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This question is inescapable. In the months before I started my sabbatical, neighbors, colleagues, and students would invariably invite me to explain my plans. And, since I’ve settled in here, the question inevitably emerges with each new social encounter.
So, what is a writing teacher doing in Paris? I have a range of short answers: why not Paris? To put a large body of water between me and my life as an administrator. To clear my head. Because I get more visitors here than I do in New Jersey.
But, these answers don’t really get to the heart of the matter. As an essayist, I need the distance; Paris holds archives of value to my wife’s research; my daughters get to spend a year immersed in another culture; every little piece of life is productively jostled.
Point of view changes everything: the aerial view of Voorhees Mall found on the cover of our magazine is not available when you are heading to class or your office or the library. At those times, there’s what’s in front of you and there are your thoughts about your destination. The shift in perspective reveals a pattern; there’s more than what’s ahead—the next appointment, the next paper to grade, the next phone call to make—there’s what’s going on in every direction; there are options.
This is what I have been working on over here; I am writing about how the essay can be used to make options visible. That’s one project. Another involves a collaboration with my friend Mark Sheridan-Rabideau, who has just joined the music faculty at the University of Wyoming, on social entrepreneurialism and the humanities. Mark and I have spent years talking about the fundamental changes that are taking place in the funding of higher education and we share a commitment to thinking about the value of the humanities in everyday life. We are exploring the overlap between creativity in the arts and the creativity of the entrepreneur, with an eye towards providing a practical guide for launching sustainable ventures that have, as their highest aim, not the generation of profit, but contributing to the social good. (By chance, I ended up with another example for this ongoing project as a result of the week I spent at the Connemara Center for Creative Arts and Natural History in County Galway, Ireland, on the way over to France. A labor of love, a vision, an effort to preserve and revivify the cultural heritage and the rural traditions of the Connemara region: Dearbhaill Standun and Charlie Troy’s Cnoc Suain is a testament to the ways that landscape, horizon, and worldview intersect with language, song, and story.) And, finally, Kurt Spellmeyer and I are preparing the third edition of The New Humanities Reader, which mostly requires, at this point, that we both indulge our love of reading to find ways to further improve our textbook.
This has been a milestone year for The New Humanities Reader: royalties from the sales of the textbook have now contributed more than $60,000 to fund initiatives in the writing program; these funds have supported advanced training for teachers, travel to conferences for graduate students, and the purchase of new equipment. And last year, quite by chance, we learned that Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, one of the books excerpted in The New Humanities Reader, was coming to campus to give a reading. Carolyn Williams and Rick H. Lee contacted the folks in charge of the event and volunteered their expertise in running the Writers at Rutgers Reading Series. What followed was something that Kurt and I have talked about for years, but could never quite manage to pull off: hundreds of first-year students got a chance to listen to and ask questions of an author whose work they, themselves, had read and written about with care. (Nafisi was featured in the recommended sequence for expository writing.) And Dr. Nafisi? She found herself speaking to an overflow crowd, with more than 750 people in attendance. One way to define the value of the humanities is as the endless flow of such evanescent events.
There are other projects, too, but the most important one involves the launch of the current capital campaign. I am co-chairing the Capital Campaign Faculty Advisory Roundtable with Carl Kirschner, who has served as the dean of Rutgers College since 1995. We are charged both with making certain that faculty have a strong voice in this campaign and with making certain that those faculty who are interested are provided with the resources to participate in the campaign productively. In the department, at this early stage, this has meant drafting numerous proposals that are to go in our “Book of Dreams.” This has been a valuable exercise, for it has given faculty the opportunity to put into words what they believe would help to bring about significant change in the department and at Rutgers more generally. And this, too, is another way to define the humanities, I would say, as training in the arts of imagining a better world.
I’m happy to talk about these projects at any time in August or thereafter upon my return. Just drop me a line; or, better yet, stop by.
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