THE UNIVERSITY recently announced the formation of the Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures, which will be integrated as part of the College. The Institute was made possible by a $2.9 million Mellon Foundation grant, and it exhibits the University's new take on international scholarship involving the humanities. According to the Institute, it is time to "re-imagine [the University's] relation to the world in terms more befitting our global century."
This new University initiative has the potential to be a commendable one. As science and technology, business and education are becoming ever more globalized, the importance of spreading the humanities on an international scale cannot be underestimated. The world can certainly gain from the global diffusion and intermixing of different nations' cultures, languages, histories and values. But, as of now, the Institute's stated mission is ambiguous and makes it difficult to understand just how this new initiative will ultimately serve the University.
As the Institute's website explains, "Workshops, conferences, seminars and reading groups will generate innovative thinking in the humanities, and serve as laboratories for the creation of new common courses." The metaphor of "laboratories" acknowledges that the Institute aims for the experimentation and rigor of the sciences. This sounds appealing and reasonably ambitious. Yet reading further it is additionally stated that "the relation between the sciences, social sciences and the humanities will be a subject pursued as urgently as questions emerging within the traditional fields themselves." Here one must wonder if the Institute's mission is too broad and overreaching.
To be fair, the Institute was only recently created and has surely outlined a good plan of how it will foster intellectual growth. In its initial stages, though, it remains unclear how the Institute will promote this second goal of developing relations between the scientific and humanistic disciplines. Hopefully, the Institute will further define its goal by describing more thoroughly how it feels the humanities can enrich or investigate these other areas.
But perhaps this ambiguity is inherent to the nature of the humanities. Unlike math and science, the humanities are not as structured or clearly definable. Humanistic inquiries into language, art, literature or moral and theological beliefs do not adhere to universally accepted pedagogies that transcend cultural and national barriers. Therefore, the Institute may not be outlining very specific goals at this point because there are a multitude of ways in which the humanities can relate to different fields and cultures. Nevertheless, $2.9 million is a large sum of money, and the Institute still needs to prove that the grant would not be better spent elsewhere.
Moreover, although its website declares that the Institute "offers a vision at once local and global," it also needs to address how it will benefit the University. Hopefully the Institute's global aims do not overshadow its local ones, as it still has a greater responsibility to its faculty and students than it does to others around the globe.
The Institute shows its commitment to the domestic side of the humanities by striving to place the University at the forefront of two particular areas of study: "Environmental Humanities and Comparative Cultures of the Pre-Modern World." This is a welcome indication of how, specifically, the Institute will better the University's academics by making it a leader in two growing fields.\nOn the other hand, there is also the Institute's "Global Humanities Initiative," which will "assemble leading scholars to discuss the present state and future prospects of the humanities" via colloquia on six different continents. The way in which these international meetings will benefit the University is more questionable.
When Thomas Jefferson founded the University, he enlisted a majority of the original faculty from overseas so as to better educate students. This was in the hope of crafting a more perfect democracy, which Jefferson believed was founded on education. Thus, efforts to integrate the University globally were originally secondary to the effort to directly train students to better the nation's government.
Today, it remains to be seen whether meetings abroad will have immediate positive impacts on the University community. And if these discussions on the nature of the humanities do not benefit University students and faculty, then why should the University be tied to them? It is nice to publicize the University internationally, but hopefully the Institute will not sacrifice resources promoting global discussions when it should be teaching or bringing guest speakers to the University itself.
The Institute will be beneficial if it increases cultural awareness among University students through classes and other targeted methods. We will have to wait to see whether this will be the case, however, because of the present ambiguities in the Institute's stated missions.
Alex Yahanda's column appears Thursdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at a.yahanda@cavalierdaily.com.
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