age in the sixties. The fifties began in 1948 with the advent of commercial television and ended with the death of John Kennedy in ’63. The sixties started—in earnest—in 1964 with the Beatles’ first tour of the U.S. An interest in the religion and philosophy of Asia that flowered in the forties and fifties in the work of Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg as a garden of aesthetic inspiration took root in the sixties in the soil of America’s discontented youth, as much a reaction against everything domestic as an embracing of things mysterious, exotic, and other. Things Eastern, or quasi-Eastern, became part of our cultural landscape—from Zen to Transcendental Meditation, from Hare Krishna to the Bagwan, from being Blissed-out with the Guru Mahara Ji to “getting it” with Ehard Seminars Training. 

We can think of America’s flirtation with the philosophies and religions from Asia as an encounter with the “other.” But we can’t really understand the nature of this encounter nor what results from it until we see that all such encounters are problematic.


There are two ways of looking at “the other.” Sam Keen has noted that throughout history we have often demonized the other, seeing what is different as something that is frightening and therefore must be strictly controlled or ruthlessly abolished. In wartime, the enemy is conceived of as evil, his motives base, his actions reprehensible. Our actions, on the other hand, are seen as necessary, as lesser evils needed to prevent greater ones. There is always a qualitative difference between us and them. When “the other” is closer to us we deal with it in a less brutal, but still brutalizing, fashion. If we dismiss it—usually out of fear or ignorance or arrogance, although the three are often the same—we then ghettoize the other, marginalizing a people, taking away the voice of a culture by ignoring it. If we do not fear it, we pretend to embrace it, or rather absorb the other, using it, making differences commodities that can be worn or heard or watched or, in some other way, consumed. 

The second way of looking at “the other” is to give it unwarranted value. This is the “greener grass” phenomenon. What is over there must be better than what is over here. Chekov’s “Three Sisters” want to get to Moscow. Everything will be better in Moscow. Huck Finn takes off for the west where a man can breathe. I always thought Virginia and Sharon who lived across the driveway from me in the fifties had the better toys. Keith, my eldest brother, thought the quieting of the mind and body before doing battle on the tatami mats with an opponent was better discipline than quiet reflection on a passage of the Bible. 

An anecdote from the sixties might help illustrate these two perspectives. A dinner table argument between a teenager and her father began when the young woman said she admired a friend who had taken up the study of Transcendental Meditation. The father was a first confused, then incensed. Her point was that the friend had found something of spiritual value in his practice. The father’s irritation was with anyone finding anything of value from a culture where indoor plumbing was a rarity. 

The problem is that both of these ways of looking at and dealing with the other—to denigrate or to glorify—are counter-productive. Dismissal leads to loss. Not only is marginalization—whether cultural, economic, or social—unjust to those people who are marginalized, but it costs those people doing the marginalizing as well. The father in the preceding anecdote has trouble valuing any culture he cannot measure by his own yardstick of material wellbeing. Because he can’t or won’t do so, he is cut off from interacting with his daughter. He cannot understand her fascination with emotional or spiritual values that have little to do with material things.

But what about the other side? Glorification of the other. Is this dangerous as well? I think it is. And my brother and myself are cases in point. If we value something before we understand it, we run the risk of chipping away at that value as our understanding grows, a paradoxical but not uncommon phenomenon. I’m reminded of a young woman with whom I went to high school. I was honored by her friendship since she was the smartest student in our school, a delightful conversationalist, and a brilliant actress. She went on to a college in Southern California because of her admiration for the professors there in the English and Theater Arts departments. Two years later when I asked her how things were going, she seemed a bit disappointed. She said she’d found out something quite disconcerting about her professors. “What’s that?” I asked. “They’re human,” she said. “Familiarity breeds contempt” does not tell us something about the situation; it tells us something about ourselves. 

Here’s another illustration. When we are children, “the other” is the world of the grown-ups. Bruno Bettelheim maintains that for the child, the adult world is frightening because it is, in fact, unimaginable. The difference between the two realms is qualitative. Imagine how different our lives would be if we really were, as adults, as fearless, as carefree, as certain as we imagined adulthood to be when we were children. One of the more depressing things you can tell a young person is “These are the best years of your life.” 

