What I’ve Learned from Teaching in a Prison Agnieszka Tuszynska

The Education Justice Project brings UI faculty and graduate students together with  inmates at the Danville Correctional Facility, a state prison in Danville, Illinois in for-credit courses in a broad range of the humanities.  In just a few years,  the EJP prison classroom has become known on the UIUC campus as an inspiring and transformative place to teach.  In our latest “Humanities and Crisis”  post, Agnieska Tuszynska  considers her classroom experience there. 

Agnieszka Tuszynska is a Ph.D. Candidate in English. Her dissertation, “Strangers from Within, Strangers from Without: Negotiations And Uses of Space in African American and Immigrant Literatures and Cultures, 1900s-1950s,” presents a comparative study of American prose that poses spatiality as the main tool used by black and immigrant writers to represent the ethnic experience in the United States from the twenties to the fifties.

Last spring, I taught a course at the prison in Danville, Illinois,  titled “Race and Place in Twentieth-century American Fiction.”  During our last meeting of the semester, I asked each student to answer the question: “What have you learned from this class?” After giving me their answers, my students proceeded to turn the questioner into the questioned: “What have you learned?” they asked. I should have anticipated that and I should have prepared for it. But I hadn’t. And so I gave them the best answer I could master at the moment. I said: I regained the ability to be excited  about what I do as a teacher and a student. It was hardly an exhaustive response, or an answer that did justice to everything that the class and the students had taught me.  I should have told them that thanks to them I’d remembered that which the stress and pressure of writing a dissertation and looking for a job have caused me partially to forget: that the study of literature and culture matters and that it is thrilling.

This blog entry contains all the things I should have told my students that day—and didn’t.

I have come to see the lessons I took away from my class on the Danville campus,  as the prison is known among the members of Education Justice Project, as falling into two general categories. The first category involves what my students have taught me about the role of the humanities in higher education; the second category refers to the ways my Danville class has transformed my methodology as a teacher and a scholar.

The Role of the Humanities.

In recent years, much has been said and written about the jeopardized status of the humanities within the increasingly profit-oriented system of higher education. Many of us in the humanities departments have found ourselves bracing against budget cuts, an unfavorable academic job market, and other ominous signs of what some have called the death of the humanities. Additionally, and often more painfully, we often find it necessary to defend the relevance of what we do to our friends and family who question the wisdom of our career choices, and to our students who sometimes resent having to take English or philosophy classes that, they feel, have nothing to do with their business or engineering majors. On a few occasions, I have found myself explaining, even justifying, to various people—students and others—the humanities’ reason for being.

My involvement with EJP and especially the class I taught in the spring have given me a new level of assertiveness and self-confidence as a scholar and a teacher in the humanities. Here’s why: I have seen the study of literature, cultural artifacts, and historical documents bring the best intellectual and spiritual qualities out of a group of students in an environment many would consider actively hostile to the human spirit. In a place where daily life has dehumanizing effects,  I have seen rigorous textual study and meticulous critical analysis lead not just to insightful conclusions but to conclusions based on compassion and empathy for the human condition of others. Let me share a couple of illustrative examples.

One of the novels we read for our class is Nelson Algren’s Never Come Morning (1942),     a story of urban violence and street life. Featuring a male protagonist and written in what I’ve heard described as “masculine language,” the novel—I thought— was likely to stir my students’ identification with the tough existence that it depicted and that many of them would find all too familiar. For that reason, I considered my decision to teach the book a bit daring.  What I did not expect was that, apart from turning into a heated Foucauldian analysis of the novel’s urban geography, our discussion would focus to a large extent on the struggles of the story’s female character. I did not foresee that within the hyper-masculine culture of the prison, my students would make room for an extensive analysis of the social conditions that women faced during the Great Depression, or for relevant and deeply stirring personal narratives in which they compared the women in their own lives, and in their own neighborhoods, to the struggling female character of Algren’s novel. While I was right to expect my students would identify with the problems the novel highlights, I didn’t imagine I would witness them performing a feminist analysis of the text.

Another example I want to share here remains in my memory one of the highlights of my teaching experience. In preparation for  reading Pietro DiDonato’s  Christ in Concrete (1939)  a novel about immigrant experience in America, the students first read the United States Immigration Act of 1924.  During our discussion of the nativist views and discriminatory language of the act, one of the students—to everybody’s surprise—expressed his agreement with the rhetoric of the document and the exclusions it imposed. In subsequent class meetings, we focused on the ways DiDonato’s experimental writing style rendered the emotional and material impact that discrimination had on the lives of immigrants. At some point in the discussion, that same student spoke to make what he called a “confession.” He told us about the new understanding of the immigrant condition he had gained while reading the novel, dwelling on its language, and participating in class discussion. He spoke to me and his classmates of being alternatively moved to laughter and tears by the novel’s imagery and stream-of-consciousness. Given what some of our Danville students have called “their emotional hang-ups,” that couldn’t have been an easy confession to make. I was deeply moved by it.

