ITHACA, N.Y. -- Two dozen scholars and academic administrators launched a new initiative in the humanities on campus with a round-table conversation, "The Humanities at Cornell and Beyond," in Sibley Hall May 9. Led by Provost Biddy Martin, the collective self-examination marked the latest effort at Cornell to address what some academics have framed as a "crisis in the humanities."

By session's end the alleged "crisis" had been downgraded to a set of questions and concerns, many of them solvable by raising the public profile of humanist scholarship and teaching on campus -- a process now under way. The consensus among participants: There isn't a crisis in the humanities per se -- at least at Cornell -- as much as there has been a general failure to effectively communicate the relevance of the humanities in the public sphere. 

"If there is a crisis, it is between us and the broader public in the way that we organize [and present] our knowledge," said Peter Uwe Hohendahl, the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of German and Comparative Literature and director of the Institute for German Cultural Studies. "In the last 30 years, we made great progress in terms of developing sophisticated theoretical knowledge that we just didn't have before in the humanities. But we paid a price: We have lost the common-sense touch with our broader audience. We have to pay attention to that gap."

That gap is closing at Cornell. The forum was organized with assistance from a newly established Office of Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, led by Linda Grace-Kobas, senior director (see sidebar), and resulted in: 

• a plan to organize a fall conference on academic freedom;
• new efforts to promote research and events in the humanities; and
• a direct request from Martin for a "list of the biggest constraints to getting research and teaching done" from the faculty members in attendance.

Martin convened the round table as part of her work on a 12-person steering committee formed by the Association of American Universities (AAU) and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). The committee is charged with helping to initiate and develop strategies that examine the role and status of the humanities. Mohsen Mostafavi, dean of the College of Architecture, Art and Planning, is Cornell's campus liaison to the AAU/ACLS planning committee. Peter Lepage, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, also was involved in the round table planning. All three participated in the discussion. 

Using the AAU's fall 2004 report "Reinvigorating the Humanities" as a point of departure, group members were asked to define the humanities and discuss why they mattered. The report, available at http://www.aau.edu/reports/report1.cfm, responds to concerns that the humanities and arts have lost ground to the sciences and pre-professional studies, that some humanities disciplines seem to lack direction and that work in the humanities is poorly understood by the public. It also highlights opportunities for new developments in humanities research and teaching. 

In establishing guidelines for discussion, Mostafavi emphasized the need to seek clarity and eschew complaint. "There's no point in us just complaining," he said. "We should be articulating our position in such a clear fashion, in such a precise manner, that it earns the support and respect of those outside our group." 

Martin also requested that speakers try to avoid debate that pits the humanities against the sciences.

"I hate to see the problems in the humanities framed over and over again … in relation to how well the sciences are doing when right now, intellectually and politically and historically, the problems are much more complicated than that," she said. "Confidence among the American public in science is, in itself, in a huge crisis at the moment. ... We need to be allied and aligned and joined at the hip with our scientists to the extent possible."

LePage also emphasized the need for finding common ground.

In casting for a definition of the humanities and why they matter, Alice Fulton, the Ann S. Bowers Professor of English, emphasized imagination and critical thinking. 

"As humanists we teach people to read … as a means of reaching places they've never related to -- places of difference and otherness," she said. "We teach them to read critically -- to describe, interpret and evaluate a text. And that sort of reading matters. So, when we ask that question: Why do the humanities matter? I think it's evident. It's bound up with reading and interpretation and evaluation."

Shawkat Toorawa, assistant professor of Arabic literature and Islamic studies, followed this line of reasoning, saying the job of the humanities is to "ask, 'What does it mean to be human?' And being human is in fact seeing, hearing, reading and telling, and these things are not always obvious. The humanities play a critical role … in teaching human beings how to be better participants in human society."

People also turn to the humanities, he said, to seek ways to solve human problems.

