Administrators hate to be called bureaucrats. They
prefer to be seen as academic leaders. Leaders articulate
priorities and values, serve as exemplars, and represent
an institution to both others and itself. Today, more
than ever, the humanities and the arts need academic
leaders at every level of the university to give them
voice, to avow their importance, to articulate the ways
in which the humanities and arts speak for the university,
the ways in which they give speech to the central values
and value of a liberal education. Yet having been a
dean for close to a decade, I am aware that leadership
takes place in an institutional and human infrastructure:
a political landscape, a network of administrative hierarchies,
faculty and academic senate committees, academic units
with budgets, constituencies, needs, and responsibilities.
Both day-to-day management and strategic planning take
place in a bureaucracy, for better or for worse. The
challenge for academic leaders, it seems to me, is to
think through bureaucracy.
I mean by this that we need
to understand administration as an intellectual problem,
that we need to understand the intellectual stakes of
bureaucracy. Thinking through bureaucracy suggests getting
past bureaucracy but it also means thinking in bureaucracy,
understanding bureaucracy as a space in which thinking
can occur, a mechanism through which thinking must take
place. We must work through bureaucracy because it is
an obstacle and because it is the means to our ends.
Leadership requires us to work through the institutional
structures that both constrain and empower the humanities.
The health of the humanities depends on our ability
to reinvigorate the academic bureaucracy that the humanities
inhabit, especially the departments that define our
teaching and research.
After the release of Reinvigorating
the Humanities: Enhancing Research and Education on
Campus and Beyond, the 2004 report of the Association
of American Universities, a University of California,
Santa Barbara (UCSB), faculty task force organized a
campus discussion called "Humanities@UCSB: A 21st Century
Perspective." But due to a typographical error, or a
Freudian slip, a flyer appeared with the title "Humanities@UCSB:
A 20th- Century Perspective." This made me wonder if
our perspective was in fact forward-thinking enough,
or, indeed, retrospective enough to avoid the common
perception that one's present situation is somehow outside
of history. In fact, it seems to me that the problem
in the humanities today is that we have twenty-firstcentury
students, a twentieth-century curriculum, and a nineteenth-century
bureaucracy. Faculty to some extent occupy all three
spheres, which overlap but do not coincide.
The landscape
of academic departments and disciplines in the humanities
has changed over the last two hundred years, yet there
is remarkable continuity in the modern liberal arts
university. We can see the traces of the classical expectation
that citizens be trained in philosophy, history, and
rhetoric, as well as the medieval map of the liberal
arts, which included grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic,
geometry, astronomy, and music. The university of the
future will and should maintain many of the disciplines
and pedagogical principles established in ancient and
medieval times. It will continue to need coherent canons
of knowledge in order to educate its students and establish
areas of expertise with which to evaluate its own ongoing
work. It will need stable budgetary units that will
be receptive to but not buffeted by new academic trends.
Furthermore, students, even graduate students, cannot be post-disciplinary if they are pre-disciplinary. We
need majors and degree programs in order to have interdisciplinary
and multidisciplinary research and education. The departmental
structure will not become obsolete. The challenge lies
in figuring out how, when, and where to rewrite the
map of the changing academic landscape that we navigate.
Disciplines
and departments
Here is a thought experiment: imagine
that one summer after graduation ceremonies, we disbanded
all of our academic departments in the humanities and
told the faculty to come back in the fall organized
into bureaucratic and academic configurations of their
choice. Here are the ground rules: no one would lose
his or her job, and the budgets and the total number
of faculty and staff FTE would be guaranteed for, say,
five years. At the same time, faculty would be expected
to teach about the same number of majors and non-majors,
prepare graduate students for jobs, and maintain a curriculum
that would allow students to fulfill university requirements.
(We won't let six senior faculty form the Department
of Advanced Heidegger Studies and teach only courses
requiring fluency in German and ancient Greek.) In addition,
units would have to ensure peer review and expert evaluations
for advancements and promotions.
What would happen?
Many faculty would be energized by the imaginative and
practical enterprise of defining an engaging intellectual
community and devising a pedagogical plan in a new major.
