cc  Welcome.  I'm Sara Guyer and I'm the  director of the Center for the  Humanities here on campus.  I'm delighted to see you all  here this evening, and I myself  am absolutely delighted to be  here.  Before we get started let me say  that there will be a reception  immediately following, you're  all invited.  It's in the Lee Lounge, which I  think is the first door on the  right outside of this door.  So please join us following the  talk.  Today's lecture is part of the  "Focus on the Humanities"  series, which is sponsored by  the UW Center for the Humanities  and Institute for Research  in the Humanities.  This series showcases the work  of our most distinguished  humanities faculty and it is a  true honor to count our new  chancellor, Biddy Martin, among  these ranks.  I am thankful that she agreed to  speak in our series, and I have  to admit, I actually wrote to  invite her maybe the first hour  I had heard that she had been  announced as chancellor so if I  had waited maybe a day or a  week, we never would have gotten  her, so I'm really delighted  that she's here.  Before I introduce Chancellor  Martin, I would like to take a  moment to tell you a little bit  about the Center for the  Humanities. 

 And if you're just coming in,  please, there are seats in the  front, don't hesitate to come to  the front.  This Center for the Humanities  is the primary unit for  programming in the humanities on  the UW-Madison campus.  And it is our aim to stimulate  vibrant conversation and truly  interdisciplinary thinking  through lecture series,  workshops, seminars, and  symposia.  As well as programs that reach  beyond the campus to engage the  broader public.  Our events bring together  historians and philosophers,  anthropologists and literary  critics, but also engineers and  lawyers, curators and  psychologists.  All of us engage with  understanding and interpreting  varieties of human experience.  Please join our mailing list,  take copies of our brochure,  they're outside on the table,  and participate in our events,  most of which are open to all.  The center will also celebrate  its tenth anniversary next year,  and many other units in the  humanities on campus, including  the Institute for Research in  the Humanities, also will mark  key milestones.  In celebration of the past and  in anticipation of the future,  2009-2010 has been declared the  year of the humanities at  UW-Madison, so this is the  moment which will launch that.  Planning for the year already is  underway and will include the  creation of a geographic center  for the humanities on campus  when the university club becomes  our new home, as well as a  tremendous series of public  events, including chancellor's  lectures, which will bring  high-profile intellectuals to  campus, and ongoing colloquia  that will showcase the work of  our faculty and students. 

 We also will launch a new  strategic plan for the  humanities and a cutting-edge  website.  That's next year.  Today it is my deep pleasure to  introduce Chancellor Biddy  Martin.  Chancellor Martin began the  tenure at UW-Madison last fall.  Prior to returning to Madison  where she received her PhD, she  was assistant and associate  professor of German and Women's  Studies at Cornell University.  At Cornell she also served as  the chair of the department of  German studies, senior associate  dean in the college of Arts and  Sciences and provost.  Most of us have come to know  Chancellor Martin over the past  several months as an energetic,  creative, and astute leader.  The same energy is apparent in  her scholarly work, which  includes "Femininity: Play it  Straight," 1997 and "Women in  Modernity" in 1991.  More recently she co-edited a  collection of essays called "Do  the Humanities Have to be  Useful?"  2006 to which she also  contributed an especially honest  and even inspiring essay on the  value of poetry and language.  And I encourage you all to read  it, it's available as a pdf  online so go home and look it  up. 

 Chancellor Martin's books and  essays are attuned to the  complexity but also the wonder  of literature and life.  Her thinking works beyond  conventional and unconventional  oppositions and engages with  social, emotional, and aesthetic  questions.  While I will not take this time  to draw the lines between her  scholarship and her leadership,  I will say that the critical  attention manifest in Chancellor  Martin's scholarly work, which  also represents the very best  possibilities of the humanities,  is the same attention that we  have come to admire in her  campus leadership.  Please join me in welcoming  Chancellor Martin who will speak  this evening on humanities and  the public.  (applause)  >> Good afternoon, or  evening, I don't know which you  call it here, but in Ithaca this  would definitely be evening.  I really appreciate that  introduction, Sara, it's  certainly, I think the kindest  introduction I've ever received.  I'm really happy to be here.  It is true that Sara Guyer  caught me about an hour after I  accepted this job and asked me  if I would speak as part of this  series and at the time I forgot  momentarily what it's like to  prepare a talk for an audience  of humanists while trying to be  chancellor.  Actually, I didn't know because  I hadn't been chancellor, but  I'll tell you.  The one concern, well I have  many concerns but I won't reveal  them here, I will reveal one  concern I have. 

