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About

Public Humanities at MSU

Throughout its 150 year history as America’s premier land-grant university, Michigan State University has consistently viewed the campus-community boundary as a thriving intersection of opportunity, not a threshold separating town and gown. It is an ideal place at an ideal time to advance the public work of the arts, humanities, and design disciplines.

Boldness by Design

In her 2005 Sesquicentennial Address, MSU’s new president, Lou Anna K. Simon, reaffirmed our land grant bearings by asserting that “and” is the guiding conjunction in the syntax of MSU’s institutional vision for the 21st century. Her strategic blueprint—“Boldness by Design”—rededicates MSU to the values and practices of connectivity, inclusiveness, and quality across its land grant mission. A renewed commitment to connection and engagement demands that MSU’s outreach agenda be fully infused by the arts and humanities.

Robust solutions to challenges of the knowledge economy must be informed by our cultural legacies and through the cultural practices of artists and humanists committed to collaborative cultural undertakings, mutual problem solving, thoughtful questioning of the status quo, and the co-creation of public knowledge.

Following the strategic imperatives articulated in “Boldness by Design,” new efforts and investments are underway at MSU to energize arts and humanities teaching, scholarship, and programming as cultural work in the public interest. Those efforts include: the creation of an active Cultural Engagement Council; a grassroots and cross-college faculty initiative to convene a Public Humanities Collaborative; the designation of 2007-2008 as the Year of Arts and Culture; and the founding of a new Residential College in Arts and Humanities which is dedicated to liberal arts education, active learning, and intercultural engagement. These new networks, collaborations, and fora for public engagement are backed up by a long tradition of leadership and investment that have made the social contract an integral part of the university’s professional economy. With the addition of a National Center for the Study of University Engagement to the Office of University Outreach and Engagement, MSU offers the infrastructure, assessment capacity and expertise, intellectual reach, and a collegial climate to nurture and sustain strong campus-community partnerships in humanities, arts, and design.

A sampling of Michigan State University’s broad landscape of conjunctions sketched in below highlights its mission of putting cultural work in the public interest, and the arts of citizenship at the heart of American higher education.

Michigan State University’s centers of scholarship, outreach, and teaching cut across and integrate a broad institutional infrastructure devoted to our historical belief that the application of knowledge and education for democracy will lead to a better world.

Centers of Excellence

The Public Humanities Collaborative (PHC) was established in June 2005. The PHC currently includes over 200 faculty and graduate/undergraduate students from across the university in the creative and performing arts, humanities, social sciences, medicine and the life sciences, and communication arts and sciences. The PHC facilitates faculty and student efforts to engage in public work, enhances public understanding of liberal arts for democracy, and develops better ways to convey to undergraduates and their families the importance and relevance of the arts and humanities in every day public life. PHC faculty maintain strong connections with outside foundations, and many faculty have received national recognition for their teaching, public scholarship, and community work.

The Cultural Engagement Council (CEC) has been meeting monthly since February 2004 for the purpose of building strong connections between units and programs that contribute to the cultural life of the MSU campus and community. The core group includes directors of the MSU Museum, the MSU Art Museum, School of Music, and Wharton Center for Performing Arts. The CEC shares information on major initiatives in the planning stages, fosters interdisciplinary collaborations, creates innovative partnerships that enhance the university’s teaching and research capacity, and increases the visibility of MSU’s cultural resources.

Michigan State University’s innovative residential colleges draw top students to MSU. The Residential College in Arts and Humanities (RCAH) focuses on the arts, humanities, and intercultural awareness. A distinctive feature of this college is its commitment to engaged humanities. Welcoming its inaugural class of undergraduates in 2007, this new college provides students with challenging opportunities to learn through civic engagement and so understand the meaning and enduring value of the arts and humanities in public life.

All of these engagement efforts have been bolstered by the establishment of MSU’s National Center for the Study of University Engagement (NCSUE).  This energetic center is a culmination of over 15 years of work in defining engagement as scholarly work of the faculty to be rewarded and acclaimed, in creating tools and identifying indicators and measures for planning and evaluating quality outreach, in revamping the promotion and tenure guidelines to incorporate outreach and engagement across the missions of the university, and in developing a means for reporting faculty work quantitatively and qualitatively through an annual online survey.