Some, for personal or intellectual reasons, would be
happy to reproduce their previous departments. (Of course,
some faculty are not really interested in redefining
the shape of the humanities but are unhappy in their
own departments and would prefer to be unhappy in another
department.) The conditions for both new and old programs
would be the same: a critical mass of faculty must support
the curriculum, teach the students, and formulate an
intellectual rationale for their fields. There would
be political considerations. Departments often police
borders and regulate citizenship. Would the fall of
the humanities' Berlin Walls mean the dissolution of
empires and nation-states into regions and ethnic identifications,
or greater unification? Would the new humanities division
look like the Israeli Knesset or the Italian Parliament,
coalitions of splinter groups trying to exert their
influence, or would we see a European Union? Would faculty
look for powerful departments, creating a giant history,
English, or cultural studies department to function
like Russia in the former Soviet Union?
We might see
humanities departments that look similar to what we
have now--English, French, Spanish--but organized along
interdisciplinary lines, including faculty from outside
traditional humanities departments. Or we might see
interdisciplinary programs defined by the periodization
that currently slices departments, such as eighteenth-century
studies or modernism. We might see more programs organized
by other collective identities, such as gender or racial
and ethic groups. Surely there would be more alliances
with the humanistic social sciences. Would we see more
departments of performance studies or visual studies?
Many of our literature departments are organized around
fictions of national literatures, inflected by vestiges
of colonial history. Is a common language or a political/genealogical
narrative of literary history an adequate organizing
principle for a department? English departments currently
contain multitudes: British, American, Native American,
postcolonial, Asian American, and Chicano and Chicana
literatures. Spanish departments encompass a diversity
of traditions, national literatures, and even languages.
Influenced by cultural studies and the decline of foreign
language teaching in high schools, some national literature
departments already have reinvented themselves as cultural
studies programs. We have programs in British studies,
medieval studies, and Renaissance studies, bringing
together historians, art historians, musicologists,
and literary scholars. Would these programs replace
our current departments?
Thinking about these intellectual
configurations, it is instructive to observe how often
they mirror professional societies. Indeed, many of
the sixty-eight constituent societies of the American
Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) do not parallel
an individual academic department, or would not have
had a parallel academic department forty years ago.
These organizations often mirror programs that exist
alongside departments, between departments, often competing
with departments for the time and teaching of their
own faculty. Indeed, the history of the ACLS constituent
societies interacts dynamically and dialogically with
the history of our academic departments. Some learned
societies mirror departments, some represent subfields
within departments, some represent interdisciplinary
alliances that may have begun when there were no cognate
departments but have helped to establish departments,
and others bring together scholars in interdisciplinary
alliances precisely because they could not be mapped
onto a single academic department or discipline. Think
about the ways in which we could and could not superimpose
the map of the ACLS constituent societies onto the map
of the academic departments of a typical university.
Interdisciplinarity and the burden of the past
I hope
it is clear that this is not the call for interdisciplinarity
that you've read dozens of times. My point is that interdisciplinary
scholarship and teaching are thriving. Humanities and
arts faculty at UC Santa Barbara for example, are engaged
in initiatives with engineering, nanotechnology, marine
science, environmental science, and cognitive science,
as well as with the social sciences. My point is that
the academic leaders (at every level) who have developed
programs for emerging and interdisciplinary fields have
not fully succeeded in negotiating the bureaucratic
relations between these initiatives and departments
and disciplines.
Budgets, FTE lines, and majors, as
well as the disciplinary border control that facilitates
peer review, can make it difficult for departments to
respond to interdisciplinary vectors of research and
gradually shifting patterns of enrollments and instruction.
Interdisciplinary programs and departments, joint appointments,
and new majors and degrees have produced unintended
side effects: misalignments between faculty and student
FTE, misalignments between undergraduate and graduate
programs, programs in which it is difficult for faculty
to evaluate each other's work, and departments whose
faculty neglect their own curriculum (or want to) to
teach in other programs. Departments may prevent students
from taking courses elsewhere, either because they are
conscientiously committed to an expanding canon of knowledge
and interdisciplinary methodologies, or because they
need requirements to populate certain courses that faculty
want to teach.
Furthermore, humanities programs face
a particular challenge from their historical investment
in and commitment to coverage. Humanists are not positivists.
They believe in the advancement of knowledge, but for
thousands of years the academy has been based on the
presumption that intellectual innovation and discovery
do not make previously acquired knowledge obsolete.
We do not de-acquisition Cervantes from the library
shelf because we read Latin American literature; we're
the ones who took all the volumes of Freud thrown out
by the psychology department, the ones who teach Marx
and Darwin and Goethe's Theory of Colors. The humanities
may be iconoclastic, but they engage in and with traditions,
in the handing down and transmission of knowledge. New
knowledge can come through archeological acts of discovery
and rediscovery, through the exploration and mapping
of previously neglected territories, and through the
continual reinterpretation and reassessment of past,
present, and future.