 And that is that some of my pet  peeves, which I'll talk a little  bit about this evening, may be  based more on my experience at  Cornell than the humanities in  general and therefore, might  feel less relevant to you than  they would otherwise.  So if that's the case just bear  with me.  That is, if you're willing.  So this, I consider to be just  the beginning of a discussion  with all of you about the  humanities.  It's not a definitive statement  of policy.  It's really a set of reflections  on the humanities and our public  relations challenges, again  without answer, but just a  provocation to think about what  I think some of our challenges  are.  And then maybe a discussion  about what we can do to address  them.  So I'll start with one of the  more visible humanists in the  country at the moment, and  that's Stanley Fish.  If you read Stanley Fish's  columns in the New York Times,  how many of you do?  Yes, of course.  Why wouldn't we?  Well if you read all of his  columns then you know that he's  recently announced that a new  book is about to appear, and  it's going to be the latest in a  long line of books by humanists  announcing the death of the  university. 

 And using the marginal position  of the humanities as a symptom  of the university's decline, or  as Bill Redding's called it,  ruins.  Now the book is not yet  available, I tried very hard to  get it so that I could read  about the death of the  university and the decline of  the humanities.  The author is Frank Donahue, but  I can only pre-order it.  Stanley Fish for those of you  who read the review will know  that he uses it to counterpoint  where he can express his  gratitude that his career ended  before the music died.  And along the way he reminds us  of what the music is or what it  ought to be or what it was in  his time as a professor.  And he says, in an interesting  formulation I think, somewhat  unlike his typical formulations,  he says, "Higher education,  properly understood, is  distinguished by the absence of  a direct and designed  relationship between its  activities and measurable  effects in the world."  Should I read that again?  All right.  He writes well, but this not a  particularly great formulation,  I think.  In any case, he says, "Higher  education, properly understood,  is distinguished by the absence  of a direct and designed  relationship between its  activities," the activities of  higher ed, "and measurable  effects in the world."  The reason it seems slightly  different from some of his other  formulations is that it seems  more cautious.  That higher education should be  distinguished by the absence of  direct and designed  relationships and measurable  effects.  It seems more careful than what  he sometimes seems to say when  he defines scholarship as a kind  of bulwark against the influence  of any reality other than  strictly defined disciplinary  legacies. 

 He opposes attempts on our part  to influence anything but  progress in our fields as if  that could be so easily divided  from effects on other things.  But I have not come here to bury  Stanley Fish.  There is much to like about his  intelligence and his analytical  powers and his writing.  There is much to like, I think,  in the fact that he has opened a  discussion of deconstruction in  the New York Times.  That he has brought his  knowledge of rhetoric to bear on  Obama's speeches.  And I have come instead, though,  to oppose the notion that the  humanities are not, and should  not, be useful.  A notion which I find useless.  Of course, the university's  relative autonomy and our  freedom to pursue our work free  of the designs and interests of  specific constituents outside of  the university are essential to  academic freedom and to what  makes the university unique.  They constitute our greatest  contribution to the world, in my  view.  Our freedom to pursue  unconditionally the questions  and the problems that arise for  us in our work does not,  however, preclude our engagement  with the important issues of our  day, or protect us from their  influence, whether we decide to  pursue them or not. 

 And in fact if there was ever a  time when the humanities or the  university as a whole were  cloistered, which is a term that  gets used in Fish's review of  Donahue, that cloistering itself  was of course the effect of  larger forces in culture and in  society and entailed a set of  exclusions that I don't think  many of us would take on board  today.  As Jacques Deridas reminds us in  his writing about the  university, the university  without conditions, or the  unconditional university, does  not exist.  And it cannot exist.  It's an important horizon for  our work as long as we remember  that it's a horizon not so much  of possibility as of  impossibility.  Deridas argues, interestingly, I  think, that the universal  structure of thought is  messianic.  It points always beyond itself  to the arrival of a future that  cannot be programmed, indeed  that cannot arrive.  But it's also our  responsibility, in addition, if  you like that language, or even  if you don't, in addition to our  sense of thought as messianic,  as pointing toward a future that  doesn't arrive, it's also our  responsibility to think and live  in the direction of the  realities of the present.  To understand their genealogies,  to reflect on them, to  understand them, and to  contribute to them.  To make what Deridas himself  would call binary decisions, in  the midst of them.  And as he might put it, it's  always important that our  thinking be capable both of  binary decisions, yes, no,  right, wrong, good, bad, now,  not now, but also that our  thinking be capable of  detachment from those binary  attachments and decisions. 

