9:15-9:45 am
Academic Freedom: Mark Steinberg, History and CAFT chair; David O’Brien, Art History and Vice President of UIUC Chapter of the AAUP
The principle of “academic freedom” is often embraced and often violated, as suggested by the AAUP censure of UIUC. For many, the category itself is contested: e.g. a recent chancellor declared that we need to redefine academic freedom for the particular needs of our university rather than accept the AAUP definition; and faculty members also disagree about what academic freedom allows and doesn’t allow (as any member the Senate Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure can attest). This is to say nothing of external political pressures. Our session will consider the meanings and value of academic freedom for the humanities, assess threats to it, and consider what needs to be done and how.
University Presses and Public Humanities — Laurie Matheson, Director; Julie Laut, Outreach & Development Coordinator
Problem: Press staff will discuss the uneven relationship between host institutions and scholarly publishing and how the changing (challenging) publishing environment affects our shared vision of the future of academic publishing. Diagnoses: We will outline the current ways in which University Presses are addressing these changes through work with individuals in the humanities and service to campuses and broader communities. Action: We will seek feedback on the ways in which we could become more closely embedded in the collaborative of the humanities on campus.
Recruiting Undergraduates — Brad Peterson, Brad Petersen, Director of Marketing and Communications; Meg Dickinson, Associate Director of Marketing and Communications, LAS
The college marketing and communications team has a comprehensive marketing plan for recruiting undergraduate students to LAS. The team will share an overview of the plan and highlight tactics specifically focused on humanities students.
10:00-10:30 am
Graduate Education and AIDE report – Isabel Molina, Latina/o Studies and Media and Cinema Studies
A discussion of the recent working group on graduate education in the humanities and the arts. Isabel Molina just completed the graduate assessment of these programs and the AIDE committee is in the process of writing a white paper based on our findings. The ultimate objective is to use it to initiate a conversation with the Chancellors, Provost and respective Dean about the AIDE findings and concerns about the long-term prospects for graduate education.
Course Correction? Thinking about Course Development – Laurie Johnson, Germanic Languages and Literatures; Kelly Ritter, Associate Dean for Curricula and Academic Policy
We propose discussing current and possible future curricular initiatives that continue to prioritize (or re-prioritize) the humanities in undergraduate education at Illinois. As the student body possibly gravitates toward STEM and business fields, how can the humanities continue to play a vital, central role in students’ study plans and lives? Large-scale initiatives such as Grand Challenge Learning and developments in the General Education curriculum are important. But could we also be thinking on a School and departmental level–and perhaps also as individual faculty members–about offering courses that our students really want to take, feel that they need to take, and that reflect the actual significance of the humanities in the world outside the university? We will identify current institutional/structural challenges to enrollment in the humanities and discuss possible solutions and approaches.
Advancement at Work for the Humanities – Tony Pomonis, LAS Advancement
With the launch of the new capital campaign in October 2017, LAS is building on recently revitalized efforts to raise funds for supporting humanities endeavors in the College. In this session, the designated advancement officer for humanities units, Tony Pomonis, will report on his success and outline ongoing strategies for increasing endowments and other ideas for drawing donors and alumni/ae into active engagement with humanities research and teaching.
10:45-11:15 am
Revenue Generating Strategies – Clare Crowston, History
With budgetary pressures likely to continue or worsen, departments across campus (and across the nation) have sought means to generate new revenue. This panel will focus on the possibilities for revenue generation, using existing examples and hypothetical ideas to examine the challenges and opportunities of such projects. (In other words: “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose”…)
Rethinking Postgraduate Careers in the Humanities– Jason Mierek, Humanities without Walls Project Manager, and Justine Murison, English
This session will address the changing nature of graduate education in the humanities as it relates to preparation of doctoral students for a diverse range of career trajectories inside and outside of traditional academe. We hope to foster discussion about the relation of career preparation to the intellectual work of the PhD. We will briefly discuss the Alternative Academic Career Summer Workshops for Pre-doctoral Students in the Humanities initiative of the Humanities without Walls consortium, based at IPRH, and also look at some related work that has been done in the English department in collaboration with the Graduate College at Illinois.
Collaborating for Social Justice North and South of Green – Carla D. Hunter (Psychology) and Jenny Amos (Bio-Engineering)
Interdisciplinary collaborations involving engineering, humanities and related fields provide opportunities that stimulate creative ideas, novel approaches to research, and are fun experiences where individuals may learn new skills and develop further expertise. In this session two members of a 4-person interdisciplinary collaborative team will discuss how their collaboration emerged, and share tangible outcomes associated with the collaboration (e.g., conference presentations, manuscripts, intramural funding proposals). We will also share our understanding of how our interdisciplinary collaboration experience fits with existing interdisciplinary collaborative models and highlight where and how our experiences diverge from the models, particularly because of our focus on social justice.
