The Fox Center and Research in the Humanities
Research in the Humanities Martine Watson Brownley

Six years ago, when what is today the Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry (CHI) was just an outline in a seven-page Emory College committee report, the single CHI staff member at the time said to me: “One big problem is that there aren’t any pictures of the humanities.” I’m very much of an earlier generation, one that has yet to adjust to life calibrated by video, and so my response was predictable: “Pictures? Why pictures? What do we need pictures for?”

He held his ground. “Pictures can’t show what the CHI actually does,” he replied. “Studying, writing, conversing, thinking—pictures can’t convey what these kinds of intellectual interactions really mean for the humanities or how crucial they are. It’s going to be very hard to show people what we do.” He was right on target. Much more than I did at the time, he understood how difficult it was going to be for the center, and by extension the humanities, to make a case for themselves.

Pictures were only the beginning. Most of the dominant trends in contemporary culture are irrelevant or antagonistic to humanistic learning. In an age of consumerism mesmerized by the new and the fashionable, the humanities concentrate instead on enduring traditions. At a time when markets dictate value and when possessions too frequently become the index of worth, the humanities generate few profitable products. Even as ubiquitous premia on utility demand results that can be measured (preferably in numbers), the impact of the humanities on individual lives and on the culture at large, however profound, cannot be accurately assessed numerically. In an environment shaped by celebrity, PR firms, and spin, the humanities resist reduction to sound-bites and lack camera-readiness—again, no pictures. Eric Gould, in The University in a Corporate Culture, sums it up starkly: “The more abstract and philosophical motives for acquiring a liberal education—especially those of the humanities—frequently run up against the insatiable needs of global capitalism and the corporate motives of the university itself, and they will lose almost every time.”

One of the most “abstract and philosophical” concerns of humanists is the imperative to do research. As Sander L. Gilman, Distinguished Professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences at Emory, writes in The Fortunes of the Humanities, humanists “are the repositories of the university’s history and future; we do the heavy lifting in teaching the bulk of the students those intellectual skills—critical reading, writing, and thought—that will serve them in any field and any future employment.” The case for humanities research is usually made by citing the resulting improvements in teaching, but those gains, although substantive, are only part of the story.

Responding to a society focused on immediate results, the humanities insist that much of what is valuable in human life demands long-term commitments. In an overwhelmingly pragmatic world focused on commerce and quantification, the humanities represent the value of learning for its own sake, the disinterested quest for knowledge and truth through which human beings can come to understand who we are, what we have been, and therefore what we can become and where we can go. Effective representation of such learning entails continuing practice over a lifetime. As the great historian Charles H. Haskins wrote of the medieval period in The Rise of Universities, “Then, as now, the moral quality of a university depended on the intensity and seriousness of its intellectual life.” Without a strong institutional commitment to humanities research, humanists cannot sustain the crucial contributions they make to “the moral quality of a university.”

It long has been axiomatic that the contemplative life gives meaning and direction to the active life. Yet time for any contemplation at all is rare these days, even in universities. An “Ivory Tower” of intellectual pursuits secluded from mundane concerns is a myth. Harvard undergraduates produce their own soap opera for campus television, appropriately titled “Ivory Tower,” and the pace of a soap opera is just about right for today’s academic denizens.

The impact of the extramural managerial and entrepreneurial society has altered the habits, the tranquility, and—above all—the tempo of academic life. Today all universities are complex bureaucracies, where too many academics find themselves reading spreadsheets rather than folios. The long summer vacation vanished long ago; administrators work an eleven-month calendar, and professors, particularly those with even minor administrative responsibilities, need to be available accordingly. Mr. Chips has become, at least for the fortunate, Lucky Jim.

In The Quiet American, Graham Greene’s novel set in Vietnam during the waning days of French colonial rule, one character claims that without political intervention, the natives “won’t be allowed to think for themselves.” The protagonist replies: “Thought’s a luxury. Do you think the peasant sits and thinks of God and Democracy when he gets inside his mud hut at night?” Greene’s “luxury” of thought is the rarest of commodities and one in critically short supply in the contemporary world.

Thought is not the most tangible result of the Fox Center’s support of humanistic research. I may chafe at the unfairness and the intellectual limitations imposed by the contemporary mania for quantification; if pressed, though, I can play the numbers game myself, and with impressive results. In our first four years as a residential research unit, based on work done at the Fox Center, our Fellows have published twelve books and seventy-eight articles and book chapters; present sixty-eight conference papers; and received twelve PhDs, because every one of our graduate Fellows completed his or her dissertation and received the degree at the end of the fellowship year. But in this case, numbers are not the best gauge.

For Emory, the greater gain is the community that emerges before, during, and after our Fellows’ printed and oral texts, the vibrant intellectual commons that incubates ideas and sustains individual intellectual and creative achievements across the campus. Providing the time and space that make possible Greene’s “luxury” of thought remains the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry’s most vital contribution.

Martine Watson Brownley, Goodrich C. White Professor of English, is director of Emory’s Center for Humanistic Inquiry. She is an associated faculty member in the Comparative Literature Program and also in the Institute for Women’s Studies, where she served previously as director. Her current research interests are early modern English historiography and contemporary women novelists.

(This article originally appeared in “A Community of Excellence: Reflections and Directions from the Year of the Faculty.”)