 So I'm not a fan of the notion  that the humanities should be an  enclave resistant to the impact  of the world around it, or  resistant to trying to influence  the world around it.  As far as I can tell, the great  American research universities  have never been cloisters.  In fact, they were founded,  established, as departures from  the elite sectarian colleges and  classical education itself.  They were designed to serve the  laboring classes by offering  instruction in agriculture and  mechanic arts.  That instruction was to be added  to classical studies of Greek,  Latin, rhetoric, philosophy,  literature, not to replace them  or be subordinated to them.  Every land-grant institution in  the country, including this one,  was founded in the late 19th  century, which is when Donahue  and Fish say our problems began.  That's when they were founded in  order to fulfill this mission.  I think the most interesting  universities today are those  where basic and applied research  have coexisted for a very long  time and where the boundaries  between them have been blurred  over and over and where the  boundaries have had to be  renegotiated.  Universities with students from  the widest range of backgrounds,  whose interests run the gamut  from German poetry to civil  engineering, African languages  to plant breeding, vet medicine  to Bedouin poetry.  Now, am I suggesting that the  increased reliance of these  great public research  universities on private funding,  including corporate sponsorship  for our research, poses no  problems?  Doesn't challenge us in any way,  doesn't require that we be  cautious about our relationship  to the outside?  No, I'm not suggesting that. 

 I think it's never been more  obvious in our lifetimes that  following the money without  guidance from ethical values is  disastrous.  All I'm suggesting is that it's  an abdication of our  responsibility to put up walls,  to make the humanities or the  university a separate enclave,  and refuse the task, or the  difficult task, of upholding  fundamental principles while  remaining an open system.  It would also be an abdication  in my view to refuse the  principled pragmatism that  allows us to find support for  our work where it exists, even  in the corporate world.  The principled pragmatism.  Scholars' interests are not  derived from closed systems or  cloistered legacies, they are  always inflected by the  challenges, questions, and  opportunities that the world  presents.  We approach social and cultural  realities as well as legacies by  subjecting them to thought, to  critical thought and analysis  that we then share with each  other, that we make public.  So I'm not a fan of the view  that the humanities is or should  be the last bastion of academic  integrity.  That is, I am a fan of the  notion that the humanities  should be  a bastion of integrity, but not  the construction of the  humanities of the last bastion  of integrity.  I think this view arises from  frustration and pessimism, but I  don't think it serves us well.  And there might be another view  abroad today, about the future  of the relationship between the  humanities and the public. 

 Some would say that Obama's  election has ushered in a new  day, not only for the sciences  and evidence-based work in  policy, but also for the objects  and subjects of our study in the  arts and humanities.  The importance of language, and  the pleasure in rhetoric, the  importance of thought that is  attentive to complexity, of  self-understandings that  celebrate hybridity or the  hodge-podge that we all are as a  people and individuals.  Not everyone shares that view,  but there's been quite a bit of  writing at least in the New York  Times and elsewhere about the  hope that we've entered a  period, politics aside, of  language, of caring about  language.  Andrew Delbanco's essay in the  forthcoming issue of the  "Chronicle for Higher Education"  suggests as much, at least in  the title.  I don't know how many of you  have read this one, it's called  "The New Day for Intellectuals."  Anybody read it?  Okay, well, I'm gonna talk about  it because it makes some points  that I like.  His essay is one that opens with  a quote from Nicholas Kristoff,  from the New York Times.  Nicholas Kristoff wrote, "The  second most astonishing thing  about Obama's election was the  fact that an open,  out-of-the-closet practicing  intellectual was selected by the  American voters."  Now, I'm not going to dwell on  the analogies, much as I would  like to say some things about  that.  But I'm going to go on.  So, an out-of-the-closet  practicing intellectual who has  gathered other intellectuals  around him and gained the  support of the American people  in the process.  So, how astonishing is this,  really?  Well, it's astonishing if you  take as a given that  anti-intellectualism is endemic  to American culture, that it's a  given. 

 But Delbanco refuses that.  He objects to that assumption  and, actually, I do, too.  He argues that the deeper  implications even of Richard  Hofstadter's  anti-intellectualism in American  life is not so much that  American's oscillate between  periods of anti- and  pro-intellectualism, but that  they tend to harbor  simultaneously, "an ingrained  distrust of eggheads and a  genuine yearning for  enlightenment and culture."  Both at the same time.  This particular take on the  issue leads Delbanco, rightly in  my view, to say that it would be  a new day for intellectuals only  if we accept the fact that the  public has a right to be  skeptical, even of those, or  maybe especially of those,  presumed to know.  That would be us.  And only if we work to earn the  public's support.  He says, "we have to respond to  the public demand for some  demonstrable utility in what we  teach.  Literature, history, philosophy,  the arts."  But in what terms do we  explain our utility, or  demonstrate it?  So he gives two standard answers  to this questions.  First, the nation needs a  liberally educated people if it  is to compete in the global  economy.  Well, he's very skeptical of  that one as I think he could be,  and he uses China as a reason to  be skeptical. 

