Playing Together in the Great Sandbox

Called St. Louis

 

Contributed by Dr. Gerald Early, Director of the Center for the Humanities and the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters, Washington University, St. Louis, MO
 

I have often asked myself, why can’t humanists pool their resources more effectively? Do we have some individualist streak that makes collaboration difficult? Humanities scholars typically are not collaborators. To be sure, humanists will circulate their work among colleagues and specialists to get feedback and criticism but they do not, as a rule, partner with other scholars to produce their work, in the way scientists and social scientists commonly do. The humanist scholar is a lone wolf who frequently disdains a collaborative culture. This is all beginning to change. With greater emphasis on interdisciplinary dialogue, humanities scholars are being compelled more and more to make common cause with their colleagues to do joint projects. This is very much to the good.

And so it is that humanities scholars are being compelled more and more, in order to get research dollars, to reach out to non-academic humanities organizations in the wider community as these organizations are finding themselves having to collaborate more with one another. In short, the humanities are discovering, in this age of shrinking public resources, that we must create a collaborative culture if we are to best serve the public and to earn the public’s support. Turf battles are becoming increasing expensive and destructive. Moreover, when we come together across disciplines and across institutions, bridging the divide between the university and non-university organizations, we can offer the public something richer and deeper, and revive and reinvent our own fields of inquiry.

In April, the Center for the Humanities at Washington University partnered with the Missouri Humanities Council and with the Center for the Humanities at the University of Missouri, St. Louis to present the first annual Celebrating the Humanities Day with Chicago businessman Richard Franke, founder of the Chicago Humanities Festival, as the main speaker. Can we have a humanities festival here in St. Louis with different arts and humanities organizations coming together under a single theme for a weekend or a week to showcase lectures and performances and to showcase our city and region as a place not only of culture but of mature collaboration? Of course we can. It does not take money. Most of it can be done with existing programming. It takes only leadership, vision, and a belief in ourselves as a city, in our magnitude of possibilities. A city is the humanities, a culture-making machine, the height of civilized life, where all good things flow.

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