Other centers of excellence include the Writing in Digital Environments (WIDE) Research Center.  WIDE positions Michigan State University at the leading edge of exploring the implications of advanced information technologies for writing, narrative practices, and interpersonal dynamics between writers and readers. WIDE understands itself as a community-based research center, and therefore many of its projects are concerned with engaging communities in processes of inquiry that work toward community development and change.

The Center for Ethics and Humanities in the Life Sciences (CEHLS) uses the interdisciplinary resources of ethics and the humanities to support reflective practice in health care and in science. Community outreach is at the core of the Center’s commitments. Its public service activities—workshops, public speaking, advising or consulting—are varied, chosen in part for their contribution to teaching and integrative scholarship, but also for their usefulness to practicing health care professionals and researchers. These involvements help Center faculty understand the institutions about which they teach and write, and help them develop fruitful working relationships with practitioners.  Through its Medical Humanities Report and writing and research projects, the CEHLS seeks to deepen the level of public, democratic deliberation about health and science policy.  

Another of MSU’s signature humanities institutions is MATRIX: The Center for Humane Arts, Letters, and Social Sciences Online, the leading humanities technology center in the country. MATRIX’s mission is to bring together the humanists' inquiry into thought, expression, and behavior with advanced information technology tools. MATRIX has facilitated, for example, the development of groundbreaking digital libraries and the delivery of arts and humanities content for distribution on the Web.

Engaged Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University is a cross-campus and interdisciplinary enterprise. The Knight Center for Environmental Journalism in the College of Communication Arts and Sciences, for example, trains student and professional journalists to cover the environment. The Center offers classes and professional workshops and coordinates faculty research. Significantly, the Center also maintains the Meeman Archives, a collection of more than 1,500 outstanding environmental journalism articles from the past 20 years. The Knight Center also maintains strong relationships with natural science programs and is a major factor in creating spaces for public engagement with respect to environmental issues, both in the U.S. and internationally.

Michigan State University continues to build strong campus-community partnerships in arts, humanities, and design. These partnerships are diverse and integrative. New efforts are underway in the College of Arts and Letters and in cultural programming campus-wide to enrich community, economic, and family life locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally.

Campus-Community Partnerships

The Michigan State University Museum (MSUM), a Smithsonian Affiliate, has a strong reputation for collaboratively developed, scholarly based exhibitions and programs that broaden academic attention and general public appreciation of the artistic contributions of minority communities. MSUM is consistently acknowledged by its peers as a leader in implementing such education programs.

The MSU Museum is home, for example, to the Michigan Traditional Arts Program (MTAP), a national leader in developing and implementing programs to advance cross-cultural understanding. Other statewide humanities-in-education programs include FOLKPATTERNS and the Michigan Rural Arts and Culture Program. The MSUM, in partnership with the City of East Lansing and the Center for Great Lakes Culture, initiated the award-winning annual Great Lakes Folk Festival, a unique fusion of arts fair, music festival, county fair, multi-ethnic festival, hands-on activity workshops, and celebration of cultural heritage.  The MSU Museum is also involved in two new and exciting campus-community partnerships with the Smithsonian Institution's Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage.  One of them, Carriers of Culture: Living Native Basket Traditions, focuses on weaving traditions in Hawaii and North America and examines the ways in which baskets and their makers are—literally and symbolically—"carriers of culture."  In addition, MSUM’s The Voices Project: Exploring Farmers, Farming, and Food at the Community Level is developing resources for planning, training, building public awareness, and inspiring change around farming, farmers and local food. The project uses the arts—videography and drama—to foster community dialogue on agricultural heritage, community culture, local agricultural issues, and contemporary agricultural life for the 21st century.

Other university-community partnerships include the Art Education Program in the Department of Art and Art History.  For over three decades, this program has sponsored a lab school for art educators. In addition, Saturday Morning Art (SMArt) provides senior MSU art education majors with opportunities to design and teach age-appropriate art lessons to young students. Other innovative professional development workshops have positioned the department as a key player in recent state policy changes regarding art teacher training programs, the certification of art specialists and classroom teachers, and the ongoing professional development of education professionals.

MSU has been a leading state partner working with Imagining America in the development of Imagining Michigan.  MSU has also been involved in the development of the Imagining Your State program of Imagining Michigan.  This effort has included the development of state partnerships with the Michigan Department of History, Arts, and Libraries, the Michigan Council for the Humanities, the Michigan Council for the Arts and Cultural Affairs, and other college and universities in Michigan. New programmatic components of this collaboration include the Imagining Michigan State Toolkit (adapted by other states), the Imagining Michigan Award to recognize exemplary collaborations by artists and scholars working for the public good in Michigan communities, and Imagining Michigan Cultural Caucuses, an annual state Imagining Michigan conference held on a rotating basis on university campuses.