 The second one he likes better.  If citizens are to participate  responsibly in a democratic  society, they require some  knowledge of history and a  capacity for critical thinking.  He likes that one, and says, "We  need informed citizens to think  about ethical questions."  But then he introduces a third  possible response to the  public's demand for utility.  And he says, "The humanities  deepens and enriches individual  experience.  It makes life worth living."  A slightly different take on  utility.  So in that sense it's prior,  actually, to its uses.  Its utility is prior to its  uses and prior even to its value  in producing informed citizens.  But perhaps the most articulate  challenge I've read recently is  the argument of our value to  democracy, which seems like the  least instrumental justification  for the humanities, offered by  many of us.  One of the most articulate  challenges comes from Don  Randall, the president of the  Mellon Foundation, in an essay  entitled "The Public Good:  Knowledge as the Foundation for  a Democratic society."  "And I like quoting Don Randall  because the Mellon Foundation is  one of the few foundations or  institutions left in the world  that supports fundamentally what  we in the humanities need:  graduate students, faculty  positions, and innovative  interdisciplinary work.  And without a lot of  requirements for justification,  beyond rational ones. 

 Randall seeks to explain what is  missing when we say that  knowledge is the foundation of a  democratic society.  Here's what he says.  "The narrow instrumental view of  knowledge that dominates our  thinking needs at a minimum to  be expanded or supported by  ideas and values about which we  may also reason and which may  even be thought useful, but  which are ultimately taken as  axiomatic.  By all means," he continues,  "let us strengthen the teaching  of and research in science and  mathematics at every level.  But the study of what makes  these undertakings truly  worthwhile, the study of the  values which support the  production of knowledge and its  proper application in society,  the study of, the contemplation  of, the exploration of what it  means to be human and why and  how we should work to organize  our lives in relation to one  another around the globe.  These are the domains of the  humanities and the arts."  And he ends by saying, "and  talk about underinvestment."  So, Randall here, essentially  does better what Delbanco is  trying to do which is to  distinguish the crassly  instrumental version of why the  humanities are useful from a  different kind of argument about  use.  I think we should talk a little  bit about investment and  under-investment in the  humanities, in those fields that  Randall says are about the  study, the contemplation, the  exploration of what it means to  be human.  Or what human has come to mean  and how.  So let me turn to some more  prosaic remarks about where  things stand, and specifically  to an article published in  "Dedalus" recently by Ron  Arenburg and Harriet Zuckerman.  I don't know how many of you  would have read this piece. 

 Anybody read it?  One person.  It's entitled "Recent Trends in  Funding for the Academic  Humanities and their  Implications."  So, very straightforward, and  I'll be paraphrasing, quoting  them liberally in order to give  you, essentially, a sense of  what they found.  So Arenburg and Zuckerman  present and analyze data on  investment in the humanities  between 1992 and 2003.  And they're interested,  basically, in major research  universities across the country.  They're trying to extend the  work that Darmes did in the  period between 1970 and 1995 and  they find the same trends that  he found about the earlier  period.  Between 1992 and 2003 federal  funding and foundation funding  both increased for the  humanities overall.  But these overall increases can  be misleading, because the  funding over these period,  though it increased overall,  decreased for the academic  humanities and increased for  what they call the public  humanities.  This is, of course, an  interesting distinction and says  everything about the problem we  face, I think.  So the public humanities, by  which they mean, collections,  museum collections, library  collections, public projects  such as NEH's We the People  project, these projects did get  increased funding and the  academic, so-called academic  humanities funding decreased.  Now, the culture wars,  obviously, and concerted  systematic and public attacks on  the humanities have taken their  toll, that's part of the story. 