Worse than the risk of disillusionment, however, is what happens to our relationship to what is in our own backyard. To glorify the foreign often involves the denigration of the domestic. It’s not only a question of comparative values. Selection always involves value judgments. How we choose to spend our time indicates what we value. But the real danger is one of dynamics rather than status. When one chooses to value “the other ” what often happens is that one’s understanding of one’s own cultural heritage freezes, stops, ceases to grow—may indeed begin to whither. 

For example, my growing understanding of the religious tradition in which I was raised stopped at about my junior year of high school. I thought I understood it, and what I thought I understood, I didn’t like. An understanding that is not growing, that is not dynamic, withers. Luckily for me, my understanding, my relationship with my own tradition, began to show signs of life in the late seventies because of my teaching. I was offering a few courses through Marylhurst college in Lake Oswego, Oregon—I believe the name when I was there was Marylhurst Center for Life-long Learning. Sister Marilyn Guldan, head of the Humanities Division, developed a correspondence/brief residency course on “The Convergence of East-West Thought.” She threw a little work to this hungry adjunct instructor by letting me team-teach the course with her. Initially, I was shocked. I believed that there was no convergence between what I thought I knew of Eastern thought and what I thought I knew of Western thought. What I discovered is that I didn’t know either, and that I had used my exposure to the one as an excuse to stop thinking about both. 

I learned that not only is there a rich tradition of Christian mysticism, but that Christian scholars had long been in dialogue with their counterparts in Japan and India. Later, when I was teaching at the University of Portland, Sister Joan Salfield and I formed the core of a weekly meditation group. My brother never had this opportunity to re-examine what he thought he had learned about others and about himself. The danger is that in glorifying the foreign—the exotic, the different—we marginalize ourselves and our own traditions. 

Another example is an experience that occurred to a friend of mine who grew up outside of any specific religious tradition. In a college course which required students to observe and report on religious services outside their own, he chose to attend a Christian service at a Protestant evangelical church. Noting that his peers were reporting on their experiences in positive and respectful terms, he did the same. His report was deemed unacceptable. When he rewrote the report and placed his observations in more negative terms, his efforts were praised, his insight encouraged. The graduate students reacting to my friend’s efforts remind me of my brother and his inability to see his own tradition as valuable, as worthy of study, as something that he perhaps does not yet fully understand. 

We marginalize that which we do not understand, and often that which we think we do. Some certainties make arguments possible; others foreclose all discussion. We can reach agreement if we both affirm that agreement is possible. And, as Kenneth Burke tells us, that is only possible if both of us are willing to change, if both of us are willing to admit that our own certainties are something less than absolute. Believing, because of fear or anger or ignorance, that you know enough about other people to warrant their separation—as with the Americans of Japanese descent interned during WW II—is needlessly damaging to our society. Believing that you know all you need to about yourself and your world is an unnecessary amputation of the self. 

Therefore, if we don’t want to push others away nor do we want to deny ourselves and our heritage, how can we be accepting of other traditions without adhering to them, how can we be respectful of other points of view while remaining steadfast and true to our own? This is one of those questions that can be answered by turning to the examples given us in literature. The answer is that the question cannot be viewed as a matter of stance—where do I stand? what do I believe? what do I know?—but as a matter of dynamics—what can I learn? where can the discussion lead? what are the opportunities for fuller appreciation of one tradition by way of the others? 

We marginalize that which we do not understand, and often that which we think we do.

Some writers have shown us that interest and respect need not be glorification. We can learn how this is done from the literature that explores the relationship between the other and ourselves without marginalizing either the other—or ourselves. From Forster’s Passage to India to Hesse’s Siddhartha to Huxley’s Island to Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Western writers have been intrigued by the East, not so much as a substitute for their own traditions but as way of getting some distance from which to view and critique those traditions. 

But the critique itself is not Eastern but Western in nature and intent. This is the case because our writers—and others—in the current century have been looking for answers in the East to questions that can only be posed in the West. These are questions of identity and purpose, questions that—as I understand the major currents of thought in Hinduism and Buddhism—are unasked because they are unaskable from inside these traditions. Dr. D.T. Suzuki was criticized by those in his own tradition when, partly as a result of Alan Watts’ writing about Zen, he decided to speak to a Western audience. “The way that can speak its name is not the real way,” says the Tao te Ching.

