Humanities at Work

An Academic Life in the Public Sphere

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By Clement Alexander Price

"To talk in public, to think in solitude, to read and to hear, to inquire and answer inquiries, is the business of a scholar."

--Samuel Johnson

Many of us who are committed scholars in the humanities know early in our careers that we want a scholarly life like the one Samuel Johnson describes. In my own case, perhaps because I am a product of the Negro History Movement, I always assumed that a role beyond the academy was among my scholarly responsibilities. Yet public intellectual work today faces a curiously contradictory set of challenges and opportunities -- contradictions that young scholars, in particular, feel acutely.

On the one hand, as fealty to the needs of the public has become a veritable political and social gospel, many colleges and universities now seek to be more useful in the larger community, to strive against the distress that too often exists just beyond the campus gates. On the other hand, just when higher education has begun to resort to the rhetoric of public service, scholars -- especially young scholars -- are under enormous pressure to retreat from the public sphere. They must stay glued to their computers, sequester themselves in archives or laboratories, constantly embellish their CVs. This culture is, I believe, creating a generation of scholars with stilted academic values and little impetus to offer our society the highly educated leadership and engagement it needs.

This disconnect could not happen at a less fortuitous time, for the public realm is now far more open than at any time in American history. Before World War II, that realm excluded vast numbers of individuals. But the civil-rights movement changed forever the meaning of public. The traditional hierarchy of race and gender has opened up, offering intellectual frontiers where scholars can be of service. Moreover, the popularization of knowledge now enables scholars to venture into every nook and cranny of public life.

We humanities scholars are special beneficiaries of the transformation in the meaning and the imagery of public. It is now much easier to discuss a host of issues -- culture, representation, sexuality, gender, race, class, and memory -- informed by the humanities and the sciences. The most heated battles of the culture wars have subsided, with those of my generation who brought the new humanities scholarship into the academy the apparent victors. I believe that we live in a time when the ideals of American cultural workers and humanists can at last find traction.

Yet far too many faculty members who began their academic careers during the late 1960s now seem to prefer an institutional insularity that harks back to a more conservative era in higher education. Despite my belief that the scholars of my generation would answer the call, my generational cohort of university and college professors is now, officially, a part of the problem. We now have influence. Our voices, were we to raise them, would be heard -- but too many of us have not raised our voices or pursued our early dreams of engagement. As a result we are largely isolated from community organizations with social and cultural agendas and from elementary and secondary teachers.

Even though the academy has seemingly relinquished so many opportunities to engage, scholars remain better positioned than almost any other class of leaders to bring informed guidance to social settings and issues. This is a moment deserving of a bold and imaginative engagement with the public, and, when we take the trouble to develop that engagement, the public reaches out with great commitment and appreciation.

Consider events of the last three decades in Newark, N.J. Newark had an extraordinary trajectory of growth, progress, and optimism through the first third of the 20th century. But by the early 1970s, through a series of private misdeeds cloaked in public policy, Newark became a metaphor for all that could go wrong in a city -- the butt of Johnny Carson's nightly jokes, a socially constructed short narrative on race colored black and brown and on the blaming of poverty on poverty's victims.

Few know, however, that during Newark's lean years, the humanities and the arts helped the city regain its equilibrium. Its valiant attempt to sustain vibrant, welcoming public spaces, along with its citizens' admiration for scholars, transformed Newark into a city that richly rewarded public intellectual work. Surprisingly for such a poor city, and one that lost more than half its population from 1950 to 1980 -- including its white ethnic middle class -- Newark continued to invest in its prestigious museum and public library system.

In the late 1980s, to the surprise of those who did not know this city's intellectual commitments, Newark was designated as the site for a performing-arts venue whose programming now rivals the good work of Lincoln Center and the Kennedy Center. In Newark, the humanities, the arts, and public scholarship have helped to redefine one of America's worst-perceived urban places.

This success story is, in part, a story about Newark's unique tenacity, combined with its own strong local commitment to the humanities and local scholars' strong commitment to Newark. But it also sets the tone for a broader, more important story: After more than a generation of listlessness in many of our cities, a new urban era is opening. Our nation now understands the vicissitudes of race and racism better than it ever has, even if not yet perfectly. We now have a real chance to interrogate race in our public policies, to hasten a long recovery from historical misdeeds -- and universities and colleges should be a part of that difficult but essential work.

The practical career lesson in all this, especially for young academics, is that the public arena holds vast scholarly and professional possibilities for those who resist academic pressures to insulate and isolate. In the years ahead, the need and the call for public engagement will be there, both in our urban centers and in other settings nationwide. And if the need and the call are there, the money will follow. Should not scholars, therefore, commit early in their careers to comport themselves explicitly as public servants, engaged in a wide range of activities that place new knowledge in public settings? Should not scholars be found on local, state, and regional boards, commissions and committees, where the grinding work of democracy takes place? And should not universities, almost as an act of faith in the public, reward faculty scholars who establish a public component in their careers?

I believe that the answer to every one of these questions is a resounding yes. I believe that young faculty members, and those preparing to become faculty members, must -- even without institutional incentives and assistance -- seek ways, early and often, to create intellectual and practical intersections between the academic life and the public one.

But how can young scholars take such an approach without also creating risks to their careers? First and foremost, junior faculty members must take their public work seriously enough to share it with senior colleagues and administrators who ultimately make tenure and promotion decisions. Young academics must not just tell these colleagues, but show them what an academic life inspired by public service and public intellectual work looks like -- the joys therein and, yes, the dangers. In this sense, junior scholars can change the academy even while they hammer out their own meaningful public roles.

As our younger colleagues push in their own ways, we senior scholars, and especially those of us who are veterans of the culture wars, must push our institutions, opening for the next generation a path to new opportunities and resources. We must also push ourselves to get back out there. And we must push our colleagues to see that it can and must be done, that evolving realities of American life and education demand humanists' direct engagement in the public sphere.

The beneficiaries of public scholarship also have to add their weight to this effort. We must ask those beyond the academy with whom humanists work -- elected officials, philanthropic leaders, museum curators, corporate officials, public school teachers and administrators, and, yes, anonymous citizens -- to speak to the real community outcomes. Their commendations, buttressed by an exacting articulation of a young scholar's public accomplishments, will likely matter in tenure and promotion. And they will matter more to senior colleagues who have been drawn early into young scholars' public work, and to those savvy about communities' practical and political demands for academic engagement.

Fiscal and social pressures on the academy to make itself relevant are not new. Nor are they diminishing. Indeed, in an era when so much of our future depends upon narrowing the gap between the American dream and the nightmares of poverty, ignorance, and hopelessness, we humanists -- whose business it is to understand and articulate such dreams and nightmares -- must shoulder an ever-greater share of the responsibilities a democratic society expects of its citizens.