 I don't think that's the entire  story.  I think the inability of the  public to understand what we do  and our failure as yet  successfully to translate it for  a larger public are also perhaps  a bigger part of the story.  But the culture wars are  certainly the crucial piece.  Now let's just review some of  the criticisms of the humanities  that we've heard over the past  couple of decades.  I think we hear them less now,  I'm going to imagine that the  culture wars really have waned  and that we're in a different  period.  Humanists were attacked for  challenging traditional canons,  of course, for transforming what  we could call our legacies, for  imagining different, more  inclusive futures.  Humanities scholars were  criticized for introducing  traditionally excluded authors,  artists, thinkers, but also  ideas, methodologies, histories.  At times, I would say, we seem  to be our own worst enemies in  the face of these criticisms.  When we took it to be our jobs  to reject the old rather than  perform rigorous analysis,  critique, and even affirmation  in relation to the legacies that  we had undertaken to change.  The humanities were also accused  of being inaccessible to the  broader public, even to the  broader public within our own  professions. 

 Heavily jargon-laden and  elitist, devoted to theoretical  paradigms that were closed off  to alternate views, closed off  to work in other disciplines,  closed off to anything that  might contradict the often very  beautiful but closed logic of  the theoretical system.  Critics also argue that  humanists have failed in our  responsibility to scrutinize our  own assumptions, and in the  process have let the work of  theory and critique become  doctrine.  I think that captures most of  the criticisms.  And my view is that some of the  criticisms are valid to some  extent, of some work.  The problem is that these  politically motivated attacks  made no effort, had no real  interest in distinguishing  between the really serious,  rigorous, and enormously  future-oriented hopeful work  done in the humanities, and the  work that might have had some of  the problems that they  identified.  How does is stand then, with  support, if we've been unable to  recruit or capture public  support.  Either as a consequence of the  culture wars in part, as a  consequence of the nature of  humanities for whatever series  of reasons.  Why don't we turn to Arenburg  and Zuckerman, who ask how  universities have handled the  burden of having the  responsibility to fund the  humanities shifted primarily to  them.  And so they look at funding of  the humanities at major research  universities and compare it to  other fields.  So I just want to give you a  little bit of what they've found  about the status of the  humanities in research  universities and then also  something of their comparisons  of private with public  universities and how the  humanities fare in each. 

 First of all, let me tell you  what measures they use, though  I'm not going to go over their  methodology in any detail.  But they used faculty salaries,  tenure-track faculty salaries,  the ability to attract jobs,  undergraduate enrollments,  graduate enrollments, PhD  produced as a proxy to some  degree of jobs available,  expenditures on academic  libraries and opportunities for  publication by university  presses, and then finally, the  looked at what they call  scholarly quality.  And by that they use the old --  rankings and the more up-to-date  US News rankings.  And they confess that this is  deeply problematic.  So first, salaries.  Comparing English to thirteen  other disciplines, now remember,  this is not Wisconsin, this is  nationally.  So comparing English to thirteen  other disciplines, they find  that English faculty have lower  salaries that faculty in the  sciences, engineering,  economics, and the professional  schools.  And that their salaries have  grown more slowly.  But they also emphasize that  English professors are not the  lowest paid.  Faculty in communications,  education, fine arts, and  library science make less than  faculty in English and  philosophy. 

 All these fields, they point  out, have a history of  comparatively low status within  the university and low  compensation in the non-academic  sector.  So there you have it.  The link between money and value  in the culture and hence, to the  extent the university is  increasingly market-driven, in  the university.  Remaining true to our core  missions given this increasing  market-driveness of universities  is a challenge, and costs have  climbed as a result of the kinds  of competition that arise from  market-driven sectors.  Surely we can and we should try  to have an effect on the impacts  of markets on the university but  only while we continue to  compete.  And accept responsibility for  navigating the contradictions in  a way that sustains the  preeminence of the university,  for the good of its public as  well as for our good.  Now, interestingly but not  surprisingly, the differences in  salaries in the humanities and  other disciplines are smaller at  public universities than they  are at privates.  Let me repeat that, just to make  sure you get the point.  The disparities, you got it?    All right.  I see that you're paying  attention to this section. 

 So.  The disparities are smaller at  the publics and also  interestingly as Arenburg and  Zuckerman write, it's not  scientists and engineers whose  salaries have grown the most, so  the opposition of sciences to  humanities is not where you need  to look.  It's faculty in business, law,  and economics.  Where faculties have grown the  most.  Okay.  So, despite what some might  predict, graduate student  enrollment in the humanities are  not down and the supply of  humanists is not declining  despite years of years of a  difficult job market as  Zuckerman and Arenburg point  out.  It may go down now, but it  hadn't over the period that they  studied.  They assume, of course, that the  availability of jobs depends to  some extent on undergraduate  enrollments and they find that  students interested in the  humanities "has neither been in  ascent nor in retreat.  The share of bachelor's degrees  in the humanities overall  between 1990 and 2004 increased  and then decreased and ended at  the same level it began."  Those granted in the arts  grew, but only barely, and then  the sciences grew only by 1%,  which surprised me.  So there've been no significant  changes in the distribution  across disciplines of  undergraduate majors. 