This is how I know the humanities matter. The humanities matter because through the critical study of the human condition we discover what we have in common with one another despite our differences. They matter because they can not only make us learn something new about figurative language and the stream-of-consciousness technique, but also invite us to confront our prejudices and make an effort to interrogate them. They matter because a literature class can make prisoners feel—and I quote from one of my students–”that we are human beings, after all.”

New Methodology

My other lesson from the prison has made me rethink not just what it is that I as a teacher and student in the humanities do, but also how I do it.  Within the walls of the prison, I have gained a new understanding of and appreciation for the notion of intellectual freedom. I have learned that disciplinary conventions and formal requirements, while important and often necessary to know, can and should be bent, stretched, and transgressed when they stop being conducive to our passionate learning and  when our freedom to grow as thinkers is at stake.

To be sure, my students performed a number of tasks that one would expect to perform in a  literary fiction course: they wrote formal literary analysis papers, did close readings of the text orally and in writing, learned to identify the elements of fiction and the characteristics of literary realism and naturalism. Following my advice, they un-learned to read fast and instead acquired the habit of dwelling on words and delighting in them. They surprised me with their nuanced use of the figures of speech. For example, after a short lecture on the role of different kinds of spaces in human experience, I asked them to tell me of those spaces that had played a significant role in their lives. Painting one of the most beautiful images we’d encounter that whole semester,  one student contrasted the rough physical space of his “hood” with the safety of his mother’s arms. All this goes to show that the men in my class were very much on top of things when it came to tackling the literary.

But in their approaches to the novels, they also relied on varieties of experience and knowledge  that couldn’t be found in most literature textbooks. In their questions, written assignments, and discussions, they spontaneously and gracefully jumped over disciplinary fences, drawing on what they’d previously learned from courses in such fields as Islamic architecture, history of madness, or radical social and political movements. In listening to the different appointed student  discussion leaders each week, I heard them approach our class readings from a wide range of perspectives, including that of a preacher, an existential philosopher, and a political analyst. Although our class focused on fiction, in their explorations of the novels, my students roamed freely across literary genres. Once, one student greeted us all at the beginning of the class with a two page poem he’d written in response to one of the novels. Another student summarized our whole class in his final paper in the form of a 30-page play based on the semester’s readings and discussions.

My students’ commitment was not so much to the cultivation of the discipline or the field but to the cultivation of the thinker inside them. The enthusiasm with which they fostered their freedom to think and to share their thoughts –enthusiasm that couldn’t be contained within the boundaries of one field—brings to mind the German thinker, Max Weber, who —when once criticized by a fellow academic for writing outside his field, responded: “I’m not a donkey. And I don’t have a field.”

With so few of their liberties left to them, my students on the Danville campus hungrily exercised their intellectual freedom, within and outside the field specified by our course listing. Since the spring, I have made a promise to myself to encourage and carve out more room for such free intellectual exploration in my future classes. After Danville, I’ll never teach literature the same way again.

My Danville students also transformed me as a student. They made me consider the notion that perhaps I’m not a donkey either. The freshness of their perspectives rekindled the passion I had partially lost for my own dissertation research. Since the spring, that research has taken me on journeys I didn’t even fathom before. My methodology has expanded to encompass an exploration of Cook County Illinois Jail’s archives from the 1940s, and field trips to Chicago’s ethnic neighborhoods and cemeteries. What I find in those unlikely places uncovers whole new layers of meaning in the works of literature I study. I owe much of the joy and satisfaction it’s given me to my Danville students.

Having read my own words above, I’m surprised to discover what a self-centered narrative it is. “What I’ve learned” has somehow turned into “what I’ve gained/what I’ve taken away/ in what ways I have become a more confident and fulfilled scholar and person.” But perhaps this best illustrates the experience of teaching for EJP. When teaching on the Danville campus, you will give—and give your best—but that part will be expected. It’s what you’ll receive that will surprise you.

Identity Matters: Occupying the New Wisconsin by Anne Pryor

Our latest post is from Anne Pryor, a folklorist and ethnographer from the Wisconsin Arts Board who lives and works in Madison.  Here Anne considers the uses of identity — historical, playful , fictional  — in protest, to make claims of community.

Since February 2011, tens of thousands of Wisconsinites have been performing their discontent. Many have used ideas of identity to succinctly communicate their distress over political changes shepherded by Gov. Scott Walker. In protest signs and songs, in playful and serious tones, they have invoked Wisconsin symbols to connect with fellow Badgers.