Literature, as we know it in the West, is a production of human consciousness attempting through language to form, define, and explain the mystery of individual personhood. Literature then is both a culmination and a celebration of individual identity. Yet what fascinates Western writers about the East is the absence of the very dependence on identity that makes such questions possible. The problem for all of us is that identity in its own fulfillment doesn’t supply satisfaction. I know who I am and I know I’m not happy. The paradox is that we, in the West at least, want to know who we are and have happiness at the same time. In fact, the way we think of happiness, as a possession, underscores this paradox. Our own traditions have called the problem with this to our attention several times. “The first shall be last.” “Who loses her life shall gain it.”

The answer? It’s a matter of maintaining a healthy relationship. In our own tradition we are exhorted to love the other as we love ourselves, not less than, not more than, and not in place of. It is in our dynamic relationship with others that we form and define ourselves. To shorten that relationship on either end is deadening; to keep it open is frightening because it leads to a richer, deeper life. 

Photo credit: Eddy Van 300, via Flickr. CC BY-SA 2.0.

About the Author

David Esselstrom, Ph.D., is a teacher and writer who encourages students to express themselves clearly and creatively. He has published fiction and journalism, and has written extensively for the stage and screen. Esselstrom combines his scholarly interests and creative projects with his passion for teaching in such courses as creative writing, composition, literature, and film and media.  Via Azusa Pacific University.

by Joseph Coulson, Ph.D.

A great many ills have beset the world and our country, our less-than-whole United States of America, and we find not least among our problems an alarming lack of empathy, as if somehow our abilities to reason and empathize were the casualty of an executive order. The current decline of empathy, a downward slope that began years ago, coincides with the decline of community arts programs, cultural organizations, and school curricula and college degrees focused on the humanities. But why has our culture kicked the humanities to the curb? Why do we often speak of empathy as if it were an impractical preoccupation? I can offer no short, easy answers to these questions, but certainly the humanities as a profession began to lose its heart and soul when we stopped talking about stories that matter.

Rather than maintaining the primacy of the story as the way to engagement and learning, we in the profession began questioning our methods and purpose, losing our direction while community and cultural organizations lost funding, college professors became obsessed with literary theory, state lawmakers and school officials aimed at teaching to the tests, and federal agencies legislated in favor of nonfiction as the primary emphasis of English instruction in elementary and secondary schools. The mantra became reading for content, for finding the argument of a text and summarizing it, as opposed to the close reading of imaginative literature which demands much weightier matters of analysis and interpretation. As a culture, we opened the door and greeted expository writing and basic journalism with open arms, and we left poetry, drama, and fiction—we left stories—at the curb.

Only in stories are we asked to look through the eyes of someone that may be very different from ourselves. Only in stories do we come to understand the motives of other people, their limitations and their humanity. Only in stories are we asked to figure out why something happened or why a character behaves in a particular way—feels loved or unloved, victorious or cheated, included or left out, privileged or discriminated against. My high school English teacher declared long ago, “To learn the facts and statistics of the Dust Bowl, read an article or an encyclopedia entry. But if you want to know how it felt, if you want to learn something about its human cost and its moral implications, then read The Grapes of Wrath.” Only in stories are we asked—even forced—to empathize with people and situations that we cannot otherwise know in the limited geography of our lives. Stories in every form, stories in every family, organization, and school, provide the training ground for empathy. The less we traffic in important stories, the more we lose our sense of community and a realistic understanding of our place in the world.

In the light of a new Presidential administration, we must advocate for a renewed allegiance to the humanities. We must advocate for funding, of course, letting our elected officials know that support for the humanities also supports the duties of citizenship and the functioning of representative government. But we must also demonstrate that both the reading and the discussion of imaginative literature, of diverse stories in all forms, provide an age-old means for cultivating and developing empathy. We in the humanities must argue for the primacy of the literary story and then demonstrate its power as an agent of change. Our advocacy should advance the belief that literature is vital to our nation’s survival and that to embrace a celebrated story with respect for its challenges and complexities is also to embrace empathy.

Photo credit: Melissa Hogan, via Wikipedia. CC BY-SA 4.0.

