My father used to tell me that we were made up of stories, our and stories of those who came before us. He told me that, “You don’t exist if you don’t know your stories.” For most, the term “humanities” relates to the study of how “people process and document the human experience.” (http://shc.stanford.edu/what-are-the-humanities) For academics, “humanities” means a scholarly approach to what humans experience through religion, literature, philosophy, history and other fields of study. In other words, we are made up of stories that we tell ourselves. While this approach may include those who are not in the academic world, this approach typically means scholars talking to scholars about what other scholars are saying about a narrow subject in a particular document-able period of time in human history (asleep yet?). Scholars, in their zeal for clarity of their subject, forget the first moments of excitement that may have led them to their passion. They disengage from their own story. I remember spinning around in my grandmother’s front yard repeating a word (any word) over and over again until, falling to the ground, the word had no meaning anymore and it was simply a feeling in my mouth. Moments like that led me to listen to stories, examine words, put them together, the reading of larger collections of words, discovering the stories and the color of the stories in my mind. What I lost, as my story got longer and I moved into the academy, was those wonderful moments of discovery of something as simple as the feeling of a word in my mouth and the academy forced me to fall in line with “their” process toward “understanding” and leave my story behind. In an era when there is a substantial movement to further legitimize the academy as reliable, a greater effort to include the public in the larger story might do wonders to keep the academy alive. People are far more likely to support an institution if they hear their own voice and feel validated. All stories matter.
As the academy struggles to find relevance in a world where the digital moment excites the masses through color, movement and sound, it is apparent that it is hard to let go of academic authority. Universities and Colleges do not make this any easier with constant pressure to make tenure and get published in all the right places so that longevity within the system is established. It is also difficult when these same Universities and Colleges spend more time worried about legality and public image than actual educational goals. The lightning speed of the digital world means that there is no time to dally with legalities and image if the academy wants to make the paradigmatic sling-shot into the current version of modernity. Public Humanities must bow to the power of the word “public” and allow public expertise and non-expertise to join in on the story telling of human experience. There are several great sites out there doing this important work and one such site is The Valley of the Shadow which highlights two communities during the same period of the Civil War through letters, diaries, maps and demographic information) http://valley.lib.virginia.edu/ and it is a great example of public humanities. I would also suggest that NPR’s StoryCorps, https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510200/storycorps , which offers a great example of putting “Public” squarely into the concept of Public Humanities.