Minutes of Open Planning Forum at "Thinking Public" Event, May 12, 2000 (Summary)
(external consultants: David Simpson, U. California, Davis, and Kathleen Woodward, U. Wisconsin, Milwaukee)

At this inaugural event of the Public Humanities Initiative, members of the U. California, Santa Barbara, English Dept. (faculty and graduate students) met with David Simpson and Kathleen Woodward to discuss long-range and immediate planning issues. The conversation proved to be very lively, and turned upon the following topics:

• Defining the Parameters of a "Public Humanities" Initiative. The planning group recognized that building a useful public humanities agenda requires thinking about the following basic issues:
  • Terminology. Much is at stake in the very rhetoric by which a "public humanities" initiative is conceived (and announced). What actually is the contemporary "humanities," for example, and is that understood by the general public, or even the university? Would it be better to name a public humanities initiative "public language," "public words," or "public discourse" (thus changing the focus from the disciplinary formations of the humanities to their point of contact with society and culture)?
  • Scope. Is the purpose of a public humanities initiative best served by expanding the focus to include the interaction of the academic humanities at large with society at large or, alternatively, concentrating the focus on the relation of a particular discipline or instance of the humanities (e.g., literature) to particular aspects of the public? (See also Strategies below)
  • Audience. How can a public humanities initiative in a research-level university engage members of the following publics in a genuine way: its students (including undergraduates), the educational community at other levels (community colleges and state universities), the "town" (both community leaders involved in university events and other classes and groups), and professionals in other sectors? One symptomatic issue: should public humanities events be held on or off campus? If they are situated off-campus, should they be in a patronized space (e.g., the house of a sponsor), a neutral space, or some combination?
  • Formats. Why should every event in the academic humanities choose its formats from the following limited palette: lecture, question-and-answer period, colloquium? What about using alternative formats to involve the public: e.g., debate, interview, memoir, field trip (e.g., to local businesses and governments), online "chat," TV or radio talk show, etc.? And should events in the public humanities initiative have a public "outcome" in the form of a publication, proposal, or other dissemination to both the academy and the public?
  • Media. How can a public humanities initiative make good use of existing and new media to publicize itself? How, that is, can the very concept of "publicity" or "public relations"—often dismissed by rote in the academy—be enriched in the context of new goals and new media to link the university to the public? While contemporary English departments, for instance, often think creatively about traditional media in the context of popular culture and the "society of spectacle," few use such media creatively (e.g., advertisements in local or national newspapers to solicit public input). Similarly, almost no academic humanities departments now use the new media of the Internet and Web to do more than broadcast their program descriptions, requirements, faculty, etc. This is despite the fact that the one-to-many "broadcast" model of communication is particularly suspect in the contemporary humanities and is even now rapidly being superseded by leveling, many-to-many models of communication (both legal and illegal) among undergraduates. How might the Web, MP3, and other new media be used creatively by the humanities?

• Topics. The following topics for public humanities events were suggested. It was also argued that a particularly interesting way to involve the "pubic" from the get-go would be to solicit feedback from various social sectors on which of these topics is most compelling:
  • "Guilt: Comparative Legitimation Crises." An event that assembles people from the academy, business, medicine, law, and other professions to discuss, as David Simpson phrased the question, "Why isn't what we are doing enough?" That is, why do each of the above-mentioned areas now feel the need to develop a public initiative (e.g., business, medical, or legal ethics; the new philanthropy of information-technology firms) that reaches out to a "public" beyond the public such areas already serve (e.g., the customer, the student)?
  • "Pleasure: Entertainment and the Humanities." Have the contemporary humanities, especially in its persona as "critique," too prematurely given up its franchise on pleasure and enjoyment? According to the Horatian dictim, for example, literature was once that which presumed both to "instruct" and to "delight." What is the relation between the humanities and the great entertainment industries of our times that now lay claim to delight (and often, as in Steven Speilberg's history-pieces, also to instruction)? An event on this theme would convene humanists in the academy with professionals from the entertainment industries in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara.
  • "Suffering: The Humanities and Advocacy." What is the future for the tradition of "critique" in the academic humanities and creative arts? How is that tradition being inflected by current political, social, economic, environmental, and other activist movements (as emblematized by the protests in Seattle and elsewhere against the World Trade Organization)? Or is the whole paradigm of critique obsolete in an age when business-as-usual believes in the built-in critique of capitalistic "creative destruction" (as Joseph Schumpeter put it), according to which each "new" innovation and each new dot.com IPO represents a radical critique of established power?
  • "Work: The Agon of Contemporary Knowledge Work." An increasingly large proportion of people are now employed in "knowledge work," and the proportion of such work bulks even larger when measured in stock-market valuations. The very concept of "knowledge work," of course, suggests a conflictual zone of overlap between the academy and the commercial sector. How do each of the above-mentioned topics—guilt, pleasure, suffering (and critique)—play out in the context of the contemporary meaning of "work"? An event on this theme would convene academics with professionals in other social sectors to discuss the twin themes of "knowledge" and "work."
  • "Santa Barbara Writers." Designed as a local instance of the public humanities, this event would convene a set of intersecting "publics" (students, community members) around such local best-selling authors as T.C. Boyle, Ross MacDonald, and Sue Grafton.

• Strategies. The planning group was equally attracted by the following two scenarios for implementing a pubic humanities initiative (see also Scope above):
• A broad agenda with multiple events focused on the above topics.
• A "one little project" strategy by which members of the U. California, Santa Barbara, English Department would volunteer time and resources to a particular pubic service project (e.g., a literacy program). "One little project" would be a demonstration of the public humanities in action.

• Conclusions. After discussion of the above issues, the following rough plan for a public humanities initiative was suggested:
  • Survey the resources and programs at U. California, Santa Barbara, that already contribute to "public humanities" under various titles.
  • Continue in Fall 2000 to think through the problem of "public humanities" at the scholarly level. Planned events: talk by John Guillory of New York U. and an in-house colloquium involving faculty at UCSB.
  • Mount in Spring 2000 a first, high-visibility event involving the public (see Topics above).
  • Create one event that investigates the possibility of adopting "one little project" (see above).
  • A further option: a reading group series.