Yet if new subjects do not necessarily
displace traditional ones, even as emphases and methodologies
change, the expansion of the canon and the globalization
of our curriculum present problems for departments.
Humanities departments often base their curricular and
FTE plans on a model of coverage, and are as reluctant
to abandon areas as they are eager to expand canons
and add approaches from other disciplines. Many departments
redefine fields and adjust requirements; UC Santa Barbara
has created digital humanities and digital arts positions,
as well as positions in architecture and the environment,
media policy, and borderlands history. Yet many departments
request positions for new areas while insisting on field coverage--strength in all the core areas of a discipline
at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Coverage
can provide a reasonable rationale up to a point, but
humanities departments need scholarly leadership to
articulate more compelling arguments, both intellectually
and rhetorically, to justify their resources and finally
their bureaucratic identities.
From teaching to research
and back
The problem of coverage is related to the bureaucratic
and cultural disconnect between teaching and research
that many humanities faculty experience. Although their
teaching can inspire their research and their classrooms
can be laboratories, they look with envy at their colleagues
in the sciences who not only teach less but get teaching
credit for research activities that result in publications
and summer stipends. Humanities departments typically
deliver student credit hours or student FTE rather than
grants and contracts, and in general this makes them
cost-effective and even profit centers for the university.
Although their distinguished faculty conduct internationally
recognized research, their institutional power tends
to reside in their enrollments; and their annual delivery
of a curriculum that fulfills a set of departmental
and general education requirements simultaneously empowers
and impoverishes them.
Some departments are changing
themselves from within, reexamining their requirements,focusing
on distinctive strengths, and creating emphases that
give focus and coherence to majors. Faculty engage in
innovative work in their articles and classrooms. On
the bureaucratic level, however, interdisciplinary initiatives
and research opportunities for faculty result in strain
and loss for departments, leading departments to resist
change. Faculty want to teach outside of their departments,
or teach courses outside of their fields. Course buyouts
seem inadequate and they downgrade the level of teaching
in the home department. Entrepreneurial faculty who
start research centers or special projects--funded and
supported by administrators-- end up feeling burdened
or even exploited. They want course relief, which is
then resented by their chairs. Joint appointments between
departments and interdisciplinary programs can be an
effective strategy but faculty complain about service
obligations; the department and program can disagree
about tenure cases. On the other hand, without joint
departments, interdisciplinary programs can duplicate
faculty in other programs, hiring literary scholars
or historians or art historians on their own. We still
have not solved the imaginative and bureaucratic problem
of designing an academic landscape in which faculty
live simultaneously in departments and interdepartmental
and/or interdisciplinary programs.
Part of my strategy
as dean has been to find ways to keep departments from
experiencing interdisciplinary initiatives and research
projects as loss. I have encouraged faculty and departments
to think in terms of course credit rather than course
relief, to find ways to give both faculty and students
credit for these sorts of projects. When I offered funds
for interdisciplinary curricular initiatives, I stipulated
that courses had to be offered within departments. Our
comparative literature program lets the home department
of the instructor get all of the enrollment credit from
its courses, which turns out to be a good deal for some
departments with underpopulated courses. A summer theater
lab involving visiting artist residencies created a
parallel undergraduate course so students and faculty
could get credit.
We have a variety of centers both
in and between departments to organize research clusters
and to integrate teaching and research to a greater
extent, especially for graduate students. Some of these
have been magnets for grants and philanthropic support.
These include, among other centers, the Carsey-Wolf
Center for Film, Television, and New Media, for which
we've raised $10 million; the Walter H. Capps Center
for Study of Ethics, Religion, and Public Life, for
which we received a $500,000 National Endowment for
the Humanities (NEH) matching grant that helped us to
raise an additional $1.5 million; the English department's
Early Modern Center, which has just received a $325,000
NEH grant for an online English Ballad Archive project;
and a digital humanities project that had early NEH
seed funding and has spawned two University of California
multi-campus research groups.