 Yeah, wow, right?  This leads them to ask whether  job opportunities have been  decreased if not by changes in  student enrollment then perhaps  by other trends, the hiring of  part-time faculty or  non-tenure-track faculty.  And then they write, "In fact  the distribution of full and  part-time faculty members  employed in various fields in  1992, 1998, and 2003 shifted  only be a few percentage points  over the decade."  They find evidence only for  small changes and conclude that  employment opportunities have  not worsened significantly in  the humanities across the  country.  Non-tenure-track faculty, they  find, are hired by and large by  virtue of needs in particular  fields and disciplines for  undergraduate teaching and the  increases have come in English,  Spanish, writing and  composition, economics, and  mathematics.  In short, the trend is certainly  not confined to the humanities,  it's not even necessarily most  serious in the humanities.  They also provide evidence about  the upward trend in PhD  placements in English and the  foreign languages since the late  90s, also interesting, the share  of new PhDs getting tenure-track  jobs at four-year institutions,  they write, has fluctuated but  has increased since the late  90s, and they say that they  could tell a similar story about  history as the one they're  telling about English and  foreign languages which is what  they have in mind when they talk  about PhD placements increasing  since the late 90s.  Then they get to the relative  quality of the humanities at  public and private institutions,  they talk also about graduate  student support not only as an  index of quality, but certainly,  it would be accurate to see it  as one support of quality in the  humanities.  And they acknowledge that  graduate student stipends are  higher in the sciences and  engineering as a reflection of  federal investments in graduate  study in the sciences and  engineering and that stipends  and support are better at  private universities than  publics.  They also suggest that many  public universities humanities  fields have started to reduce  the number of students and  therefore there will be  potentially a reduction in PhDs  in order to support those  students that we teach.  So then they talk about the  scholarly quality of the  programs and they're implicitly,  if not explicitly, asking the  question, is the relative lesser  funding at public universities  represented in lesser quality in  the humanities than at private  institutions?  And here's what they say.  The percent of public  universities ranked in the five,  ten, and 25 top-ranked programs  in five disciplines, economics,  English, history, mathematics,  and physics, shows some modest  slippage in the number of public  universities in English. 

 But no changes at all in history  departments, no deterioration in  the top five or top ten in math,  physics, or economics.  No deterioration at all in the  ranking of public universities  relative to privates in those  domains.  And they hypothesize that public  universities have been  protecting their major  departments and the quality of  those major departments in the  humanities and in other fields  in the face of shrinking  resources.  They also show no change in the  number of public university  libraries in the top ten, and  expenditures there are fewer in  the top 25 but not fewer in the  top ten.  So.  Undergraduate interest in the  humanities has not waned, and  the modest growth in PhDs  awarded, relative decline in  salaries that is compared to  other fields but not as  significant in the publics as in  the privates.  I smile when I say that.  Little change in the share of  full-time faculty members in the  United States and universities  who had jobs between 1992 and  2003.  Growth in the share of part-time  faculty but it's responsive to  enrollment pressures.  There is no evidence, they say,  that the humanities have been  targeted for larger budget  reductions or for downsizing. 

 Now does that surprise you?  Yeah.  Well, I've been gathering data  about the University of  Wisconsin-Madison.  And I don't have enough, nor  have I discussed this adequately  with Dean Sandford to talk about  it in any great detail, but what  I can tell you is that the  trends are similar.  That we reflect the national  picture.  It's true humanist salaries are  lower relative to a range of  disciplines here but not all.  PhDs relatively constant.  In L&S the losses of faculty  lines have certainly affected  the humanities, but not more and  not even as much as they've  affected some other disciplines.  As a percent of the total.  Steady increases in library  acquisitions, number of graduate  students, and PhDs produced  relatively constant.  The quality is certainly very  high. 

 I think we can all agree on  that.  And that reflects something of  what Zuckerman and Arenburg had  found.  The facilities here  are certainly  inferior to the newer facilities  for the sciences.  But not inferior to the  facilities for a number of other  fields and colleges.  The east campus gateway and the  east campus transformation  including the ridding of  ourselves of the humanities  building are-  (laughter)  I know  there are some people who oppose  getting rid of the humanities  building, but I'm not one of  them.  Those plans are made and  question of course, given the  economic downturn, will be the  pace at which we're able to do  the work.  But there will be no change in  direction.  We're committed to redoing the  east campus and giving the  humanities the kinds of space  that we deserve.  So the humanities, in  conclusion, suffer from the  failure to find eager patrons  from outside the university.  That's the words of Harriet  Zuckerman and Ron Arenburg. 