Faculty Passion for Public Work

The following programmatic examples of engaged teaching practices and public scholarship reflect a common commitment to cultural work at Michigan State University. This commitment is seen across a broad and energetic panorama of individual faculty activities that contribute to community-building, public problem-solving, public creation and judgment, and the development of learning communities where scholars, musicians, poets, and artists can stand with the public in addressing important issues and problems and co-creating solutions. . .

  • Mark Sullivan, Professor of Music Composition, secured federal grants to support Hispanic and African-American artists in five artistic disciplines (theater, painting, writing, music, video) in modeling effective ways to integrate the arts into the curriculum at schools with high proportions of at-risk students.
  • The Jazz Studies Program, under the direction of Professor Rodney Whitaker, partners with The Arts League of Michigan to develop, present, promote, and preserve African and African-American cultural arts through summer jazz camps for inner city students in Detroit, an Artistic Mentorship Program, and a jazz concert series in Detroit.
  • Tom Tomlinson and Ann Mongoven of the Center for Ethics and Humanities in the Life Sciences offer their academic and practical expertise to assist Lansing-area hospital ethics committees.  These committees are responsible for ethics training for hospital staff, developing hospital policies, and providing consultations on difficult cases in the areas of ethics and medical care. 
  • Howard Bossen, Professor of Journalism and MSU Art Museum Adjunct Curator, curated, in collaboration with Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art, “Luke Swank—Modernist Photographer,” an internationally acclaimed exhibition of 130 photographs that established Swank (1890-1944) as a pioneer photographer who combined modernism and social documentary into a compelling visual poetry. Outreach programming organized by the Art Museum included public gallery walks led by Bossen, radio theater performances, co-public-programming by the School of Labor and Industrial Relations, the Department of Art, and the American Studies Program, and a public writing workshop where writers of all ages explored connections between literary forms and the visual arts.
  • As a moral philosopher and medical ethicist deeply involved with issues of health care and public policy, Professor Leonard Fleck and his “Just Caring” project use a deliberative model of public discussion to guide community forums across the country on critical policy issues such as health care rationing, resource allocation, right to life, priority setting, genetics, ethics, and reproductive decision making.
  • With the support of the Public Humanities Collaborative, Pennie Foster-Fishman led a Photovoice project with youth in Battle Creek, Michigan.  Photovoice is an international initiative that utilizes photography for citizen empowerment, neighborhood development, and as a creative technology for social change.  In Foster-Fishman’s project, young students learned to use cameras to document social life in their neighborhoods.  By publicly exhibiting their photoessays, these student photographers gained a greater voice in the political process.
  • MSU poet and Residential College in Arts and Humanities Professor Anita Skeen worked in Oklahoma City shortly after the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. She designed a poetry workshop where citizens wrote about their thoughts and feelings evoked by injured works of art that had been in the building at the time of the bombing. The project allowed for a compelling look into the effect of the humanities on people’s reactions to shared tragedy.

These stories, along with dozens of others at MSU, show that interdisciplinary public-minded work in arts, humanities, and design isn’t marginal, ephemeral, or even value-added. On the contrary, it springs from the heart of a new knowledge enterprise. Julie Thompson Klein describes that enterprise as “boundary work”—knowledge formation at the crossroads of university and community, conventional disciplinary borders and new hybrid fields, career vocation and personal avocation, spirit and reason, imagination and memory.  “[T]he interactions and reorganizations that boundary crossing[s] create,” Klein writes, “are . . . central to the production and organization of knowledge” in the contemporary academy.

“The agenda for the next decade ought to be the opening up of the [humanities] disciplines, the ventilating of professional communities that have become too self-referential.”

—Thomas Bender

Paraphrasing John Dewey, the public work at our university, in short, is not preparation for life or career; public work is the business and the art of life itself.

Public arts and humanities at Michigan State University benefit from lively, committed, and engaged students. An unusual institutional synergy between the University Outreach and Engagement, academic affairs, and student life yields strong ligaments at MSU between academic and co-curricular experiences. “Boldness by Design” commits us to enhancing the ethical life of students through meaningful and reflective engagement in our home communities and around the globe.