11:30-noon
External Funding Opportunities in the Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences – Janelle Weatherford, Senior Director of the Office of Foundation Relations; Rajeev Malik, Director of Foundation Relations
Seeking and securing private foundation funding for humanities research can be challenging especially with the small numbers of opportunities available. In an effort to assist, Janelle Weatherford, Sr. Director of the Office of Foundation Relations will discuss the funding landscape in the private foundation world for humanities and present a number of specific grant and fellowship opportunities offered through the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and others. Rajeev Malik, Director of Foundation Relations, will also cover the many services of their office.
Public Engagement through the Humanities? Institutional Challenges, Community Resources, Promising Connections – Kathy Oberdeck, History
We propose to engage issues involving the support for humanities engagement into communities surrounding the University by drawing on some of the issues we have addressed in the IPRH Cluster on Public History and Student Research. Our aim is to stimulate a wider discussion about Humanities-oriented public engagement at the University of which our own project would be but one vector.
Digital Technology and the Humanities at Illinois – Ted Underwood, English and the ISchool; John Randolph, History
Participants are invited to discuss, not just work that calls itself “digital humanities,” but a wider range of opportunities and challenges for humanists at Illinois. Scholars are using computers to explore and analyze new kinds of sources, to reach out to the public in new ways, and to experiment with new scales of interpretation. At the same time, the history of information technology and its meaning for the future of humanistic scholarship are themselves increasingly important themes of critical discussion. What is Illinois already doing in this space, and how could we do it more thoughtfully, more collaboratively, or more usefully for our students?
1:30-2:00 pm
Digital Publishing and Digital Scholarship Services at the Library — Janet Swatscheno, Visiting Digital Publishing Specialist, University Library; Karen Hogenboom, Head of Scholarly Commons, University Library
This session will focus on the expanding services and collaboration opportunities for faculty and students to pursue new forms of publishing and digital scholarship with the Library: Janet Swatscheno will provide an overview of the services offered by the new Scholarly Communication and Publishing Unit, with a highlight on their recent work with the IPRH and Humanities Without Walls scholars to develop new digital publications. Karen Hogenboom will present on the Scholarly Commons and its network of services to support data-centered research and digital scholarship across disciplines. The session also will include open discussion and invited feedback for a planned new Scholarly Commons space for supporting digital scholarship.
Humanities Careers on Our Terms – Kirstin Wilcox and Derek Attig, English andGraduate College
How should we make our graduate outcomes part of the conversation about the humanities on our own terms. Students, parents, and policy-makers share a similar set of stories about how higher education connects to careers. According to this familiar tale, particular degrees are necessary for particular vocations, and everything else lacks purpose or value. This story discourages engagement with and investment in the humanities—“What are you going to do with that?”—and ill-prepares students for the realities of the workplace, which demands the very creativity and flexibility that the humanities teach. So how can we disrupt these career narratives that undermine the humanities? And how can we generate new narratives that celebrate the humanities and prepare students to use their degrees in a wide variety of ways? In this PDS session, we will work together toward answers to these questions and practical, practicable solutions to the problems that bring us to ask them.
2:15-2:45 pm
Campus Research for Advocating Campus Change?: The Case of an IPRH Research Cluster’s Report on Its Post-US Election Impact Survey – Anita Chan, Media and Cinema Studies and Faculty Fellow, NCSA
Over the last decade, the UIUC campus has launched a wealth of web-driven tools and data tools to facilitate data collection and sharing. In the middle of the Spring 2017 semester, following the announcement of the second Executive Order for a travel ban in March 2017, the Recovering Prairie Futures IPRH Research Cluster utilized a selection of such tools to publish an online survey to document the impact of the post-2016 US Presidential Election political climate and subsequent executive orders on the academic life and research-related activities of the UIUC campus community. Questions about impacts included recruitment activities, hiring, travel related to research into or out of the US, travel within the US, collaboration activities, and daily research and study practices. This information sharing session provides an overview of the case, and shares the responses received from sectors on campus to explore the question of whether and how utilizing campus tools for campus research might be applied to advocate for local change by humanities, social science, and arts faculty.
Communication Strategies for the Humanities – Harriet Murav, Slavic Languages and Literatures
Participants in this session are invited to discuss a communication plan for the purpose of informing university administrators and undergraduate students about the value and purpose of study in the humanities and arts. Action item: draft a series of messages and vehicles to deliver them. Think about the messages as ads or a campaign for the humanities–brief, catchy, with a visual. Can be coordinated with specific events on the 2017-2018 calendar.