 The humanities suffer from the  failure to find eager patrons  from outside the university.  Again, they're showing that  universities have worked hard to  maintain their support of the  humanities over this very  difficult period.  But we are having a hard time  finding eager patrons outside  the university.  So, how to go forward?  That's, of course, my question  for you.  And of course it depends on the  sense that you're interested in  the question.  And that's why I thought I might  be speaking here to the choir,  because what has really  interested me since I arrived at  the University of  Wisconsin-Madison is the  interest on the part of the  faculty in the Wisconsin idea.  And in the notion that the  humanities ought to be not only  a marginal but a central part of  what we mean when we talk about  it.  But that makes it incumbent upon  us to think about how to present  and represent the value of the  humanities, which is why I  wanted to come and talk about  some of my pet peeves and also  some of the ways in which I  think the humanities can quite  beautifully be explained and  justified.  But here's a set of questions  about what I think might matter  in our quest to think about the  relationship between the  humanities and the necessity of  getting patrons outside the  university.  So here are the kinds of  questions I like to ask. 

 First of all, does the faculty  care about teaching?  And take our students as our  most immediate and actually our  most lasting public?  I think the answer here is yes.  There's a long history here in  the humanities of which I am a  beneficiary, of extraordinary  scholars who are also amazing  teachers.  I'm thinking of what I learned,  not just in content but from the  performative dimension of what a  George Mosse or an Elaine Marks  had to offer.  I believe from what I know that  this tradition of combining  outstanding scholarship and  productivity with devotion to  undergraduate teaching is still  alive here.  But there are questions we could  ask ourselves if we were  inclined, and had some resources  and some time, about how we're  organized.  Now perhaps I should step back  for a moment, I should say you.  Because I'm the chancellor.  I say we because when I talk  about the humanities I think of  myself as part of the we.  But you understand that I  understand that you have to be  interested in these questions,  too.  Faculty governance and all that. 

 (laughter)  Okay.  We could ask questions about how  we're organized, whether we're  meeting students where they are,  which really interests me.  Are we using their cultural  reference points and their  aesthetic tastes and their  preferred technologies and  media.  Not in order to affirm their  preferences and tastes, but as a  way of helping them learn to  appreciate the very different  experiences of media,  technologies, texts, that are  less familiar to them.  Do we begin where they are, or  not?  How else do we give them the  tools to think for themselves  and ensure that their preferred  media and means going forward  are going to be shaped by  critical thought and awareness  if we don't meet them, in part,  where they are?  Are we aware of, do we study the  paths that they mark out in  their trajectory through their  educations and across the  campus?  Because there's a lot of  innovation to be captured in  looking at what students  actually do.  What courses they take, what  they combine.  What they think is the  relationship between computer  science or information sciences  and English.  For example.  Are our classrooms and  pedagogies adequate for the many  ways in which students learn?  That's a set of questions about  students, our most immediate and  lasting public.  Do we adequately combine  disciplinary depth and quality  with openness to  interdisciplinary inquiry and  research and teaching?  Well again, I think the answer  here is clearly yes. 

 This is an extraordinary place.  I went to the web and studied  the number of departments,  programs, centers, and  institutes in the humanities  alone at the University of  Wisconsin-Madison.  Of course part of me was  thinking, talk about savings.  No, I wasn't really, I really  wasn't.  (laughter)  I'm kidding!  I wasn't doing that.  I wasn't doing that.  What I was doing, though, was  just taking note of the  remarkable combination of  disciplinary depth and  interdisciplinary innovation.  What I love about this place is  that we, you, teach more  languages, literatures, and  cultures than just about any of  our competitors.  And if that's not useful in the  world in which we live today, I  just don't know what is.  Another pet peeve of mine. 