About the Author

Dr. Joseph Coulson is the President and Chief Academic Officer of Harrison Middleton University. He is the past president of the  Great Books Foundation.  Beyond teaching, his poetry, drama, and fiction have been widely published, including two novels, Of Song and Water and The Vanishing Moon, that translated into German and French. Joe studied at Wayne State University and the University of Oxford, and he holds a Ph.D. in American Literature from SUNY Buffalo.

by Alissa Simon

Rebecca Mead’s book My Life in Middlemarch weaves a well-researched narrative that involves land, people, women, love, and story-telling, among other things. Mead incorporates her own journey to underscore the way that Middlemarch changes with every decade of life. My Life in Middlemarch explains how one can continually learn lessons from a single book. In fact, it has instructed (and continues to instruct) Mead’s understanding of character, moral, intellect and empathy. She feels that Eliot’s novel cannot be minimized into quotations. Actually, quite the reverse, the book rejects summary. With each decade, the novel speaks to a different aspect of Mead’s own life. Through a variety of characters, Middlemarch underscores the complicated nature of life, reminding us that sometimes the choices we receive are out of our control. Eliot’s book, in other words, looks closely at the many large and small complications in the web of life. Mead’s book echoes this journey by incorporating personal narrative, research of Eliot’s own life, and a sense of Middlemarch itself. 

Via the Washingtonian, CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

Near the beginning, Mead introduces questions of motherhood which haunted Eliot who did not have any children of her own. Rather, Eliot grew to love and care for George Lewes’ children. When the youngest child died at the age of twenty-four, Eliot too feels this loss deeply. Mead writes, “A book does not tell us exactly how to live our own lives, but our own lives can teach us how to read a book. Now when I read the novel in light of Eliot’s life, and in the light of my own, I see her experience of unexpected family woven deep into the fabric of the novel – not as part of the book’s obvious pattern, but as part of its tensile strength. Middlemarch seems charged with the question of being a stepmother: of how one might do well by one’s stepchildren, or unwittingly fail them, and of all that might be gained from opening one’s heart wider.” (110). Mead connects with Eliot’s experience because of their shared experience as a stepmother. 

More than understanding our own lives, however, Mead describes Eliot’s book as a passage through the big questions of life. In attempting to understand art and the role of the artist, Mead explores an Eliot quote: “If Art does not enlarge men’s sympathies, it does nothing morally. The only effect I ardently long to produce by my writings, is that those who read them should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and the joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the broad fact of being struggling erring human creatures.” (56). Furthermore, she claims that these characters grant us a sort of self-awareness. They offer a lens through which to measure and weigh our own lives. Mead writes, “Looking back from the vantage-point of forty-five, though, twenty doesn’t look quite so far away. We are still recognizably ourselves, with many of the same confusions, even if experience has abated them, and granted us some self-awareness. We can hope, at best, that growing older has given us some degree of emotional maturity, and a greater understanding of the perspectives and the projections of others.” (162-3). Novels provide a space to ask what we might do in another’s situation and Middlemarch presents a great variety of characters of ambiguous morals. These characters address issues of poverty, wealth, religiosity and moral depravity, love and power, among many others. Since Mead herself has grown up with this novel, she highlights many of the same themes in My Life in Middlemarch

Middlemarch gives me a deep love of virtue, but only as it relates to flawed individuals. Eliot expresses the refreshing notion that flaws do not contradict virtue. In fact, virtue is built upon our response to flaws, and Rebecca Mead not only embraces this theme, but reinforces it by scaffolding her own journey with the wonderfully researched narrative My Life in Middlemarch.

About the Author

Alissa Simon is a Tutor at Harrison Middleton University. Though she is interested in (and studies) all sorts of literature, she typically focuses on poetry and translation. When not reading and writing, she spends her time in the outdoors, rain or shine.

by Erin McCoy

After considering the subject “Feminist Perspectives on the Humanities and Higher Education,” the first question that flitted across my mind was: “What do women and the humanities have in common?”

Scrawled across my Snoopy notepad, my answer: “They have to fight to be heard.”