The success of these and
other projects has led our faculty to propose a humanities
lab initiative that would develop new paradigms for
collaborative research projects in the humanities. These
research projects would incorporate team-teaching and
graduate student training. We need to break down the
opposition between teaching and research in the humanities
and make our ability to join the two an advantage rather
than a liability. We have created freshman courses linked
to our departmental centers, taught by graduate students,
in an effort to create vertical integration across faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates. We have created
a postdoctoral fellow position (which includes some
teaching) in our Early Modern Center. The challenge
has been to locate these centers in and across departments
in order to connect them to the life and teaching of
the departments we want them to enrich rather than drain
departmental resources. Some of them also have a public
humanities component--especially the Capps Center and
the Carsey–Wolf Center for Film, Television, and
New Media (which works with the Donald Bren School of
Environmental Science and Management on an environmental
media initiative). Public programming has allowed us
to draw a public audience. This includes philanthropic
donors, but we need public engagement as much as we
need funding.
The place and places of the humanities
In order to reinvigorate the humanities, academic leaders
must take into account the need for strong departments
and degree programs that address the intellectual and
pedagogical demands of faculty and students drawn to
interdisciplinary ventures. At the same time, we must
design a landscape of departments in regional affiliations,
confederations, and alliances rather than the old model
in which each department stands as an autonomous country
with borders separating languages, cultures, and citizens.
We may want to locate FTEs within academic departments
yet make allocations that recognize research specializations
and/or teaching responsibilities that address the interests
of other departments and interdisciplinary programs.
It may be that the model of faculty living in the same
department for their undergraduate and graduate programs
will become obsolete. Someone might teach undergraduate
courses in an English or history department yet work
with graduate students (and other faculty) in a medieval studies research center. This is not a new model, at
least outside of the humanities or outside of the United
States, but it will require a rethinking of departments
and degrees, and new paradigms for research, teaching,
and public engagement in the humanities that lead to
new bureaucratic paradigms.
There are many success stories
in the humanities, but the very success of the humanities
in reinvigorating itself has in some ways led to the
creation of a shadow university in the programs and
centers that lie in the interstices of the current structure.
Strategic planning, the reinvention of the humanities
that has occurred throughout the ages, must be carried
out by the faculty, most of whom live in departments
that can be agents of resistance rather than change,
for both good and bad reasons. I have been suggesting
that we acknowledge some of the good reasons. Abandoning
traditional majors in many cases would be pedagogically
unsound. Some worry about the fate of reading and literary
analysis in cultural studies programs dominated by historical
or sociological approaches. Furthermore, dismantling
departments could represent strategic suicide if it
takes away the rationale for a discipline and opens
the door to downsizing and an indiscriminate assembling
of humanities fields and faculty. Many faculty fear
that administrators' interest in interdisciplinarity masks an agenda to downsize, consolidate, and weaken
departmental power structures.
This paranoid vision
of interdisciplinarity is not wholly paranoid. There
is a danger that the game of sending people home to
form new departments on the university level would really
be a game of musical chairs and that, when the music
stops, the humanities would be left standing. Generic
units of literature or humanities professors, without
a coherent canon of knowledge or a rationale for necessary
research fields, might encourage the attitude that humanities
programs are centers of service rather than research
centers, and increase the tendency to hire lecturers
or adjuncts rather than research professors.
This is
where academic leadership makes a difference. We need
to explain why the arts and humanities matter, why they
are at the core of a liberal education, providing the
context for all disciplines. The digital arts, digital
media, and digital humanities are exciting and vital
today, but the arts and humanities are not relevant
only insofar as they relate to technology. As we enter
a world of difference in the global society taking shape
around us, what can be more important to our understanding
of the stories that we tell about others and ourselves
than history, religion, language, art, and culture?
If the university of the future does not have a central place for the humanities, and for the principles of
the liberal education that the humanities embody in
both research and teaching, then the university will
be impoverished along with the humanities.
For the humanities
to have a place, however, faculty, faculty committees,
department chairs, deans, and learned societies need
to worry about the places in which the humanities conduct
and organize their research and teaching, and that means
thinking about bureaucracy. Thinking about bureaucracy,
thinking through bureaucracy, means designing new maps
rather than defending territory. If we ignore bureaucracy,
we will risk leaving the humanities vulnerable to the
sort of academic redistricting that will leave us without
a territory to defend. We need an overlay of maps that
design and define the overlapping intellectual communities
in which teaching and research take place and new forms
of collaboration develop. These are the maps that will
help students, colleagues, academic leaders, and the
public understand that all roads lead to the humanities.
David Marshall is professor of English and comparative literature, dean of humanities and fine arts, and executive dean of the College of Letters and Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. This article is adapted from a presentation made in May 2006 at "Reinvigorating the Humanities," a national convocation organized by the American Council of Learned Societies and the Association of American Universities.
To respond to this article, e-mail liberaled@aacu.org, with the author's name on the subject line.
|
