The Director's Desk

by W. Robert Connor

Visitors to the National Humanities Center, I have noticed over the years, often go away saying they were surprised in some way. Sometimes it is by the architecture of the building, or by the fact that we are a private and independent institution, not a federal agency. Some go away disappointed that we are not the Humane Society.

Even very well informed visitors often tell us that they had no idea that the Center does so much to strengthen teaching. (We devote about a sixth of our annual budget to improving instruction in schools and colleges around the country.) The goal in this part of our work is to improve our children's education by working directly with their teachers in seminars here at the Center and in classrooms in the schools themselves. The teachers and independent evaluators tell us that remarkable results are achieved when teachers renew their enthusiasm for the material they teach through close collegial collaboration with National Humanities Center scholars. More surprising, however, as Andrew Delbanco's essay points out, is that the benefits flow both ways. Our efforts help in the classroom, but they also help advance, sometimes in surprising ways, the scholarly work of our Fellows. Teaching and scholarship are not a zero sum game. They feed one another.

Our resident Fellows also tell us they were surprised by their year at the National Humanities Center. One recently wrote that three months at the Center could advance his scholarship more than three years at his home university. There are unexpected friendships and a forthright collegiality all too rare in academia today. What pleases me most, however, is when a Fellow reports, as Lilian Furst does in her conversation with Wayne Pond, that the fellowship at the Center helped her conceptualize her next book. That is one of the benefits of working in this challenging, interdisciplinary setting.

I hope you and all other readers of Ideas will find many pleasant surprises in this issue and in all your relationships with the National Humanities Center.

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