The spark that ignited the Wisconsin uprising was the “Budget Repair Bill,” the main provisions of which would eliminate most collective bargaining rights for public employees and increase their pension and health insurance payments, allow cuts to Medicaid, and separate the flagship Madison campus from the rest of the University of Wisconsin system. The bill was the spark but how the proponents of these changes operated was the fuel for the fire of outrage. Many in the state perceived in the new political leadership a meanness of spirit and a lack of respect for others, something that doesn’t go over well in kindhearted Wisconsin. It signaled an abandonment of core Wisconsin values, leading to such comments as “I don’t recognize my state anymore” or “This is not the Wisconsin I grew up in.”

How to communicate with a dismissive opponent? One way is to invoke group identity. Folklorists have documented that this creative element is called into active duty especially during times of social stress. Performance of identity in such events as mass protests makes manifest understandings that often lie dormant, framing community bonds and delineating boundaries interpretively and reflexively.

In Wisconsin, this turn to identity took various forms during the winter protests. Some were focused on loss of identity, as in this first verse of the song “Bring Back Wisconsin to Me,” with lyrics adapted from “My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean” by musicians Lou and Peter Berryman.

Wisconsin whose motto was “Forward”

Was populist as it could be

But now the new motto is “Backward”

Oh bring back Wisconsin to me

A less playful statement of loss of identity were protest signs at the Capitol in Madison with renamings of Wisconsin to “Wisconistan,” a reference to the non-democratic nation of Afghanistan, or “Fitzwalkerstan,” combining the names of Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald and his brother, Assembly Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald, with Gov. Walker’s.  Another renaming was “Wississippi,” implying that Wisconsin was about to be more like Mississippi than itself.

Along with statements about loss of identity were others claiming identity. “Wisconsin Works Because We Do” summarized the idea that Wisconsin is a hard-working efficient state with a high quality of life thanks to public employees. Taking away collective bargaining rights was seen as a particular assault on “Wisconsiness” because of the state’s legacy, as Wisconsin was the first state to legislatively allow union representation for public workers and teachers (1959).

Drawing on the state’s history to establish protesters’ authenticity as the true Wisconsinites was one way of making claims of identity. The favorite historical figure employed for this was Robert La Follette. The symbolic hero of the protests, La Follette (1855-1925) was a Wisconsin governor, U.S. Senator, and 1924 presidential candidate, who, through his magnetic leadership at the turn of the 20^th century, led a coalition of labor and farmers against the lumber, railroad and mining barons that ran the Republican party and the state. Known as Fighting Bob, he represents clean government, social reform, progressive values, and independent thinking, all held to be Wisconsin values. His bust on the second floor of the Capitol became a shrine during the occupation and protests.

Protesters claimed even the most infamous Wisconsin politician as an object lesson in what happens when the state’s core values are ignored, as evidenced in the third verse of “Bring Back Wisconsin to Me”:

They’re trying to stifle our voices

They’re trying to keep us derailed

They’ll find it’s not easy to do though

McCarthy once tried and he failed.

Invoking identity means reinforcing group boundaries. A favorite manifestation of this was signs, shirts and sculptures that disowned Gov. Walker with the sentiment, “Walker is a weasel not a Badger.” Bucky Badger, the iconic mascot of the University of Wisconsin, was held up in other ways as well, as in the sentiment, “Bucky doesn’t bust unions.”

Reference to ideas that only a local would understand was another way of invoking group membership and identity. One sign drew on the in-group joke of border state rivalry through mock sympathy for the 14 state senators who fled Wisconsin into Illinois as a way to delay passage of the budget bill. “A weekend in Illinois can’t be fun.  Thanks Fab 14.”

As of late November 2011, the energy of the protests has transferred into a recall campaign against Gov. Walker. Activists are working to collect by January 17 the 540,208 signatures required to force a 2012 gubernatorial election. As they stand on sidewalks or outside their cars in the cold of early winter, there is little of the creative symbolic representations of discontent seen during the previous winter’s protests. Messages are completely straightforward now: “Sign Petition Here!”

Many in Wisconsin feel that the February 2011 uprising, especially with its two-week occupation of the Capitol building, helped to inspire the national Occupy movement. And just as could be observed in Wisconsin’s protest messaging, Occupy’s most successful statement, “We are the 99%” invokes group membership. Unlike the highly localized Wisconsin symbols of identity, “The 99%” is diffuse enough to translate readily across the country or globe. It succinctly calls for identification with a group and delineates boundaries between an ‘us’ and a ‘them.’ The myriad Occupy encampments across the country doubtless employ more localized symbols of identity as well.  I would enjoy reports and interpretations from readers of this blog of such identity matters.

Space Matters!