Engaged Undergraduate and Graduate Students

A pioneer of the national service-learning movement, The Center for Service-Learning and Civic Engagement (CSLCE)—co-founder of the Michigan Campus Compact in 1989— is committed to empowering students with service and civic-based educational opportunities that extend beyond the classroom. Students who participate in service-learning/civic engagement contribute to the public good of local, national and international communities via co-curricular and academic service placements. MSU students relate passionately to university-based service experiences, allowing for real-world applications of learning and development of personal, professional, leadership and citizenship skills. The rate of growth in engaged student learning over the past five years has been exponential, with an estimated 16,000 enrollments expected in 2010.

The CSLCE currently partners with 340 human and social service agencies, neighborhood organizations, health care and rehabilitation providers and hospitals, schools and educational institutions, senior citizen programs, museums and other cultural facilities, government and legislative offices, and on-campus service-based programs and initiatives to provide placements for the increasing demand.

The quality of student experience in service learning is reflected by the Princeton Review’s inclusion in 2005, of MSU as one of 81 institutions that meet its “colleges with a conscience” criteria. In addition, five MSU students received Outstanding Student Service Awards from Michigan Campus Compact, and three MSU faculty members were awarded the Michigan Campus Compact Faculty-Staff Community Service Learning Award.

Student engagement is not limited to the undergraduate population. The dean of the Graduate School, Karen Klomparens, has been a strong advocate for civic engagement in higher education. She recently participated in a Wingspread gathering devoted to that topic. In partnership with the University Outreach and Engagement, Dean Klomparens recently agreed to develop a competency based curriculum that leads to a Certificate in Community Engagement for MSU graduate students.

The Residential College in Arts and Humanities (RCAH) was mentioned earlier as an emerging center of excellence. Perhaps no feature of this college is more compelling than its vision of student engagement. The proposal for the new RCAH opens with guiding questions: “What is public life? How does it differ from political life or public service? Who is entitled to participate in it, and why? Is there a particular language or vernacular that ought to be used in public life? What role does art play in the public realm?” The RCAH is concerned with public life in the broadest sense, that is, in the life of political communities whose cultural identities have emerged, coalesced, and come apart.

The public humanities movement at MSU draws upon engaged scholarship, a rich curricular context, energetic students, dedicated leadership, adequate resources, and a strong and creative research culture. These resources yield an innovative program in the public arts and humanities that is diverse, open, engaged, cross-disciplinary, and international.

The Future of Public Humanities at MSU

Strongly supported by a dynamic partnership between the College of Arts and Letters and University Outreach and Engagement, the public humanities movement at MSU is also enriched by a variety of innovative design and technology curricula and research in communications technology, fashion design, public journalism and broadcasting, medical humanities, community music education, and urban and rural landscape architecture.  

“Our approach to ‘the life of the mind’ always has been distinctive and boldly experimental.  One hundred and fifty years ago, the founders of this university imagined a learning institution the world had never seen—one that would empower practical knowledge and combine it with traditional scientific and classical studies to create a new model of higher education.  This model—our model—became the prototype for the land-grant university . . . that would apply the benefits of higher education to advance society and the public good—to build something enduring.”

—Lou Anna K. Simon, “Boldness by Design”

In articulating a concrete and creative vision of the public humanities’ future at Michigan State University, the founding faculty and current director and associate director of the Public Humanities Collaborative have learned much about the cultural legacies and the cultural practices that innervate the body politic at our university. 

We have developed a greater appreciation of and respect for the dedicated leadership, the centers of excellence, the extensive campus-community partnerships, the concrete investments and application of scare resources, the excellence and persistence of our faculty as creative agents of structural change in higher education, and the energy of our students and their commitment to social equity—everything about our university, in short, that brings life and meaning to our Boldness by Design values and imperatives. 

We are exhilarated by our journey.  We are excited about our future.  We warmly welcome the challenge to pursue questions President Lou Anna K. Simon has posed as a moral compass for that future:

  • How can we contribute to creating a more civil society—on campus, locally, nationally, and globally?
  • What is the best way to transform education to achieve real progress in transforming society to advance the public good?
  • How can we nurture and exercise the inventive mind, sharpening and freeing it to meet the rigors of problem-solving demanded in the 21st century?

 


Contact Information

  • Public Humanities Collaborative
  • 119 Morrill Hall • Michigan State University • East Lansing, MI 48824
  • Phone: 517.432.3910 • Fax: 517.355.0159 • E-mail: phc at msu.edu