The Scholar and the Public

This article is reprinted by permission from Hu­manities, Vol. 6, No. 3, June 1985.

Ed. Note: In celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the National Endowment for the Humanities, over the next year, we will be publishing articles on different aspects of the Endowment and its contri­butions to history and the humanities.

Until fairly recently, in generous historical terms, the question of why the “scholar” should involve himself with “public” would have been more or less incomprehensible. The humanist idea which emerged in the late Middle Ages posited an entirely public role for the scholar, whose function it was to define for his fellows the meaning of truth. Truth, that is, was a public rather than a private matter, the basis upon which every­ day life was to be organized. The models for such an idea were Erasmus and his fellow Renaissance humanists, but the idea survived until the nineteenth century.

For the most part, the modern scholarly professionals emerged in the latter part  of the nineteenth century. It was then that scholars organized themselves into profes­sional groups, established university-based training programs with general criteria of professional competence, and stratified themselves into hierarchies. It was also the era in which the modern research university emerged. The result, especially in the United States, was that the “gentleman scholar,” who was necessarily a more or less public figure, gave way to the professional scholar and, especially, the professor. By modern defini­tions, the task of the professor was to teach as much as he needed to in order to sustain his (and in this period it was always his) research, to publish his findings in order to inform fellow scholars, advance knowledge, and fur­ther his professional career. “Publish or per­ish” is the product of this turn-of-the-century period, and it established the modern profes­sorial paradigm: the scholar in the ivory tower who writes abstract books addressed only to other scholars, descending from the tower only occasionally to condescend to un­dergraduates. This picture has always been a caricature, but it certainly has represented a common view of scholarship and the teach­ing professions.

Of course, much has changed in American education since the turn of the century. The great educational expansion of the 1960s opened the doors of a wide variety of institu­tions of higher education to an incredibly broad range of students and faculty. When one looks across the spectrum, from community colleges to research universities, one sees that there is hardly an adequate generaliza­tion one can make any more about professors as “scholars.” There are really only tenuous links among teachers at such widely diverse institutions. The task of the teacher-profes­sor at a community college is necessarily (and appropriately) a much more directly public undertaking than that of the professor­-teacher at a major research university. Pro­fessional organizations, in fact, are struggling desperately to include those who are primari­ly teachers within their organizational juris­diction in order to maintain at least a facade of professional unity. The general public, however, tends to view professors as an un­differentiated whole. The “ivory tower” met­aphor is probably all too commonly accepted.

Surely it is the task of scholars to push their disciplines just as far as they can in the search for truth. As scholars have become more professionalized, of course, they have also become more specialized. It was only at the beginning of this century, after all, that vari­ous “social sciences” split apart, and we began to denominate ourselves historians, econo­mists, and sociologists. Likewise in the hu­manities, although there the disciplinary lines are somewhat older. Nevertheless, what has been typical of the last generation has been the internal differentiation of the disci­plines, so that specialists in American litera­ture distinguish themselves from experts in English literature, and scholars of family history distinguish themselves from writers of legal history. Specialization and new tech­niques make us even more isolated from one another as scholars and threaten to separate us radically from the general public. When scholars can barely understand colleagues at professional meetings, it is not surprising that we cannot communicate with our neigh­bors who are business people or profession­als in other fields. Privatization is part of the price we pay for progress.

But that does not mean that we have to ignore the traditional public function of the scholar. On the contrary, it means that the scholarly profession must make special effort to think of ways in which the professions and individual scholars can participate in public discourse in order to recover the traditional role of the humanist as a public figure, In the modern world it is even more important that scholars would undertake this task. The idea of the humanist is an ancient European idea, but it is significantly related to the very nature of republicanism. Republicans, after all, are committed to the notion that the strength of the body politic is dependent upon the virtue and knowledge of individual citizens, who define collectively what constitutes the public good. That is why general education is so critical in a republican society. That is why Brown v. Board of Education, a decision about equal educational opportunity, is the cornerstone of modern American constitutional law. As the society becomes larger, more fragmented, and more  privatized, it becomes more and more difficult to cultivate what individual learning and virtue in which republican citizenship ought to be founded. It is here that the scholar can play a special role.

