What is the role of humanities centers and institutes, and what can they do to spark change in graduate education? In this episode, we speak with our mentors, Dr. Barbara Mennel (UF CHPS) and Dr. Kelly Anne Brown (UCHRI), in a wide-ranging conversation about how humanities centers and institutes function as an incubator for intellectual and professional networks, hubs for experimental programming, and safe spaces for grad students. We discuss how underfunding the humanities might lead to a host of issues downstream, including space for cutting-edge scholarship. We also speak about distributed models of mentorship and how they can prepare students for multiple career paths.
Contact us at humanitiesunderreview@gmail.com
Episode Resources:
- Center for Humanities Centers and Institutes
- Federation of State Humanities Councils
- National Endowment for the Humanities
- National Humanities Alliance
- Wisdom, Maria. “Do You Really Need to Hire A Career Coach?” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 7 Apr. 2021
Episode Takeaways:
- “Humanities centers and Institutes can’t really reform graduate education, because they don’t do curricular development, they don’t make decisions about degrees. You know, they don’t do stipends. But then at the same time, they also have more freedom and programming and supporting graduate students, because they’re not bound by disciplinary expectations.”
- “This whole question of graduate education in the humanities is not just contained with graduate education. And I’m realizing that right now, even in my undergraduate classes, in terms of assignments, there was always this understanding that you teach a discipline, and you teach a discipline at all levels. And the question really becomes, what am I educating undergraduate students for? Am I educating them to go to graduate school? Or am I educating them for skills that they can use in a variety of positions?”
- “What if we just radically changed how we thought about the value of work, how it can be valued, what it contributes value to. So if we allow ourselves to engage with all sorts of work in the world, not just the professoriate, there may be the chance that we could see value in other things: in journalism, in healthcare, in the arts, in government. That’s why I think alumni tracking is important: it forces you to engage with these other fields, these other industries, but not just in the sense of getting a job, but what’s the work going on? And what needs to happen? What changes need to be effected? How are these industries affecting our world? Is it not the role of the humanities to be engaged in questions like that?”
- “I think one of the issues that’s not been talked about a lot is that tenure track positions are often not good positions anymore, either. So I have by now three graduate students who have tenure track positions that have a four/four or five/five teaching load. And so what’s happening to me lately is that I’m becoming more concerned with what is gonna happen with scholarship itself…. Graduate students are the force that is supposed to innovate disciplines. And if graduate students lose their passion and their self confidence, and their awareness of their importance, and stop taking risks, because they’re focused on the job market, or not actually doing the research, I’m really also concerned about scholarly stagnation, because it’s dissertations that are innovative that six years later, will be innovative books.”
- “Building a community is so important…So I’ve been able to make a community for myself and for hundreds of grad students through Humanists at Work, I think that’s the most important thing. And then two last pieces of advice, the first is to find your voice. I believe in hard work and rigorous scholarship. But I actually don’t think we all need to write in the same voice. And that’s something I also regret. If I were to do my dissertation over again, there are lots of things I would change, but I think the voice would change. And that’s just something that I’ve come into in an administrative role is finding a different voice. And the last thing, and this is especially to first gen scholars and scholars of color… is just to say that you belong, you belong there just as much as anyone else. And you have the right to ask for things and to not be afraid to ask whether it’s for knowledge, whether it’s for resources, whether it’s for access. That’s my advice, is to not be afraid to ask.”
- “There is, of course, a dark side to professionalization, right, it becomes a numbers game, people don’t really engage with the ideas as much as they feel they have to complete a certain number of publications, and it feeds into the expectations of the institutions for productivity. And so we’re kind of creating our own monsters. And, and that’s a really hard conflict, the same way that I talked about, you know, on one hand, overproduction of PhDs. But on the other hand, humanities departments are underfunded. And to kind of think about those two things together, I think, is really challenging.”