Of course, feminist perspectives don’t always mean “women,” and I’d add that “Higher Education” also often has to sing for its state and donor-funded supper. My vocal range is limited as a woman/feminist; my black and brown colleagues in Higher Education have it harder than me, so my voice must include and make space for theirs. And the Humanities – my official doctoral degree – usually has to raise its voice the loudest in the chorus, creating looping arias about “the importance of the humanities” over the percussive roll of “STEM, STEM, STEM, STEM” across the higher education landscape. Like the road for equality between the sexes, the path of the Humanities in the 21st century has been slow-going. As a woman working in the Humanities, I attribute part of the problem to the exhausting weariness that comes with repeatedly insisting your existence has value.

A few months ago, the University where I teach hired a consultant to assist in “restructuring” academics. As a member of the consultant’s working group – and as someone who teaches English classes – I felt dismayed when drafts of “academic organization” immediately combined my Department (English, Theater, and Interdisciplinary Studies) and the Humanities Department (Languages, History, Philosophy) with others as a first measure to cut costs. I called several colleagues – mostly women – to just listen to their thoughts; they were sharply articulate about the need for resources. One likened combining departments in the Humanities as “over-suffocating the garden”; she pointed out that money, faculty hire lines, and the overall Department budgets get a lot tighter if there’s too many plants in the pot. If anything, the Humanities need more space to breathe, as well as more water, more sunlight – more support.

And while I’d like that support to mean “people in the Humanities need to be paid more,” what I really mean is that the Humanities should be tapped for the wellspring of creative innovation they are. I recently virtually attended the annual Humanities Education and Research Association (HERA) Conference. I have been part of HERA – as a member, a newsletter editor, a non-voting board member, a conference participant – since 2011. So, as it is with Covid-19, I saw familiar HERA faces over Zoom, heard the hallmark throat-clear of a long-time HERA member over an un-muted mic, and watched seasoned and green humanities scholars probe ideas. I presented a paper on a course I’m teaching, Sports and the Humanities. I asked my audience: how do I better root the course in the Classical Humanities? I was rewarded with references to Ancient Greek urn art (as sports propaganda), the real name of Plato, and the “culture of celebrity” alluded to in antiquity texts. But it didn’t stop there. My privilege was duly checked, as were questions about including transgender and disabled athletes in the course materials.

That’s part of the problem with the Humanities – it’s so integrative, it is hard to argue that it deserves a room of its own.

To me, these exhilarating discussions essentially turn over and over William Faulkner’s assertion that “the past is never dead. It’s not even the past.” But how does literature, philosophy, Game of Thrones, Freud, Bridgerton fan-fiction, Tik Tok, etc. tell us about humanity, and it’s “present past”? I’d seen a similar exchange, but younger and more diverse, at a conference my University hosted in February – the First Virtual Interdisciplinary Studies Conference.

I’m really proud of that conference, because it was I who supplied the seed of it, and my colleague – a wife and mom and actor – took my arm and we ran with the idea. We were awarded a grant from the South Carolina Humanities Council, which funded our Zoom purchase and speaker fees. We were offered funds from Academic Affairs, but I wanted to prove that we were worth funding outside of the University. It was important that a project rooted in interdisciplinary humanities get money and thus be recognized in newsletters and Faculty Senate notes. People need to be reminded that the Humanities deserves investment. We had lots of help, support, and engagement from a third woman – another dear, female, colleague of mine, whose help with organizing the program was enough. But she went on to create presentations that brought current students and librarians together, and they were talking about race and health disparities with such grace and intelligence; it’s truly beautiful to see, our shared humanity mirrored back at each other.

The collaborative spirit – from our fellow women in the Grants and Accounts offices to our fellow faculty and to our delightful keynotes – underscored the real value of the Humanities. There were plenty of men who helped and supported the cause as well, I should add. We had a solid team helping each other out, which begets a more egalitarian product from the start; as Angela Davis noted in Freedom is a Constant Struggle (2016): “It is in collectivities that we find reservoirs of hope and optimism.” That’s part of the problem with the Humanities – it’s so integrative, it is hard to argue that it deserves a room of its own.


The 2021 NFL Super Bowl featured a spoken-word performance by poetry super-star Amanda Gorman. I cannot recall a time where a poem preceded the Super Bowl; Twitter already surged with academics and literature folks giddy over Gorman’s reading of her poem “The Hill We Climb” at President Biden’s inauguration. The primetime Super Bowl spot put us over the edge. Popular music is full of poetry, sacred geometry found in nature is full of poetry – studying poetry thus helps us understand the world around us. It allows us space to think about different ways to interpret that world and how we might question it, as well as to recognize what came before it.