Our latest post is by Katie Walkiewicz,  currently an IPRH fellow and a graduate student in English at UIUC.  Following on Jim Barrett’s recent post on “Their Depression and Ours,” Katie takes up the Occupy Wall Street Movement , a movement, potentially, of the unemployed – the political development that turned the miseries of the 1930s into a movement for social change.   The “Occupy” movement is unfolding as we write, and Katie documents the ways it connects to the central humanities issues of space and place, memory and and the possibility of communication.  Occupy Wall Street New York seems to be a new development in the vernacular culture of protest — the use of private corporate spaces like Zuccotti Park to make lively arguments about the much weakened state of our public sphere.  I encourage readers to submit more documentation of  your local “Occupy” events and comment on Katie’s thought-provoking piece. Susan Davis

Early Tuesday morning, November 15,  Mayor Michael Bloomberg ordered the clearing of Zuccotti Park in New York City. As police officers dismantled tents and the park was cleaned, concern grew that this could be the beginning of the end for Occupy Wall Street.

As the Occupy Movement this fall and the protests in Wisconsin earlier in the spring have showed us, space matters. Throughout 2011, public dissatisfaction with privatization, wealth inequality, and persistent unemployment has continued to increase, and the responses have been deeply spatial.

When I visited Madison earlier this spring to protest in solidarity with public sector workers of Wisconsin, I was awestruck by reconfiguration of the seemingly inflexible space of the capital building—its austerity as a symbol of state power muted. The formality of marble floors and wrought iron banisters faded behind the notes to Governor Walker and children’s illustrations papering the walls of the first floor; alcoves were transformed into spaces for child care, sleeping, and a medic’s station. The sterile formality embedded in the architecture had been displaced by new uses for the space, and the sheer number of bodies inhabiting it. One had to look hard to notice the architectural detail hidden behind hundreds of people, their banners and signs, and the swell of noise from megaphones and drums echoing in the rotunda.

As someone academically invested in the study of space and power, I am partial to spatially-privileged readings, but I do not think it is a coincidence that the most prominent acts of collective resistance in recent U.S history have emphasized occupation, duration, and community building, standing on contrast to rallies of momentary spectacle. Instead, these protests have been more inclined toward an activism of lingering, as evidenced by the Occupy tent cities—forms of protest that are a qualitatively different form of expressing public dissatisfaction, as they privilege building relationships between individuals and promote a sense of more protracted visibility and stability.

In his IPRH blog post earlier this fall, Jim Barrett reminded us that we are not only in a moment of severe economic crisis, but one that limits the ways in which we, as individual citizens and 99 percenters, can respond. Unlike the 1930s, we live within “the ideological strangle hold of neo-liberalism.” In response to the diffusion of neo-liberalism, however, has grown a movement rooted in the material and the physical that anchors democratic resistance in shared spaces. Neo-liberalism has literally restricted and choked off access to public space over the past few decades. Even within this clasp, however, workers, students, activists, and disaffected citizens have shown that there is room for (a) movement, so long as we are willing to move our bodies into shared, physical space.

Despite my excitement at the current level of mass mobilization we see across the country, I can’t help but notice that the rhetoric surrounding claims to public space echoes that of white “Boomers” who occupied Native land in Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) appropriating the space for white settlement at the end of the nineteenth century. The emphasis on occupation and the use of the term “occupy” echoes, if only unintentionally, over 500 years of colonization of indigenous peoples in the hemisphere. It invokes a relationship to land that, in the present-day U.S., is deeply related to a spatially-driven history of oppression. Some local efforts, like the one in Albuquerque, have highlighted this problem by terming their movement “(Un)Occupy Albuquerque,” but the emphasis on spatial takeover we see in most places is not as sensitive to the history of violence associated with the term.  

In New York City the clearing of Zuccotti Park did not weaken the movement—if anything it reinvigorated protesters  as they reach the two-month anniversary of their original march through Lower Manhattan. For some, there is the sense that the physical space of Zuccotti is no longer necessary for the movement, that a network built on personal relationships fostered in the General Assemblies and smaller caucuses and the use of various social networking and new media sources has shifted organizing from a spatially-anchored model into a new form of protest.  What this will look like is still up in the air (rather than on the ground in the park). The movement’s objective has been to change the status quo in the U.S., which includes the occupation of areas and people outside the parameters of large urban centers. Perhaps the loss of Zuccotti Park as a highly symbolic but centralized space will ring in a new phase of protest that looks to the wider network of communities, neighborhoods, and rural and suburban spaces that are also touched by imperial and corporate occupations.

Katie Walkiewicz

Their Depression and Ours

Webster’s dictionary defines economic depression  as “low general economic activity marked by mass unemployment, deflation, a low level of investment” and decreasing use of resources.  Whether or not it’s time to use the D-word, with unemployment over 9% nationally by the limited, official standard and much higher if  discouraged workers and part-timers who can’t find full-time jobs are counted, the unemployment picture in the United States is starting to look, well, historic.

I asked James Barrett, a distinguished historian of working-class movements and American history at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, to place the current economic situation in the United States in the context of American social history.  Below,  Jim discusses “Their Depression and Ours,” comparing people’s responses to the crisis of the 1930s to what’s happening today. 

