Humanities Scholarship at USM
Donna Cassidy
"Remarks, Reception for Principal Investigators"
May 5, 2005
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I'd like to begin talking about humanities research and scholarship at USM by relating the following story. Having received their invitations to this reception for Principal Investigators, two humanities colleagues contacted me since my name appeared on the invitation. Both were perplexed about the nature of the reception or why they had been invited or what I had to do with the event. For them, as for most humanities scholars, the phrase “principal investigator” has little meaning. It is, as I understand it, used for the lead researcher in grant-funded projects involving multiple researchers in the sciences, social sciences, education, and public policy. For humanities scholars, “grant recipient,” “fellow,” “lead scholar,” or “project scholar” constitute the equivalent.
My point in telling this story is to show that the language used to speak about research at USM excludes, that it defines research largely around a science-based model. At USM, we have principal investigators, receptions for faculty engaged in funded research, and consultants for the Provost's Review of Research from the sciences. Forms distributed to department chairs to solicit information on research for this review requested information on collaborations with other universities and industries—a category many humanities chairs (myself included) left blank even though dozens of humanities faculty work with non-profit cultural institutions in the state—organizations we rarely think of as “industries.” The preliminary report of the AAAS Assessment Team offers little to humanities scholars: it speaks largely about research focused on local businesses, science, technology, and external funding. Mention of the statewide initiative on the Creative Economy, which would involve the humanities (as well as the arts), is absent, as are the humanities (areas like History and American & New England Studies) in reference to tourist initiatives.
Funded-research related to commercial enterprises is a model that excludes much work now being done by USM faculty in the humanities—a broad area of study that includes modern and classical languages, literature, history, philosophy, the history, criticism, and theory of the arts, as well as social sciences and environmental studies that use humanistic methods. Located outside this model, humanities scholarship becomes invisible. We have no new building that marks our presence on campus, no Center for the Humanities, no art gallery, concert hall, or theater to present our work. The USM webpage on Research states, “Research at USM includes a diverse array of topics and projects, spanning the social sciences, public policy, and education, to earth sciences, the life sciences, technology and information.” Where are the humanities here? There's information on the Research webpage on the new Abromson Community Center but nothing on the USM Library, Special Collections, or the Osher Map Library—the former an essential support for humanities scholars, the latter two actually have scholars affiliated with them.
In my cynical moments, I think that this marginalization of the humanities is part of a calculated plan to transform USM into a university that is singularly tied to regional industries and business needs. In my more rational moments, I see this as mirroring larger social and cultural values. I think about my own personal experiences—the perplexed and disappointed look on my father's face when I announced that I was going to major in American studies and not biology when I went to college, giving up the practical for the unpredictable and making him wonder if his smart daughter was as really as smart as he had thought. Since I am now an American studies scholar, I can understand his attitude as part of a larger cultural disdain for the idealistic and intellectual, and admiration for the practical, commercial, and entrepreneurial. This opposition has a long history in the United States: in the early twentieth century, cultural critics like Van Wyck Brooks and Waldo Frank personified these contrasting qualities in the Puritan and the Pioneer, while we witnessed these figures taking the stage yet again in recent politics—in the battle between the thoughtful, if not scholarly, New Englander John Kerry and the man of action, arguably the thought-less, Westerner George Bush. These contrasting types are also gendered—the former feminine, the latter masculine—a typology that shapes how the humanities and the sciences are viewed in our culture.
Such values account for the startling discrepancy between the budgets for the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities: $5.6 billion versus $138 million, respectively requested for fiscal year 2006. And here's the bigger picture: The NEH is the largest funder of the humanities in the US and only a small percentage of its budget is earmarked for individual scholars. There is just not the same kind of funding sources for humanities scholars. Humanities scholars moreover often work on topics that critique the economic and political powers in this country. What granting agency or industry, for example, would support the research that resulted in George Caffentzis's article, “No Blood for Oil: The Political Economy of the War on Iraq ”? It is crucial for colleges and universities to support such scholarship and serve as a kind of “commercial-free” zone, where diverse and controversial ideas can circulate and thrive. [As an art historian, I have seen how corporate sponsorship has shaped and limited the scholarship produced by art museums. In this context, college and university art museums and galleries have a critical role in providing space for art that is controversial, as witnessed here at USM in the recent exhibit, War Flowers , co-sponsored by Union of Maine Visual Artists and Peace Action Maine.]