But it does not exist only to bolster shiny “new” things, like Digital Humanities (by default, everyone working in the Humanities is doing some digital things, because we live in a digital world). I am fascinated by one of my previously mentioned colleague’s work with Medical Humanities, and I think I can contribute to it in some way, even if it’s just supporting her ideas and championing her courses. But the Humanities don’t wholly exist in these new iterations; they have long existed on their own, but in concert with each other.

Credit: Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

What’s hopefully clear, in this prose, is some celebration of the Humanities, often done in defiance of the perception that it is “lesser-than” other disciplines. The root of feminism is believing in equality, and the Humanities is a metaphor for the treatment of women inasmuch that the value of Humanities will never be the same as the value of Medicine, for example. My aforementioned partner in conferencing (and opera-trained vocalist), Ms. Libby Ricardo, read a draft of this essay and immediately followed the metaphor: “WE ARE THE ALTOS!  We create the support and foundation while others get to be flashy and thus recognized.  Everyone knows a famous Tenor or Soprano.  But an Alto?  And yet, they create the lushest sound.”  

That’s practical – we don’t hear the alto when we’re paying attention to the soaring soprano. We don’t need the arts and humanities to live (though our quarantine addiction to Netflix tells us otherwise). A friend of mine writes that he’s “a doctor, but not the kind that helps people” in his social media bio – it’s funny, but the self-depreciation also comes with defeat. When a very grumpy man derided the First Lady Jill Biden for using her professional title, Dr. Biden, because it “feels fraudulent,” academia roared back. The grumpy man’s article was also derisive, dismissive (he called Dr. Biden “kiddo”) and sexist. It goes without saying (but bares repeating) that no one would’ve written this crap about a man.

Another glass ceiling breaks, and the chorus sings on – in this anecdotal essay, the song was about women in the Humanities, and my limited, privileged view of feminism in the Humanities. I am writing this on International Women’s Day, which I’m happy to celebrate but feel put out that women only get a day; a week would be nice. But that’s how I approach some of the issues I’ve seen in higher education, in regard to Humanities – sometimes the gesture is made, but it feels half-baked. Yay, a day. Yay, an obligatory one-line “congratulations” email. But the Humanities echoes a strong lesson: If you’re always looking outside yourself (your state, your school, etc.) for support (funding, enthusiasm), you’ll never be complete, or feel “good enough.” But I think our voices are good enough. I think the Humanities has a rightful place in the Higher Education pantheon – and I plan to keep singing. Loud.

About the Author

Erin R. McCoy is an Associate Professor of English and Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of South Carolina Beaufort. Her forthcoming book about the cultural historiography of the Viet Nam War is under contract with McFarland Press.

 

by Volker Frank

I. By Way of Introduction: A Sociological Perspective of the Problem

A little more than a century ago, Emile Durkheim wrote his last book The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. In it, he explained why religion and faith are such universal human phenomena, regardless of their particular expressions, Gods, or sacred texts. To him, religion’s fundamental value was not the saving of the believer for an afterlife, but what religion – in its organized and collective form – did to those who believed and practiced it: they were members of a community of values. While Durkheim succeeded in making the point, he unfortunately failed in his other goal – the recovery of a consciously and collectively shared human morality, for which the Elementary Forms was a sort of preliminary study, a foundational perspective. Durkheim realized that modern life with all its scientific revolutions and progress (technological, medical, etc.) raised a serious challenge to community life of all sorts (the nation, the Church, the citizenry, the rural towns, the educational institutions). In fact, he argued, the birth and evolution of modern life produced secularizations and separations of all kinds. Even religion itself was not immune to this development. This was a problem, he argued, because while modern life produced a more complex division of labor that gave specialization, it also weakened our social and moral ties. He was quite skeptical about modern life’s ability to reproduce – in secular form – what religion had (presumably) accomplished before the arrival of modern life. In this vision that modern life will be diverse and yet profoundly divided, confused even, about values and what values we should nurture and protect and teach, he was not alone. Other famous Sociologists, Politicians, and Philosophers also feared that modern life will be increasingly about what we have and less about who we are and who we want to be and how we see ourselves as a part of something bigger. 

