On the left is a photograph of the Old Bridge in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina
[On March 11, the Unit for Criticism and the IPRH hosted a panel on "Visions for the Future of the University of Illinois" featuring presentations by Hadi Esfahani, Peter Fritzsche, Feisal Mohamed, Lisa Rosenthal, Alexander Scheeline, and Ruth Watkins. Below are excerpts from Professor Fritzsche's contribution.]
Written by Peter Fritzsche (History)
My perspective is from the core campus and the humanities. It is important to underscore that the resources are here, the quality of faculty and research is unimpeachable, but these resources have been mismanaged so that the remarkable enthusiasm for Illinois and at Illinois nurtured in the 1990s is in jeopardy. There is obviously a huge money problem, but there is also a problem of what I think of as “readership” that hampers “leadership,”
The mismanagement has come in the form of a lack of recognition of core campus strengths. Overall, the humanities and social sciences are not recognized on this campus; the books and arguments of the faculty are not profiled and their role in the production of new knowledge is not widely understood by recent campus administrators.
The campus has huge resources in international studies, in the area studies centers, in our Title VI investments. These strengths add up to nationally and internationally recognized excellence which is woefully neglected by the campus, imperiling future federal investments.
The humanities and social sciences, which often play with big ideas about the origins of violence, the nature of belief, and the ramifications of genre can help the university make its arguments about excellence. It is extraordinary that these fields are not mobilized to represent the university in a more sustained manner—especially as we make our case to the state during a time of budgetary shortfalls.
There are not sufficient resources available to sustain grass-roots faculty initiatives. The Research Board is great and I am delighted that its funding has not been cut. This is the single most important program and it is a great credit to the University of Illinois not simply to fund the Research Board but to reap the benefits of the research it supports. However, at this point, after being “taxed,” many departments have no money to partner with faculty to provide intellectual programming for our students and colleagues. No ability to invite disciplinary visitors and maintain disciplinary academic programming. Cross-disciplinary initiatives are so underfunded so that only particular top-down initiatives can be put on. IPRH and the Unit for Criticism lack the funding to link up with faculty ideas that trickle up. This jeopardizes the academic environment at the University. Both units need more adequate resources to sustain more grass-roots programming.
Faculty excellence in teaching and research is not sufficiently rewarded through the low-cost expansion of teaching awards and teaching releases. Moreover, the cost of recognizing and showcasing faculty accomplishments on websites, university publicity, and university presentations of itself comes at no cost whatsoever, but failure to do so sends a dispiriting message to the humanities and social sciences.
The crucial transmission of knowledge to our students is imperiled by a drive toward economies of scale so that the time-tested model of teaching assistant sections in large lower-division courses–the model in history since the 1890s–is being de-legitimated by ill-considered initiatives in distance learning and by cost-cutting efforts to replace TAs with graders.
Recognition of excellence and research capacities are mocked by strange top-down initiatives such as Stewarding Excellence at Illinois which has all the signs of being completely tone-deaf to what really happens on campus, and the persistent drumbeat of IT and digital humanities as the next big thing. It is not. Recognition of excellence is also mocked by the cronyism that marred the chancellor’s office until this fall. And finally recognition of excellence is mocked by a fascination with what we don’t do and a disregard for what we do do, indeed by an actual disdain for “strength,” which, from my vantage point, characterized the provost’s office until recently.
What do the humanities do? They critically evaluate the cornerstones of the ways in which we understand the world. Why were people slaughtering each other in Yugoslavia less than twenty years ago? Was it economic hardship, religious feuds, memories of violence and victimization? Were the reasons contingent or structural, sticky or elastic? The answers to these questions were pertinent to the conduct of American foreign policy, which initially wrote off the violence as ancient and thus intractable.
The humanities evaluate just this sort of proposition through local ethnography and historical research and discourse and symbolic analysis. Humanities teachers then transmit questions to their students who have to figure out what is going on without recourse to the passive tense or the cliched phrase or the unsubstantiated argument about “human nature” or “instinct.” To do this evaluation, students need to read books, discuss them around seminar tables on which they have pulled out their books and can take notes–I have never taught a regular undergraduate seminar around a seminar table in my 23 years at UIUC, Professors then mark up the assigned essays and return them to the students who will try again in order to hone critical thinking. This IT is intellectual, not informational.
Concrete suggestions:
*more seminar rooms
*more TA rather than grader-supported classes and an emphasis on thought and method rather than information.
*the university has hired great faculty; resources are needed to support the faculty that are here, a problem identified long ago by Jesse Delia
*more recognition of the humanities and social sciences in the ways and means the university represents itself to itself, to students, to trustees. U of I faculty should be celebrated and enlisted more.
*more recognition of the demonstrable excellence in the humanities and the social sciences
*there need to be basic minimum fiscal resources in the departments (the real-existing disciplines) to sustain modest programming. These minimums should be immunized from college and campus taxation. Otherwise, graduate education grinds to a halt.
*more resources for cross-disciplinary initiatives specifically designed to allow faculty ideas to trickle up. It is great when the Unit organizes a conference; these initiatives need to be augmented by grass-roots ideas that the Unit and IPRH are in a position to consider funding.
*more effort on the part of cross-disciplinary initiatives to utilize and mobilize faculty strengths.
This is where faculty can do more: since the campus and departments are so big, we need to design byways to collide with each other more; we ignore each other too much. English, History, Anthropology etc. should be talking to each other more, and we need to fashion structures to make this interaction possible.
*why not provide more teaching awards to an excellent teaching faculty
*there should be a less parsimonious attitude toward teaching releases, which are good investments.
*why not provide more teaching awards to an excellent teaching faculty
*there should be a less parsimonious attitude toward teaching releases, which are good investments.
*there should be altogether less talk about IT to facilitate these goals, I recommend:
*more representation of core campus disciplines in search committees
*more faculty representation in the dean’s office
*a push to select insider candidates for president, chancellor, provost, IPS, and deans to restore political legitimacy on campus, promote recognition, and insure longer, more committed tenures on the part of senior administrators, who should be obligated to maintain at least one undergraduate class each year.
In my view, the tools are there, they need to be sharpened, not reinvented; the traditions of faculty co-management are there, they need to be revived; the excellence is at hand, it needs to be recognized, cherished, and supported The future is in the past. We don’t have to invent excellence, but to recognize and sustain it.