Teaching Humanities outside LAS – Terri Weissman, Art History; Lisa Rosenthal, Art History
This session panel will look at how the economic and structural moment that we find ourselves in seems to force programs like Art History (but many others too) to decide between behaving like a design program, successfully recruiting majors as a way of justifying lines and hires, or becoming a service unit that only teaches giant surveys and that can’t maintain the kind of intellectual community that earns disciplinary respect and sustains its faculty.
3:00-3:30 pm
“Illinois Success” – Kirstin Wilcox and Derek Attig, English and Graduate College
This session features a presentation of the Illini Success survey, which tracks students’ paths within the first six months after graduation. This is the third year that the university has collected this data for undergraduates, and it will soon be collecting it for students graduating with advanced degrees as well. This survey is of interest for two reasons: one is that many of these the results counter the narrative that humanities degrees are inherently worthless on the job market. The second is that the university uses this data to understand the value of the degrees it awards. These are certainly not the only terms that the humanities should use to define themselves, but they are the terms that broader administrative structures will be using to understand the humanities.
Advocating for the NEH and NEA in the current Federal Funding Landscape — Melissa Haas, Associate Director of Federal Relations, University of Illinois
In an era of shrinking public budgets across higher education, faculty and students in the humanities and arts want to know what they can do to advocate for the NEH, and NEA as both employees and citizens of the state. In this session Melissa has will give an overview of the current funding landscape and offer concrete suggestions and strategies for how to be effective in the public discussion of fiscal support for the agencies that support this work.
The Current Material Realities of Graduate Students at U.S. Universities – Augustus Wood III, History and IPRH Graduate Fellow, 2017-18; Marilia Correa, History and IPRH Graduate Fellow, 2017-18
This presentation will examine the working and living conditions that put strain on graduate students. As higher education faces assault from federal, state, and local policies and officials, graduate students and unions are losing resources and support at an alarming rate, but also organizing resistance mechanisms to reclaim living standards. Crises such as food insecurity, homelessness, and wage theft are now common threats to graduate students in the U.S., but graduate worker unions, alongside other community organizations, are creating alternative tactics to protect graduate students in harsh realities.
3:45-4:15 pm
Faculty Recruitment and Retention – Martin Camargo, College of LAS, and Kevin Hamilton, College of FAA
What factors determine whether faculty searches in humanities fields are authorized? How have Target of Opportunity and Dual Career hiring policies and practices changed in the face of budgetary constraints? Why aren’t all retention requests treated in the same way? These are some of the questions associate deans are expected to answer. We hope participants in this session will raise others.
Undergraduate Recruitment & Yield Strategies for the Humanities — Kristine McCoskey, Academic Advisor, Department of English; Jonathan Elugbadebo, Associate Director, LAS Recruitment & Admissions; Erica Koury, Assistant Director, LAS Recruitment & Admissions
Undergraduate enrollment in the humanities has been on the decline in recent years at universities across the country. This session will focus on the enrollment challenges faced by the Humanities at Illinois and a review of historical admissions data. The panel will then speak about the creation of the Community for Humanities OutReach & Teaching (COHORT) and the various recruitment and yield strategies that have been implemented over the last two years to reverse the declining enrollment trend in the humanities.
Immigration, Undocumented Persons, and Sanctuary – Naomi Paik, Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies and part of Sanctuary of the People; Gio Guerra, Director of La Casa Cultura Latina
This session will identify and discuss current issues faced by immigrant members of our community, including undocumented persons, students with DACA, members of mixed status families, and people subject to profiling and targeting by ICE and other agencies. We seek to brainstorm and identify ways we can draw on our capacities as faculty, staff, and students of UIUC to address these challenges and to determine ways the university can meet its responsibilities in supporting and protecting students and meeting the needs of our immigrant neighbors.
4:30-5:45 pm
Humanities + Publics at Illinois? — Chris Higgins (EPOL), Anke Pinkert (German)
How can public universities reconnect with their publics? Can the arts and humanities lead the way, or must the humanities remake themselves to engage in public work? In this session, we explore these questions and consider how we should respond to the ubiquitous calls for “public humanities” (PH). We will present some ideas about how we might face up to the challenges of this call in our teaching, scholarship, and community engagement. And we will sketch a vision of how we might form a collaborative, PH-oriented community in and around UIUC. But we also want to critically engage the professed need for this type of work. Do the humanities themselves need fixing, do they truly have a public deficit, or is it the discourse of PH itself that is the problem, with its implicit instrumentalism and presentism?