II. Diversity and Inclusion, Diversity or Inclusion?

 What has happened to Durkheim’s concerns? Has the University managed to address a central problem of modern times? And has the University not only addressed it, but arrived at a “good enough” conclusion or recommendation among its teachers and with its students? I am not so sure. In other words, while a lot of Universities and Colleges, and especially those who teach the Humanities, have recently – and rightfully so – engaged more intentionally with issues of diversity, equity and inclusion, frequently we are still not addressing a fundamental question: what are our values and beliefs, why do we have the values and beliefs we have, and what’s so unique about the Humanities in their attempts to clarify values for us? Is there a trade-off between diversity and inclusion? What lies underneath our talk of diversity and inclusion?

Let us assume for a second that the problem lies not so much with our attention given to diversity, but with inclusion. Many argue that finally, the Humanities are paying more attention to diversity of all kinds: here at “home” in the West (e.g. race, ethnicity, multiculturalism, gender, trans-gender, etc.) but also there “abroad” in the non-West (e.g. indigeneity, coloniality, cosmopolitanism). In the classroom, and among colleagues, talk about non-Western cultures, religions, and belief systems is not always easy. There are many reasons for this but two should be mentioned here. First, a lack of familiarity with “abroad” (produced, in part, by education biased toward the West, limited exposure to other cultures, reinforced by language limitations, and a lot more). To be blunt, or overly simplistic, not everybody who teaches about Africa, Latin America, or Asia, did what Levy-Strauss, or Geertz or Mead could do: spend years “abroad”. 

Second, and perhaps more importantly, a profound philosophical bias towards one-sided reason. Here we could mention a long line of intellectual thinkers who continue to have great influence over our Humanities: Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, Smith, Darwin, Habermas, Foucault etc…Is it because they are all white males or is it because they share something that goes beyond race/ethnicity and gender? Maybe what they and others share is “subjectivism”, i.e. their ontological and/or metaphysical belief, philosophy, and their neglect of what in Anthropology is called a “wholistic worldview.” Looking beyond what is offered not only by Kant and company but also by most Sociologists and so many Social Theorists in terms of an explanation of who we are as human beings, is it possible that we are looking at a false dichotomy, and therefore not really looking at the bigger picture?

In other words, instead of looking at humans either as “agency” or “part of structure”, homo faber or homo ludens, instead of  disagreeing over whether we are, as Kant, Descartes, Smith, or Darwin had it, individuals in a competitive world, unable to fully understand and connect with the outside world, or instead of wondering if there is still a “grand narrative” since the Enlightenment (the modernization, democratization, secularization of the world), or whether the grand narrative is now a text to be de-contextualized, broken down into separate, distinct and different parts, instead of approaching the world from the perspective of Western vs non-Western, religious vs secular, developed or developing, rural or urban, rich or poor, healthy or sick, diverse and global, inclusive for some and exclusive for others, we ask again, who, what, and where are we as simple humans? But this time, we do so from a less “nominalistically” influenced world view. By nominalist I mean a world-view that assumes a dichotomous world: mind – world, subject – object, individualism – objective world, human nature is social vs. non-human nature is not social. Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, and Habermas, and others, present this world-view, their philosophical stand, their theoretical position, for some even their political position, and thus their theories represent a value to the degree to which they describe what is, what is natural, what is not, what we are, what we are not, what is reason, what is rational, what is not rational, what belongs to God and what belongs to humans, what is fact and what is (to them)  “mere ritual” and finally, what deserves to be learned and what not. These are then, at one and the same time ontological affirmations, metaphysical accounts, epistemological recommendations.

Looking beyond what is offered not only by Kant and company but also by most Sociologists and so many Social Theorists in terms of an explanation of who we are as human beings, is it possible that we are looking at a false dichotomy, and therefore not really looking at the bigger picture?

