Finding Futures for the Humanities across the Nation

The conference was both a reminder that we at EPCC and UTEP are not alone in our effort to strengthen pathways in the humanities between research universities and community colleges and a reminder of what makes our efforts in the borderland region distinctive.

EPCC was represented by six faculty members: Margie Nelson-Rodriguez and Brian Kirby, co-PIs on grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that funded the creation of The Humanities Collaborative at EPCC-UTEP and Associate Professors of English, Elizabeth Acosta (English), Crisol Escobedo (Philosophy), Yasmin Flores (Music), and Mauricio Rodriguez (English). UTEP was represented by PI Brian Yothers, a Professor of English, and Tom Schmid, also a Professor of English and the mentor who is leading the Collaborative’s burgeoning partnership with the Wordsworth Trust in the United Kingdom, Jose Leyva, a doctoral student in History, and Maria Schrock, a doctoral student in History who was recently hired full-time by EPCC, establishing a pattern of hiring of UTEP doctoral students at EPCC that we hope is the first of many such successes.

As the title of the conference indicated, an underlying assumption for the entire meeting was the idea that community colleges and the partnerships that they form with research universities in humanities disciplines are essential for the flourishing of the humanities in the years to come. A central theme, and perhaps the central theme for the conference, was the contribution that teaching makes to the flourishing of the humanities as a cluster of academic disciplines, and more importantly still, to the flourishing of human beings.

Two panels illustrated this emphasis on the act of teaching especially well: one on the first day at The Graduate Center, and one on the second at LaGuardia. In a highly interactive workshop led by Cathy Davidson, co-director of The Humanities Alliance at the CUNY Graduate Center and LaGuardia, and faculty from throughout the CUNY system, I was especially struck by the dedication that the faculty presenting and those participating in the audience showed to drawing all of their students in to the work of sharing and creating knowledge. The presentations emphasized the value of engaging students in shaping their classes, from getting students to participate in exam and syllabus design to ensuring that even students who might otherwise listen silently in a class where faculty have not explicitly ensured their contributions have the space to make their voices heard.

On the second day, serendipitously for my purposes as a faculty member in Texas, faculty from Austin Community College in Texas and Hostos Community College in the Bronx, along with several students from Hostos, discussed how assigning major humanistic texts in introductory college courses had enriched the experience of first year community college courses. Notably, faculty from both institutions shared that reading Plato and W.E.B. DuBois, among other major figures from philosophy, literature, and the history of science, provided students with a common body of material to discuss across class sections, thus building community for students at a particularly fraught time in their academic career. Meanwhile, they shared that a similar effect emerged among faculty, who had the chance to become students again themselves as they studied these foundational texts together in preparation for integrating them into their classrooms. The most powerful words of all came from Hostos College students who were in attendance and who emphasized that the humanities-infused curriculum had increased their sense of community and that, in W.E.B. DuBois’s words, they were glad to be taking classes that led them to “know the end and aim of that life which meat nourishes.”

The intersection of the arts and humanities was also crucial to the conference, as one of the best attended sessions (so well-attended that I was wait-listed to get into the session until the day before the conference!) was a performance and reflection by the cast members for LaGuardia Community College’s production of Sophocles’ play Electra. The cast of Electra was broadly representative of the college, in that it was multi-racial and multi-ethnic, and it included students from across Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Manhattan. One of the more stirring moments of the conference came when the woman who played Electra reflected eloquently on the vulnerability and power of the human body in the act of performing in a theatrical context, and another came when one of the men in the cast, in answer to the question of why a play from over 2000 years ago could still resonate among a cast of young women and men from the boroughs of New York City. He proclaimed, “Justice is of concern to us now.” Yet another stirring moment emerged when the actor who played Orestes plunged into a detailed description of the research that he had done into Greek thought and culture in preparation for his role.

During the conference, we learned about the humanities partnerships taking place at other institutions, including a superb graduate student mentoring project at the CUNY Humanities Alliance and an excellent undergraduate student mentoring project at Mesa Community College in California, and we have already begun to discuss strategies for incorporating their insights into our own work. We also realized that the work that we are doing here, with its strong emphasis on our location in the United States-Mexico Borderlands and its wide-ranging combinations of student and faculty research fellowships, community internships, and professionals-in-residence programming, can provide a model for other partnerships even as we continue to learn from partnerships elsewhere.   After a long day in sessions, I took a break to look out at the city from the Empire State Building, and it occurred to me that what I was seeing was an apt metaphor for the exciting work in the humanities across the country as revealed by the conference: an intricate and diverse design of light illuminating a future for the humanities that could belong to anyone with eyes to see. 

Written by Dr. Brian Yothers
Principal Investigator, The Humanities Collaborative at EPCC-UTEP