— Susan Davis

The current depression presents many people in the US and around the world with rather daunting prospects.  Conditions were much worse during the Great Depression of the thirties and workers faced the crisis with fewer resources at their disposal. Yet the prospects for creating social and economic change and solving the problems they faced were far better than they are today.

In the US, about one in three workers was completely unemployed and perhaps another third were working only part-time in the depths of Great Depression.  And if you are getting impatient with our slow recovery, consider the following:  With only a brief respite — produced, it seems, by New Deal spending and jobs programs — depression conditions persisted from around the end of 1929 through most of 1939 and abated only with the advent of war production. 

With private charity overwhelmed and the government continuing to follow a laissez-faire course until New Deal programs began to take hold in the mid-thirties, the unemployed were forced to rely on their own resources and creative collective self-activity.  Coal miners in the anthracite region, thrown out of work and faced with a cold winter without heat, set up “bootleg mining operations,” providing energy for their families and friends and marketing the pilfered coal on a small scale in Philadelphia and other cities.  Workers bartered their skills: An electrician turned your power back on for a basket of home-grown vegetables.

But the decade also saw spectacular organized social movements that transformed the social and economic character of the US.  By far the most impressive efforts were the unemployed movements that burgeoned in the early thirties and the industrial union movements of the late thirties.  The earliest and largest movement, organized by the Communist Party, was the Unemployment Councils of the USA which led resistance of evictions and demonstrations to demand new government policies.  Between such self-help actions, unemployed protests, and strikes and organized factory occupations by those workers still employed, private property was violated on a regular basis in the name of human needs. 

Today, while Jobs with Justice and other progressive organizations have staged demonstrations of the unemployed, by comparison with the thirties, we have seen little activity from above, in the form of systematic lobbying for relief and public works, or from below, in the form of marches on DC and the state capitals.  Likewise, despite valiant efforts among service, educational, and some manufacturing workers, we are seeing little of the sort of union organizing we saw in the thirties.

Where did the unemployed and other workers’ movements of the thirties come from and why are we not seeing something comparable today?

 First, we live in a remarkably different political environment.  The election of a relatively more progressive government in late 1932, which retained its grip on power for two decades, only increased the need for independent organization on the part of working people.  Without the organized unemployed movement and the powerful industrial unions, the meager welfare state measures of the depression might have been quickly dismantled in a conservative reaction.  Instead, these movements mobilized their members in the streets and voting booths and New Deal measures were preserved and modestly expanded during and after World War Two, creating a safety net for the unemployed and a modest redistribution of the nation’s resources toward its working-class families. 

While most would point to the strength of the political right today at both the state and federal levels, the biggest difference may be the lack of an organized left.  With no coherent alternative to severe reaction from the GOP and an endless parade of compromises from the Democrats, we have no coherent alternative vision and few organizers at the local level to win any such vision.  Most the leadership in the thirties came from the left and we simply don’t have that today.  Another dimension of this poverty of ideas and leadership stems from the decline of the labor movement over the past four decades.  In the thirties, the decrepit and conservative labor movement sprang to life in the very midst of the depression, but there is little sign of that today. 

Behind all this lethargy looms the ideological strangle hold of neo-liberalism.  The thirties certainly had its share of sclerotic free marketers, but they were drowned out by a chorus of voices ranging from the Democratic Party through the democratic left to revolutionary socialists of various stripes.  Today, a remarkable and seemingly groundless faith in the market has become a kind of civic religion. Our conviction that creative solutions to our problems are at best “impractical” and probably “impossible” robs too many of us of our creative instincts.

It would be good to think that the solutions to our current problems lie in our own hands, as they did in the thirties.  But it is difficult to see a way forward at the moment and the odds remain stacked against the sort of genuine democratic movements that heralded vital change in our last great depression.

Jim Barrett

History, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

New Theme: Humanities Respond to Crisis

Susan Davis

How could the theme for this year’s blog be anything other than crisis?

In a respite from the turbulent events of the spring, I was lucky enough to take nearly the whole summer away from headlines.   I lost myself in a manuscript, telling a life story that begins in the late 1910s and develops into adulthood in the 1930s: these were years of crisis, from the 1918 world influenza epidemic to the Great Depression.   My feeling of away-ness was punctuated by the giant rolling clouds of smoke from New Mexico wildfires, but it was only when the air became hard to breathe that I began checking the fire websites. Then I had the uncomfortable experience of moving quickly, even seamlessly, from crisis considered historically to the crisis of packing to leave.

A month later, coming back to the world of morning newspapers, Twitter and email, it’s hard not to feel a pervasive sense of turmoil.  If it is not a world economic slump we are in – perhaps that was last week – it could be we’re seeing our environmental undoing ;  if it is strange meteorology this week, it might be the weird political weather next.    Certainly, in the state universities, the realization  that we are still reeling from the effects of national and state economic problems is amplified by sharp rhetorical attacks on our teaching and research missions.