It is not that some would not have warned us. Here, one could mention a few voices: Weber argued quite eloquently that “the fate of an epoch which has eaten of the tree of knowledge is that it must know that we cannot learn the meaning of the world from the results of its analysis, be it ever so perfect; it must rather be in a position to create this meaning itself. It must recognize that general views of life and the universe can never be the products of increasing empirical knowledge” (Giddens 1971:136). E. F. Schumacher echoes Weber’s warning in that he asks “we know how to do many things but do we know what to do? He goes on to argue that the current crisis (moral, political, economic, and environmental) of western civilization is due in large part to a crisis of education. There has been, so to speak, a “metaphysical collapse” of our deepest convictions and he concludes “education which fails to clarify our central convictions is mere training or indulgence and education, far from ranking as man’s greatest resource, will then be an agent of destruction, in accordance with the principle “corruptio optimi pessima” (Campbell et al. 2002: 555).  

And so, steeped in this tradition, today our Humanities face some serious challenges. From a nominalist perspective, how do you make sense of a statement like this: The Dagara people (Southern Burkina Faso, North West Ghana), explains M. P Somé, “have no word for the supernatural.” Moreover, “the world of the Dagara does not distinguish between reality and imagination” (Somé 1995:7). Likewise, Achebe (1994) argues that, as a consequence of a Western-imposed world-view, economics and politics, philosophy and science, the “problematique” of post-colonial Africa is how to get its people “back to the authentic” or “out of” this modern or post-modern Africa. In a similar vein, Maldonado-Torres, following Heidegger, asks how can we remind or convince non-Western people that for many former colonial subjects, it is not Descartes’ I think, therefore I am, it is I am, therefore I think. How do you unpack this?! 

The good news is that there are some really interesting proposals how to get us out of this bias. And so, re-reading Achebe or Somé and others (e.g. Halton), I wonder, do they propose what in my view constitutes a non-nominalist theory, a philosophy that might acknowledge the other, the stranger, or that might even “otherize” and yet still explore common elements in our humanity as the real foundation? Thinkers like Goethe, Mumford and Gandhi, Morrison, among others, present us with the possibility that rationality (including the one so strongly represented in the Social and Natural Sciences, in the Humanities and in Philosophy), is only a part of what makes us human, and there is more to the human condition, as religion, as extra-rational, as nature shows us and perhaps unlike at any time before now, is even trying to tell us.  

III. A Modest Proposal

The way we understand each other, the way we communicate with each other, the way we are and who we might become is far from an individualistic project alone. Our common project is rational but it is also so much more, it is reasonable, emotional, symbolic, and yes, it is calculating and sometimes dishonest and, lately, very conflictual. Halton argues that ”the reasonable is far more than the rational and runs deeper than cultural and biological reductionists can admit. It includes empathic intelligence, which can feel what rational mind cannot know, as well as projective intelligence, which can body forth ideas, images, feelings, and forms utterly irrationally, though reasonably” (Halton 1995:74). Many theories and philosophies see the rational individual as the center of attention – and hence as the place from which to explain the social, yet in doing so they risk missing more than what they reveal. Emphasizing diversity at the cost of inclusion is also bound to make the same mistakes, to fall into the same bias. Diversity and Inclusion are distinct ways of looking at the world, but maybe Inclusion is more than the sum total of Diversity. Inclusion is more than adding stories about “diversity at home and diversity abroad” – as important and timely as these may be. Inclusion is about shared humanity, regardless of place and time. 

 

Works Cited

Achebe, Ch. Things Fall Apart. New York Anchor Books, 1994.

Giddens, Anthony. Capitalism and Modern Social Theory, An analysis of the writings of Marx,

Durkheim and Weber. London, Cambridge University Press 1971. 

Halton, Eugene. Bereft of Reason. On the Decline of Social Thought and Prospects for Its Renewal.

Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Maldonado-Torres N. “On the Coloniality of Being” In Cultural Studies, 21:2, 240-270.

Routledge, 2007.

Schumacher E.F. “The Greatest Resource – Education.” In Asheville Reader The Individual in the

Contemporary World. Edited by G Campbell, M Gillum, D Sulock, M West. Copley Custom Publishing Group, 2002, 540-555.

Somé, M. T. Of Water and the Spirit. Ritual, Magic, and the Life of an African Shaman. New York,

Penguin, 1995. 

Tantillo, A. O. Goethe’s Modernisms, New York, Continuum 2010.

Wiredu, K. and Gyekye K. Person and Community. Ghanaian Philosophical Studies I. Washington,

Council for Research in Values and Philosophy. 1992.