Soon after the inauguration of George W. Bush a small group interested in the humanities met in Washington, D.C., to talk informally about the future of congressional support for a small but important agency of the federal government—the National Endowment for the Humanities.

I was invited to participate. Around a conference table we reflected on the good and bad times of the NEH under various administrations since its founding in 1965, the frequent shifts in funding priorities, and the persistent tension between federal support for research and teaching on the one hand and public programming on the other.

But we also recognized the sea change in the past thirty years: scholars in the humanities, those devoted to research and teaching, had increasingly incorporated public work in their activities—a new form of civic engagement that has contributed to American culture and has invigorated the academy as well.

While new faculty are still pressured to focus exclusively on teaching and research, tenured faculty are well positioned for public service. Each day, scholars of the humanities are involved in literally hundreds of public programs across the nation: forums, seminars, conferences, lectures, television and radio documentaries, museum exhibitions, or library reading and discussion programs. State humanities councils, through a combination of federal, state, and private funding, sponsor many of these projects.

Some of these endeavors are an extension of teaching: a conference room at a public library becomes a classroom. Such projects draw from a rich current of American history. Other projects address serious public issues, interests, and needs.

In the 1990 article Making Connections: The Humanities, Culture, and Community, Jim Quay and I identified this latter work as public service scholarship. All too often, we noted, the terms "scholarship" and "public humanities" stand in opposition, with scholarship considered to be private or academic humanities. This distinction collapses when scholars engage in particular public concerns. Often this involvement leads to fresh research and publications.

I encountered humanities of each type when I served on the Texas Council for the Humanities. From 1978–98, the Council funded some 1,600 public projects, awarding more than $10 million. Most projects reflected the first emphasis, with scholars teaching in the community. For example, in 1985 the McAllen International Museum in South Texas sponsored "Mexican Ceremonial and Festival Dance Masks." Scholars developed the project which included public lectures and a catalog. They traced the mask from its use by Indian peoples long before the sixteenth-century Spanish Conquest to the superimposition of Christian meanings onto the native traditions in subsequent centuries. Over 9,000 South Texans saw the exhibit, which then traveled to other Texas cities.

A three-day symposium in 1982, titled "Understanding Vietnam," characterizes the second kind of public humanities project, one that responds directly to public concerns, inviting scholars to engage in new areas of scholarship and thought. Sponsored by the Institute for the Humanities at Salado, a community north of Austin, this project was one of the first public programs nationally to break the terrible silence on the Vietnam War in the years following our painful withdrawal. Scholars and former officials of the Johnson administration, along with military leaders, joined with the public to assess the impact of the war on the soldiers and the nation. The symposium spurred publication of a collection of essays, Vietnam in Remission, and a subsequent symposium, "Understanding Evil," which explored multiple nightmares of modern history. The prominent scholars involved offered new and compelling insight on recent history and on the human experience. The project included a documentary film produced by Bill Moyers and a book of essays.

In the programs on Vietnam and on evil, scholars were not simply coming before public audiences to share their scholarship. Reciprocity between the public and the scholars dominated these programs, and the concerns, ideas, and values shared by the public influenced the subsequent work and scholarship of the participating scholars.

In both kinds of projects—those that disseminate the humanities and those that encourage reciprocity—we encounter the civic purposes of the humanities. In a powerful essay, The Humanities and the American Promise, historian Merrill Peterson notes that the mobilization of consent in a highly differentiated electorate, as well as the implementation of the popular will once it is determined, depends upon the quality of public debate and discussion. "Civic discourse," he says, "is the lifeblood of democratic government." Thus the public humanities promote the civic conversation necessary to sustain democracy.

What we don't know, however, is where we would be as a nation without the public humanities. What would happen if our libraries, museums, historical societies, service clubs, community reading groups, and colleges and universities stopped sponsoring public humanities programs?

One can argue that public humanities resist contemporary cultural and social tendencies that ultimately destroy democracy: excessive materialism, pronounced individualism, and abrasive ideology that strips our ability to compromise.

The public humanities have also profoundly changed colleges and universities, and there is renewed national interest in rediscovering the civic dimensions of higher education. Since the 1950s, national and state governments have increasingly turned to academia to develop technology, economic growth, and a skilled workforce. But as the twentieth century ended, scholars and higher education officials were recognizing that the pendulum had swung too far; the time had come to reconnect our institutions of higher education with community needs and national interests that go far beyond the quest for economic vitality.

After a quarter-century in the public humanities, I have returned to the academy and am able to witness the growing impact of this more expansive mission of higher education. Professional societies are now encouraging scholars to participate in public programs and encouraging academic administrators to take such involvement seriously when making promotion and tenure decisions. Locally, there is new discussion about how such activity should be evaluated. At my own campus, a faculty committee has been meeting this spring to review policies that determine how various professional activities, including community outreach, should be reviewed and weighted.

While many factors have contributed to the growing renewal of American higher education and a rediscovery of its civic role, the public humanities movement of the past thirty years is surely one of the most important. Academic administrators and faculty are now grappling with the moral purposes and societal obligations of their institutions beyond those of education, research, and technological innovations. Colleges and universities are strategically placed to expand America's social capital, to strengthen local civic infrastructures, to serve as centers for lively citizen debate and discussion, and to encourage more Americans to participate in finding solutions to our problems.

For me, the public humanities movement is about hope, about nourishing the unique human capacity to transcend immediate circumstances, individually and collectively. The late Konstantin Kolenda, a philosophy professor who taught at Rice University and served on the Board of Directors of the Texas Council for the Humanities, once noted that the humanities, while focused on the past, also inherently call us to imagine new futures. As such, the humanities in their public as well as academic manifestations are those activities of the mind that sustain faith in a meaningful universe and in the value of endeavors that lift the human spirit.

Works Cited
Veninga, James F. and Quay, James. Making Connections: The Humanities, Culture, and Community. New York: American Council of Learned Societies, Occasional Paper No. 11, 1990.