The Director's Desk
by W. Robert Connor
Director, National Humanities Center
The Provost, a not undistinguished scientist at a not
undistinguished university, said as we sat down at the
dinner table, "When are you humanists going to stop shooting
yourselves in the foot?" With an opening gambit of this
sort, I thought, this will not be a dull evening. I resisted
the temptation to quibble about whether we humanists had one
collective foot or several individual feet. Instead, I
prepared for another discussion of the Kulturkampf. The
conversation turned out to be friendly enough. The Provost
was too well informed to assert, as some critics have, that
humanists have abandoned canonical authors in a rush to
construct a rainbow coalition of new and more acceptable
texts. Shakespeare lives, though he keeps rather different
company these days than a few years ago. That did not
trouble the good Provost. Nor did he claim that research in
the humanities was consuming energy that should have been
directed to teaching. As a good teacher and productive
scientist, he knew that research and teaching are not a zero
sum game. They can and should feed on one another, in the
humanities as in the natural sciences. I think he would be
willing to admit that as a society we are under investing in
humanistic scholarship with the result that teaching
suffers. I asked if departments in his own university had
been taken over by "tenured radicals," deconstructionists,
or shock troops imposing a reign of Political Correctness.
No, not really.
I never found out exactly what was bothering him, perhaps
because his feelings were a vague mixture of fears that the
humanities have not in recent years done a good job in
presenting themselves to the public, anxiety about the
epistemological claims made by some postmodernists, and a
suspicion that his colleagues in the humanities had given up
struggling with the Big Questions about the human condition
and were contenting themselves with the more manageable
agendas of their separate professions. There is pressure on
all those fronts, as anyone who has visited a university
recently knows. So I am glad the Provost is concerned about
the humanities.
Such considerations make it all the more important that
humanists, professional and amateur, themselves think
through their mission and be clear about it. That is one
reason we have the National Humanities Center and one reason
the Center publishes this journal. As you read through it,
you will see why we are sending a copy to my friend the
Provost. I hope he and all our readers will find it
reassuring to see for themselves the quality of work carried
forward at this Center and the persistent respect for
evidence and argument. An inquiring mind will enjoy
exploring these fresh approaches in the humanities. And, of
course, there is nothing like a good murder mystery,
especially when, as in the case Karen Halttunen
investigates, the darkest of crimes can be made to shed new
light. My friend the Provost will also see that humanistic
scholars are not turning their backs on the issues that
affect individuals and societies around the world and in our
American schools and cities. I hope once he has read Alvin
Kernan's brief report on a project concerning structural
change in the humanities, he will rush out to place an early
order for the book that will result from a project the
National Humanities Center has been able to help carry
forward.
Finally, he will surely be pleased that the heroic
couplet is alive and well at the National Humanities Center.
Nobody here is shooting it in any of its ten feet.
W. Robert Connor
Director
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Ideas is published twice a year. Editor: Jean Anne
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Copyright © 1996 by the National Humanities Center.
Comments to: lmorgan@ga.unc.edu
Revised: September 1996
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