I find the headlines and Sunday  morning talk shows mostly  flat, unhelpful and ahistorical. It is as if everything is happening for the first time – today! –  and through no human action, but rather because of some cosmic force.  And yet the present situation has been gathering, in my view at least, for more than three decades.

As someone who lives too much in headlines, I find I  also have to rely on the work of writers and scholars, often in alternative media sources, to provide different versions and interpretations of reality – more accurate understandings of where we are now  – than the same old stories circulated in so much of the supposedly new news media.

So how could the theme for this year’s IPRH blog be anything other than “Humanities Respond to Crisis”?  As is appropriate to the current situation, we will define crisis very broadly, allowing that it has natural as well as man-made dimensions, acknowledging that it is local as well as national and global, and underscoring that it is unruly, in many ways irrational and certainly unpredictable.   And we’ll define humanities broadly, too.

I invite you to send me your blog posts and short articles that will help our readers see the dimensions of the crisis as it is being experienced.   In no particular order, we want to hear from artists, poets, labor journalists,  urbanists,  documentarists, historians, ethnographers, experimental educators  and others who would be willing to share with their work ways to listen to voices that aren’t often heard, to see beyond facile descriptions of this very tense world, in historical and comparative context.

Susan Davis, Professor of Communication at UIUC, is the IPRH blog editor for AY 2011-12.

The Place of the Humanities

Si monumentum requiris, circumspice

By Carol Symes

            There’s an image that never fails to move me.  I saw it for the first time in January of 2002, on my first visit to Urbana-Champaign:  I was a candidate for a job in the History department, and I was leafing through a brochure I’d been given.  The picture shows University Hall (now Foellinger Auditorium) in 1907, the year of its dedication.  Set apart from the boxy classroom and laboratory buildings that had originally formed the nucleus of the Illinois Industrial University, it rises against a backdrop of seemingly endless farmland, dwarfing the tiny observatory completed in 1896.

University Hall (now Foellinger Auditorium) in 1907

At the time, it would have been the largest and most stately building that many rural visitors had ever seen.  Indeed, it would have been visible on the traveler’s horizon for miles, and must have made a lasting impression on the aspiring students who approached the University for the first time on foot or on horseback, in loaded wagon or crowded train.  So must the pilgrims en route to Chartres have felt, when they first glimpsed the towers of the cathedral soaring above the plains of northern France.   For unlike the unobtainable spires of Christminster in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, our University was made for men with mud on their boots and dirt under their fingernails.  It was eventually made for women, too.   As a person whose own academic pedigree betrays a life of relative privilege and opportunity, I found this sight (and what it symbolized) intensely poignant.   These noble structures on the prairie, and the books and equipment inside them, had been both imagined and made real by far-sighted people with extraordinary patience, people who would never live to see these cornfields become a place for the humanities.

A view of Notre-Dame de Chartres from the south

The building of University Hall signaled that the Illinois Industrial University was finally growing into the new name it had acquired in 1885:  the University of Illinois.  It was also a sign that it was becoming what its founding president, John Milton Gregory (1822-1898), had envisioned during his years in office (1867-1880).  At a time when public funding and political support for the humanities seem to be at an all-time low, it’s worth recalling how extraordinary that vision was, and how unlikely.  The Morrill Act of 1862 had been championed by men like Jonathan Baldwin Turner (1805-1899), an abolitionist and missionary who wanted to ensure that the “industrial classes” had access to an appropriate education. Turner himself had studied the classics at Yale – actually, that’s all one really could study at an American university in the 1830s, that and Protestant theology – but this was not the education he advocated for workers in cities like Chicago.   The terms of the Morrill Act, accordingly, provided for

the endowment, support, and maintenance of at least one college [in each state] where the leading object shall be, without excluding other scientific and classical studies and including military tactics, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in such manner as the legislatures of the States may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life. (U.S. Code, 7.13.1 § 304)

So while the Act did not rule out the study of more esoteric subjects (“other scientific and classical studies”), it explicitly stated that practical knowledge of warfare, farming, and mechanics would be the “liberal and practical education” best suited to working-class citizens.

Yet Gregory, and many of his successors, clearly disagreed.  Perhaps they were familiar with the way the “liberal arts” had been redefined by the men who laid the intellectual foundations of the first universities in the early twelfth century.   In ancient Rome, studia liberalia denoted the leisured pursuits appropriate to men who were already free (liber):  in other words, classical education wasn’t itself an instrument of freedom, it was a commodity.  But for the young men-on-the-make who flocked to study with the iconoclastic Peter Alebard (1079-1142) at Paris or in the student-run law schools of Bologna or the new colleges of Oxford, the liberal arts were the path to freedom:  they were the means of acquiring the skills of analytical thinking, persuasive argument, and problem-solving that would liberate you from the slavery of ignorance and the tyranny of the status quo. They were also the skills that would get you a good job in the era’s commercial boomtowns, burgeoning bureaucracies, and competing courts.  So some of the boys who had been lucky enough to get an elementary education at the free grammar schools maintained by monasteries and cathedrals (those boys, that is, whose parents could spare them from the farm or the shop) could choose careers that rewarded more wide-ranging and more flexible skills.