USM faculty have had occasional success in securing NEH, Fulbright, and Guggenheim fellowships as well as grants from smaller foundations, but scarce funding means that much research in the humanities at USM is supported internally or self-supported. Faculty Senate Research Grants and the new CAS Research and Creativity Fund Grants provide this support, but many humanities faculty are doing research and publishing who are not funded or funded in small part only by USM. While humanities scholars usually don't need expensive specialized equipment, all require time, books, good libraries (and excellent library support staff—which thankfully we have at USM), and many need to travel to archives, libraries, and museums, in the US and across the globe. A commitment to research and scholarship requires careful planning and budgeting of personal resources, usually over many years, to move a project forward and bring it to publication. In the case of my own recently completed project on the artist Marsden Hartley, I received a Faculty Senate Grant for one part of my research and funds from the Provost's Office towards some publication costs, but most of the research and publication costs (travel to museums and archives in the US and Europe, photograph and copyright costs) were self-funded. (Happily, I am the Chancellor of the Exchequer in my household, so my husband remains unaware of the final tally of the costs of this project.)
The work that USM humanities scholars are doing is exceptional and extraordinary given these circumstances. They have published in the past 3 years or will soon publish books with Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, University of Delaware Press , University of Minnesota Press , Johns Hopkins University Press, Routledge, and many others. This work has local value and addresses regional needs, but it also helps USM build national and international recognition. Here are some examples of this work:
The initial report of AAAS comments that USM outreach and engagement with the Portland community does exist but is “below the radar screen.” This is very true of the work that humanities scholars are doing in the local community and the many ways that they bring their scholarship to local audiences. In partnership with the Maine Humanities Council, Kathleen Ashley, Diana Long, and Eve Raimon have conducted seminars on literature and medicine for health care workers, nurses, doctors, and administrators at Maine Medical Center and Mercy Hospital . Faculty like Deepika Marya have designed “Let's Talk about It” reading and discussion programs sponsored by Maine Humanities Council and offered by libraries throughout the state. Numerous faculty—Peter Aicher, Ardis Cameron, David Carey, Joseph Conforti, Matthew Edney, Kim Grant, Maureen Elgersman Lee, Kent Ryden, Adam Tuchinsky, Jeannine Uzzi, Kate Wininger, Jie Zhao, and myself—have worked with the Council in offering content-rich humanities seminars, often based on our own scholarship, to K-12 teachers in Maine; we have conducted seminars with dozens of teachers who, in turn, bring this scholarship to hundreds of students across the state. The research of humanities scholars have infiltrated the community in other ways: through Lorrayne Carroll and Ann Dean's literacy training in prisons and schools, and Bud McGrath's trade council briefings on the history and culture of Northern Ireland . And some of the research we engage in is even centered on the region—from Eve Raimon's editorial work for the Harriet Wilson project to Eileen Eagan's research for the Portland Women's History Trail. My ANES colleague Joe Conforti has edited a book Creating Portland: History and Place in Northern New England , with contributions by ANES and History Department faculty, to be published this fall by the University Press of New England.
Many of my humanities colleagues at USM are not focused on southern Maine , but produce scholarship that significantly contributes to cultures outside the US . Charlotte Rosenthal has resurrected the reputation of the turn-of-the-century Russian writer Anastasiia Verbitskaia; not only has she uncovered astonishing period documents (such as fan mail from officers in World War I) but her work will re-define the history of Russian literature of the period for Russian readers today. David Carey has recorded and analyzed the oral histories of the Mayan people in Guatamala—a history that he not only presents to other scholars in his field but gives back to the Mayan people in their own language. An expert on American Pragmatism, Bill Gavin was invited to serve as advisor for the Center for the Studies of John Dewey and American Philosophy at Fudan University in Shanghai , China . And Chris Holden is in the process of interviewing female survivors of the Ravensbrück concentration camp—critical work as witnesses of the Holocaust are dwindling in number and as we are reminded that racism and genocide are still with us.
These are the stories that need to be told, that need to be made visible, when administrators, faculty, and staff speak about and write about research at USM. Much of this work is now largely invisible—some of it because it's not commercial or externally funded, some because it does not seem to address “regional needs.” Scholarship in the humanities is essential to our society and culture—and both humanities scholars and university administrators need to be better about articulating its value. At a time when we are bombarded with information, when the media and politicians erase the past in their words and images, the humanities can foster “wisdom” and provide “context”—to paraphrase the mission statements of the NEH and Maine Humanities Council. My own family also taught me about the economic and personal power and value of language and literature, of the humanities—when my father, trained in a vocational school not a high school and unsure of his own skills as a writer, asked me (then age 13) to help him compose a short essay for a job application; and when my mother quit her job at age 50, mortgaged her house, and went to college to do something she always wanted to do, study literature. The importance of the humanities and research in the humanities—its cultural, personal, and even economic importance—must become more central to USM and its vision of research. It is central to enhancing “economic development and improved quality of life for the greater Portland area and for the citizens of Maine ”—to borrow language from the recent AAAS report. And maybe next year, when the invitation goes out to USM faculty for this reception, it will read “reception for Principal Investigators, Grant Recipients, and Project Scholars”—words that recognize the diversity of research at USM and that move the humanities from the margins to the center, from being invisible to visible.