Ironically, the modern media have done very little to facilitate the process of present­ing scholars and scholarship to the general public. Television has been a special disaster from this point of view. Unlike television in Europe, our own stations tend to deprecate “talking heads” and seldom use scholars in a creative fashion. Every once in a while, a humanist does something dazzling on televi­sion, and the public begins to perceive the vast benefits of the scholarly search for truth, but these moments are all too infrequent. Our television is geared to entertainment values. Breast-beating will not change this situation. It is up to the scholarly community to find other means of presenting itself to the public.

State councils for the humanities have played a very special role in this regard. Congress mandated that the state programs constitute a significant portion of NEH activ­ity because it believed, somehow, that hu­manists ought to relate to the public. For more than ten years now, the state commit­tees have been trying to work out ways in which this could be accomplished. I’ve been fortunate to have been involved in activities of this kind for a very long time. My initial contact came from the first of the city-based programs established to celebrate the Bicen­tennial of the Revolution: the American Is­sues Forum, Chicago Committee. I chaired this committee, composed of some twenty-five representatives of cultural institutions, ethnic organizations, religious groups and the like. It was a splendid introduction to the complexities of Chicago social organization, and an opportunity to oversee the effective use of money to encourage humanistic dis­cussion of the Revolution. I then moved to Princeton, and from 1979 to 1985, I served as a member of the New Jersey Committee for the Humanities. Here again, the commit­tee was broadly constituted, and it enabled me to learn a great deal about the social organization of the state to which I had just moved and introduced me to perspectives sometimes quite different from my own. Ad­ditionally, throughout my career, I have lec­tured, participated in panels, and worked with committees striving to bridge the gap between the scholar and the public.

. . . the scholar has a very real historical obligation to conceive of scholarship as broadly related to public needs

What are the benefits of such participation for the scholar? First, involvement with the leaders of the many groups that constitute a typical community and exposure to segments of the community that scholars all too seldom encounter on intimate terms. Second, the opportunity to learn to mediate cultural dis­cussion in the society, to determine what subjects are of broad social concern and to relate those to humanistic ideas. Third, to be able to experiment in the presentation of those ideas to audiences as diverse as stu­dents, the general public, senior citizens, prisoners, and a wide variety of ethnic, reli­gious and occupational groups. Fourth, to perceive how intelligent laypeople respond to humanistic ideas in public fora. For some of us, it is only in this way that we can test ideas that we are all too accustomed to com­municating only to our professional peers. It turns out that when we are forced to interact with nonprofessional audiences, we can frequently clarify and improve our ideas, Fifth, and in some ways most important, to repay the humanist debt to the public for the support that it provides the scholarly profes­sions.

I would not be honest, of course, if I did not also contend that there are benefits to the public. First, local communities are exposed to some of the most interesting people and some of the greatest ideas of our time. Second, the public is able to have meaningful links to professional intellectual life in ways that are  gratifying for many. Third, and most important, when public humanities programs work at their best, the traditional relationship of scholar and public is restored, and scholars begin to play their appropriate republican role—informing the public, and helping the public to make intelligent judg­ments.

I know that I cannot speak for all scholars. I can only say that I would think my career incomplete without the public contact that programs such as the NEH provide. I am happiest when I can both pursue my own rather narrow scholarly interests and try to relate those to a more general concern. For myself, I’m inclined to seek out research subjects that have some public pertinence, although I certainly do not believe that is at all the obligation of the humanist. I do think, however, that the scholar has a very real historical obligation to conceive of scholar­ship as broadly related to public needs, and to see his or her own role as that of both public and private scholars. Participation in public programs is therefore, potentially one of the highest expressions of humanism.