Everything that we’re learning about the emerging global economy of our own world is that it will require workers capable of intellectual agility and cultural sensitivity. Moreover, technical innovations and their implementation by human beings are consistently shown to be the products of the intellectual creativity and collaboration fostered by a place for the humanities.  But the assumptions about prosperity and the public good that are being made right now – by state legislators, national governments, and myopic individuals – sound eerily similar to those that informed the Morrill Act.  Accordingly, “the practical education of the industrial classes” will once again be “such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts” and their 21^st-century equivalents, and of course “military tactics” This means subordinating education to the military-industrial complex, to the making of immediate profit, to conventional notions of utility – something that could arguably have been justified in 1862 but is far less defensible now.  Luckily, though, when this act was put into practice here in 1867, its blinkered definition of what a publication education could be was re-interpreted by Gregory and a host of other visionaries – like President Edmund J. James (1904-1920), who oversaw the enlargement of the library, the recruitment of world-class scholars, and the building of University Hall.  In the process, higher education in this country was transformed.  Established, elite colleges had to shake off their torpor in order to compete with the new land-grant institutions; much the same thing occurred in England, where the “red brick” universities of the industrial North soon put Oxbridge colleges to shame.  It was no longer enough for universities to be genteel seminaries or finishing schools; under the influence of places like Illinois, they became power-houses of productivity.

The problem, of course – then, as now – is that one cannot predict what will be produced in a place for the humanities, just as one can’t know for certain what will be profitable or practical in the future.  That’s a problem only for small minds, though.  Great ones know that if you build it, they will come.  No doubt President James took a lot of flak for spending $100,000 on University Hall (he’d initially asked the legislature for double that sum, and had to scale back plans accordingly).  A venue for lectures on art and social policy, poetry readings, theatre, concerts?  How can that possibly contribute to “the practical education of the industrial classes”?  He probably took some flak for the auditorium’s persistent echo, too.  Was he also able to take some credit when the Illinois physicist Floyd Watson pioneered the science of acoustics in order to deal with the issue?  (See F. R. Watson, “An Apparatus for Measuring Sound,” Physical Review, 30 [1910]:  471- 473).  The framers of the Morrill Act would have had no way of knowing that this sort of knowledge would be necessary, or useful:  they could not have foreseen the invention of the telephone, to which Watson also applied his findings, or a host of other technologies.  Would they even have recognized physics as “related to agriculture and the mechanic arts,” or would it have been a more dubious example of “other scientific studies”?  Luckily again, the humanists of Illinois left room for such discoveries.  President James even made the new physics laboratory a place worthy of the human beings inside it, not only a state-of-the-art facility for 1909, but a place of dignity and grandeur.

The new Laboratory of Physics in 1909, with faculty and staff (Floyd Watson is fifth from left:  back row, balding pate)

In 2011, as in 1867, there is no way of knowing what skills our students will need in five years’ time, never mind 25 or 30.  No career can be reliably built on the shifting sands of “practical education,” narrowly defined.  Instead, it needs to encompass not only “other scientific and classical studies” but  multiple literacies, sophisticated techniques of analysis and interpretation, and informed understanding of how contested ideas about the past constantly impact the present and shape the future.  This is the sort of education one can only get in a place where there is also a place for the humanities. 

President Gregory’s memorial, on the Quad:  “If you seek his monument, look about you”

Carol Symes is an Associate Professor of History and Theater at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her areas of expertise include medieval European history, cultural history, theater history, and the history of information media and communication technologies. Professor Symes is the author of A Common Stage: Theater and Public Life in Medieval Arras (2007).

The Place of the Humanities

A Kind of Usefulness

By Gabriel Solis

At the beginning of the Spring semester 2010, when the University of Illinois administration announced that all employees would take mandatory furlough days, I was interviewed by the News Gazette, our local paper. I took issue with the use of furloughs to address the university’s budget problems—in part because they seemed (and indeed were) fiscally insufficient, but more importantly because they suggested a theoretical discontinuity between teaching and research.  We were asked to do no work one weekday per month; but also to take the furloughs without a visible impact on our teaching. To explain why teaching and research are, at least ideally, inseparable for humanities faculty at a Research-1 university, such as ours—indeed, how they create a productive feedback loop—I told the story of how I wound up doing research into the music of Indigenous people of Australia and the southwestern Pacific. The story is a positive one, I think, and a tidy package.