"The humanities are at a critical point right now … because of issues that are being raised in American society," said Susan Christopherson, professor of city and regional planning. "People are not going to turn to science to determine what it is to be human; they're going to turn to the humanities. They're going to turn to interpretation. They're going to turn to expression. They're going to turn to people who can tell stories about values and human life."

Maria Fernandez echoed comments by Lepage and Martin that humanists and scientists should be working together. "It is time to make alliances … to initiate risky conversations, because I think there is a lot of fear in facing the disciplines we are not familiar with," said Fernandez, assistant professor of history of art and archaeology.

Picking up on a strand of that notion, Michele Moody-Adams, newly appointed vice provost for undergraduate education and Hutchinson Professor of Ethics and Public Life, said: "There's a tension in the disciplines between people who see themselves as doing something that's purely humanistic and something that can be formalized … What we study as humanists [and] hope to have people think about are values, purposes and goals that can't be entirely understood in formal terms … When we offer an explanation, we don't think of it as something that involves reducing a complicated set of phenomena to some very simple law-like phenomenon."

Framing the humanities in terms of crisis was counterproductive for Tim Murray, professor of comparative literature and English. "I don't necessarily believe there is a crisis in the humanities. I think there's an opportunity … for rethinking networks and interfaces that I think invigorate what it is we've been doing all along."

Buzz Spector offered a working artist's take on why the humanities matter. "I am very much concerned with the artifacts of the humanities … they are all artifacts of human thought," said Spector, chairman of the Department of Art. "And when we examine these artifacts, we find the chief sort of pleasure therein to be recapitulating the thought that went into their making." 

Among those artifacts: books and other reading materials that will always play a central role in the humanities, said Sarah Thomas, giving a plug both for the humanities and Cornell's vaunted library system. "One of the things the humanities are able to do is provide a place for things that are at one time deemed insignificant or irrelevant or ephemeral or marginal so they can later be examined and reinterpreted, and that can inform what we're doing today," said Thomas, the Carl A. Kroch university librarian.

David Feldshuh addressed the issue of audience. "One question I had when reading this [AAU] report is: What audiences do we want to speak to and whether we are speaking to ourselves and our those of our ilk or whether we desire to speak more generally," said Feldshuh, artistic director of the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts. "I think everybody at this table has a passion, and I think the question is whether the humanities is conveying that passion, in the way it deserves to a wide enough audience to influence the stories that will ultimately affect us in a pragmatic way."

Susan Buck-Morss, professor of government, said she was "at a loss" when asked to "package her product" for presentation in a distance learning project. History professor Sandra Greene followed, saying the humanities are a tough sell in part because of the nature of modern society. "We're operating in a period in which the notion of deep thinking and analysis simply is not valued," said Green, chair of the Department of History. "The humanities are about encouraging people to step back and ask, 'What's really going on here?' How do you sell that? We need to be more articulate about what we do -- not only for our students but for the rest of society."

There was no question of audience for Martin Hatch, professor of music. "I can't think of the humanities in any other way than as in my role as a teacher … my immediate audience are the students," he said.

Jeffrey Rusten, professor of classics, said it was paradoxical that humanists as teachers would be disconnected from the "broader general public because every year we get to sample the outside world through our students." He said, "One of the questions we might want to ask ourselves is what do we seek to have happen to those students under our mentoring or guidance while they're here?"

In addressing the humanities at the institutional level, Amy Villarejo said reinvigorating the disciplines is an inside job. "A lot of the passion in the humanities comes from interdisciplinary conversations that have happened out of politicized programs and institutions that have evolved in the past 30 years," said Villarejo, associate professor of film studies. "It seems useful to think about what we can now make of these institutions, whether they're still useful and whether they should be reconfigured and how they can continue to energize the work that we're doing in the humanities." 

Dominic Boyer, assistant professor of anthropology, pointed out that presenting the work of the humanities for the general public requires a kind of "translation" that is often about "finding ways to communicate between our own expert languages within our departmental or interdisciplinary communities and the vernacular languages" in use outside the academy.