 The interdisciplinary work in  environment and culture for  example, I find absolutely  captivating.  The importance to the state and  to the rest of the world and to  each individual one of us, of  understanding our relationship  to place and to the environment  cannot be overestimated.  How could that not be conceived  as useful?  How could the study of the  history, a field in which we  have enormous strengths, the  history of the workings and  practices of the world's many  forms of aesthetic and  intellectual expression not be  considered useful?  How could our critical and  deconstructive tools, yes I'll  use the word, those that permit  us to identify unwarranted  presuppositions in our own  efforts to understand these  forms of human expressions and  thought, how could they be  considered superfluous?  Third set of questions.  Is our work seriously engaged  with scientific and social  scientific discoveries about the  things that we care about?  And about reality, I use that  word, too.  Are we guilty of very  internally, highly internally  consistent theoretical paradigms  that admit of nothing that has  been discovered or proven in  other disciplines?  Just a question.  Does our definition of  collaboration extend beyond the  interdisciplinary to what Gordon  Gee, president of Ohio State  recently called the  trans-institutional and the  trans-national.  This is a very interesting  question.  How many of our centers,  institutes, departments, have  trans-institutional  collaborations at work?  Are we really trying to serve  the citizenry, not just of the  country but of the world by  working horizontally with other  institutions?  And, even more importantly, are  we working collaboratively with  people in other parts of the  world on some of the questions  that interest us here?  I think it's clear that  Wisconsin is far ahead of some  other places that I won't name  in its relationship to the  sciences, between the humanities  and the sciences, the project of  defining the human, the  genecology of the meanings we  attach to the human.  And the interest in the WID and  Muir projects, the  interdisciplinary work in the  environment.  All of these things are signs  that the answer to my question,  about this place, the answer to  my questions are good, strong,  yes. 

 Then I wonder, do we have the  beginnings of a focused  communications strategy that  would help us with our public  relations issues?  That would engage us in the work  of translation, that would allow  us more fully to engage with a  wider public, identify the value  of the humanities, also, in  places other than the  university.  Do we identify, recognize,  acknowledge, and celebrate good  thinking, good writing,  beautiful uses of language in  places other than the  university?  Well, we have to think of  ourselves as something other  than an enclave to do that.  The year of the humanities  that's now being planned, I  think, is a wonderful  opportunity and I hope that we  all use it well.  I'm really just urging us all to  abandon defensive and  Cassandra-like postures, which  is how I began this talk, and  instead to come out as  intellectuals with a purpose and  a use.  I'm urging you to go positive  and do what you do.  The world has never needed it  more.  The capacity to reason, to  reflect on the ethics of our  choices and our relationships  with one another, the  understanding of history and  cultural legacy, the  responsibility to affirm and  transform those legacies.  The world has never needed it  more.  The question of how we should  organize our relationships with  other human beings, across the  globe, to borrow the language  that Randall used.  Our relationships to the  environment. 

 Our relationships to ourselves.  It seems to me in a lot of the  theoretical work that went on in  the fields of the humanities in  which I participated what got  jettisoned in a lot of that work  was any notion of individuality.  We got to a form of social  constructionism, and Foucault,  and I contributed greatly to the  impact of Foucault in my little  tiny bit of the world.  But I think we took it to the  point where the notion of a  psyche that's anything other  than an effect of what we can  see in the social world, got  lost.  And the attention to  individuality, the relationship  to ourselves, the value of  awareness for ourselves and for  our students, more importantly,  seems to have gotten lost as one  of the great uses of the  humanities.  So, the difference between  proceeding robotically and  enacting what has been given us,  what we've inherited, versus  choosing on the basis of our  awareness and analysis, that's  the difference we have to work  with.  Stop casting ourselves as  marginal.  Stop casting ourselves as an  enclave and a lone voice in the  wilderness.  Read the books that announce  that the humanities is marginal  and that the university is at  its end.  Because there will be important  local analyses and critiques in  every one of those books that we  need to pay attention to. 

 I'm not saying the university  doesn't need criticism.  Lord knows it does.  But what I'm saying is let's not  construct the humanities as so  exclusively, and so  emphatically, as that critic.  Because what you do, I think,  the public has, not only the  capacity, but the desire to  appreciate, to go back to an  earlier point.  In all of my work at Cornell,  any opportunity we gave our  trustees or our alumni to hear  historians, literary critics,  anthropologists, teachers of  language, film critics, any  opportunity we gave them to hear  from those faculty completely  engaged them.  Completely engaged them.  I think we need to talk less  about what we do and why it's  valuable, and do what we do  that's of value.  But insure that we're actually  gaining access to a public that  I think will be more receptive  than we may have imagined.  And I take it to be a big part  of my job to ensure that you  have the opportunity and that  you have the resources and that  you have access to publics that  may feel completely  inaccessible.  And all I can say is that I  accept that responsibility with  pleasure knowing that I can only  do so much but hoping that I'll  be able to make some small  difference. 

 And now I accept the  responsibility to hear what you  have to say about all this and  to answer any questions you  might want to ask me.  Thanks.  (applause)