Stanford Today Edition: March/April, 1998 Section: News on Campus: Unwrapping the Humanities WWW: Unwrapping the Humanities
News on Campus
High-profile visitors will discuss the future of the arts and sciences
By Diane Manuel
"Acceptance letters have rolled in from around
the world:
Authors Isabel Allende, Svetlana Alpers and Umberto Eco, critics Harold
Bloom and Henry Louis Gates Jr., artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude,
playwrights Hélène Cixous and Wole Soyinka, philosopher
Jacques Derrida and architect Peter Eisenman all have agreed to
participate in the new Stanford Presidential Lectures and Symposia in
the Humanities and Arts.
Invited by President Gerhard Casper and supported by his office's discretionary funds, the high-profile visitors each will spend two or three days on campus, giving lectures and participating in discussions with faculty and students. The campus conversations will ask - and attempt to answer - fundamental questions about the state of humanities today and how various disciplines can best be strengthened in a university setting.
"This is the long-term payoff of a change of culture in the humanities at Stanford," Hans Gumbrecht, the Albert Guérard Professor of Literature and director of the series, says about the anticipation surrounding the 10 speakers who have accepted invitations to date.
"The old certainties in the humanities no longer exist and no new paradigms or set of answers have emerged," Gumbrecht adds. "So I think the experiment we are launching with the lecture and symposia series is very important. The humanities can win big but they can also lose big, and the fact that it is an experiment makes it very exciting."
Organizers hope the visits will spark discussions that will influence the shape of the humanities at the university and explore new and unpredictable directions of study. The Stanford Daily suggested that "perhaps Christo will do a project on campus or the architect Eisenman will inspire a new building in his style."
David Holloway, associate dean for the humanities, says that "after the intense debates about multiculturism, I think there's a sense that there is a new kind of thinking about the humanities and how they should develop. We've come out of a stringent period, as well, into one that seems to provide more economic opportunities."
Holloway, the Raymond A. Spruance Professor in International History and a specialist in international security and Soviet nuclear policy, says "the humanities have to do with the kind of society we live in, and a society that closes off the humanities, as the Soviet Union tried to do, is a society that loses a capacity to reflect upon itself." He adds, "The humanities also are one of the ways in which we try to understand not only our own culture but also the relationship between our culture and other cultures."
The lecture and symposia series is one of several new initiatives aimed at transforming the humanities at Stanford into a "more visible and dynamic participant in shaping, enriching and challenging the intellectual agenda across the university," Casper says.
In his annual state of the university address last fall, Casper announced that his office would provide $12 million to fund four new professorships in the arts and humanities. Endowed professorships typically are funded at $2 million, but Casper said the university wanted to attract top-ranked scholars to the new chairs.
"These professorships will enable the humanities departments to appoint the most distinguished scholars working in these fields today," Casper told the audience in Kresge Auditorium. "The opportunity to make such appointments should encourage departments to think ambitiously and imaginatively about ways to strengthen the humanities as a whole."
The new professorships and lecture and symposia series will coincide with the 50th anniversary of the School of Humanities and Sciences in the 1998-99 academic year. Faculty in the school were encouraged to submit proposals in January for symposia, conferences, performances and readings. The projects selected were scheduled to be announced in early February; they would receive funding of between $5,000 and $50,000 from the school.
Keith Baker, the J. E. Wallace Sterling Professor in Humanities and the Anthony P. Meier Family Professor in the Humanities and director of the center, said the conferences will explore the role of university literature and language departments.
Stanford libraries will support the humanities initiatives with a website that will provide information about events.When the Green Library renovations are complete, rooms will be available where scholars from various disciplines can gather.
Faculty from the arts, humanities, natural sciences, social sciences, engineering and the professional schools now are meeting to talk about how best to strengthen the humanities over the next two and a half years. The discussions were launched with a six-hour retreat at the Humanities Center in December to plan for the upcoming symposia.
Currently, the schedule for the symposia is as follows:
March 2: Christo and his partner, Jeanne-Claude. Best known for his monumental wrapping, tying and covering projects, the artist has wrapped a stretch of coastline in Sydney, stretched an orange Valley Curtain across a canyon in Rifle, Colo. and erected a 24-mile Running Fence in Northern California.
March 9: Peter Eisenman. An architect and professor of architecture at Cooper Union in New York City, Eisenman is considered an innovator in large-scale housing and urban design projects and has been honored for his social housing project at Checkpoint Charlie at the former Berlin Wall.
March 16: Hélène Cixous. An internationally respected feminist philosopher, theorist and playwright who is at the center of contemporary French thought, Cixous is the author of more than 40 volumes of literary criticism and theory, essays, novels, short fiction and plays.
May 18: Harold Bloom. The De Vane Professor of the Humanities at Yale University, Bloom is considered a leading critic of English and American literature. His A Map of Misreading applies critical techniques to close readings of poems by major poets from Milton and Wordsworth to Ammons and Ashbery, and Omens of Millennium examines such New Age issues as angels, prophetic dreams and near-death experiences. ST