In a nutshell: having finished my first book, on Thelonious Monk’s music and the history of jazz in the last quarter of the 20^th century, I needed some new, large research project. I could, certainly, have continued to investigate jazz and American music-culture—and in time I have—but I wanted to do something different first. My teaching has always revolved mainly around theory and method seminars in ethnomusicology and a large, 100-level, gen ed course on world music. While teaching those courses I had become interested in Aboriginal Australian music. My interest stemmed from a number of things, but most importantly the fact that in all the world, there was no place I had learned anything about where music and dance were accorded such importance. They were, as I read, a total social and cosmological fact. Music and dance encapsulate the creative power of the ancestral spirit beings who made the earth as we now know it, and they are a primary modality for managing land, law, and the structures of sociability. Over the past five years I have travelled regularly to Australia, doing fieldwork with Aboriginal communities in remote North Queensland and Sydney and have recently expanded my work in the area to include Papua New Guinea, doing research in collaboration with professors at the University of Goroka. In addition to writing about this material, I have begun teaching it, with good results. The students seem to enjoy it, it helps crystallize my understanding of the material—as teaching generally does—and it adds a distinctive feature to our course catalog.  It is, as far as I can tell, the only such course presently offered at an American university.

I expected some push-back from somewhere when the News-Gazette article was published—administration, tuition-paying students and parents, non-university folks—because, ultimately, I think we professors have it good.  Our jobs are neither arduous, dangerous, nor insecure, in comparison with many, and despite how it feels sometimes, we are well compensated for our labor, in the greater scheme of things.  We—I—have relatively little to complain about, and I imagined some would balk at what they might perceive as complaining—particularly unseemly, given the larger economic picture at the time.

I was surprised, though, to hear, on local talk radio, the morning the article was published, the only real objection to the piece was not to my general point (that furloughs were an inadequate response to the university’s very real financial straits, and that they fundamentally misconstrued the nature of academic labor); rather, the caller was shocked and appalled that the state of Illinois was wasting its money paying  someone like myself to research and teach about Australian Aboriginal music. What value, what use, what point, the caller wanted to know, could that possibly serve taxpayers, students, the state at large?

I do not know how best to argue the case for what I do, and for this research and teaching in particular. Given the recent publication of Academically Adrift, which suggests (among other things) that students in the humanities show more significant gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills over the course of their college years than students in many other programs, I might posit that regardless of the particular topic, students who learn about Aboriginal music and dance from me are better off for it because they have learned something about critical reading and have had feedback on their writing.  That is: whatever the topic, my classes and those of my colleagues in the humanities are potentially valuable for their educational process. But I am inclined to argue something further, that the specific work I do in Australia and the Pacific is of some real use, value, and meaning in the world and in the interconnecting worlds that make up the University of Illinois.  I am so inclined because I think we, humanists, choose topics for study not at random, but for good reasons; not always reasons that are easy to articulate, or even ones of which we are fully aware, perhaps, but good reasons nevertheless.

What might the specific value of studying indigenous music from literally the other side of the world be for the various constituencies served by a flagship land-grant university? I believe the opportunity to transition from the received exotica perpetuated in virtually every corner of Western popular culture about the Pacific—about indigenous people around the world—to a more informed view is fundamental to building a clear understanding of the world our students and we live in. It gives students—particularly those whose upbringing is typical of our students at the University of Illinois, middle-class, suburban—a vision of the world that is fundamentally different from the one they see in the 24-hour news cycle, read about in most media, hear about in casual conversation.

As Chickasaw nation scholar Jodi Byrd has said,

“As the twenty-first century faces looming economic and environmental disasters, along with territorial wars initiated by current and former superpowers, questions of living convivially at the expense of Indigenous peoples will continue to haunt us even as we strive to reorganise political structures in ways that are inclusive for all. Until the ongoing colonisations of Indigenous peoples around the world are recognised and redressed, the project of liberal democracy, no matter how inclusive it becomes, will remain a lost cause.”

This, to me, is one of the values of the humanities in the contemporary academy. Indigenous peoples of the southwestern Pacific may never command airtime in the U.S. media, but I will have done a small part to raise the subject.

Each of us studies something that, on the face of it, is obscure in its own way. In my own case that means giving students a new perspective on the histories that brought Western people into contact and in time relations of domination with Indigenous peoples. For another it may be studying little-remembered 17^th century English poets, and yet another it may be understanding changes in the idea of night in early modern German-speaking lands. We all do so—at least ideally—not to lose ourselves and our students in a world of our own, and not to fortify the walls of the ivory tower. Rather, the effect of our collective endeavor is to upend the everyday, to disclose the strangeness of received wisdom, to trouble the surface of experience, and to show the centrality of knowledge at the margins. I believe this is a kind of usefulness.

Gabriel Solis is an Associate Professor of Musicology and African American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Monk’s Music: Thelonious Monk and Jazz History in the Making (2007), and the author of the forthcoming book What Is He Building In There?: Tom Waits and Rock at the end of the ‘American Century,’ a project completed while he was a Faculty Fellow at the IPRH.  

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